Languages in GURPS

Languages in GURPS

I've always enjoyed the study of languages. I even almost applied to study linguistics at a local linguistic university, but at the last moment decided that engineering would give me a better chance to find a job. My love of all language-related things extends to tabletop gaming as well. When I read the D&D supplements and, for example, see that treants or worgs have their own language, I always think of various translation-related situations or why would anyone who does not belong to these races learn this language. I remember that when I was playing D&D 3.0 as a kid, I had a huge list of languages, believing that every race must have its own languages. It did not make sense to me that, for example, frost giants and fire giants speak the same Giant language despite living in diametrically opposed environments and probably not ever being in contact. My players did not like it, but we still had some amusing situations that have arisen from it (the one I remember the most clear is a player taking the Giant Eagle language randomly as a joke, but it coming in handy later in the game). Only yesterday I found out that that's actually how languages worked before D&D 3.0 - in AD&D every sapient species had their own language. So, let's take a dive into the linguistics of GURPS.

GURPS Basic Set has a language section on pages 23-25. In short, languages are treated as advantages. Spoken languages have four comprehension levels - None [0], Broken [1], Accented [2], and Native [3]. The same applies to sign languages. Written languages have three comprehension levels - Literate [3], Semi-Literate [1], Illiterate [0]. At least this is how understand it, because I find some things ambiguous. For example, it says "Literacy is a written comprehension of Accented or better" and has an example of “French: Spoken (None)/Written (Native) [3].” This seems to imply that written comprehension levels of Accented and Native are different, but the first excerpt does not list any differences.

Sapient beings (IQ 6 or higher) start with their native language at Native and Literate for free. However, at TL4 or below, it is possible that literacy is not widespread. In that case, being semi-literate in your native language is treated as a -2-point disadvantage, and illiteracy is a -3-point disadvantage. These do not count against the disadvantage limit. In D&D, all characters are assumed to be literate, unless they are barbarians or totemists. So, if you want the D&D experience, you know how to become illiterate now.

Wait a second. IQ 6? Chimpanzees and gorillas in the Basic Set have IQ 6, so, technically, they should start with the Chimpanzee and Gorilla languages, respectively. Also, that sapience sidebar mentioned that you may know the language but be unable to speak it physically, at no discount. Chimpanzees and gorillas have the Cannot Speak disadvantages, so, technically speaking, they have a language that they cannot use among themselves, but they would be able to understand a human speaking Chimpanzee. This is making my head hurt. This limitation is not talking about Cannot Speak, but talks about a character having their voicebox unadjusted for a language in question. For example, some insectile species might be able to speak its native language perfectly, but would not be able to speak human languages at all, even if it knows the language and can understand human speech. Perhaps, in some cases, you can limit the spoken comprehension level. For example, you might let the humans learn this insect language, but they would be able to speak it only at Broken. I remember reading the D&D supplement Lords of Madness, where it was said that it is possible to learn the Aboleth language, but you can only speak it if you have a certain collection of pipes to blow. The same thing can be found in GURPS Banestorm, where the dolphins have a spoken language that they can only use amongst themselves - nobody else can speak or understand it. These dolphins do not have Cannot Speak.

Accents are treated as familiarities for Acting and Mimicry (Speech).

You can learn a language just as you can learn a skill - 200 hours of study equals to one character point. However, language study without a teacher is four times as difficult! It is also said that if you live in another country and speak its language at all times, then you automatically get 4 hours of study per day, which is equivalent to one character point every 50 days. I guess the local population counts as a teacher, because 50 x 4 = 200, not 800. This is also an exception to the "one skill at a time" rule.

Untrained Skill Use was introduced in GURPS Social Engineering: Back to School (p. 9) and then somewhat expanded in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 4: Sages (p. 13). Languages are not skills, however, unless you're using Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously, which I will discuss later in this post. I see nothing wrong in allowing somebody with a language manual to translatee texts or even converse with somebody, provided they have enough patience to wait for the character to look up all the words and grammar. I do not really have any tested mechanics in mind, but I would do something like the following: a successful Linguistics roll (or IQ-6, since the textbook will allow untrained skill use) allows you to translate or pronounce a sentence at Accented, while a failed roll lets you do that at Broken, unless you fail by 5 or more. The base time requires for this task would be five minutes, modified normally as per Time Spent (p. B346).

There's a few advantages and modifiers related to languages in the Basic Set. The first one is Language Talent (p. B65). This one costs 10 points and decreases the point cost of languages by one step.

Speak With Animals (p. B87) costs 25 points and allows you to speak with animals. Limiting it to a single species is a -80% limitation, which translates into an animal language costing 5 points. Animals cannot write, so it probably should be closer to 3 points. If you want to make these costs more consistent with human languages, decrease the cost of Speak With Animals from 25 to 15 points. On the other hand, maybe 5 points result in 3 points being modifier with Cosmic, Can speak to non-sapient beings, +50%? Who knows? I'm just speculating here. I should note that GURPS Template Toolkit 2: Races does mention that games about talking animals should have animal languages.

Speak With Plants (p. B87) costs 15 points, but does not have a premade limitation that allows you to specialize. If we borrow the limitation from Speak With Animals, then a -80% will give us the cost of 3 points for a single plant language.

Dyslexia (p. B134) makes you fully illiterate. Non-Iconographic (p. B146) is somewhat similar, but for abstract symbols and images. However, this does not cover hieroglyphs or similar written alphabet. Thus, a Non-Iconographic character can read and write Mandarin or Ancient Egyptian.

Now here's an interesting one. In D&D, it is assumed that thoughts are universal, they have no language. Thus, if you are casting detect thoughts or using telepathy, you will be able to read the mind of the subject or communicate with it, respectively, regardless of the language barrier. GURPS does not assume that. Mind Probe, Mind Reading, and Telesend do require you to have a language in common (note that Mind Control does not), unless you take the Universal, +50% enhancement. If you want Mind Control or some other ability be language-dependant, then you should apply the Accessibility, Only on those who share a language with me, -10% limitation (GURPS Power-Ups 8: Limitations, p. 5). It is usually accompanied by Hearing-Based. By the way, Rapier Wit and Medium also require a shared language.

This brings up another thing - if a character knows multiple languages, what language does he think in? Personally, I think in two languages, but there was a time when I was thinking in three languages. If a telepath tries to read my mind when I'm thinking in a language #1, but both the telepath and I also know language #2, while the telepath does not know language #1, should he be able to gain any information from me? Technically, we do share a language, but I would be thinking in a language he does not know. In such cases, I think it would be reasonable to determine randomly the current internal monologue language from among the languages whose spoken form is known at Accented or Native. If the mental contact lasts a long time, roll every minute. What if the character knows that his mind is being read and he wants to force his internal monologue into a specific language to foil the attempt? The Mind Block skill does something similar, but much more broad. I suggest requiring a Will roll every minute (or every second in a stressful situation, just a per Mind Block) to force yourself to think in a language you know at Native, or Will-2 for a language you know at Accented, with the same situational bonuses and penalties as for Mind Block. But how do deaf or mute people think? I had to look it up online - apparently, deaf people who were born deaf and have not undergone vocal training think in signs and pictures. So, being deaf gives a minor advantage against mental intrusions, since it's unlikely that a telepath would know a sign language. And now let's go back a bit - it is possible that you do not have any language at Accented or better, even your native one. In that case, if you know your native language at Broken, then your inner monologue is at Broken comprehension level, and it requires an IQ roll to interpret for the mind reader. If you cannot speak your native language at all, you think in images.

Other than that, there is only one skill related to languages - Linguistics. It allows you to determine what language somebody is speaking or writing, and a successful roll per month allows you to study a language without a teacher at full speed instead of quarter speed. This roll takes a penalty if the language is very alien, as described in GURPS Space.

And that's it for the Basic Set. What about the other books? First, let's take a look at perks and quirks from GURPS Power-Ups 2: Perks and GURPS Power-Ups 6: Quirks. First, we have the Accent perk that allows you waive some rolls to imitate accents. Then we have the One-Way Fluency and One-Way Literacy perks that allow you to only understand or speak a certain language, or only read or write. The only language-related quirk I've found is Mild Dyslexia. GURPS Supers also has the Omnilingual and Xeno-Omnilingual Unusual Backgrounds that cost 40 and 80 points, respectively. These allows the user to communicate in any language. Let's look back at Speak With Animals. We know that Accessibility, Only on animals is a -25% limitations. If we apply it to Omnilingual, we get a 30-point advantage. Close enough, right?

GURPS Template Toolkit 2: Races has a new advantage - Signals. This one allows you to communicate not with sound, with with blinking lights, electric pulses, chemical agents, or color changes. This brings up a question - what exactly counts as a language? For example, a light elemental and a will-o'-wisp may be able to communicate among their own kind with blinking lights, but would they be able to communicate with each other? They probably would blink differently, so they would have two different blinking languages. The same would apply to two different alien species that employ chemical communication. Can you be Accented in producing smells, or are the fluency levels less discrete in such languages? It's up to the GM to decide. Now that I think about it, what about the machines? Can a human robot use radio communication and be understood by an alien-built computer? Probably not, so this would probably count as a language too.

GURPS Powers: The Weird has a language-based power - Logos. However, it does not have an actual language, but represents grasping the very essence of communication without the need for a language. At least in some cases. Some other languages can possess supernatural qualities, but still allow to use them for actual communication. I have converted some of them from D&D - Alignment languages, Dark Speech, and Words of Creation. GURPS Horror: Madness Dossier has some languages provide minor bonuses to resist some abilities. Adding such minor bonuses could give your languages a lot of flavor. For example, if Draconic is the language of magic, then perhaps knowing Draconic at native gives a +1 to rolls made to decipher arcane writings.

The language barrier can also be circumvented via magic. Spells, such as Borrow Language, Lend Language, Gift of Tongues, and Gift of Letters make communication very easy. Gift of Tongues is statted up as a sorcery spell in GURPS Thaumatology: Sorcery, and costs only 28 points. That's actually cheaper than Omnilingual! This alone makes the college of Communication and Empathy very useful. If you feel that these spells ruin the feel of your game, feel free to forbid them or restrict them in some way.

There's also three Pyramid articles that are related to languages:

1. Languages, Culture, and the Common Tongue from Pyramid #3-16 by Demi Benson talks about language defaults, trade pidgins, and the cinematic and realistic takes on the Common language.

2. Speaking in Tongues from Pyramid #3-54 by Jason "PK" Levine is very similar, discussing language defaults, language groups, but it also introduces wildcard languages and reprints the Omnilingual advantage from GURPS Supers with some new limitations.

3. Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously from Pyramid #3-44 by Roger Burton West provides an entire alternative language framework that takes inspiration from the third edition of GURPS. Languages become skills instead of advantages. I actually like this take, especially the fact that it introduces the difficulty levels of languages, but it ends up making languages much more expensive.

Now that I described everything I've found concerning the languages in GURPS, let's talk about what role the languages play in the game. Languages themselves rarely are the central point of the game. They can play a very important role, for example, in espionage games or in wild frontier games where dramatic translation scenes can happen. However, the translation scenes probably don't look as exciting as, for example, combat, and they do not involve many dice rolls, unless, of course, you're translating from Broken to Broken. Languages feel very binary - you either know a language or you don't. Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously fixes the latter by turning languages into skills.

In games, such as D&D-style fantasy, languages may seem less important. As I said before, in AD&D every sapient species had their own language. D&D 3.0 revised this, consolidating many languages into a single one. For example, all goblinoids in D&D 3.0 speak Goblin, while in the past goblins were speaking Goblin, hobgoblins were speaking Hobgoblin, and bugbears were speaking Bugbear. The same applies to fey, giant, dragon, and many other languages. While from the point of view of verisimilitude and realism, this feels wrong, from the point of view of gameplay it's a good thing. Humans usually had more languages, based on their ethnicity or region. Why are other races much more monolithic in terms of languages is not explained. I've also encountered this problem when I was building the setting for my game. It just made no sense that some of the races were speaking the same language. But the more languages there are in the game world, the less valuable each language feels. And if you take, for example, ten different languages, you feel scammed, since you spent 40-60 points on them, and the language problems will rarely come up.

That's why I think that language defaults are very important. If your setting has many languages, consider creating a map or a table of language default. Thus, if a character has purchased Goblin language at Native, he'd be able to speak to Hobgoblins at Accented, and to orcs at Broken. If the character picked up the language of the Blue Dragons at Native, he's be able to talk to Black Dragons at Accented, and to Silver Dragons at Broken. This makes things much better, and each language feels much less like wasted points.

I can understand that some people feel that the language barrier encounters, where you might need to use the Gesture skill, pantomime, or drawing, are boring; and they certainly can be if overused. But I just love encounters with unknown languages, where finding the teacher or an interpreter is an entire quest of itself. Also, I feel that languages are much more important to wizards. Magical scrolls and spellbooks all use languages, and if you explore an ancient dungeon and find a spellbook in an unknown language, the reward for deciphering and translating it will actually be tangible to the character, as he will gain access to the new spells.

However, even considering all of the above, the languages may seem overpriced. That's why I am considering making them cheaper, using the following scheme: add up the points spent on the spoken/written/signed forms of a language, apply a -60% limitation, round up. Also, Language Talent now costs 5 points. That should probably do it.