I wrote this as a letter to a podcast, but I’m posting it here to be able to share it elsewhere. (You should listen to the Happy Jack’s RPG podcast, because it is great.)
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Dear Jovial Jackholes
On the subject of language in games, I’ll share with you a story from my Traveller campaign. It may be a bit long, but 90% of your show is emails and the other 10% is complaints about the length of emails, so either way: you’re welcome.
In session 1, I knew the crew was going to need to purchase a starship, so I prepped a few used ones for them to choose from by rolling on the Mongoose tables covering age vs. flaws and quirks. Of the three floating in the shipyard they chose a 100 year old Free Trader with flawed sensors.
Between sessions I wrote a backstory for the ship they chose, detailing its use as a colony jump-start ship. By supplying otherewise-illegal “anagathic” anti-aging drugs, the Imperium had given a crew of old folks an extra 30 years of life on a remote planet in exchange for their service building the infrastructure for a later, and much larger, colony ship. After the ship was mothballed, it was purchased by the Aslan, a race of cat people, and used for unknown purposes, before being sold off to the shipyard where the players found it for sale.
In truth, I picked Aslan solely for the amusement of having a ship whose cleaning robots had failed due to excessive ingestion of cat fur. During character generation I had house-ruled having the players pick a minor advantage and disadvantage from the GURPS rules, so when one player picked “allergies” the die was cast. You take “allergies,” you get cat fur; it’s basically my duty as GM.
Several sessions later the engineer decides to try to fix the flawed sensors, but rolled snake eyes. So, with the ship’s backstory in mind, this failure causes the sensors to suddenly switch into Aslan and look completely different. There was clearly more detail visble, but no one onboard could understand it. They then figure out how to switch the language back and forth but are otherwise stumped.
Another few sessions went by and a friend of mine asked to join my game. I offered as an option an NPC who had just joined the ship, or he could generate a completely new character and we would figure out where he could join the crew. The player decided that the NPC sounded interesting, so we did random character generation with the NPC in mind as an objective.
At this point all I knew about the NPC was that he was an expert in ancient languages, and his university sent him to investigate the writing on an artifact the crew had found. Of course the artifact had since been stolen but the crew assured the professor they could track it down again for a fee. So the linguist boarded as an NPC passenger but would became a PC two sessions later.
My friend went through random character generation and came up with a character he thought would work. I agreed and was secretly amused that the language he had chosen for his area of study was Aslan, since the player had no knowledge of the ship’s history.
The player joined the game and the professor offered to help with the sensors. Unfortunately for them he didn’t have the Sensors skill, but the engineer welded together a double-chair so he and the professor could cooperate. Together they slowly discovered that the sensors weren’t “flawed”, it’s just that they had been replaced by the Aslan with military-grade sensors, which didn’t work well with the default civilian software.
Meanwhile, in real life I am friends with an actual scholar of ancient languages, so I asked him to help me understand how languages vary and how we could build an interesting story out of it.
He explained to me that translations are not one-to-one. A word may work in 80% of cases, but you can’t rely on word for word translations in every case. Think about the word “green” and how it would translate to a matching color in any dual-language dictionary, but how that would fail when your spies report the enemy discussing “green troops.”. Even among humans, language affects the way we see and process color. The Himba tribe of Namibia has only 5 words for colors, and they have trouble distinguishing between blue and green, but they can easily distinguish between subtle shades of green which most of us cannot. (I encourage you to watch the fascinating BBC documentary called “Do you see what I see?” for more detail). Imagine how much more variable words could be in the mind of an alien or an orc.
Specifically the most variable words (at least among earthly languages) are prepositions. My expert friend explained that in Hebrew he would say that “the chair is FROM my back” and to Germans “the clouds are ON the sky.” These subtle differences can lead to major misunderstandings.
Also, context is very important and it’s not always clear that a subtext even exists without being a native speaker. Knowing every word in a passage is not sufficient, particularly when the speaker is being coy or subtle. What’s meant as a joke or play on words could have deadly consequences if interpreted literally.
So, what does this mean for our starship crew? Literally years of enjoyment as I fed them extremely detailed sensor data through the cultural and linguistic filter of a race of cat people. Through this filter we got to explore how the Aslan see the universe. For example since they are predators their sensors show everything as either prey or larger predators.
I play all my games online so I fed information to the player such as “There is a huge dog in orbit, but it seems to be limping and has a missing tooth”, and “The ship leaving dock looks like a delicious morsel”. Then the player interprets THAT and passes it along to the crew in character.
Any time i wanted to make things difficult I could misapply a preposition, describing something as “through” rather than “behind”, or “with” instead of “near”. But overall they got a wealth of information from software that no other human civilian would ever see. They still haven’t figured out that this software is worth more to the Imperium than their entire ship.
This highlights one feature of Traveller among game systems, which is the near-complete lack of D&D style character advancement. There is no leveling up, and skill points are added EXTREMELY slowly, if at all (depending on version). But that doesn’t make for a boring or static story! The characters still increase their power and ability to influence more significant aspects of the world, but they do it through gained knowledge, the development of influential contacts, and upgrades to their equipment and to their ship. And sometimes by hiring a linguist to interpret the dander-covered “flawed” sensor display on their discount starship.
Keep up the good work
-Hoyle
PS : …and beer
PPS: dick joke