[MUD-Dev] War and language (Was: Usability and interface and who the hell is supposed to be playing, anyway?) (Was: PK Again)

[Matt Chatterley]

On Fri, 26 Sep 1997, Michael Hohensee wrote:

> In <E0xDotA-0004Hx-00 at crucigera.fysh.org>, on 09/24/97
>    at 08:46 AM, Maddy <maddy at fysh.org> said:
> 
> >Imagine race X is at war with race Y.  It takes a lot of the fun out
> >of things, if you can sneak up to race X's headquarters and have a
> >good listen to what they're all planning for tomorrow.  The way I've
> >got languages planned out is that each letter maps to another letter
> >(although I'm probably going to use groups of letters).  If I say
> >"Hello world" in human, it might appear to an elf as "Ifmmo xpsme".
> 
> In that case, you may want to give each race a "battle language" as well
> as their spoken language (idea from Dune).  Otherwise, some clever human
> could learn to decipher the language based upon everyday conversation or
> interception of everyday conversation with elves.

This was an excellent notion in Dune, and something that added a lot of
credibility in places where it might have otherwise fallen down (as long
as you count only as far as the first three books in the series).
 
> Perhaps the battle language could be represented by a short (30-90) list
> of words that get encoded to something completely random.  These words
> could be battle specific words, ie: love isn't going to be among them.
> :)

In otherwords, you have words for 'troop', 'cavalry', 'charge', 'fallback'
and so forth. Chess would suffice to provide a sufficient vocabulary for
this purpose.

It is largely a matter of perspective and your intended gameplay. While I
want to create quite an immersive world, I am also heavily aimed at 'fun'
gaming (realism is not of tantamount concern, although consistancy within
the game is critical), and while it is fairly non-sequitor that languages
take 'fun' out of things, it is certain that they can make life
frustrating.

They are also extremely hard to depict without an awful lot of work for
something which adds relatively little to gameplay in many situations. For
instance;

The common way of doing this in many games (witness most LPs? Many games
simply do not handle this), is to tell you 'X says something in a language
you do not understand' if you know nothing, and to reveal random words
based on your level of understanding (either blanking out or garbling the
others).

By far the best way I have ever seen this done was by one of my admin on
B5, a loong time ago. She wrote a system whereby a configuration database
was applied to speech in foreign tongues, changing specific letters to
other letters or combinations, so, you could create a 'Sean Connerismic'
language, where 's' changed to 'sh'.

This did give a very good illusion that it was really another language,
for instance, if we take a simple sentence

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

And change o into oe, j into gh, and switch d and th over:

De quick broewn foex ghumped oever de lazy thoeg.

This doesn't look too badly mangled (considering I'm picking more or less
random pairs, and this really requires thought), if we take a few more..

ck into k, er into r, z into ss and x into ks..

De quik broewn foeks ghumped oevr de lassy thoeg.

This looks a little strange because a couple of my pairings were really
phonetics of their counterparts, but it is far better than random bunches
of letters, random words from a finite list, or scrambling the existing
letters (or blanking them out).

Regards,
	-Matt Chatterley
	http://user.itl.net/~neddy/index.html
"Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics." -?