[UA] RE: Negative Skills?

[Niall]

But riddle me this: It's one thing to be a person who has studied a foreign

> language (ie. taken French in Unversity, or lived there long enough to
> pick
> it up), but what about bi-(or even tri-)lingual societies? For example, I
> live in a country with ELEVEN official languages where most people are
> bi-lingual and tri-lingual is becoming increasingly common.
>
> Or what about a UA game set in Europe? Especially as the EU leads to
> integration, you'd expect more and more people to grow up with "two first
> languages". That rapidly becomes expensive.


Would it matter if someone could do that? I'm of the view that communication
issues in games have a limited period of being fun and then get dull and
irritating. I  would be inclined to say that a player could have 2-3
languages for free if it is reasonable to expect the character to have those
languages as native and let them spend the points on fun (useful?) skills.
After all if the game is going to be set in a place where multiple languages
are expected then restricting player choice for some sort of artificial
balance seems a little, well artificial, unless you are making a point that
the characters are outsiders and want to make that language barrier a point
of the game to highlight the differences.

 Simply give all the characters that option and explain to players who want
to be from a different background where multilinguals are not common (for
instance if playing in the EU then they could be British :) that their
characters will be at a disadvantage and to suck it up. This is UA not D&D

Niall
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