Fantastic Frontiers: Diplomacy and Languages

If you want a game that's about exploration, it's necessary to have a somewhat more developed system for negotiations. Being able to purchase (or extort) food in the field is essential to survival. I've contemplated allowing provisions to be looted after a battle, but in a vast uncharted wilderness, pillaging isn't as reliable a strategy as it would be for an army attacking a well-populated civilization of farmsteads.

There are essentially two questions that need to be answered:

1. Can I talk to this guy?
2. Is he going to like me when I do?

The first question is a matter of communication. Here we encounter the first problem of a game based on exploration of a new world: The locals don't speak your language. The success of various famous expeditions was heavily dependent on their access to a good translator, a La Malinche or Sacajawea who managed to secure critical assistance from natives at a pivotal moment in the overall campaign. This sort of thing is difficult to model in a game, since negotiations are heavily dependent on the content of the conversation, and conversations are free-wheeling affairs that require inventive role-playing, not mechanical rules. I've elected to provide a system that creates flavor and some interesting decisions, but remains at a high level of abstraction that boils down to a single roll against a table.

To create some consequential decisions, FF uses a demeanor system. The player picks what kind of interaction to attempt in a few broad categories, and this choice creates a set of outcomes for the roll. Modifiers to the roll include: whether the natives are aligned with your sponsors (or with an enemy), the skill of your best diplomat (based on a numerical charisma bonus), and the relative size and strength of your force compared to the natives. The possible matrix of outcomes is given below:
 









The player picks a column, and the (modified) dice roll result picks a roll. The possible outcomes are loosely inspired by the ones in Magic Realm, which has a rather detailed and convincing negotiation system, but lacks the mechanic of being able to pick your own poison demeanor. The demeanor concept is based on the parley options in the Gold Box series, which always seemed evocative to me despite their terseness.

You can see that different columns are better for certain things. "Meek" is your standard "Please don't kill me" posture, for when you're hopelessly outclassed by the playground bullies. "Haughty" is the opposite, essentially letting you bypass the effort of crushing a minor nuisance by a display of force. "Affable" gives you the best chance to set up commerce with friendly locals, and "Sly" is a wildcard alternative to "Meek" that gives you a chance to turn the tables more aggressively.

The second question is somewhat dependent on the first question. Your best diplomat may not be able to speak the correct language, making it important to bring along a translator as well. When this happens, the quality of the translator functions as a bottleneck to the bonus provided by a skilled diplomat. That is, it's important to both have a charismatic diplomatic and also an intelligent interpreter working as a team.

This raises the question (still unresolved) in my mind of how broadly or narrowly to define languages. In a primitive region, there would typically be dozens of local languages spoken, but also a few "trade languages", often either a crude pidgin dialect or else the lingua franca of a current (or recently fallen) empire with hegemony over the region. There's something appealing to my mind in the idea of finding a balance between "a few popular languages are all you need" (as in Mesoamerica, with Mayan and Nahuatl) and "knowing a specialized language gives you an edge with exactly the right group of locals" (as Lewis and Clark received from the Shoshone).

It's interesting to note that fantasy worlds have faced the same sort of balancing act, where the plot often demands that either one approach or the other be present. Sometimes the secret plans of the enemy need the additional concealment provided by a foreign language, so that the notes that the orc dropped just contain a vaguely ominous map and a bunch of illegible writing. Other times you want the protagonists to be able to freely converse with the locals after traveling halfway around the world, and the author posits the existence of a "Common tongue" of the sort that Tolkien relied upon in LOTR, with justifications drawing from his background in linguistics. But a universal common-speech works better for a world based on the premise of a feudal world built on the bones of a fallen elder civilization. I feel like it instead undercuts the idea of a discovery-based premise if the natives of the new world are insufficiently alien, so I'm planning to rely on local languages at least as heavily as on trade languages. I can't think of another game with a detailed language system, and I'm still debating how useful it would be to develop one, or what it should look like. At the very least, I want players to be just as happy to say "My expedition just found a guy who can talk to those dwarves!" as to say "My expedition just found a top-notch gunnery captain".