Incline Disco Elysium - a hardboiled cop show isometric RPG

The 1985 Oriental Adventures hardcover rulebook, an attempt at creating a version of D&D based on eastern Asia rather than Europe, had class names such as yakuza, ninja, samurai, and bushi straight from the source material, acting consistently with Dungeons & Dragons having classes named fighter, magic-user, cleric, thief, paladin, et cetera. Similarly, other terminology arising from the new source material was (more or less) true to the source material, while established terminology remained unchanged. Obviously, the fictional setting of Kara-Tur, briefly sketched in this book, used fictional place names, but complaining about this would be analogous to complaining about the names Revachol, Insulind, Jamrock, and so forth in Disco Elysium.

 

I don't think you can make consistent standards for this kind of thing. Like anything else, this can be used intelligently and intentionally or stupidly and randomly.

If used well, words tell stories. One consistently annoying thing with RPGs is the loredump. Disco has some, but it also avoids a lot of them. You don't need somebody tell you that there's a Holland-analogue or a Finland-analogue or a Poland-analogue somewhere nearby, when you've got Klaasje the Miss Oranje Disco Dancer, Soona Luukanen-Kilde with an outrageous Finnish accent plus Cuno going "Vittu kyttä fägäri," or Goraçi Kubik, kojkos, and POTAAT coming up. Guillaume Le Million, the French graffiti, and the fact that it's called the Débardeurs Union tells you something about cultural, economic, and political power relations without needing a character to spell it out to you in detail.

The other extreme is something like Numenera, where they've really just slapped on exotic names on things and called it a day: aneen for horses and so on.

 

Ekera!

 

I'll have to hand this much to Josh: he tries. His conlangs are a bit stilted and the writers can't use them properly in dialogue (fucking pidgins, how do they work?) but at least his gellardes and ekeras mean something.

When it comes to fantasy cRPGs, PS:T's cant is still the gold standard as far as I'm concerned.

 

At the very point where you try to go for a "conlang", someone should beat you up with a mallet.

USE ENGLISH or something that closely resembles English.

If your setting calls the business of thievery "cross-trade", once can infer what "a knight of the cross-trade" would mean. And you can naturally use that slang yourself to come up with new stuff that fits the setting. Or if the word has a clear connection to the description of something in the setting. Persons of power physically reside in a different part of the city? Use that to describe them. Nobles are taller than normal citizens? Again an opportunity.

But if you start assuming players would need to remember words like "Ferscönyng" or "Héamecwyn", you're in a dire need of a beating.

 

A world where the only language is English is a world for dumbfucks. Good job outing yourself.

I have no recollection of those words, although I think cönyng must mean king and cwyn must mean queen. Funny that you think you would need to remember those.

 

It's aluminum, dude

 

Encyclopedia can help you understand some things by having a couple of points in it, but it can really go overboard if you invest too much into it, because then it can turn into a repository for useless trivia. It's pretty clever the way it works.

If I recall correctly, Pillars of Eternity did something similar [to encyclopedic knowledge] by giving you contextual info when mousing over highlighted words.

On a tangent note: I wish more games separated player's character from the player in general, because it rises the importance of stats and their level, and it's these stats that should help you navigate the in-game world. In most games the separation is mostly physical and the players can still use their out-of-character knowledge (of the game, setting, etc.). This is why I liked that in Kingdom Come: Deliverence you had to actually teach your character how to read (among other things) in order to be able to read, otherwise it was all gibberish to you.

 

Same as with titanium, the metallurgy doesn't fit.

Neither is present in metallic form in nature. You need electrolysis to refine aluminum, and a chemical process involving conversion from titanium oxide to titanium chloride and then from that to metallic titanium in an inert atmosphere (e.g. argon). There is no suggestion dwarves have that kind of technology.

Stainless. Steel. You're frying your eggs in a mithril pan.

 

I guess the word of Prime Junta is not to be trusted eh? The poor berk got his sodding tail whooped so hard that his addle-coved brain-box can't remember what language the Planescape "cant" is expressed with.

 

I said ONLY LANGUAGE IS English, retard. For someone who wants his RPGs in English you sure don't seem to understand it very well. Unless your problem is with logic.

 

Are you really asking why, in a medium where at least half the atmosphere is conveyed through words, a writer would use a particular word instead of a generic one?

Why is "the Icewind Dale" not called "the Cold Valley"?

Why are "orcs" and "goblins" not called "green mean people"?

 

READING COMPREHENSION TIME: In the context of using made up languages, I say "use ENGLISH". You straw-man and start whining about how "A world where the only language is English is a world for dumbfucks".

While at the same time you praise a game that uses what could be called "a posteriori language" based on ENGLISH. The "slang" still uses features of the English language (vocabulary, grammar). Even with a few made-up words, in practical terms it is English.

That is the reason why it works and Klingon or Josh's attempts do not. You can go beyond just adding a few weird words here and there.

Planescape succeeds because it is something that most players can naturally use and understand. Sure, you can create made up languages based on German or Japanese, but for the majority of the audience they will be gibberish that they can't relate to. Co-writers won't be able to pick up the writing without training, voice actors can't pronounce the made-up words in the script etc. Might as well have them talking straight German while you are at it.

If you want to perform masturbatory writing exercises, dig up weird extinct dialects and use them instead of making things up:

 

How is that a strawman? Or are you now going to attempt to weasel out of this by claiming that when you said "use ENGLISH" it didn't mean "use only English" at all, nonono?

...or twist what I was saying into meaning "never use English?" Or that "no English-based argot is any good?" That's weak even by your pitiful standards.

Translation: it's HAAARD whaa, therefore it must cater to the lowest common denominator, i.e. Dumbfuckus Kwanzanius Zoomeri. And then you complain about .

Stop projecting your own intellectual disabilities on "most people." Most people aren't clinically retarded.

 

I didn't know you were a Negroid Habba. It sounds like if it's not written in Ebonics, "wE wUz KaNgZ 'n ShI'", poor Haba can not comprehend what is happening on the screen. Poor 'lil guy. I guess the rest of us multilingual intellectual chads can enjoy these games for ourselves.

 

Yeah man, Tolkien should just have used English, what kind of a stupid name is Minas Tirith anyway, it's gibberish and nobody could understand that, at least not Haba

 

PJ, you really deserve all the shit you get.

I speak six languages, you dolt.

 

Yeah, fuck Tolkien, fuck trying to build a unique world. Fuck rpgs, who even has the time to play them anymore? Fuck videogames in general, they are gay anyway.

What the fuck is a "Candlekeep"? Who even is this "Baldur" everyone is talking about? We already have cities with names in our real world, why would you go to great lengths to reinvent the wheel? Just call them with renown names.
In an ideal world, "Baldur's Gate" would have been named simply "Washington Monument": your MC, a midget (what the fuck are "dwarves", "halflings" and "gnomes" supposed to be?), has to escape from Harvard to go to Washington and stop George W. Bush, who is trying to build a case for war with false evidence.

Yeah, that's the dream.

 

I also am fed up with corona.

 

Says the guy who first presents his argument with the following cool, courteous, and reasonable phrases:

Yep yep. Can dish it out, but can't take it. Cry some more, punk.

 

I feel like the point to stop was before throwing all conlangs out with the bathwater.

 

oh boy, are we having a fight about whether if it's cool or not to use fictional languages in media? i'm almost tempted to ask Haba on whether if Pathologic 2's writing benefits from the conlang made to give the game's fictional universe more flavor and depth. in my opinion, it adds to hypnagogic quality the game has.. which is also a trait Disco Elyisum has.

 

Question is whether this sort of retardery is the mental product of McComb or if it's just an artefact of the thoroughly stupid and ridiculous tabletop setting that they've chosen for the next Torment game for some unfathomable reason.

 

The "unfathomable reason" being that Numenera was heavily inspired by Planescape and his designer worked on a lot of Planescape stuff.

But yeah, Torment 2: electric boogaloo sucks. However, that's not the point here. The point is that Sarevok should have been named George W. Bush.

 

I don't agree with Haba on the English thing but Tolkien based his fictional languages on real ones, precisely because they just sound "right" to our ears, they resonate. So the high Elves are Finns, Wood Elves are Welsh, dwarves are underground Jews, horse masters are Saxons and so on. Even if you're not a linguist it just somehow, subconsciously makes sense.

Languages that are just completely made up, like blaa-bli-blaa baby speech, do not have this effect. Usually they sound incredibly lame.