Remove /language or tweak it.

[kari]

1 hour ago, kate said:

hmmm i dunno honestly, i think this isn’t seeing the bigger picture

If someone’s going over the top, maybe it’s for humour’s sake; perhaps they’re not ‘meant’ to be understood. Their intention is for people in the scene to look at each other and go “huh???? what???”

However in the other case: say a player appears in a scene speaking in fluent Spanish. There’s a Spanish-speaking character nearby, but the player behind the screen doesn’t know Spanish IRL, which lends to them a very unfortunate circumstance where they feel stupid for not knowing the language OOC, so they can’t engage in the conversation, despite that their character could.

In this respect, the argument for this being an English speaking server vs the unintelligible accent roleplayers is null; they’re similar, but not nearly the same

I can get this, and, I'm not particularly trying to argue against typing accents - simply that I don't think it should be forced. It's a stylistic choice that has a lot of literary roots in either method, and I think preserving that is a good idea. 

[Bartleby]

9 hours ago, victorian ladies boots said:

Indescribable Cadence

always feels intense heat of second-hand embarrassment at these because how is somebody meant to imagine an inflection 2 a voice that they specifically can't describe.  cant realyl do your lovecraftian epic noneuclidean "described as indescribable" to something with strict limits like voice. Oh is your character speaking shapes and colours. esp. paired with the most tame lexical choices that could have an air of Other through specific word choice. 

would your high soc character use words of a specific field that your bowery whore wouldnt? (yes)
would your italian goomba rper use small elements of sicilian in his muddy american-italian patois? (yes)

 

at the end of lengthy court rp big bailey asked with a voice dripping with delighted sincerity if my character was, uhh, simple, due to the words he used nd things like verbal fillers in speech. i didnt just do /language Simpleton bc characterisation can and should be far more nuanced than set-and-run command toggles. 

 

9 hours ago, Grumsman said:

People aren't and shouldn't be -both by administration and server culture- expected to get their accents down to a tee from the get-go

 

roleplay isn't a game to win you shouldn't care if somebody is being perfect with their silly voices. if somebody's that pressed abt it they should help them until they're good enough 🙂

[Lawliet]

/language should definitely only be for languages. I'd advocate for potentially a low-profile /accent command with a limit to 2 words that appears either in a unique color or has a predefined set of accents for use (IA = Irish Accent, RP = Received Pronunciation, CA = Cockney Accent, FA = French/Franco Accent, etc for as many as are realistic/could be potential). Or maybe a symbol that indicates accent Ashley R. Pauncefote (British*): where the * is short for it being an accent, not a language.

I'm also all in favor of it being specifically used in descriptions. However people actually pulling up individual character descriptions seems to be a rarity unless they're specifically directed or do so regularly anyway. Not a lot of folk actually do it consistently.

[mint]

I think that there are a lot of things that could be changed about the existing chatbox. Some QOL things could be some minor markdown support (for **bold **and *italicized* text) and an easier way to differentiate between dialog and actions instead of color codes; maybe two forward slashes or something like that. That way you could phase out people using colors, and posts would be more consistent and people will stop randomly highlighting text in red.

If you were to use some sort of decorator to switch between dialog and describing an action then you could support a feature from helix that worked quite well: language flags.

You have a list of languages and at character creation you can select an additional language that your character can understand. So let's say my character can speak English and French. Then I can use /language french to switch to speaking french, and whatever dialog I type will only be understandable to other characters which have the same language flag. For everyone else it 'translates' it by replacing the words with random words of that language from a list. This way you can prevent people from metagaming what is said in foreign languages.

For example, if I type "/me Hello! //as he walks into the bar. //How are you?" (while using French language):

• For characters that understand French (and also in server logs and such):
  • John Smith says: Hello! as he walks into the bar. How are you?
• For everyone else:
  • John Smith says: Avoir ! as he walks into the bar. Dans autre pouvoir?

That system worked really well on helix and I'd love to see it on RedM.

[jupitr]

Having /language limited to one and two parts would be awesome, and if somehow colors could be removed from /language inputs that'd be even awesomer (the ^0 doesn't fade into grey at distance so it seems like everyone with a colored accent is talking right next to you)
I much prefer seeing ppl write out their accent, going off of phonetics etc, but /language does serve a purpose in 1, writing in a diff language (which is a major reason to keep the command) and 2, writing an accent if the person doesnt feel comfortable/confident in their ability to write it phonetically
It's just the whole Random Man says (young snarky irish-american accent): that comes off as ridiculous and overdone
 

Spoiler

PS
I'd love the ability to use italics, bold, paragraph breaks, etc simply for ease of editing/emphasis
having bold and italics would (hopefully) remove the number of people using colors in their /me's or dialogue to emphasize, which imo is a complete eyesore
i.e. /me says X thing loudly and obnoxiously
to /me says X thing loudly and obnoxiously
"The United States Militia is butting heads with the Makoyi"
to "The United States Militia is butting heads with the Makoyi"

 

[buffy]

accents in /language help me spot italians before they get too close