litphoria

It's not a good trait and very confusing.

People have the same and better reasons than me, down below.

One of my very close friends is very much into language barriers. I've talked about the situation with them just now. I'm not interested in them myself, but I've also learned a lot from them via osmosis. Here's our thoughts.

First: 'common' and 'foreign' (or who speaks whatever whoever can understand) is not useful to express in absolutes. In their words: foreign is "vague as heck, like well who is it foreign to, and how foreign is it". Consider that you can have two characters who pick "common", but one speaks Belgian, and the other speaks Russian. Boom, you have a language barrier to play around with, but the trait didn't do anything helpful.

The suggested categories are still effectively the exact same thing, so nothing much changes.

Language barriers are a pretty niche thing (says my friend, who's rarely found anyone into it), and people into language barriers don't necessarily pick a "side" to play, unlike say a dom or a sub does, so picking "I'm foreign" or "I'm common" doesn't help anyone. Someone into language barriers just finds someone else into it, then they excitedly discuss what situation to put themselves in and who'll be in what role, who (if either) will understand the people around them, whether they'll understand each other, whether some level of communication or none at all is possible across the language barrier, etc.

Bottom line: All we need is find profiles into language barrier. The character language trait doesn't actually help people into language barriers. For the rest of us it's useless because 'common' and 'foreign' don't mean much at all (common and foreign to who exactly and how much) under the current version or the proposed version.

(Um, not very interested in language barriers myself*. Mixed up my pronouns. I have learned a lot from my friend about language barriers, I'm totally still into said friend.)

If I have two chars who take "common" and one speaks Russian and one speaks Bulgarian, then they can't play together because one is in Russia and the other one in Bulgaria. Since "common" refers to the place and time where they are, if both speak common and are at the same place, they can understand each other. Choosing "common" means I want to play my char at places where I understand the people and "foreign" the opposite.

It says nothing about if I understand the other character, since my char could be multilingual. Though I am "common" and he is "foreign" I could understand his foreign language. The "non-verbal" trait is a bit odd in the context.

I didn't mean it literally, a place is not necessarily a country. It works the same if in street A English is common and street B Spanish.

Sorry about the delay. This is now open to be endorsed.

For those who would prefer to keep this trait, I made a feedback that proposes different categories within it. delete and replace categories under character language (litphoria.com)