>>Before I step ahead of myself, I know this has been brought
>>up, but what about adding racial languagues?
>
>I know I've answered this before, but I suppose I'll answer
>it again.
>Imagine this, we spend a couple weeks generating perl-based
>language
>rules for a handful of races. The language goes in and you
>do a
>little dance as your Drow begins speaking pig-latin to his
>buddies
>and all the Dwarves in the room grumble to themselves. Then
>one
>Dwarf creates a Drow and begins speaking every word
>combination he
>can think of to build up a lexicon/translator for Drowish.
>He then
>runs that through his client and has it autotranslate
>everything you
>say so he can understand it perfectly. There goes a couple
>weeks of
>work and this "cool feature" of the game becomes a non-issue
>as
>translators are pawned off over out-of-character channels.

Well, one, the person would have to be extremely anal to go through all word combinations.

Second, how about it ALWAYS looks like gibberish to someone not the race, like any dwarf listening to elf words gets it all garbled, but an elf sees it fine. This would fix any of this, and would allow only races to understand each other.

You could also make languages able to be learned by certain races, like a dwarf could learn some elvish like (50%) if he spent a long time with elves and like 1,000 gold or something. Then you could have translators...

I still like the idea of racial languages, and think if you make it look like random gibberish to anyone not of the race listening, it would fix this and allow for races to communicate.

>
>>To take it a step further, what about adding racial cabal
>>options? Such as the Dwarven Brigade, or Elven protectors,
>>or Fire Giant Marauders, etc etc.
>
>Oddly, this was the original plan for the Empire. The draft
>title
>was "Empire of the Underdark" and it was going to be a
>racial alliance
>cabal. Things changed. Morale was based heavily on racial
>combos
> encouraging racial separationism); interestingly enough,
>the people
>that were cleaning up from having high morale said nothing
>and the
>great gnashing of teeth from folks with low morale woke the
>dead.
>Would I like to see CF race wars? Yeah. Do I think it's
>going
>to happen any time soon? Probably not.
>

And I was hoping to see a marching dwarf army

What about making towns more dynamicly to be changed. Like, see how fire ravages a town like Galadon 24-7 and nothing is done - how about make it damage the economy? Add some more wandering guards who try and put the fire out, and if something burns long enough, the prices raise because of need of repairs or gates are unable to be shut because of fire, etc.

Then people would actually care if it's burning in the room besides the little searing heat. If you want your precious potion of return, you save the wizard shop. And you could fight, newbies can do nothing against this but make it so people can empty water supplies in the room to help. It'd make town love a lot more important than just somewhere you recall to.

Also more towns that have a prison like Hamsah would be nice. I think Galadon is tired of being the city of blood.

>>To take this even a step *further*, how about adding Cabal
>>items for them?
>
>I'd be ok with (for example) Orc Clans being able to down
>cabal
>items, regardless of whether or not they had a village item
>themselves. A few years ago, after visiting Venice, I was
>intrigued by the idea of having holy relics in different
>cities;
>possession of the relics resulting in various benefits, loss
>of the
>relics resulting in various urban misfortunes. Those ideas
>have
>sort of been back-burnered and may or may not ever see the
>light of
>day again. I'd probably vote for that before voting for
>cabal items
>for the non-human villages.
>

That's my point. I kind of stole this idea from hearing of Dark Ages of Camelot that each realm has a relic, and if taken, they don't lose anything, yet the opposing realm gets a bonus. That way it would never hurt those too young if it got taken, but you would want your relic to grant you power.

Even go beyond the orc village, but add relics to each town...then you could have town wars and alliances. Now THAT would be fun.

>>To take this even a step *FURTHER*, how about adding
>>race-only classes to these race-cabals.
>
>There is some talk of handling races separately from
>classes. I
>won't say much of anything about that, though.

Good
Always wanted to see a fire giant warrior learn things different then a gnome, not just be better at bashing.

Wise men talk because they have something to say,
Fools talk because they have to say something.
-Plato