A situation arose in a game I've been running lately:
An oracle with the deafness curse wants to cast Comprehend Languages.
We've been talking it over, trying to come to an agreement about what would happen.
I'd like to know everyone's opinion on this.
You can temporarily read lips. Or alternatively,you now comprehend WRITTEN languages.
A situation arose in a game I've been running lately:
An oracle with the deafness curse wants to cast Comprehend Languages.
We've been talking it over, trying to come to an agreement about what would happen.I'd like to know everyone's opinion on this.
It should function normally. He is dealing with a curse and that means that there will be things that the curse interferes with. It is supposed to be a drawback. If he had taken a different curse, then he would have other issues.
Comprehend Languages only works for languages that the caster can sense. A deaf person can't understand a spoken language, though I'd permit a Linguistics check to get some data from reading lips. Otherwise that oracle is limited to the remaining 4 senses for languages, the spell notwithstanding. That's why the deafness curse is completely unbalanced compared to some of the other choices. The oracle can still use the spell to comprehend written, signed, tactile (ex. braille), light/color, and scent languages, so it's not a complete waste of a spell. Lipreading would be using a sort of signed language, which is why it's possible, but since the language is only indirectly a "signed" language a skill check of some sort is called for.
Thanks for the input, we've decided to use essentially bittergeek's post, but with a bit of personal modification.
I really appreciate it.