I'm doing my first novus character and I'm bugged about what is the starting language skill when doing a level 1 character. Is it measure on a 10 scale or 5. is fluently speaking/writing is 6/10 or 3/5 ? just need a little help here. I'm working with the 0.5 version of the pdf.
You are thinking of Rolemaster/HARP (which I have worked on previously) which has 10+ skill ranks or MERP (which has 5 skill ranks per language -- Note the US Military also uses 5 langauge ratings in real life).
In Novus, languages separated into spoken and written. And you either know the language or you don't. Learning the language is a done through purchasing a Talent, which happens to cost 1 Character Point for normal languages, more if you want to learn a Magical or Ancient Language.
And since the language talents are trainable, that allows you to learn a new language whenever you go up a level if you want.
I made the decision to handle languages the way I did to keep things simple and in part because of the number of Character Points received each level. I had originally considered using the US Military's rating system, but frankly that would have turned languages into an enormous CP sink, which is not something I wanted, but I did want it to take time and effort (i.e. cost CP) to learn new languages, so treating learning new languages as a Trainable Talent was the best solution that I could come up with.
