Homogenized Races?

dragoner said:

As a factoid, "lingua franca" or literally "tongue of the Franks", is a medieval dig at Rome by Constantinople, in that Latin was the language of Barbarians (the Byzantines called all Germanic barbarians Franks), because Rome had been conquered by barbarians.

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There was a trade language at the time that was based in Italian (mostly northern dialects) with a whole lot of loan words from other languages. This pidgin, sometimes otherwise called "Mediterranean Lingua Franca" or Sabir, was what they were referring to, rather than Latin.

Umbran said:

There was a trade language at the time that was based in Italian (mostly northern dialects) with a whole lot of loan words from other languages. This pidgin, sometimes otherwise called "Mediterranean Lingua Franca" or Sabir, was what they were referring to, rather than Latin.

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Venetian? I don't know. But that's what I would suspect just hearing about it.

It's a lot of time since I GMed a truly fantasy setting, but I never had problems with differentiated species. We regularly had the so-called (by the humans) high elves, forest elves, and dark elves. The dwarves had several kingdoms; IIRC there never was a dwarf PC, so I just dealt with those by assuming that the PCs couldn't get most of the cultural differences because they did not know enough. We had orcs who preferred living in the open wastelands, and others who preferred staying underground and could see in the dark. Etc.
It never was too difficult for the players. Just like there were many different human countries.

Yes, there also always was a common trade language. Occasionally, there was a communication snag because some isolated community of whatever species (including humans) wouldn't know the lingua franca or any other language known by any PC; but I played that card only rarely. Once in a while it may be interesting and require creativity; constantly having that problem is not fun.

Aldarc said:

Venetian? I don't know. But that's what I would suspect just hearing about it.

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Venetian and Genoese dialects, yeah. Significant amounts of Catalan and Occitan as well. And then loan words from pretty much everything on the Mediterranean Sea, as you'd expect for a trade pidgin.

It's already too complicated that we have all of these humanbutnothuman races in D&D as it is to be practically playable. These simplifications may or may not be realistic (who knows what a supposedly alien demihuman thinks, believes or behaves like anyway) but making it "realistic" doesn't make the game any more fun or playable; in fact, it quickly crosses the Rubicon into making it considerably less fun and less playable to get caught up in some esoteric "realism" fetish that probably only you care about.

I had to face this after having my own crisis of linguistics with regards to gaming years ago—since linguistics is a hobby of mine, I wanted to overly complicate it to highlight stuff that I personally thought was interesting. I had to let it go; nobody else cared, and in fact, found the focus kind of irritating at best, and extremely stupid and crippling to play at worst.

Desdichado said:

I had to face this after having my own crisis of linguistics with regards to gaming years ago—since linguistics is a hobby of mine, I wanted to overly complicate it to highlight stuff that I personally thought was interesting. I had to let it go; nobody else cared, and in fact, found the focus kind of irritating at best, and extremely stupid and crippling to play at worst.

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Yeah, this echoes exactly my experience. There are a ton of ideas that I've had that I thought were cool and came from my understanding of "how the real world works" that turn out to be just annoying when you implement them in a game and don't add anything to the game, but instead detract from it.

Realistic languages are near the top of that list, but I'll add of the top of my head...

Realistic currency.
Realistic taxation.
Truly medieval cultures.
Numinous magic items.

You have no idea how much time I spent (and wasted) as a teenager trying to define original cuisines and cooking styles for the different cultures in my game.

It's not that any of those things are bad, it's just that they make (for somewhat different reasons) terrible focuses of play. Once they start intruding into your game, they start taking up time that could be spent on other more interesting issues. There is only so long that most people, including interested students of the subject like myself, are going to be interested in playing out realistic currency, realistic taxation, money changers, or even fiddly magic items with unexpected emergent properties if those unexpected emergent properties only have fiddly impact on the game.

What I've instead learned from all of this is that you can keep all this in a tool bag, and use it when it can add something to the game. So for example, you can keep the numinous magic, just apply it only to a few important items across the whole group, not to every single item that the players come across. You can do the whole "culture shock" thing when the players move between region, combining exposition with a bit of funny gameplay and a rare spot light on skills that might otherwise go unused (like knowledge of accounting or law). But if you make the pervasive problems of mundane life the focus of the campaign, it's going to get as dull and frustrating as mundane life often is.

And yes, ironically this means Gygax was more advanced in his DMing than is I think generally credited, and my objections to how "unrealistic" everything was were less intelligent than I thought they were when I was younger. I didn't really fully appreciate the 1e AD&D DMG until I was much older.

The Session Tapes said:

Okay, folks... here's a good discussion topic for you;

Racial languages/religions/alignments.

I personally really dislike the "homogenous" races idea which seems to be present in a lot of TTRPGs, (D&D in particular). The idea that an entire race follows the same pantheon or speaks the same language, regardless of where in the world they're from just doesn't ring very true to me. This is why the idea of "racial" anything seems very incongruous to me. I have a hard time believing that the Elves of Silverymoon and the Elves of Cormyr speak the same language, let alone worship the same pantheon or have the same cultural structure.

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In my campaign, several of the nonhuman races are extremely long-lived, which leads to a significant amount of linguistic stasis. Elves, in particular, live thousands of years, or at least they did until the last generation or so. But they travel and disperse themselves at about the same rate as humans, so widespread elves speaking a single tongue makes good sense to me. Likewise, dwarves live several centuries and are extremely linguistically conservative on the whole.

Despite this, I do have Ancient Elven (from long, long ago) and Old Dwarvish. And two elves (or whatever) from sufficiently far apart might not speak the same tongue; a long time ago, a pc elf arrived via long-distance teleportation and spoke a language that was similar to Elvish called Elfisti.

I do think some degree of the culture of a given race arises from their makeup- call it their genetics, their soul, or whatever. So the fact that my dwarves are almost universally conservative cultures, slow to change and with significant reverence for the ways of generations past, is not *just* a cultural thing- it's innate to some degree. Those innate traits are part of what make dwarves not-human.

The Session Tapes said:

As for Alignments, I don't use them anyway... I think they're WAY too "mechanical" to reflect true morality. I think the devs themselves even realised this; adding characters like Drizzt and gods like Eilistraee to pay lip-service to "moral complexity" within the cultures. But for people who use them, do you ever have issues with the idea of an entire race having the same moral compass? Or does it just not come up?

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Did you play 3e? In 3e, a monster's alignment wasn't just "chaotic good"; it was either always, usually, or often (? might be misremembering that last one) chaotic good. So I would treat elves as "usually" chaotic good. Not all elves are, but the average elf you meet probably is.

No, I don't have an issue with a race having an innate moral position. In a game where there are actual demonstrable gods of moral positions, it only makes sense.

The Session Tapes said:

(Oh, and don't even get me started on the fact that there's a language called "Common" )

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There needn't be. The Common Tongue in my game is currently Imperial, but a while back, depending on where you started, it might be Forinthian, Strogassian, or Peshan- hell, it might even be Elvish, if you came from the right place.

Common Tongues are real- today, it's English. Not too awfully long ago, it was French (thus lingua franca). At one point, it was Greek or Latin. But I will agree that, generally, a language actually named Common would be weird.

the Jester said:

Common Tongues are real- today, it's English. Not too awfully long ago, it was French (thus lingua franca). At one point, it was Greek or Latin. But I will agree that, generally, a language actually named Common would be weird.

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I'm pretty sure the convention is, like so much of fantasy, from Tolkien.

In the Lord of the Rings, several characters make reference to "the common tongue" and I think that the writers of D&D assumed that "common" was the name of the language. But "the common tongue" being referred to is actually called "Westron" and is basically is to Numenorean what modern English is to Norman French. Ironically, the language isn't even really used in the text, as unlike any of the other languages in Middle Earth, when a Westron word or name would appear in the text, Tolkien produced an Anglicized equivalent to make the sound more pronounable and familiar to the reader rather than alien or foreign (which is achieved by leaving the other languages in their 'true' form). "Westron" itself is an example of this, as the word an actual speaker of the language would use for it is "Aduni". The "real" name of the character "Sam Gamgee" is Banazîr Galbasi.

Celebrim said:

I'm pretty sure the convention is, like so much of fantasy, from Tolkien.

In the Lord of the Rings, several characters make reference to "the common tongue" and I think that the writers of D&D assumed that "common" was the name of the language. But "the common tongue" being referred to is actually called "Westron" and is basically is Numenorean what modern English is to Norman French. Ironically, the language isn't even really used in the text, as unlike any of the other languages in Middle Earth, when a Westron word or name would appear in the text, Tolkien produced an Anglicized equivalent to make the sound more pronounable and familiar to the reader rather than alien or foreign (which is achieved by leaving the other languages in their 'true' form). "Westron" itself is an example of this, as the word an actual speaker of the language would use for it is "Aduni". The "real" name of the character "Sam Gamgee" is Banazîr Galbasi.

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I think you may be over complicating things and although it may seem strange now I think the phrase common tongue was once more common than we realise. For instance in one of Winston Churchill’s speeches in Canada he states that “the gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance

there’s also some scholarly articles which wax poetic using the term “the common tongue of England” distinguishing it from Welsh and Anglo-Norman. The distinction of Saxon English of the common folk and prestige Norman is illustrated in Ivanhoe thus:

“ old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him.“

the Jester said:

At one point, it was Greek or Latin. But I will agree that, generally, a language actually named Common would be weird.

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In Greek, Koine literally means "common" or "shared." In general, I have no problem with the notion of a common tongue.

With regard to cultural homogeneity - or a lack thereof - in nonhuman creatures, it really depends on the understanding of that "monster" group within each particular game's internal logic.

If they are "folkloric" entities - and they are understood as such by the (human?) characters - then a homogeneous, unchanging culture seems fine - Pendragon might describe them in this way.

If they are "funny looking humans," à la Star Trek (elves are magicky, long-lived, pointy-eared humans; dwarves, squat, bearded, axe-wielding humans etc.), then it's reasonable to expect them to have internally divergent cultures, religions, languages etc., in the way that human societies do. I feel that this is D&D's default assumption, although individual games certainly need not follow this model - I tend to prefer a more "folkloric" approach.