Unpopular opinions go here

[Micah Sweet]

Basically, yes. The game works precisely because we don't subject it to this level of scrutiny. It's all about suspension of disbelief.

There's effectively two issues.

1. This is a game and we want it to be fun. Constantly having to play charades isn't anyone's idea of fun, so, let's not do that.

2. We want the game to be believable. Fair enough. But, again, that level of believability is really subjective. And it gets rather frustrating when people will believe 6 impossible things, but, man, that's 7th. That's just too much. And the counter argument is, "well, you don't have a problem with these other six things, so, howzabout you let this one go too?" But, nope, we're going to use that "it's not realistic" as a huge bludgeoning tool to try to justify personal preferences as some sort of objective criticism.

These two issues are always pulling in different directions.

So if anything is too much realism, then everything is too much realism? Come on.

 

[MGibster]

What if the PCs ask about the economy? I want an answer, and I don't want to make it up on the spot, because that means the answer is meaningless, and the players lose agency.

I ran a Hell on Earth campaign set in Little Rock and one of the PCs rapid fired a bunch of questions: How many people are here? How many women and children? How many people of fighting age? How many mutants? Where do they get their food from? I answered each and every question immediately without thinking and she finally said, "You're just making this up right now, aren't you?" I had to answer in the affirmative. Well, before I she asked her question I had already decided there were 5,000 permanent residents.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You'll need to have prepped that. Wizards sure as hell isnt going to do it lol!

That's right. That's why we do prep.

 

[Lanefan]

Again, I'd suggest giving it a try. Insist that in the next five sessions of your current game, your players must only use hand gestures when speaking to NPC's because no NPC will speak their language. Watch how quickly things like Tongues becomes a go-to solution. Added bonus if two PC's in the group don't share languages.

Strangers in a strange land - which adventurers very often are - should really expect language challenges when talking to the locals to be an ongoing issue, particularly outside of the more cosmopolitan centres.

And within the party? Both the party I currently run and one of the parties I currently play in have characters who flat-out can't talk to each other without a translator.

We get by.

 

[Lanefan]

Again, two weapon fighting was a thing in 2e, and you could burn a couple of proficiencies to reduce your penalties to zero.

2-weapon fighting was a way bigger thing in 2e than 1e. In 1e the only characters I ever saw (or now see) do it were Thieves, mostly because they usually had enough Dex to mitigate the to-hit penalties enough to make it worthwhile.

Look, I'm not saying anything particularly weird here. In 1e and 2e, fighters were very popular because fighters were the undisputed damage kings. Clerics and thieves weren't even in the same zip code. Wizards, eventually, got there, but, for the first six levels or so, wizards had so few spell slots - remember, 1e, no bonus spells whatsoever for Magic Users- that your fighter was the star of the show in combat. In 2e, your fighter got HUGE boosts to damage from 1e. Multiple attacks at 1st level. +1 to hit and +2 to damage as well. Two weapon fighting from the Complete Fighter. The fighter was literally death on toast.

When outright damage was the best way to win, certainly.

THAT'S the difference here. That's why people loved fighters. That's why people go on and on about why fighters need some sort of boost in later era D&D. Because we loved that fighters were actually warriors back in the day.

For some reason 4e decided Fighters were to be defenders, intended to soak damage while the strikers (Rogues, mostly) gave damage out. In weapon combat (as opposed to magical) Fighters should be both the main damage dealers AND defenders.

That said, the answer isn't to add yet more power creep to the game but instead to dial back (pretty hard, perhaps) on the combat damage non-Fighters can regularly deal out. They've already dialled back spell damage from 1e-2e (which IMO wasn't much of an issue to begin with), but when Rogues and Clerics can give out as much or more damage than Fighters, something's gone wrong.

Note here that when I refer to Fighters, Rogues, etc. here I'm talking about the broad class group, not just those specific classes.

 

[Emberashh]

There's a reason they have the universal translator in Star Trek, it because we don't want to spend 10 minutes every episode showing the Federation trying to communicate with a new species.

Unlike a procedural TV show, games have the unique capacity to make language barriers repetitively interesting by way of gamification.

It just depends on implementation, and outside of a few examples not a lot of RPGs have actually tried to do it in a way that isn't just checking a box; and those few examples made language the entire point and focus of the game, taking it to the opposite extreme.

I still think my previous post on this is a way forward on a nice middleground that properly gamifies language without making it a chore or an overdeveloped part of the game.

 

[Lanefan]

Umm, any dungeon crawl? Remember, speaking "Undercommon" doesn't exist. Every group of goblins, orcs, and whatever speaks a different language. Heck, think about something like Keep on the Borderlands. There'S a dozen or so different tribes in the Caves, plus the Lizardfolk. There's pretty much zero chance the PC's will speak even a majority of the languages.

So, no, it's not an unreasonable scenario. Any travel scenario should feature not being able to speak the language. If your characters are from Waterdeep, you should not be able to speak to anyone in Neverwinter or Baldur's Gate. Cormyr? Nope.

When you start trying to be "realistic" about languages, that means that every couple of days travel you go, you encounter new languages.

Yep, that's pretty much it.

That said, in fairness in a typical D&D setting there's a few mitigators:

--- trade languages, for which we have real-world precedent; Common is just a jumped-up version of just this
--- active-in-setting deities who might find it in their better interests if their followers can all communicate with each other no matter where they live (e.g. Gruumsh probably makes good and sure that twenty or so key words such as "kill" "war" "food" "boss" "home" "friend" "water" etc. are exactly the same in every Orcish dialect in existence, such that his Orcs can communicate on a basic level no matter where they are)
--- a few geographically widespread shared cultures (mostly species-based e.g. Elves, Dwarves) who may all use the same language, or close enough (this might also be divinely driven in part)
--- the possibility of almost an adventurers' subculture which might take Common as the equivalent of their trade language.

Heck, it wasn't that long ago that even a fairly geographically small area like England would have several different languages spoken, none of which can communicate with each other. French, English, Celtic, Latin and I'm sure there were more. Documents would be in French, Latin or English and, again, probably more. "Speak to the locals"? Locals means "someone who lives within about a hundred mile diameter circle". Anyone outside of that circle? New language time.

And that's with everyone being human. Imagine adding in a couple of dozen intelligent races as well. Why would elves all speak the same language? Or orcs? Or Giants? In a fairly small geographical area - say about a hundred mile across circle, you could easily have a dozen or more languages being spoken.

So, no, it's not unreasonable at all. But, again, we slam upside against, "I want my D&D to be realistic, but, only to the level of realism that I want".

I take the lazy approach with most non-Human languages and make them species-based; so each type of Giant has its own language but all Frost Giants speak Frost Giant, all Fire Giants speak Fire Giant, etc. Elves have about seven languages, mostly tied to Elvish sub-species. And so on. Humans have lots of languages; and while they're not always as cheek-by-jowl as your England example, you can usually expect a change of local language when you go from one realm to the next.

 

[Lanefan]

So many things like this, if people actually thought about, would just fly apart. The game (unpopular opinion, yes D&D is a game) just doesnt exist under this level of scrutiny.

In this one instance I can tell you that, for us, it can and does exist just fine.

 

[Lanefan]

Bingo. There's a reason they have the universal translator in Star Trek, it because we don't want to spend 10 minutes every episode showing the Federation trying to communicate with a new species.

I always put that down to each show being only an hour long; they had to skip all that stuff but the assumption was it still happened, as even with a universal translator there's going to be misunderstandings before communication becomes smooth.

While I don't view it as a necessary evil, I pretty much just stick to the parts of the world I think players will find interesting. Does it really matter what the main import is for the kingdom? No. Not unless it has something to do with an adventure.

What the main import is might not matter but who-where it's coming from probably does; not for the import itself but in terms of knowing at least vaguely what kind of cultures and people are out there that might be represented by and on the ships that sail into port (and, by extension, might pop up among your group's PCs).

 

[Emberashh]

Something else to note re: languages is that if the party is running into new languages constantly, they're either speedrunning from region to region, or more likely, you as GM are modeling far too small of a world. Whether thats because you're abstracting too much (like travel) or because you've literally created too small a world is immaterial.

Theres a balance to be struck as far as how frequent language barriers should be encountered. The use of a more well defined system doesn't mean language problems have to be shoehorned in everywhere, but it does mean it should come up where logical.

If that balance can't be had, its almost guaranteed to be because you're not accounting for the real geographical separation that results in distinct languages developing, which in game terms should be putting a considerable amount of gameplay inbetween instances of different languages.

Funny thing about realism is that it often provides insights into how realistic things can be gamified.

Another example of that is travel drift, which is a real phenomenon that "Getting Lost" mechanics fail to properly model (not to mention failing to properly model what being Lost actually means), which if you integrate actually results in a much better and less arbitrary travel sequence that still allows for things like random encounters and the like.