D&D General Languages suck in D&D.

[Maxperson]

Cool. My immediate family is scattered about lower Michigan. My parents live up near Traverse City and an older sister in Kalamazoo/Grand Rapids. I live with my twin brother 30 minutes outside of Detroit.

My grandparents and some cousins lived in Southfield.

 

[Umbran]

TLDR
Racial languages, which D&D runs on as a foundational principle, suck. Regional Languages are way better.

(I have not read through the 15 pages - so what I say here may have been already said, ro argued away. If this doesn't add anything for you, my apologies. I just wanted to get my initial reaction to the OP down...)

Eh. I don't think racial languages were the foundational principle. The relevant foundational principle was using "race" as a (problematic, easily criticized) proxy for culture.

As I recall the maps of old, D&D used to have regions (usually broken up by terrain type) controlled by races. Here there be giants. There's the hobgoblin nation. Lizardmen fill these swamps. Dwarves in these mountains. Elves in these forests. Orcs roam these plains and hills, and so forth. In this model, race/culture, and the associated languages were still associated with regions.

The problem came when we discovered that, really, players love playing different races, but they do not love playing the impacts of racism or being cultural outsiders. I can hardly blame us, 'cuz racism sucks more than D&D languages do.

The end result is that our worlds on large and small scales tend to have permanent cosmopolitan racial diversity, but still assume race=culture for linguistic matters.

 

[Hussar]

Really, this boils down to a conflict between what makes for an interesting setting and what makes an interesting game.

If you're all into world building and whatnot, diving into language is a great way to differentiate cultures. How do we know Culture X is different from Culture Y? Well, they can't even talk to each other. And there's all sorts of elements this applies to - writing, art, information, and so on. It makes a whole lot of sense.

But, does it make a fun game? Getting players to role play can sometimes be a slog at the best of times. Getting them to actually talk to NPC's beyond the bare minimum required (and sometimes not even that much) can be like pulling teeth. Add in an extra layer of difficulty where conversations are difficult or even impossible without a translator and it can very quickly stop being fun and start being a chore.

And, of course, magic becomes the solution here. The caster just takes Comprehend Languages and can now understand, at least, everything around in ten minutes. It's a Ritual, so, it doesn't cost any resources. Never minding some bright spark just plays a warlock and does all the translating. IOW, the players will simply find a magic solution around the problem and all that work about the different languages goes out the window because we're right back to everyone speaking the same language (effectively).

It's one of those ideas that look really great on paper but, I think in play, it's nowhere near as much fun as people think it might be.

 

[Lanefan]

Really, this boils down to a conflict between what makes for an interesting setting and what makes an interesting game.

From my own perspective these things are interconnected enough that they might as well be one and the same.

An interesting setting will lead to an interesting game. An interesting game will lead to or produce an interesting setting. If either one is or becomes too boring, the wheels fall off.

 

[Hussar]

From my own perspective these things are interconnected enough that they might as well be one and the same.

An interesting setting will lead to an interesting game. An interesting game will lead to or produce an interesting setting. If either one is or becomes too boring, the wheels fall off.

No, I do not agree with this, and, honestly, it's games and game designers that forget this that lead to very boring games IMO. It's like doing mazes in RPG's. It always seems like a really cool idea, but, in execution, it's boring as all get out most of the time.

 

[Horwath]

This brings out a-whole-nother can o' worms to open up: language proficiency.

As in, sure you in theory know the language but how good at it are you really. Are you able to scrape by and that's it, or are you that language's version of Shakespeare, or is it a language you learned in school and then 98% forgot (guilty as charged on three languages!), or what? Is it a language you learned in order to actually speak on a daily basis, or just to be able to read some ancient writings while never having met a native speaker?

We (highly) abstact this by having players roll an open-ended d10 for each language known (with some modifiers e.g. advantage on the roll if rolling for your native tongue) and then letting the player determine how-why the roll's result was achieved in the fiction. For example, if one of your languages is Drow but you only rolled 1/10 on it you might say you only learned it to read something archaic in Wizard school and then mostly forgot it; while if another language is Dwarvish and you came up 14/10 as a Human character then you might say you've spent a lot of time not only living among Dwarves but specifically studying their language.

I would say, that when you have language proficiency you know your local dialect of language and any foreign you can communicate well enough, but you are clearly a foreigner.

when you take same language proficiency twice, you get "expertise" in the language.
you can speak any dialect of the language and pass as a local while speaking it.

so, it's a choice of be able to communicate in 2 extra languages or be expert in one language.

I.E:
for English,
if you are from England, ofc you know english and can communicate with anyone in the world that has basic english literacy. If with a heavy accent from certain part of England.

if you take the proficiency twice and with that getting "expertise", you can pass as any local from any part of Great Britain, USA, Australia, New Zealand or Canada.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Common is the issue. Limit it so it only works in large centres of trade. It’s supposed to be a trade language so it should only be useful for talking about the buying and selling of goods. It shouldn’t work in some random goblin camp or as a universal language

 

[Steampunkette]

(I have not read through the 15 pages - so what I say here may have been already said, ro argued away. If this doesn't add anything for you, my apologies. I just wanted to get my initial reaction to the OP down...)

Eh. I don't think racial languages were the foundational principle. The relevant foundational principle was using "race" as a (problematic, easily criticized) proxy for culture.

As I recall the maps of old, D&D used to have regions (usually broken up by terrain type) controlled by races. Here there be giants. There's the hobgoblin nation. Lizardmen fill these swamps. Dwarves in these mountains. Elves in these forests. Orcs roam these plains and hills, and so forth. In this model, race/culture, and the associated languages were still associated with regions.

The problem came when we discovered that, really, players love playing different races, but they do not love playing the impacts of racism or being cultural outsiders. I can hardly blame us, 'cuz racism sucks more than D&D languages do.

The end result is that our worlds on large and small scales tend to have permanent cosmopolitan racial diversity, but still assume race=culture for linguistic matters.

That is a very insightful angle, Umbran, thank you! I appreciate this perspective.

 

[Steampunkette]

Common is the issue. Limit it so it only works in large centres of trade. It’s supposed to be a trade language so it should only be useful for talking about the buying and selling of goods. It shouldn’t work in some random goblin camp or as a universal language

Common is an issue. There are a few others.

1) Race is being used as a proxy for culture (Thank you, Umbran) which supports some pretty racist assumptions.
2) New Races and thus new unique languages are added, CONSTANTLY. Practically with every release.
3) Languages thus are diluted to relative uselessness because Elves don't get Common, Elven, +1 language to choose the racial language of another party member. So everyone -has- to default to Common for every conversation to ever happen.
4) Every race speaks Common and their own language. Or just common if they're human, meaning little overlap.
5) Common is a simplistic trade language which isn't supposed to be nuanced or able to handle complex ideas like politics or magic, but it's also the de facto "Human" language.

All of which culminates in the 6th issue...

6) We now have to invent ridiculous explanations for why every elf everywhere ever speaks exactly the same form of Elven regardless of any social differences across time or space. All elf slang is exactly the same in all worlds and is utterly unchanged from the moment Elven was first spoken, and the language is perfectly preserved... And so is Orcish and Goblin and Tabaxi and...

 

[Piperken]

...I'm saying that, as a concept, the languages that are provided are terrible and provide an image of cultural monoliths and narrative identity-stripping to a ridiculous degree. Sincerely just awful...

There are concepts in this blog post I likely will implement for languages in the near future; I have a character whose player intentionally decided to not know Common among their starting languages.