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<blockquote data-quote="LurkAway" data-source="post: 5773080" data-attributes="member: 6685059">Longish preamble: I recently read about the fascinating history of Esperanto, the most successful artificial language in history. (This account comes from Uncle John's Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader, which is way more interesting than the Wikipedia entry.)Apparently, Esperanto was reviewed by the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Language in 1904, but critics wanted to fix some &quot;problems&quot; with the language. Yet Zamenhof (the inventor of Esperanto) was adamant that Esperanto would only survive if the central core grammar and vocabulary remained unchanged.From pg 298 of Uncle John's Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader:Volapük (another constructed language) was splintered and displaced in the 1880's in that way. In contrast, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamento_de_Esperanto" target="_blank">Fundamento de Esperanto</a> prevented the &quot;movement&quot; (Esperanto was a culture as much as a language) from splintering into numerous factions each thinking their version was the best.As for the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Language, they made a new version of Esperanto, called it Ido (literally &quot;offspring&quot; in Esperanto) and announced it the world's international auxillary language in 1907. It was an immediate failure. From pg 374<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin&nbsp; &nbsp; :D"&nbsp; data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />&amp;D is not a language, and so the analogy surely fails on several levels, but it does face similar obstacles in trying to be a unifying subculture or movement with a common artificially constructed vocabulary/grammar. So can any takeaway lessons be applied to 5E, which wants to have a robust default and be modular and unifying all at the same time?Or to put it another way, if 4E encountered unexpected problems by not being inclusive to all/most playstyles, what equal but opposite dangers should WoTC watch out for if/when 5E swings in the other direction?Edit: My two cents for a solution is <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/5774261-post18.html" target="_blank">here</a></blockquote>

[QUOTE="LurkAway, post: 5773080, member: 6685059"] Longish preamble: I recently read about the fascinating history of Esperanto, the most successful artificial language in history. (This account comes from Uncle John's Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader, which is way more interesting than the Wikipedia entry.) Apparently, Esperanto was reviewed by the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Language in 1904, but critics wanted to fix some "problems" with the language. Yet Zamenhof (the inventor of Esperanto) was adamant that Esperanto would only survive if the central core grammar and vocabulary remained unchanged. From pg 298 of Uncle John's Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader:Volapük (another constructed language) was splintered and displaced in the 1880's in that way. In contrast, the [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamento_de_Esperanto"]Fundamento de Esperanto[/URL] prevented the "movement" (Esperanto was a culture as much as a language) from splintering into numerous factions each thinking their version was the best. As for the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Language, they made a new version of Esperanto, called it Ido (literally "offspring" in Esperanto) and announced it the world's international auxillary language in 1907. It was an immediate failure. From pg 374:D&D is not a language, and so the analogy surely fails on several levels, but it does face similar obstacles in trying to be a unifying subculture or movement with a common artificially constructed vocabulary/grammar. So can any takeaway lessons be applied to 5E, which wants to have a robust default and be modular and unifying all at the same time? Or to put it another way, if 4E encountered unexpected problems by not being inclusive to all/most playstyles, what equal but opposite dangers should WoTC watch out for if/when 5E swings in the other direction? Edit: My two cents for a solution is [url=http://www.enworld.org/forum/5774261-post18.html]here[/url] [/QUOTE]

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