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Message: <blockquote data-quote="trancejeremy" data-source="post: 5861698" data-attributes="member: 924">It's like on TV (or Hollywood movies), where everyone speaks English most of the time. Even say, on Stargate SG-1, they've go to a new world, the natives would speak English. Beyond that, in LOTR, all the orcs, goblins, even trolls spoke English. Heck, the trolls had English names in The Hobbit.Common might not be (overly) realistic, but unless you want to play a game more about trying to communicate with each other than adventuring, it's a good thing to have. Especially since I don't think anyone wants to put in the effort to develop several truly unique languages, which are not based on anything on Earth. Probably the closest thing to that is Tekumel...and while it's brilliant, it's never gained more than a cult following.Ultimately though, this is something that should depend on the setting, not the rules. And quite frankly, it's not something that should be relevant in most campaigns, unless you do a lot of world traveling. It makes sense that everyone on in a given region would know the most popular language and call it common.It's not like we haven't had something like that in the real world. We even have a fancy term for it, rather than calling it "common". Lingua Franca<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca" target="_blank">Lingua franca - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</a>D'oh, beaten on the Lingua Franca comment. But as you see, in a region, the most popular language (or from the most powerful country) becomes the language used to communicate with others. Is it a world wide language, as somewhat implied by D&D's use of "Common"? No, but it's very close...</blockquote>

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