D&D (2024) Do you understand the words coming out of my mouth? - Languages in 2024

[Remathilis]

It’s be fine as an Origin feat though. Like, sure, it’d probably be the worst Origin feat, but Origin feats are mostly pretty bad anyway, bar Musician, Magic Initiate, Tough, and maybe Lucky.

Alternatively, they could have buffed it with the ability to decode ciphers or communicate with creatures who don't share a language through simple communication. Or just let Skilled or Skill Expert give language options alongside their current uses.

 

[Steampunkette]

Languages as implemented is fine.

The true issue is guidance.

Just throw in languages out there and telling DMs to use it doesn't work. The way it's supposed to use language is to have several common languages and let the party cover them with multiple party members.

Disagree. Setting everything up as racial languages independent of region and culture is just bad storytelling for the sake of easy gameism.

In a good system, there'd be a handful of specific languages (Thieves Cant, Druidic, Drow Sign) and then a general instruction to the Narrator to either invent 6-10 languages for their world or use a world with a pre-generated list of languages.

And then they could put a "Languages" list in their settings that doesn't include "Elven".

Instead, everyone speaks Common unless they're trying to be a jerk at which point they swap to a 'Private Language'. And the fact that EVERYONE speaks Common undermines -any- language system there is, completely. It's just bad.

 

[Minigiant]

Disagree. Setting everything up as racial languages independent of region and culture is just bad storytelling for the sake of easy gameism.

In a good system, there'd be a handful of specific languages (Thieves Cant, Druidic, Drow Sign) and then a general instruction to the Narrator to either invent 6-10 languages for their world or use a world with a pre-generated list of languages.

And then they could put a "Languages" list in their settings that doesn't include "Elven".

Instead, everyone speaks Common unless they're trying to be a jerk at which point they swap to a 'Private Language'. And the fact that EVERYONE speaks Common undermines -any- language system there is, completely. It's just bad.

I didn't say anything about racial languages.

For example you would do something like in my home city of New York. The most common languages are English Spanish French Russian and Chinese. So if you have party members proficient in those five languages you can speak to most of the people in the city.

So for a fantasy campaign you would say people speak common, Undercommon, Northern, Southern and Elven. This the party only needs to contain those five languages to do most of the speaking. And when it comes up to having to speak one of those specific languages the party member who has that language feels special.

Instead D&D has a dozen languages spread around and there's no way to cover them all without magic.

 

[GarrettKP]

Dungeon Delver and Martial Adept are also gone, not just Linguist.

I like that rare languages are rare, and I hope that they come up more in printed adventures. I do think Linguist should have been reprinted as an Origin Feat for the Scribe background and hope it comes back for an updated Archeologist or Anthropologist background.

For Anthropologist, give them Linguist and change it so you can "quick swap or quick learn" a language by studying a speaker during a short rest or something?

 

[bedir than]

Level Up introduced a Culture skill to address this issue.

Yeah, I take a slightly different approach to Cultures, having them replace languages and History.

 

[Steampunkette]

I didn't say anything about racial languages.

For example you would do something like in my home city of New York. The most common languages are English Spanish French Russian and Chinese. So if you have party members proficient in those five languages you can speak to most of the people in the city.

So for a fantasy campaign you would say people speak common, Undercommon, Northern, Southern and Elven. This the party only needs to contain those five languages to do most of the speaking. And when it comes up to having to speak one of those specific languages the party member who has that language feels special.

Instead D&D has a dozen languages spread around and there's no way to cover them all without magic.

Yes. That would be a slightly better language system. One which recognizes that cultural divergence is totes a thing and linguistic drift happens.

But "Common" being present remains a problem.

No other language matters if everyone speaks Common. They become nothing but trappings. "Oh, my character speaks Northern Elven, just like the King!" "Okay. But the King is speaking in Common so that doesn't matter unless you wanna keep secrets from us."

Don't get me wrong, it made for a decent scene in the Two Towers:


And you can recreate that scene within a game. But the only reason Legolas swapped to Elvish was to keep the many ignorant humans from knowing what he and Aragorn were saying. It added drama for a movie, but at no point in the movie do people face a sincere language barrier that -requires- external translation.

Meanwhile, 13th Warrior had this excellent section:


Which leads to Ibn Fadlan trying to learn the language on the journey through context clues which is really neat.

Language isn't a barrier in D&D unless it's something written down somewhere and you don't have a party member who reads that specific language... but every goblin and dragon and demon speaks Common so it doesn't matter 99.9% of the time.

 

[Clint_L]

A fairly easy in-setting explanation for that could be that language is more or less tied to pantheon and that language initially came from the deities. As most Elves worship the same pantheon, so would most Elves share the same language; ditto Dwarves, and so on. But Humans have numerous pantheons, and thus numerous languages.

That just kicks the can. Why do humans have more pantheons? (Also, they don’t in my setting).

The implication seems to be that everyone else is less special than humans.

 

[Remathilis]

I didn't say anything about racial languages.

For example you would do something like in my home city of New York. The most common languages are English Spanish French Russian and Chinese. So if you have party members proficient in those five languages you can speak to most of the people in the city.

So for a fantasy campaign you would say people speak common, Undercommon, Northern, Southern and Elven. This the party only needs to contain those five languages to do most of the speaking. And when it comes up to having to speak one of those specific languages the party member who has that language feels special.

Instead D&D has a dozen languages spread around and there's no way to cover them all without magic.

Part of the problem for me is the disconnect between the standard and rare languages and the PC options in the game. The standard languages are great if your game deals primarily with just the species of the material plane, but the 24 PHB gives us two species with planar origins, plus a bunch of planar related classes, subclasses, and even feats and no way to access the languages associated with them. There is no way by RAW for a tiefling fiend pact warlock to learn Infernal and that just doesn't make sense.

And as the game expands PC options, that disconnect is going to get weirder. At some point, they are going to print (or reprint) aquatic species that can't speak with other aquatic races (Primordial) or fey species who don't know the language of the feywild.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think it was just too weak a feat.

They could have adjusted that if they wanted to. Instead, it's just another setting and sim aspect of the game sacrificed in the name of "getting to the action".

 

[Crimson Longinus]

That you cannot learn new languages is weird, and that warlock cannot learn abyssal, dragonic sorcerer draconic etc is hella annoying.

That being said, as noted, languages almost never matter in D&D, as everyone speaks common anyway. And I'm not so sure that even is such a bad thing, even though it is super unrealistic. Constantly locking out some characters from social situations because they don't know the language isn't actually fun, and cool things you can do with different languages are really limited.

In my houserules I got rid of languages as a game concept, and replaced them with linguistic skill, that can be rolled when trying to decipher weird runes or communicating with strange cultures. It has it's own weirdness, but it allows more flexibility, and the relationship between fiction and rules is more fluid.