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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steampunkette" data-source="post: 9433928" data-attributes="member: 6796468">Languages kinda annoy me in most games but D&D is probably the worst because of racial languages being the 'core' of language.Desert Elves, Mountain Elves, Forest Elves, Sea Elves, Dark Elves, Winter Elves, and Bar Elves all speak the same language. Oh, were they spread out across massive gulfs of the world for incredibly long periods of time? That's okay. They all still speak the exact same language.Europe is a prime example of humans living within pretty close proximity of each other not even speaking the same language. Even with a massively powerful conquerer-culture of Rome slapping everyone under the yoke of Latin they don't all speak the same language, even if there's similarities.But get a Castillian speaker and a French speaker together and if they don't know each other's language they won't understand each other even though they're both speaking Romance Languages. Meanwhile the English, German, and Scandanavian languages are all based in early Germanic and can't communicate directly. And don't get me started on the Balkan languages and Cyrillic languages.All of which are fundamentally distinct from the Arabic and Semitic languages that developed next-door.D&D 5.5e is actually making an effort to get away from racism in it's new species, which I applaud. But in this relic of game design, this vestigial limb of 'eh, close enough' just annoys the piss out of me.Languages should probably be regional and broadly defined as having dialects and different ways of speaking. The issue, of course, being that D&D is invariably presented as a system rather than a setting so it makes the general overture of "Languages should exist" but use races to be the stand in... mostly.'Cause they also do broad sweeping interplanar languages as well! Not only do all Elves speak a single language, but so do the Fey and Demons. Chaotic creatures all speak the same language, how -useful-!And everyone, regardless of where you are in the world or the planes, speaks the Common tongue, rendering all non-Common languages essentially moot except when you want to use a language to keep information hidden from people who don't speak it.UGH. Like -that- isn't a stereotype that people who speak a primary language other than English routinely have to deal with in the US.Anyway... yeah. Languages as an idea: Great.Languages as implemented: Garbage.</blockquote>

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