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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steampunkette" data-source="post: 9434132" data-attributes="member: 6796468">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:[MEDIA=youtube]5iCkVRZGIZw[/MEDIA]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:[MEDIA=youtube]rMHxA72ubjY[/MEDIA]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.</blockquote>