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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6276722" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, while my own language rules mostly incorporate your intuitive sense of how langauge should work, I should confess that in practice such rules are mostly honored in the breach.This is because I long ago learned that many things that were realistic added nothing to the game.  One such area is realistic linguistics.  In reality, in the year 1400 there were probably 10,000 spoken langauges in the world.  In my game world, I doubt that there are as many as 40 humanoid languages and probably fewer than 100 languages altogether.   Additionally, in practice almost everyone on the big continent of Sartha speaks the Westron common tongue.   And even further, most languages are assumed to be pretty closely related.  If you can speak Ancient HUman, you can probably achieve at least very basic communication with most humans in most dialects in the way that Italian, Spanish, French, and Portugese all have many similarities.  This because fundamentally, it is almost always failure of your game if it is not possible to communicate at all with the NPCs.  Why?  Because it is simply not fun.   RPGs are about RP, and RP requires communication and interaction.   It's not fun to have a potentially interesting NPC that the PC's can't interact with.   It's not fun to have potentially interesting clues written on the walls if the PC's can't get at least some of the clues.More than as barriers to communication, being able to speak a language in my game usually serves as an effective bonus to diplomatic efforts.   Those hobgoblins probably speak at least some common.  But if you can speak to them in goblin, it's going to greatly improve their esteem of you.  You might not get full zenophobia circumstantial penalties on your skill checks, or you might if you are very fluent get bonuses - perhaps you are a friend to the goblin people if you can speak so eloquently in their native tongue.   I try to avoid creating situations where knowledge of a particular language is needed for understanding.Another thing that you could concievably be quite realistic about is coin.  There is no strongly realistic reason that coins should be standardized around the world, and plenty of reason to assume that they are not.  You could, and realisticly maybe should, create elaborate regional systems of coinage and define exchange rates and so forth.  But unless your campaign is really mostly about numismatism and economics, this is likely to not only be wasted effort but to actively get in the way of what your game is supposed to be about.   This is related to the fact that in practice, most people spend very little amount of time dealing with the Appraisal skill.   Unless your campaign is really meant to be mostly about shopping, haggling, and bartering spending lots of times obfuscating the value of objects, and spending lots of time developing relationships between the PC's and merchants, is simply going to be a book keeping and time sink nightmare.   It's realistic, and maybe even potentially interesting, but its probably less interesting than what you could be doing for 95% of all groups.   Realism is no justification for going deeply into this.Sometimes this realization actually hurts, because you realize that the book keeping actually detracts from something you really value to the point that you can't justify it.  In my own case, one example of this is the numinous and fearful quality that magic has.  I can give magic this quality, so that it actually seems like magic, but only at the expense of book keeping and mental overhead that is simply beyond what you can reasonably expect when DMing.   One of the reasons that in practice most systems make magic items uninteresting and fully disclose magic items powers is simply that it allows you to shift the mental overhead and burden of resolution fully off onto the player.   If the players don't know what their magic items do, it improves the relationship players have to magic in the setting, but makes the game almost impossible to correctly run.   As a DM in practice you have to make the decision as to what you are going to make the game about and what you are in session going to make your mental space, and in practice, as a human being that memory buffer is finite.  You can't remember everything about the game state.  So you have to make trade offs.  In my case it means keeping most items fairly simple (while still trying to be flavorful), and limiting complex treasure distribution to just 1 or 2 items per player (at most).It also means trying to avoid using my language rules unless they add to the game, avoiding shopping and haggling unless its super impactful (and hense, reporting values to the players and having them keep track of treasure), and using standard unrealistic universal coinage.</blockquote>

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