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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 2389406" data-attributes="member: 14159">I very intentionally made it so that somebody from one world is speaking more or less the same common as every other.  To be honest, it's always been that way in ever campaign I've ever played and every DM I've ever talked with about this.Now, 3e has thrown this concept out, but back when I and my gaming friends started playing D&D was back in the 2e days, when all the worlds coexisted and used the same cosmology and the same planes.  Spelljamming ships and planewalkers regularly travelled from Krynn to Toril to Oerth.  This is based in that idea, that over millennia of planar travel and spelljamming, along with regular trade convoys a de facto standard language could emerge doesn't seem especially strange to me.  The idea that somebody fresh from Waterdeep could speak common without translation to somebody who just left Solace seemed pretty much presumed in both Spelljammer and Planescape, and the 2e sources always approached the various setting specific languages as dialects or local variants of one widely accepted language, which is what I went with.Now, my players know me as somebody who actually uses languages, at least more than other DM's, which is to say that if they're snooping and listening in on a conversation, it'll likely be in a regional or racial tongue that they might not understand, not the convenient common.  If they run across somebody speaking common, I will occasionally say a completely incomprehensible word or bizarre phrase in the speech just to underscore that they are speaking a significantly different dialect.  If they find some written text, it could be in a wide variety of languages, with draconic being predominant for arcane texts and celestial, abyssal and infernal being most common for religious, but nonmagical, nonreligious texts could be in anything, and only documents related to travel or trade are likely to be in common.  Most DM's I've seen hand wave the issue away just assuming that there is a convenient Common which everybody speaks and uses most of the time, and if other languages exist they are second languages to people, or are long extinct academic curiosities, and since I actually bothered to think about the issue and deal with it in my game, I wanted to have an article explaining why my game doesn't have one nice happy truly universal common that everybody speaks the exact same way everywhere as a first language.</blockquote>

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