D&D General Languages suck in D&D.

[Dire Bare]

D&D handles languages poorly, yes . . . it is one of the areas of the game that hasn't got a lot of attention as the game has evolved over the years. It comes down to the concept of "race", which D&D is moving away from, but still has legacy issues remaining.

Germans speak German, Spaniards speak Spanish, Orcs speak Orc, Elves speak Elvish . . . in the real world, we conceive of Germans as a race of people who have a distinct language, in the fantasy world we (used to) see orcs as a race of people who of course have their own distinct language.

Now that we are trying to decouple the ideas of "race" and "species" . . . Germans and Spaniards are different ethnicities of the human species, humans have multiple cultures and languages. If elves are also a species, do elves have different cultures and languages too?

And how much of that goes into the core books? And how should we model it, to give a sense of verisimilitude but also keep things simple?

I'm glad the TTRPG community is having these discussions, even if I don't particularly care for any of the solutions I've seen so far. Progress is being made.

I'm hoping that the eventual 2035 revision to the 5E rules (or something a lot sooner) will lean into re-imagining the various "subraces" from past editions as different cultural, ethnic, and linguistic groups in the core rules. There would be no elvish language, but rather the wood elves, high elves, grey elves, and dark elves would all have distinct cultures, distinct ethnicities, and distinct languages.

 

[TiQuinn]

Oh, no... you misunderstand me:

I don't want to make it impossible to communicate. Just slightly more difficult without the right languages -or- a broad linguistic understanding that lacks the nuance of local languages...

Instead of being utterly handwaved as "Everyone speaks common and no languages actually matter 'til you find the puzzle in a language that I forgot to check to see if any of you read and now the puzzle is impossible and we're going to sit here for three hours of trial and error unless I get so frustrated I just give you the answer."

The intent is not to perfectly mimic real world languages. No more than the intent is to bring a sword to the table to hit your DM with any time you swing on an orc.

Just to be more realistic than "Common" and a bunch of fantasy race languages that grow every time someone makes a new player race for some splatbook.

Technically Black Speech is also an Elven tongue, since it was created, specifically, to be used by Orcs who are, themselves, twisted elves.

What is the difference between proposing a number of languages based on monster or species type versus culture beyond verisimilitude?

From a game perspective, the settings in the past often did have these differences. Greyhawk had different languages with Flan, Baklunish, Nyrondese, Old Oeridian, etc. But those don't work in Forgotten Realms, so there you have Netherese, Thorass, Illuskan, and others. Each setting has set up its own languages culturally, but they are deep in the canon for a reason. My guess is they generally get thrown out anyways in favor of just...Common.

 

[Lanefan]

You're not wrong, but when it comes to actually playing the game how does this affect a campaign? And I'm not being dismissive here, I've tried incorporating language into D&D in a meaningful manner but it's never quite worked so well. This is the reason the universal translator exists in Star Trek. I don't want to spend a whole lot of time not being able to have NPCs and PCs communicate, I want to play the game.

Thing is, dealing with the inability of PCs and-or NPCs to communicate with each other is playing the game.

I've many times seen, run, and played in parties of PCs where there was no single language everyone in the party could speak. It's just another challenge to be overcome.

And note I specifically said "speak" there. Literacy is another area where D&D sacrifices too much on the altar of simplicity. Other than Wizards, who have to be literate in something in order to write-read their spellbooks, there's nothing saying any given character in the setting has ever learned how to read and write.

At cost of an extra minute spent during roll-up we long ago came up with a system of determining if a character is literate and if so, in which of its known languages that has a written form (not all of them do).

 

[Dire Bare]

People really have to stop imaging D&D as some sort of reality simulator.

Languages are what they are for purely gameplay reasons. They are not a treatise on culture or worldbuilding or how things "are" or "should be".

D&D isn't and shouldn't be a "reality simulator", but a degree of verisimilitude goes a long way to making our fantasy worlds more immersive.

Of course, how detailed and complicated do we make various systems to get there . . . the answer is different for different gamers, which is why we have crunchy games with lots of simulationist mechanics and more soft games that breeze past all of that.

D&D, to me, needs to fall somewhere in the middle. Not ignore verisimilitude and simulation, but also not get bogged down in game-slowing mechanics not of interest to the average gamer.

 

[Sorinth]

It's worth mentioning that PCs all knowing common + at least one other language is an Adventurer thing and not necessarily a world building thing where everyone everywhere knows common.

I don't have the new MM, but in the 14 version lots of creatures don't know Common. Gnolls only know Gnoll, Sahuagin only Sahuagin, many Giants only know Giant, Genies only have their relevant primordial, Githyanki only have Gith, etc... Now it's true the monsters that are more commonly on the border of the civilized world like Goblins, Orcs, Ogres, seem to all speak common. That makes some sense as a default, but is also one of those things that seems like an easy change for any DM to make if they want to make language more important to their own world building.

 

[Dire Bare]

I'd think the druidic tongue - being a sort of "secret club language" - is something it would be in the druids' best interests to keep from having variants - you want all druids to be able to speak with other druids from all over the world, right?

Johnathan

Are druids a type of mystic character that appear in different cultures . . . or are they an organization with their own distinct culture?

Originally, if your standard D&D campaign was a pseudo-medieval Europe analog . . . which was the original base assumption back in the day . . . druids WERE an organization that existed across the "continent" and maintained their own practices, cultural values, and language. It was a secret club!

But the D&D classes have broadened as archetypes as the game has evolved edition by edition. Now druids are simply nature priests that can have wildly different expressions in different parts of the campaign world. Druids are no longer a "secret club". Well, in the core books anyways. They still are in my campaign!

 

[Lanefan]

Nevermind that one could argue that racial languages are effectively a standin for "regional" languages.

Though honestly calling them "regional" is ... somewhat silly. In reality, who mostly speaks German? Could it be -- the Germans? Certainly seems to make sense, then, that goblins would speak Goblin.

I think the point is that given there's Goblins all over the world, what we generally abstract as just "the Goblin language" would itself have many regional variants and-or dialects, just like Human languages.

Which means the Goblin tongue you know here might not be of much use when meeting some on the other side of the ocean.

 

[Hriston]

Yeah, no. Or rather, it's complicated.

The issue of how the orcs were created was one that Tolkien kept coming back to over the years, because he effectively wrote himself into a corner where their origin was concerned. That was because it was a fairly important point in his legendarium that evil could not truly create anything; it could only twist and corrupt what had already been made. But he also wanted there to be hordes of evil beings who could act as foot soldiers in evil armies, acting as fodder that the heroes could cut down without raising questions as to whether they were beings would souls (and so could potentially be redeemed, which was a theme meant to be focused on the likes of Gollum).

The result was that Tolkien came up with numerous ideas about the origin of the orcs, but never settled on one, which means that them being corrupted elves is just one idea out of several that he contemplated but never fully committed to.

Nevertheless, Black Speech was made in mockery of Quenya with which it has many correspondences, so could be seen as a form, or at least derivative, of Elvish. For example, Quenya urco, orco becomes Black Speech Uruk.

 

[Lanefan]

Maybe for the one person at the table that's interested in linguistics.

I've had linguistics students and-or linguistics degree-holders in my games on and off since forever. I don't always take things to the extent they might like but I still want a diverse and vaguely-waves-at-believable language system.

Everyone else is going to find it annoying and unsatisfying that they can't talk to the shopkeeper two towns over.

As they should, as language isn't likely to change that much just two towns down the road.

But two countries down the road, or across the ocean? Hell yeah they should expect to have trouble communicating.

 

[Dire Bare]

In my experience the only time a language has been an issue in game has been a DM issue. By that I mean a DM in a game or 2 has had a key part of the game hidden behind a particular language that none of the party spoke. It was awkward, but the DM's were quick thinkers and found work arounds.

I have also played games where things like "thieves cant" were a lot of fun in game and very helpful to the arc.

Languages are only important if you want them to be in D&D.

I'm running a LotR 5E campaign right now, and we are having a lot of fun with languages.

The party is a mostly dwarven expedition delving into Moria, to begin the retaking of the ancestral dwarven home. None of my players created characters that speak either of the elvish languages . . . and got stuck at the west-gate of Moria right at the start! ("Speak friend and enter.") They were frustrated . . . both as characters, but also as players (lots of forehead smacking)!

Did this derail the campaign? No! The group's patron simply suggested searching for the hidden elvish community up north, Rivendell, and asking for help. A whole new storyline and avenue of the adventure opened up! The players expected a nearly constant dungeon-crawl of a campaign, but so far they've traveled all over Eriador (the large region west of the Misty Mountains) in their quest to just begin delving into Moria!