D&D General Languages suck in D&D.

[PretzelBoy]

Things you could (but you don't have to) use languages and/or dialects for in a RPG:

• Provide characters with a spoken identity. People can spot a dialect pretty quickly and in many cases determine where the speaker is from (or at least where they are not from).
  • To pass as a local/native speaker of a dialect could turn out to be useful in social encounter. Boom! A non-combat problem solving skill test! Deception? Performance?
  • This does not have to be a huge piece of homework. You can use a broad brush without going into specifics: If people do not listen to any continent-wide radio stations and do not travel very far beyond the closest market town, the inhabitants of a valley might start to sound different from the people in the sparsely populated uplands or the densely populated coastal area. Boom! Local cultural variety in a sentence! And any native speaker would recognize the difference.
  • When a speaker has an identity in their speech, it could become a lead: "What did they sound like? Were they from around here? What kind of a foreign accent?" A mystery: "Oh, you'd better watch out for 'em river folks!" Or a late warning: "You done taken a wrong turn".
  • If you happen to have any sort of social classes in your game, people of different status might use noticeably different words and sounds broadcasting their background. Again, it does not need to become a great piece of homework, but simply something that could be used to foreshadow, explain, perplex, hint, or suggest.
• Provide a meaningful motive for cultural variety. If you are running a geographically widespread campaign, you could encourage players choose different cultures or birthplaces providing them with slightly different proficiency in languages and/or dialects. Much like character height or hair color, it does not need to become a focus of the game or does not need a rigorous system around it. Yet, tall people can usually reach higher than non-tall.
  • This minor variety may give players slightly different feel for the situation based on what they know. A player character from the coastal area might recognize the tradesman speaking in "wrong" dialect. Boom! A mystery! And a player feeling special without an inflated set of "special abilities". And the players learn that there are these things in the world that you could maybe figure out, that could maybe have meaning, that could be reasoned about, that could be used to divert or could be used solve problems. In story-telling parlance, it's kinda showing things about the world instead of telling.
  • The Fellowship of the Ring was one such multicultural group, although the benefits were poorly recorded by the person least knowledgeable of languages. Boom! A Joke!
• Provide a sense of mystery and in-game problem solving, when the player characters embark on a quest beyond the areas familiar or known to them.
  • Differences provide a sense of differences. (How about that for a true statement?) If your game has cultures, you could suggest how the other culture sounds a bit different to the player characters. I suppose it has to do with that verisimilitude.
  • For a period, the players might not have a complete understanding of the situation around them. Maybe they could hire interpreters to make non-stakes social encounters run smoothly. With the interpreter, the GM could "do exposition" on the political or economic situation that the PCs would otherwise have difficulty of learning. Or, an interpreter could have connections that could help the player characters in their quest (for a favor or two, perhaps). And suddenly, the game is knee-deep in local politics should that suit your fancy. Boom! A side-quest!
  • Foreign surroundings could be a motive for language acquisition. Again, it does not need to be huge piece of homework. Does the system support it? If not, you could wing it! Gradually, the player characters could develop skills to "read" the foreign surroundings or even to pass as a local. You could make the aptitude of language acquisition INT-based: a cheap way of making some a characters appear special. Boom! Adventure down-time content!
  • With some non-player characters able to exchange ideas in a language not immediately accessible to the player characters, you can turn a letter, an engraving or a symbol a puzzle for the players to solve. They might not be able to solve it themselves, so they might need help. Boom! A social encounter! And through somebody learning about this puzzle, the GM has a venue to "do exposition", increase the stakes, pick up the pacing, dial up the mystery or whatever makes the game more fun.
  • Translating an important text in a foreign language might itself turn into an adventure requiring non-combat skills. What language it is, who could translate it, where is it from, how old is it? Boom! An adventure! "Why was this note written in language X of a rival power?" Boom! A mystery! All these questions leave social bread crumbs that the player characters could follow (if they are pursuing somebody closer to the MacGuffin) or the antagonists could follow (if the players are closer to the MacGuffin). Boom! An intricate chase sequence!

There is plenty you could do with languages to make your game more fun, more intriguing, more cohesive, more exciting, more rewarding and more meaningful. Speakers reveal a lot about them when they use words. It does not need to be super geeky, just some common sense et un peu d'improvisation.

The super-geeky part would be coins. They could be more just pieces of metal. They could have like some symbols or encravings on them suggesting different mints, rulers, eras, city states, metals even. "Ah, you are paying in two-hundred-year-old coins, just like the other person two weeks ago."

 

[occam]

The vast majority of Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit takes place in what was once the kingdoms of Gondor/Arnor so that makes sense though.

That's not really true, though. The Nûmenorean kingdoms never had much sway over Wilderland, and much of The Hobbit takes place there. Canonically, Thorin's party should've had some problems understanding others and making themselves understood after crossing the Misty Mountains, but they didn't. Every Elf they met apparently spoke perfect Westron, as did the Men of Lake-town when they should've been speaking Dalish or something like it.

And there's a large portion of The Lord of the Rings that takes place in Rohan, where we encounter lots of Rohanese characters that all speak Westron instead of their native tongue, even amongst themselves, at least on the page.

BTW, I'm not making the argument that everyone should play D&D the way that Tolkien wrote stories for mass consumption. Personally, I like playing out occasional scenarios where language gaps exist. But Tolkien, perhaps contrary to intuition, is actually not a good example for highlighting language diversity in fantasy roleplaying. He understood that it helped the storytelling if everyone could easily understand one another.

 

[TiQuinn]

Ok, so you believe verisimilitude in a game where you are portraying an imaginary character interacting in an imaginary world shouldn't be a big deal from a design perspective if broad appeal is a priority? What should be a big deal then in such a game? What else should or shouldn't the designers care about?

I think speed of play and engaging, interesting game play should be the foremost concern. A mechanic could be very precise and realistic, such as the aforementioned calculation of distance from a character on the ground shooting a missile weapon at a flying monster, but if it slows the game down, and an abstraction is easier for the players and DM to understand and use, I'd rather go with the abstraction.

Also regarding the "appeal" to broad appeal, when did the designers of D&D decide that should be the priority in your opinion? Or has it always been that way? Because throughout the editions the game has obviously been designed differently, and the kind of verisimilitude I prefer has been given various degrees of attention. And that of course disregards 3pp games using the same basic mechanical underpinnings as one version of D&D or another.

I think it's an ever-evolving cycle of design, and the game is never operating in a vacuum. There are always outside pressures dictating how a game needs to be designed. 2nd Edition absolutely HAD to be backwards compatible with 1st Edition, because "OMG, we've still got all this old product on our shelves" to the point that Zeb Cook had to stick with THAC0, even though he KNEW that it made more sense, and was just plain easier to have ascending ACs.

But in general, I think you try out a mechanic, you play-test it, and you see if it makes the game better. Certainly that works for house rules; I don't think it's terribly different conceptually from professional design. I think there were a lot of rules initially written that made logical sense to the designer, but didn't really undergo any kind of play-testing, and were quickly discarded. This obviously happened a lot in the earlier editions.

Other editions had different goals. I was all-in for 3rd edition and the customization of classes, the way bonuses would stack or override each other, feat chains, and it all made logical sense on paper...and then I DM'd it, and it was probably the most excruciating version of D&D I ever ran. The sheer weight of the mechanics and things to track from the DM's side overcame the enjoyment that I was getting out of the system. Part of that was discovered over time, part of it was by design. I think Monte Cook's notion of system mastery was, looking back on it, a pretty flawed idea, for instance. The Gen Con 50th Anniversary videos were very interesting from this standpoint - in listening to the designers, I think they were very upfront about the limitations they had, the constraints at the time, what they were attempting to do, what they thought worked, and what didn't. For instance, I highly doubt Monte Cook, Jonathan Tweet and Skip Williams would design the game the same way they did if they had a time machine.

Does that answer your questions?

 

[Velderan]

The example I used was Latin with specific local languages French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. If you speak Italian but not French you can still broadly communicate, but subtleties are lost. In reality, this isn't the case, but it's an abstraction that essentially creates a 'Partial Fluency'.

So the interesting thing about Italy specifically is since it spent so much of it's existence as different regional kingdoms, each developed their own dialects which borrowed heavily from other languages in neighboring countries they were exposed to through traders visiting their ports. I spent 3 years living in Naples where the dialect which is still commonly spoken borrows a lot from Spanish, so if I couldn't think of the word in Italian to ask for something, my friend who spoke Spanish would try Spanish and usually get a respond in the regional dialect that sort of made sense to him. There were gaps for sure, but it was better than trying English. My wife who is from Genova, Italy said her grandmother used to say she could speak their dialect in Portugal on vacation without speaking Portuguese and could generally be understood well enough to handle basic things as a tourist.

 

[Lanefan]

Try running a campaign based on your theories and get back to me.

Not sure if my theories and @Steampunkette 's line up exactly but I've been running multi-lingual campaigns where not everyone (even including the PCs) necessarily share any languages in common for 41 years now; and so far, so good.

 

[Lanefan]

Fine then. What precisely your position then? I still don’t really know. Or better yet, how does whatever you are proposing going to make everyone’s game better? You’ve said D&D sucks at languages. Make it not suck, and make it also not be a hoop I have to jump through at the game table.

The point is that making language a hoop to jump through at the table - i.e. making it an in-character challenge to be overcome now and then - is what makes it not suck.

 

[TiQuinn]

The point is that making language a hoop to jump through at the table - i.e. making it an in-character challenge to be overcome now and then - is what makes it not suck.

Okay. That has not been my experience.

 

[LordEntrails]

I'm saying WotC should change their language rules. 'Cause for most people it wouldn't really matter, for some people it would be interesting, and for everyone it would be another step to breaking the races represent cultures structure that's existed in D&D for a long, long, time.

So spend limited developer/writer resources on a niche part of the play space that most people would never use... That sounds like a bad business decision. But, a great opportunity for you to publish a Languages Guide on the DMsG.

 

[Steampunkette]

So spend limited developer/writer resources on a niche part of the play space that most people would never use... That sounds like a bad business decision. But, a great opportunity for you to publish a Languages Guide on the DMsG.

Writers cost between 5 and 25 cents a word.

WotC, of all companies, can afford to have someone write 2,000 words on Language.

"Limited developer resources" my left butt cheek.

Like. We're not talking about AAA Gaming high end graphics and engine coding, here. We're talking about writing up a minor side system entirely in text.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So spend limited developer/writer resources on a niche part of the play space that most people would never use... That sounds like a bad business decision. But, a great opportunity for you to publish a Languages Guide on the DMsG.

Personally I don't care who makes it. I just think there should be lots of optional rules modules out there, and I think the fact that WotC disagrees with me for their part is sad for those folks who, for one reason or another, feel they can only use material WotC publishes.