D&D General Languages suck in D&D.

[Lanefan]

The problem is it can't.
It's the fundamental issue D&D fans struggle with.

At some point, at the last point, you have to choose looks, story, or gameplay.

I just looked up the umber hulk monster.
It speaks umber hulk.
No PC in there right mind will have knowledge of speaking umber hulk before meeting a humblehawk unless they were purposely going to meet in umber hulk.

And yet if some players choose to randomly roll some of their characters' languages (and if Umber Hulk is on the table to be rolled - is it?) then who knows - maybe someone does speak Umber Hulk.

This sort of thing comes up in my game all the time - they meet some bizarre creature I've never DMed before and maybe someone in the party just happens to be able to speak to it. Or not.

If you include all the dialects my game has about 120 (at a guess, I've never counted them all) different languages in it. And that's just some of what's out there in the setting.

You will never ever having a standard PC in a regular D&D adventuring party knowing Umber hulk at the point that a random encounter gives them an umber hulk to speak to.

So if your gameplay is based around one of your PCs knowing umber hulk then you've designed a language system that fails it's gameplay because of its aesthetic desires.

For me, you throw that encouter in there anyway and if someone in the party just happens to speak the right language then maybe the encounter plays out differently than if no such person is present.

In other words, it's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

 

[Hussar]

Again, going back to my experience with Out of the Abyss. It turned out, within about the first hour of play that we actually had enough common languages for different characters to play interpreter with all the NPC's. Ok, fair enough.

Now, do I continue to play the Telephone game? With me, the DM, talking to myself, in front of my players, where they can hear me telling one NPC to the next NPC what they are trying to say? Of course not. So, all this language stuff gets put by the wayside because, well, there's no actual way to play it out.

 

[Minigiant]

And yet if some players choose to randomly roll some of their characters' languages (and if Umber Hulk is on the table to be rolled - is it?) then who knows - maybe someone does speak Umber Hulk.

This sort of thing comes up in my game all the time - they meet some bizarre creature I've never DMed before and maybe someone in the party just happens to be able to speak to it. Or not.

If you include all the dialects my game has about 120 (at a guess, I've never counted them all) different languages in it. And that's just some of what's out there in the setting.

Which means the "game" is optional and not designed to be played.

So the game is secondary to the aesthetic.

It's more important that Umber Hulks speak Umber Hulk, Gith speak Gith, Slaadi speak Slaad than how to use a system of how a PC interact with Umber Hulk, Gith, and Slaad.

The classic struggle between gameplay, logic, and story.

 

[Lanefan]

Which means the "game" is optional and not designed to be played.

So the game is secondary to the aesthetic.

It's more important that Umber Hulks speak Umber Hulk, Gith speak Gith, Slaadi speak Slaad than how to use a system of how a PC interact with Umber Hulk, Gith, and Slaad.

The classic struggle between gameplay, logic, and story.

Give me the in-setting logic, every time. The gameplay and story will both take care of themselves.

 

[Minigiant]

Give me the in-setting logic, every time. The gameplay and story will both take care of themselves.

This thread wouldn't be 30+ pages if it always did.

Language in Fantasy games are world built not game designed. So we shouldn't make languages a game.

But we keep doing it

 

[Hussar]

Give me the in-setting logic, every time. The gameplay and story will both take care of themselves.

Fair enough. But, again, that's only one possible approach.

There are those like me that couldn't give a rat's petoot about "in-setting logic". So, for me, such rules are not going to work. It's always the tension between different approaches. What honestly baffles me, and always has, is why anyone who wants "in-setting logic" would ever play D&D. I just don't get it. Why have to constantly battle the system? D&D has never, ever given the slightest care about "in-setting logic". There's a reason that we have games like RoleMaster or GURPS or a thousand other systems that actually DO care about "in-setting logic". I will never understand why people hitch their wagon to a system that so utterly fails to achieve their stated preferences.

 

[SkidAce]

Fair enough. But, again, that's only one possible approach.

There are those like me that couldn't give a rat's petoot about "in-setting logic". So, for me, such rules are not going to work. It's always the tension between different approaches. What honestly baffles me, and always has, is why anyone who wants "in-setting logic" would ever play D&D. I just don't get it. Why have to constantly battle the system? D&D has never, ever given the slightest care about "in-setting logic". There's a reason that we have games like RoleMaster or GURPS or a thousand other systems that actually DO care about "in-setting logic". I will never understand why people hitch their wagon to a system that so utterly fails to achieve their stated preferences.

If you could clarify? D&D may not have rules for running the game as a total sim, but it certainly has "in-setting logic"...

or I'm not understanding how you mean it....

 

[Bohandas]

To be fair the way languages are handled in D&D doesn;t make much sense from a narrative standpoint either, perhaps that's what was meant

 

[Belen]

We may need some new spells:

3rd level: Mass Comprehend Languages

5th Level: Fluency: Touch a creature and immediately become fluent (speak, read, and write) in one of its known languages. If the creature is unwilling, it may make a Intelligence saving throw to resist. A successful save causes 8d8 psychic damage to the caster and a 1d4 loss to the caster's intelligence. A caster regains 1 point to their int score for every long rest.

 

[Sorinth]

In my view the bolded is a massive error.

Why? In a world were in theory anybody can learn magic by reading/studying it would make complete sense for literacy rates to be much higher then they were in the real world.