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<blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 9607333" data-attributes="member: 7006">I've never been one to really get concerned about languages in games such as this myself, because at the end of the day there are really meaningfully only two-- the language that the players (and their PCs) use to communicate with each other and the world... and the language that no one in the group understands and thus basically becomes a &quot;puzzle&quot; for the the party to try and figure out to get the info out of.&nbsp; Whether that &quot;puzzle language&quot; is just flavored as a single unknown language, or any one of a dozen different in-world languages doesn't really matter.&nbsp; All that matters is that the DM is highlighting the fact that people are talking in a language that the party doesn't understand knowing full well that the party is going to try and figure it out.&nbsp; Because if the foreign language being said had no import whatsoever, the DM wouldn't have made it known to the party that the NPCs were talking in that way.&nbsp; After all... NPCs speak all kinds of unintelligible things in the backgrounds of scenes all the time and the DM never bothers alerting the players that there's background noise of this sort because it is a waste of everyone's time if the party were to suddenly decide to stop what they were doing to try and translate it.It's like characters going to the bathroom.&nbsp; We all know that every PC and NPC does it, but we never mention it or bring it up during the game because it is pointless to.&nbsp; It's information that serves no purpose, so why waste each other's time passing it on?&nbsp; But that also means that the one time the DM does mention a character going to the bathroom, it's because this is the one time where there IS a purpose for mentioning it.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="DEFCON 1, post: 9607333, member: 7006"] I've never been one to really get concerned about languages in games such as this myself, because at the end of the day there are really meaningfully only two-- the language that the players (and their PCs) use to communicate with each other and the world... and the language that no one in the group understands and thus basically becomes a "puzzle" for the the party to try and figure out to get the info out of. Whether that "puzzle language" is just flavored as a single unknown language, or any one of a dozen different in-world languages doesn't really matter. All that matters is that the DM is highlighting the fact that people are talking in a language that the party doesn't understand knowing full well that the party is going to try and figure it out. Because if the foreign language being said had no import whatsoever, the DM wouldn't have made it known to the party that the NPCs were talking in that way. After all... NPCs speak all kinds of unintelligible things in the backgrounds of scenes all the time and the DM never bothers alerting the players that there's background noise of this sort because it is a waste of everyone's time if the party were to suddenly decide to stop what they were doing to try and translate it. It's like characters going to the bathroom. We all know that every PC and NPC does it, but we never mention it or bring it up during the game because it is pointless to. It's information that serves no purpose, so why waste each other's time passing it on? But that also means that the one time the DM [I]does[/I] mention a character going to the bathroom, it's because this is the one time where there IS a purpose for mentioning it. [/QUOTE]

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