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<blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 6744458" data-attributes="member: 16814"><p>I do not usually tinker with languages, for the reasons noted by many above -- it adds complexity without a commiserate benefit in gameplay (for my groups, at least). I will tinker with it if it highlights a core concept of a campaign. Such an example is my current campaign, where I have languages that are difficult to learn (2 language slots for mastery, 1 gets you a pidgin version), and rare and common languages. However, to offset that, I shrunk the types of languages and added common alphabets to many meaning knowing one gives you a pidgin ability in similar languages. So, I get to have some cultural complexity with most characters being able to get by in most places while those that come from that culture or choose to spend resources on it have better results. This achieves my campaign goal of all races having a relatively common origin point while still having developed separate cultures. The difficult/rare languages achieve my goal of having Outsiders and the progenitor race being more difficult to approach/discover things about than normal. Given the campaign is centered on finding out what happened to the progenitor culture, why that culture ended in a world shattering calamity, and why there's an organization devoting significant resources to seemingly recreate that calamity, all of these changes directly aid the campaign goal.</p><p></p><p>TL;DR: If changing languages suits a campaign goal clearly, that's fine; if not, don't add complexity for the sake of complexity.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ovinomancer, post: 6744458, member: 16814"] I do not usually tinker with languages, for the reasons noted by many above -- it adds complexity without a commiserate benefit in gameplay (for my groups, at least). I will tinker with it if it highlights a core concept of a campaign. Such an example is my current campaign, where I have languages that are difficult to learn (2 language slots for mastery, 1 gets you a pidgin version), and rare and common languages. However, to offset that, I shrunk the types of languages and added common alphabets to many meaning knowing one gives you a pidgin ability in similar languages. So, I get to have some cultural complexity with most characters being able to get by in most places while those that come from that culture or choose to spend resources on it have better results. This achieves my campaign goal of all races having a relatively common origin point while still having developed separate cultures. The difficult/rare languages achieve my goal of having Outsiders and the progenitor race being more difficult to approach/discover things about than normal. Given the campaign is centered on finding out what happened to the progenitor culture, why that culture ended in a world shattering calamity, and why there's an organization devoting significant resources to seemingly recreate that calamity, all of these changes directly aid the campaign goal. TL;DR: If changing languages suits a campaign goal clearly, that's fine; if not, don't add complexity for the sake of complexity. [/QUOTE]
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