No Common Tongue

[Kahuna Burger]

What you really want is something that achieves the effect of having Common--i.e. the players can more or less easily communicate with most people, and do not spend game time parsing odd dialects, hunting for translators, or pondering why *this* village speaks Os Padain rather than Os Palak like the surrounding villages. That may turn YOUR crank as a linguist, as somebody else said, but you're not running the game for yourself.

Actually, tht might be what YOU want, but its obviously not what the original poster wanted. And, yeah, he is running the game for his own enjoyment, in addition to his players, unless they pay him. And as this thread amply demonstrates, there are plenty of people who would enjoy having all those as part of their game.

Sure, an adventure can and usually should start in a place where you can communicate and get by, but for me, the whole point of being an adventurer is to go places you don't know about and explore! and language issues are a huge part of exploring.

I want to parse dialects. I want to hunt for translators, or have a character who serves as one. I want to run the risk of being distrusted out of hand because I speak Os Palak instead of Os Padain. We're talking in this thread mostly about how to do that while maintaining skill balance and ease of play. A "I like it the way it is" post is expected, but speaking for the world isn't appropriate.

Kahuna burger

 

[rpgHQ]

Okay. I'm dropping common, however my campaign world still has a "common" tongue, a dead language called "sarynth" which is spoken as the lingua-franca of the educated and the church. (Pretty much like Latin) While most peasants won't speak it, the nobility and clerics will speak it to some extent. Although I've designed a plethora of languages and dialects, most of the initial campaign will take place around trade centers (the logical starting point for an adventuring party) where some of the major languages will be spoken. When and if the party moves across the continent, hopefully they have spent some points in speak language to learn other languages. There should be some interesting moments, but hopefully it won't be a major burden. This is my solution. If the players miss the common tongue, I'm sure that I'll hear about it.

By the way, just out of curiosity, I'm wondering how the KoK language rules handle dialects. The boundary between a dialect and a language isn't always clear. If I were to design different dialects for each major orc tribe (fairly mutually intelligible, but resulting in some communication problems), would players have to point on each seperate dialect?

Shadow in my rather rambled and long winded prior post in this thread I had an example of two farmers speaking dialects of the same langauge, I am making the assumption of say a language rank system of 0 to 10 with 5 ranks being what the common person would speak in regards to fluency/education. And had the DC at 10. So say two orcs from different tribes speaking would get that +5 on their DC roll and I talked about maybe taking the differance in the rolls as a reaction modifier of sorts the bigger the difference in the rolls the more misunderstanding and hostility is likely. Along those same lines if oyu speak a langauge or several langauges all based on the same root tongue then you get synergy bonuses like with standard skills. With me orcs are part of the goblinoid races and all speak a variation of the same root tongue. So say a player has 5 ranks in a golbin langauge and 5 ranks in a orc langauge and is listening to some orcs talking in a 2nd orc tongue he would get a +4 synergy on top of his INT bonus when he makes his dc roll. But then again maybe you were just making some joke that I missed with the players pointing bit? I am tired so maybe I did miss something hehehe.

After reading folks thoughts here and looking back on my own thoughts on how do handle langauges I am thinking more and more the way I am going will work nice and be flexible enough that everybody in my games will be ok with it if not actually happy with it. EN world is such a great place to find brain fodder to dig thru for my games

 

[Nifft]

IMC, there was a Latin-speaking First Empire 2k years ago. They spread far and wide, across this world and others. Humans so far encountered speak French, Spanish or Italian (depending on where they're from -- those from the Great Western Valley speak French, those on the Free Islands speak Spanish, and those in the Southern Highlands speak Italian). These groups are separated by 2k miles or so each.

Latin is still spoken as the language of the educated. Elven is a single and very constant language, as are Dwarven and the elemental tongues. People can speak Celestial, Draconic, Sylvan and Infernal, though the powerful languages have a cost:

• Mortals cannot lie in Celestial, and Celestials do not lie, but Devils are not so restricted. Demons cannot understand Celestial, but they know it causes them pain.
• Oaths spoken in Infernal are eternally binding, sometimes in horribly literal ways. (Some cultures have dabbled in using Infernal for wedding vows, with dark and disasterous results.)
• Mere knowlege of Abyssal by mortals saps their sanity. -2 to all Will saves vs. Tanar'ri, and Tannar'ri make Intimidate checks against speakers with a +4 Circumstance bonus. ("He who gazes into the Abyss..." and all that.) However, against other mortals or Evil outsiders, Intimidate checks made in Abyssal confer a +2 Circumstance bonus to the speaker.
• Sylvan is vague and euphamistic, and more full of indecent proposals than a typical American's perception of French. -4 to all Intimidate and Sense Motive checks for speakers & listeners, respectively, and a +2 Circumstance bonus to any seduction attempts conducted in Sylvan.
• Draconic is the language of Arcane magic. So, +2 to Spellcraft checks vs. Wizards, and +2 to Knowlege (Arcana) dealing with things written in Draconic. Also, speakers of Draconic know exactly how weak the language's creators consider humanoids, and therefore gain a +2 Circumstance bonus to Sense Motive checks against dragons, but take a -2 penalty to Will saves vs. a dragon's Frightful Presence.
• Druidic oaths are as binding as Infernal ones, but the agency enforcing the oath is far more benign. It is a pity that the language is not more wide spread. However, Druids always trust each other's word, and this lets them to function together more cohesively than their loose organization would seem to allow.

 

[rpgHQ]

Actually, tht might be what YOU want, but its obviously not what the original poster wanted. And, yeah, he is running the game for his own enjoyment, in addition to his players, unless they pay him. And as this thread amply demonstrates, there are plenty of people who would enjoy having all those as part of their game.

Sure, an adventure can and usually should start in a place where you can communicate and get by, but for me, the whole point of being an adventurer is to go places you don't know about and explore! and language issues are a huge part of exploring.

I want to parse dialects. I want to hunt for translators, or have a character who serves as one. I want to run the risk of being distrusted out of hand because I speak Os Palak instead of Os Padain. We're talking in this thread mostly about how to do that while maintaining skill balance and ease of play. A "I like it the way it is" post is expected, but speaking for the world isn't appropriate.

Kahuna burger

hehe thats sorta my view too, in our own world guides are hired/bought/enslaved more for being able to communicate with the other native folks along the way and to keep from making too many cultural mistakes that might insult than for their ability to guide you to a specific destination.

You hire someone as a scout/guide to keep you out of trouble/act as the middle man on your way to whever your going or exploring. If a merchant or explorer doesnt feel like learning a new langauge or learning about a cultures tabu's/traditions they hire someone to do it for them.

And like you say it opens up lots of hooks for adventures and plots.

I just wish more folks would discuss the game mechincs part of it here though, finding a way to make it balanced and acceptable by the majority of a groups players, something flexible enough that theres defined rules and usage like with many skills but enough leeway that the GM can either as much or as little as he needs during an adventure to cover different situations or even the groups mood during play at the time. I think the way I am going as I stated in a prior post is a good way to go but with no one making comments on the mechanics side of it and mostly talking about how they do or dont use common doesnt help anybody who actually might want to figure out some decent rules for doing languages and get away from all these common tongues.
With talk of a couple different rpg's having plausible langauge rules I think I might end up spending an afternoon at my hobby store browsing the KoK book and such to see what type of rules their using to see if the rules I am working out follow similiar lines or even better than what I am working on.

 

[der_kluge]

I removed Speak Language as a 1-point skill. IMC, it's a regular skill like any other, except that it has sub-skills. So, you can take Speak Language (Elven), or Speak Language (Celestial), but you have to have ranks in it like any other skill. 10 ranks in a language is fluent, and everyone starts out with 10 ranks in "Common" though it's not called common - the major dialect of the known world in my setting.

Wizards have to have 1 rank in Draconic per spell level to cast spells. Clerics automatically get 1 rank in celestial every level.

There are some other bonuses that other classes get, but this is it in a nutshell.

If you want to speak to an elf, you have to make an elven language skill check. Failure indicates that you either didn't communicate what you intended, or you insulted him in some way. Like I said, 10 ranks is fluent, and at 5 ranks, you can "take 10" and essentially communicate everything you need to, but you just kind of have to take your time with it. So, unless there is some urgency, having 5 ranks in any language is sufficient.

Most don't bother to take 20 ranks in their own language. Like, only poet laureates, or lawyers, or someone like Shakespeare would be the only ones that would bother having 20 ranks in 'English', for example.

 

[mythago]

Actually, tht might be what YOU want, but its obviously not what the original poster wanted. And, yeah, he is running the game for his own enjoyment, in addition to his players, unless they pay him. And as this thread amply demonstrates, there are plenty of people who would enjoy having all those as part of their game.

Oh, *I* am one of those weirdos who would have a blast with multiple languages. (Come to think of it, one of the plot threads on my last character was that she was a half-elf who never learned Elven, and when she got around to it spoke with a 'funny' accent.)

But the original poster was concerned because his players may not like it, to the point of actually telling him they were worried about the game getting bogged down.

And, let's face it, it's easy for a GM to overdo "GM's area of interest/expertise" to the point where the person having the most fun is the GM, while he's preparing the next adventure. You have to balance between what you like, what your players like, and what works for gameplay.

I wasn't speaking for "the world"--merely for the point of view his players seemed to express, and from experience with similar tensions in other gaming groups.

 

[Nifft]

http://klimt.cns.nyu.edu/~fishman/DnD/languages.shtml

Updated my campaign's website to include languages.

-- N

 

[Desdichado]

I'm not sure if that's really helpful, but languages are really a result of isolation.

If Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese are different languages, it's because isolation allowed them to become different over time. Just like animal speciation. Dialects varies more and more, influenced by other nearby languages, up to the point that two languages that were formerly the same are now different.

In a magic world, where people may travel fast with teleport spells, portals, flying carpets and fast supernatural mounts like pegasi, hippogriffs, griffons or even more exotic creatures; you have a factor of unification of languages. (Just like today, where English is behaving like a linguistic Borg.)

I know this is an old thread, but I was taking a little time to follow-up on some topics that had interested me in the past but I had lost track of.

There is a danger in using biological metaphors for language development, because "daughter" languages are not strictly speaking, "descendents" of a single language. Languages develop as much through loanword, borrowing of structure, attrition of grammer and the influence of political, economic and other social factors as they do through simple language drift.

Also, without any mass media, I can't imagine a D&D setting that doesn't feature 99% of the population splintering into regional dialects. It's all well and good to describe flying carpets, teleport spells and the like, but unless those are fairly readily available to your average joe, they won't have any effect on language development to speak of.

 

[Aaron L]

The Common Tongue was one of the building blocks of my game world: where did it come from? I had it originate with a fallen empire that had united most of the world in the past and then crumbled, but lasted just long enough to empart a shared common language on most of the world. Regional languages still exist, but this sort of "Latin" is still widely known and educated people the world round still know it, and in some areas it is almost universally understood.


If you don't want to have a "common" you better have at least a commonly understood academic language, or things will get slowed down very quickly when characters start to travel the world.

 

[BryonD]

Hey Nifft,

Very cool!!