Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pickaxe" data-source="post: 805471" data-attributes="member: 10812">On Common:"The Common Tongue" is something that comes up in Lord of the Rings and likely the concept is lifted from that. In addition, it just makes life simpler for a game where characters travel the world and want to spend their time looting and fighting, rather than translating. Simpler, but, admittedly, not like anything in the world today. IMC, I treat Common as the language of a once widespread empire (think Romans and Latin) that has not yet diverged among local populations to the point of being unintelligible among them. (I actually have a completely separate "Common" on another continent in the world.)On languages in D&D 3e:There definitely is something unrealistic about the treatment of languages in 3e: You spend a couple of skill points, spend an indeterminate (but likely pretty short) amount of time, and now you speak Infernal. And, generally speaking, no one does this, because it's more important to get another rank in Spot and about a dozen other skills than to learn a language. At least that's the way it is in your standard hack and slash campaign, and only those DMs who really want to make languages siginificant will make language an obstacle for their players...provided they don't have easy access to Tongues and Comp Langs.die_kluge's system is interesting, as it promotes language as an important ability of every character. But there is one flaw that I see in the system. It essentially assumes that every character will spend some time every level learning a language. Learning languages is a time-dependent task, just like improving any skill. The 3e system essentially recognizes this by making languages a skill: you can spend time learning a language, or you can invest that time (and the skill points) in another skill. die_kluge's system doesn't reflect this. I do, however, like the idea of language checks.--Axe</blockquote>

Verification