Does anyone actually care about different races speaking different languages when it comes to running the games?
Does anyone actually care about different races speaking different languages when it comes to running the games?
Does anyone actually care about different races speaking different languages when it comes to running the games?
It feels rather pointless at times. Everyone speaks Common, so there's little incentive to speak anything else unless someone is purposefully trying to exclude a PC from a conversation. Even then, usually one of the other PCs has a language that'll cover it and will fill them in.
Not exactly pointless, even if the party has something that's an equivalent to comprehend language. If it's written, it can tell you the origins of the writing, there could be riddles that don't make sense through a strict translation, it can tell you how fleunt the writer/speaker is in the language, it just requires some creativity
depends on the GM. But most of the times, its pretty pointless. You might get a nice feel good moment if one player can read some stuff because he knows language X or has a spell. Or maybe you can go to some npc or have a little side adventure to translate something. But being in some ancient elven ruin deep in the woods, there is some ancient scripture and no one knows elvish and there is no decent mean of decipher it doesnt add anything. Its just meh.
Reminder that Comprehend Languages is a level 1 spell and be ritual cast, because DnDogshit loves rendering its own game mechanics pointless with MAGIC. Frick castergays.
Tbf it should be a cantrip. My phone can speak languages and I don't even have to be some programming expert to construct a script that does it. It's readily available, for free
This is why you D&D homosexuals hate the idea of guns in your campaigns. It would make martials great again when an AR-15 is fireball you can buy at Walmart
Languages are bad design because they're a lock-and-key problem. You present a lock, the players have the key, there's never a reason to not use the key on the lock, and the problem is fixed. There's no interesting choice to be made, meaning it's a waste of everyone's time. Furthermore, the DM always has to contrive scenarios to make languages useful, usually in attempt to make a player feel special for knowing a particular language. But what that often translates to in-game is everyone else gets excluded from the social encounter for a rather arbitrary choice they made before the game even started.
HEX handled it pretty well with Linguistics skill. Rather than having a list of languages, separate abilities or whatever, whenever your character is facing people speaking "foreign" language, they make a linguistic check. Who knows, maybe they've learned Portugreek in their childhood? Same applies with deciphering codes, or trying to read old tablets of ancient civilisations. And you can always use corresponding other skills, so it's not that you even need Linguistics directly
fun on paper, pointless in play, as was already said
about the only thing I stretched out of it was having some groups have a better starting opinion of you if you actually spoke their language fluently
and then had stuff like speak language spells and magic items give you a very 'textbook' way of speaking. still totally functional and you get what you paid for, but natives to the language know that you aren't
some other game systems put a little more work into getting a solution to the language barrier problem, though
No-games will tell you how it adds "soul" to the game and how important it is to have 40 different accents for the feeling of "verisimilitude".
Everyone else will point out how useless of a gimmick it is and how everyone just reverts to speaking normally after just few sentences, because they are there to play games and have fun, not doing an improv, literal theatre.
I've generally been relatively strict about it but after a few months of game time most PCs are going to normalize to all having conversational ability in the most convenient language anyway.
It matters more outside the PCs. Communication difficulties are relatively common with uncommon languages, or just ones with little external exposure. Despite living next door to both, very few of the PCs in my current game speak giant, and only one has the vaguest idea that gnolls can talk at all.
I don't like the idea of 'common', but do generally agree most people in a region will learn a language of convenience. When the game started a lot of things got passed around in writing because a lot of the characters could interpret written dwarvish but not speak it, since dwarves are often employed for their meticulous recordkeeping, so anyone of decent birth can read dwawvish for histories.
All the time. Peoples talk in their own tongue among themselves. Common is used as a trade pidgin when dealing with outsiders.
In a more "gritty" and low-magic campaign, translating and learning a new language like an episode of Star Trek sounds interesting, but in my current game I simply can't be bothered.
In fact I can't be bothered so much, that in my current game a powerful enchantment allows all living things capable of speech to be able to speak Common, created by a puppetmaster-type antagonist for the sole purpose of making everyone everywhere easier to manipulate.
>everyone just forgets common one day
>everyone is plunged into chaos as they revert back to their old languages
>people born after the spell are reduced to babbling mutes
Now this is a campaign idea.
Yes, it's a necessity in any good setting
Plays a fairly big role in my games. Unless the characters have a Noble/Scribe/Knight/Artisan/Acolyte background they can't read. They can speak the languages they chose but can't read unless they spend a lot of time learning in their down time in a civilized area. There's also NPCs/Enemies that speak and write in their native language, so, presents an obstacle if its the one those in the party don't know or can't read. Since reading/speaking are treated as separate things.
Ah yes, the everyone was illiterate back in ye olde days myth. Dumbass.
I played a nerdy Wizard who was trying to learn all the languages in the world. I was probably going to have to take a level in Druid soon, but the campaign ended.
Mostly important for dungeons imo.
Reading runes on walls and such.
Generally people don't travel much so language barriers haven't come up.
Might be real neat in spelljammer or planescape.
languages are bound to and travel along locality, races in proximity would develop pidgin and eventually a local language
I played a game where people were constantly slipping into and out of languages all the fricking time.
It was a pain in the ass.
And this was on pbp, where it was easy to keep track of who was talking what.
Yes i do. Also the amount of brainrot in this thread in handling this trivial non-issue is kind of astonishing. Yet these people have the guts of calling others "nogame". Pathetic.
It comes up both more and less than I'd like.
More, in that many creatures and people speak not-common
Less, in that my GM has decided almost all monsters, kobolds included, speak orcish.
So it matters in my game, except it doesn't.