>enter new town >none of the peasants seem to understand

>>52380499
In what region? The same, over the mountain, in a new kingdom or the town a week trip away?

This is good. You are wrong

I really liked that about 7th Sea

>>52380499
Who cares about a translator they said, he'll only slow us down they said.

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>We're transported into another world
>Everyone speaks common

>>52380499
if done right this might be fun. Plus i take it you are american? Come over to the more rural parts of poland, i can bearly understand the fuckers even though i spent most of my summers at the country side playing with the locals for like 15 years

Why on earth would you want to speak to peasants? They're borderline retarded field work robots who subsist on 1000 calories a day and can't read.

I always roll a White Necromancer in case everyone wants to go murderhobo.
Chaotic Good undead arriving shortly.

>>52380499
Did he say so before you made your characters?

>>52380594
Isn't it implied that Barovia is filled with peoples that got taken from other areas, and then locked in by the fog?

>>52380662
>other areas all speak common

>>52380764
Common is a state of mind. If you're a dirty commoner, you speak common.

>>52380499
Having a "common" language at all makes you a hack. Even english today, the closest thing to "common" to ever exist in the history of humanity thanks mainly to american hegemony, is spoken only by a small percentage of planet earth.

>It's an "amateur writers hate tolerating players" thread.

>>52381356
I am a hack, but given enough time I could probably come up with a conspiracy - theory tier explanation for a common language.
I got my current game from another DM, so I haven't been able to enforce language barriers as much as I'd like, and my players don't care.

>>52381356
Thats because a large portion of earth is uninhabited.

>>52380499
>not just speaking common loudly and slowly

>>52380499
>I guess nobody in this village wants to ever trade. They're welcome to go fuck themselves.

>>52380499
As long as he doesn't pitch a fit about how much work he did fleshing out the town and its inhabitants when you decide to just fuck off to somewhere with people you can talk to to this doesn't sound too bad.

>>52381976
>when you reply to the OP but the poster count doesn't go up

>>52380499
Cool concept. I imagine that being an interesting dimension in roleplaying. You need to somehow cooperate with the locals to get what you need. Seems like something that could only work with a good jmaginative, and well travelled DM though

>>52380499
>DM has distributed languages geographically rather than racially and has made not everyone on earth speak common

And he never told you until the game was already underway? He ought to be more transparent with this sort of thing.

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>>52381740
In my setting, languages are a gift from gods. Because of this, "racial languages" are an objective measurable thing, and only the Human God is able to bestow the ability to learn any language.

Anyone can learn a language not of their race, but only through raw memorization. For example, Penta, Polygon, and Pentagon would be completely different words with no relation between them to someone without the gift of the language. They can't even extrapolate from context.

Also, the captcha. Rest in peace, Sir Patrick Stewart.

>>52381356
American Hegemony isn't why english is so widely spoken. It's that American hegemony followed on from the British Empire. You basically just had 200-300 hundred years of English being the language of the most powerful and most influential nations on the planet. And whilst English isn't the most widely spoken first language, nothing comes close once you factor in secondary languages.

Also not having gone too crazy with specific ways to address specific subgroups of gender or age helps. (Source Living with international students from 10 different countries in the last two years)

Can't blame a GM for not taking the easy route every time, so long as the players were forewarned and have a way to deal with it (given time and clever thinking)

My party: goes into town, no one speaks the language, I'll try to commune with the locals through sign language and single words.
My party will get shitty with the locals and go murder hobo and take everything they want while I try and contain the damage.

>>52380499
>something happens to make the game not super easy like the shitty DnD vidya I'm used to
>brain fried, cannot compute
>blame it on That DM, because obviously there was nothing we could do and it's not our fault for not dealing with it

>>52381356
>american hegemony
>AMERICAN hegemony

BRITISH. YOU MEAN BRITISH YOU FUCKING WANKER

>>52380499
Rad.

>>52384741
>And whilst English isn't the most widely spoken first language, nothing comes close once you factor in secondary languages.
Inaccurate. English has .35 billion native, and .5 billion non-native speakers. Chinese has 1 billion native speakers. Whether English or Spanish, when counting non-native speakers, has the higher number? Not clear. Spanish has more native speakers, though.

>>52380499
>adding details the players don't care about

Your DM needs a new group and you need a new DM. This clearly isn't fun for you, but I've met players for whom it would be.

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This came up in a game I was in once. We had all split up once we got into the city, and my character went to stable the horses. After about half an hour of everyone running around getting nowhere, my guy rejoined them.
"Anon!" they cried. "Do you speak (local language)?"
"I'd better," I replied. "This is my home town."

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>>52381850

>>52382230
RIP

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>>52380499
>the cleric casts Tongues and relays all information between party members and NPCs regardless of nationality or race
Easy.

>>52380567
OP kinda implies they weren't told about it at the outset, which is kind of dick move, but other than that, I agree it's a good thing.
(Lot of odd language coordination always happened whenever we made 7th Sea characters. Never knew what would end up being the 'trade tongue' of the party.)

>>52380545
Kinda shitty if the players didn't know about it though

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>>52380619
My fellow necrotic infused and melanin-enriched friend!

>>52380499

If you can't think your way out of this, you don't deserve your DM.

Just go to the merchants' quarter, find a trader who trades with your party's country and thus speaks your language, then hire him as an
interpreter. Easy.

>Not playing a polygot
>Not understanding every possible language
>Not using your extensive knowledge to listen to enemy plans
>Not being able to understand all those insults in strange tongues you hear whispered behind your back
>Not trash talking a demon in Infernal, just to see them get super pissed before smiting them
>Not speaking the King's Dwarven in front of the local dwarf lord
>Not regaling the Fey Queen in a form of Elvish she hasn't heard since she was but a child
>Not calling convincing the ogre in his own debased tongue that working for you is so much easier than raiding caravans for the occasional bauble and salted pork.
>Not calling the orc war chief's mother a knife eared treefucker in his own tribal dialect.
>Not telling the earth elementals you'd love to get stoned with them.
>Not telling the fire elemental you'd love to get blazed with them
>Not telling the air elemental you'd love to get high with them.
>Not telling the water elemental you'd love to get drunk with them
>Not telling the drow matriarch in Lolth's exalted tongue it's okay she never heard of your bard. He's pretty underground
>Not flirting with an angel in Celestial
>Not turning down a succubus in Abyssal
>Not wafflebland the petticoat with the fafful wamble with a slaad in Slaadi
>Not causing intentionally mistaking a githyanki and githzerai in Gith.
>Not presenting yourself as a humble worshipper to the elder wyrm in the low draconic of kobolds as you present a relic of power to them
>Not smugly mocking the dragon as they activate the cursed relic and have mishap and misfortune fall upon them in Draconic so high, Tiamat would be impressed.

>>52389979
This comment is criminally underrated.

>>52380499
Reminds me of a party I'm in where we had exactly the opposite problem
>Our Paladin is a "that guy"
>Hand waved a bag of holding and lordship over a city with his backstory
>Joined an early campaign were everyone was level 2, decided he needed to be level 3
>DM is buds with him so it isn't questioned
>Starts at level 3 with plate, a +1 AC helmet, +2 damage gauntlets, and other OP bullshit for this early on
>As we encounter a young green dragon, he pulls Draconic out of his ass, says he knows Elvish, Draconic, Common, a few other languages and he just forgot to tell the group
>Also he has a book where if you write the name of an enemy in their blood, you can command them to do as you please
So we have a guy who knew the language of most enemies and allies we'd be around, and a book that if you knew how to write someone's name, gave us an easy win all the time. Thank god the DM is trying to put a leash on it.

>>52390698
how the fuck can someone like that possibly exist?

>>52380594
>We're transported into another world
>Not allowed to speak to people until we level up and get skill points
>mfw

>>52386418
>Chinese is a single language
oh wow

>>52390859
That could be really cool if done well though. Makes every interaction an interesting encounter of miming out what you need and learning bits of the language.

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>>52386165

>>52390902
You know the DM isn't going to actually create a full language.. That'd take far too much effort...

>>52380499
>Why don't all Races start out with a Common Tongue?

Not all Races speak Common. In a strict campaign, this can lead to the possibility of an adventuring group getting together at 1st Level and being totally ignorant of another PC's tongue. They'll have to learn the new Common Tongue during the campaign itself. Their ignorance of another's tongue could lead to some very interesting role-playing. This, of course, is the strict interpretation. In most of our campaigns we simply allow the non-Common-speaking PC's to take a basic Level 1 knowledge of the Common language being spoken in the campaign, but only if they can rationalize it in their origins to the satisfaction of the Creator. Not bad, huh? A free Skill, simply for embellishing the origins of a PC. ("I picked up some Common as a child. My Demonian masters trained me in it such that I could truly know my enemy...") Of course, some Players may not wish to share their rationalizations with the rest of the group. Either way works. Call it as you see it, Creators. It's your campaign.

>>52387430
>tfw cleric ran out of Xth level spells/mana when we were accused of murder, unable to cast tongues.

>>52390925
You don't need to. You can just track skill points for how well you know the grammar of the language, or the language overall, and have the players write down what words they know. Just in English.

>>52386418
Leaving out the part where an estimated 25% of the world's population has some understanding of English.

Not everyone is fluent but by god you can find someone who can (with some difficulty) understand you in nearly every region on the Earth.

So, allow me to ask anons, how does one do this well? It's an interesting premise, and I'd like to know how you handle systems that assign a number languages racially? Do you still give them the same number of languages overall? Do you force their backstory to justify EVERY language, or is "book learning" allowed?

>>52391380
Basically?
The main continent that the party's started on is standard fantasy continent. Common is widespread on the northern part of the continent because the last major empire there was a human one. Outside of the major kingdom in the area (which works as a huge multicultural hub) and the human kingdom, people's grasp of common is basically only as strong as the trade routes near them. People closer to the mountains speak more of a Dwavrish style of common, Halfling maintain their own language as a sort of cultural thing (think how Italian Americans will speak Italian umonst family) and Gnomes refuse to speak Common inside their own communities.

The further you get away from the old trade routes in the north, the more rural dialects and Old Common start to take over. The Human kingdom explicitly speaks in an older form of Common because of cultural heritage ("modern" common = American english, old common = Middle English/Early Modern English)

>>52391380
How hard is it to just tackle it on a case-by-case basis? If it's reasonable for the character to speak a certain language then why can't they?

No need to work out a hard system for it, just say "okay your character was born in this country, but has been operating in this other country for years, so you're fluent in the first and conversational in the second".

>>52391380
>Change common to human
>Assume starting area is predominately human, even though there are nearby cities and civilizations of <insert other language using race here> due to being geographically close they speak human.
>Other empires or other lands have a different language as common.

So say you spend a months travel over to the dwarven empire of fuji. Everyone there generally speaks dwarven, even the smaller cities mostly populated by elves or gnomes. But then if you spend another month or two in travel to the Fuck Dwarves Union, the common language there is Elvish.

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>>52390925

Are you sure?

MA in linguistics here. In the middle of doing just that for a Numenera campaign I'm starting. Mostly I realized that I wanted to have consistent place and person names, and that the best way to avoid choosing between technical and religious terms for things was to simply build new terminology from the ground up. I don't expect the players to like, learn to speak it or anything crazy, but I want it to provide cultural flavor and internal consistency they can reference.

So far mostly I've just got the phonology worked out and a little bit of the morphosyntax; haven't done all that much with the lexicon yet. Vowel system's borrowed more or less directly from Slavic and Guarani, and the consonant inventory's fairly restricted (notable inclusions are bilabial fricatives, l as the only liquid or rhotic, uvular stops). SVO word order, prefix rather than suffix inflection, 3 lexical tones (level, falling, rising).

Anyways, constructed languages are totally a doable thing if you throw a little effort and a little reading at them.

>>52391599
That's pretty good, actually.

>>52391916
>MA in linguistics here.
>constructed languages are totally a doable thing if you throw a little effort and a little reading at them.
And have years of training.

>>52391916
>>52392517
This. What's the bare minimum kind of training one needs to fully understand that post, let alone come up with a similar language?

>>52382230
>>52387326
Fuck the both of you

>>52391916

> Constructing a thing is easy, says the person who spent years studying it

>>52381356
My explanation for a single widespread language in my current game is that their language was programmed into their species by a superior creator civilization that terraformed that world and engineered their species to be a certain way.

Regional dialects did develop, but it's no worse than the difference between a Scottish accent and a Texan accent.

>>52380499
Only works if the player characters have access to several languages and can somewhat rapidly learn a new one.

>>52395243
https://youtu.be/le_uNGdpa4c

>>52395856
is this real

>>52381356
1.5 billion people speak English - about 20% of humans.
That's after only a few decades of widespread instantaneous communication worldwide. If we had had the ability to teleport and speak widely at a distance for the past several thousand years I think common would be a feasible development.

>>52391380
Most importantly
>let your players know that you're doing this and give them relevant details

But I'd do it like
>Very nearly everyone in a given region speaks to some degree the language
>people near the border of another region will have some fluency in the language of the bordering region
>"Common" is spoken by traders and the well-traveled, though most people will have at least some understanding of it, even if they don't like to speak it
>occasionally dot around people who speak a language not from their region or from a bordering region
>people from a foreign region follow the rules of their homeland, though they will most likely speak the local language

So someone in not!France will speak not!French, and maybe not!Deutsch if they live near the border of not!Germany, but will have some functional understanding of not!English, and there's a very small chance that they may speak not!Polish for one reason or another, maybe they're a scholar or has not!Polish heritage.

It's a bit of work for something that's not really necessary and adds only a bit of detail, but go wild if that's what you like.

>>52380499
"Luckily I read the setting guide and know that educated people tend to speak the old imperial language that all of the religios and okd scientific texts are written in. I search out the nearest church or monastery to see if someone is willing to translate for me."

>>52389979

>Not trash talking a demon in Infernal, just to see them get super pissed

The polyglot in my game tried that, in a dead language, to an ancient monstrosity. Which had a CR of approximately double the party level and was about to leave the scene due to not finding a challenge.

I had to bust out the Navy Seal copypasta (altering it to fit the setting, of course).

>>52380618
I dunno, they seemed pretty on point about the merits of democratically elected head of state over the nomination by a watery tart.

>>52384741
>>52386165
The British Empire was never hegemonic.

>>52399123
Yes it most definitely was, go learn history.

>>52398761
The peasants never gave me a sword, though, so I'm more inclined to side with the tart.

>>52380604
rural pole here. what are you smoking m8? We have shit like fucking poznianaks and fukken śluńsk
They are hard to understand.

>>52389979
Sure would be a shame if someone invalidated all those years of hard work and study with magic

>>52390698
Jesus.
The option is clearly to ask the GM for a droplet of blood "so I can write your name in That Guy's book and influence you into cutting that shit out."

>>52398677
That's amazing. It's like he tried out the obscure item combination and found the easter egg.

>>52380618
at least they have homes, which your average adventurer doesn't

>>52382230
> For example, Penta, Polygon, and Pentagon would be completely different words with no relation between them to someone without the gift of the language.

Well, that's a bad example, because these words have morphemes in common. Can only humans study linguistics in your setting?

>>52392517
>>52393961
>>52395098
Not him, but
>implying you don't need just a few months of casual-but-autistic hobbying to get most of the basics down

>>52391380
In my game, I've declared that anyone in contact with a major city (villagers are in contact) speak COMMON, all religious types speak CLERICAL, all orcs and thugs and such speak ROUGH, all thieves speak THIEF, all gods and demons (and their mortal servants) speak both DIVINE and DIABOLICAL, magicians speak MAGIC, regional people speak regional variations and weird foreigners speak weird languages that nobody in the party knows or recognizes. It's complete bullshit but I don't have the time or the inclination to create ten or twenty different conlangs that nobody but me will speak
One or two maybe, but ten or twenty is too much.

>>52393961
It's not too hard to understand the post. I've taken Linguistics 101, and I'd never be able to make my own language. But understanding what he did is not too bad if you've gotten some basic linguistics under your belt. I may be wrong about some of these things.

>So far mostly I've just got the phonology worked out and a little bit of the morphosyntax; haven't done all that much with the lexicon yet. Vowel system's borrowed more or less directly from Slavic and Guarani, and the consonant inventory's fairly restricted (notable inclusions are bilabial fricatives, l as the only liquid or rhotic, uvular stops). SVO word order, prefix rather than suffix inflection, 3 lexical tones (level, falling, rising).

phonology = the sounds you can make in a language
morphosyntax = grammar, basically
lexicon = words
consonant inventory = number of consonants
bilabial fricatives = a sound in between a b and a v, or a sound in between a p and an h, not used in English
liquid = sounds like l
rhotic = sounds like r
uvular = sound made at the back of the mouth
rhotic, uvular = the "r" in Paris with a French accent
SVO word order = Subject Verb Object
prefix inflection = well, suffix inflection is basically adding an "s" to a word to pluralize it. So this is the opposite. Instead of "dogs," it's "sdog."
lexical tones = chinese shit

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>>52404860
>lexical tones = chinese shit
Perfect ending to an informative post. Gold star, anon.

>>52404860

Guy you're responding to here. Yeah, basically on top of things. The uvulars I'm using is like the q in Hmong and Arabic, if that helps. The comments about liquids and rhotics, to put it more simply, instead of r and l or something more complex, there's just l here, so it's kind of like Japanese or Cantonese where there isn't a distinction made, they only have the one sound.

>>52405040
I see, I misread and didn't register the "stop" in that sentence.

>>52400604

Oh it got better. The thing was primarily aquatic and could shred the whole party in no time...if the party had been in the water. After the taunt, they just backed up onto land as water receded. The thing decided it wasn't worth trying to chase them (it was only as fast as an armored fighter on land) and just went into a nearby lake.

While the party celebrated, I read up on some of its abilities. Turns out it could contact anyone via Sending, and even make Demands of them. After it settled into the nearby lake, it made its usual mindcalls, but no one picked up at the old numbers that have been disconnected for millennia.

So it started calling the only person it knew - the polyglot.

>>52380539
Man, Papua New Guinea used to have a huge range of divisions linguistically, all because the jungles were too thick and the mountains too high.

Cross a peak? New language. Cross a river? New language. Walk five kms? Two new languages.

>>52380764
What is a pidgin?

>>52381356
Surely Pidgin languages are what "common" is supposed to represent, rather than established languages with rules and conventions. Merchant tongues and cants are the best.

>>52399123
What are Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Rhodesia, Canada?

>>52391380
Have several languages in the role of lingua franca for different classes and faiths. So maybe you've had a notGerman empire recently, but if you go far east or west (or meet someone who subscribes to eastern or western faiths) notGreek or notLatin become a common enough second language. Or you could go south and many of the traders speak notArabic.

Outside of several "commons," regional dialects vary widely and locally. And people prefer their local vernacular for most interactions, even if they know a "common" or a neighboring vernacular. Players probably don't need to actually speak localSlavdialect, but could probably find someone who speaks notGreek and could act as a translator.

The more important thing is to leverage the players on this stage. Your translator can be an unreliable narrator or otherwise not neutral to the situation. He could start fights on behalf of the party that the party doesn't want. Or the party could be stuck struggling through two peoples' half-remembered third language. Trick is to sort of telegraph this stuff in advance so you're not just dicking them over.

>>52381356
English also just so happens to be one of the easiest languages to throw new words into, hence the reason why it is the business/science language.

Common works perfectly well, the most important point being that not everyone speaks it, just the people that matter. You know. Like a story. The thing we're all trying to make here. You can throw other languages in there for flavor, and potentially additional local information/opportunity.

Making it the mainstay of a game gets old fucking quick. If you ever get to the point where players form a language pipeline to speed things along in a party with a variety of tongues you've already fucked up.

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>be running homebrew
>have NPCs talk in a different language to what the PCs know be mysterious and not have to do a whole NPC to NPC conversation
>I forget that the PCs have supercomputers in their heads capable of translation
>they don't
>mfw

>>52391380

Everyone speaks 'common'.
'Common' is actually a weird mish-mash of bits of various human trade languages, dwarven trade language, and elvish trade language.

PCs speaks their own language, their own trade language, and common.
As such, most can also pick up a little bit of dwarven and elvish and can get by in conversation with a dwarf or elf who doesnt speak common, though they might miss certain details. The same is true of other human dialects, via their trade languages.

Other languages that arent part of this pidgin mishmash are relegated to book learning.

>>52389784
Ehh... I meant this one.
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/3rd-party-classes/kobold-press-open-design/white-necromancer/

>>52408817
And India.

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>>52380499
Good thing I prepared Tongues this morning!

>>52380539
It really isn't a new language, but an impenetrable dialect.

>>52411282
we've been over that, you aren't clever.

>>52382230
Kek I see how ridiculous your setting is from a mile away:
>somewhere on the countryside, a peasant uses slang
>the god of objective grammar, enunciation, pronounciation and spelling is angered beyond rational comprehension
>the god sends a horde of grammar nazi demons to prey on the peasant, raping him until he promises not use slang anymore
>content, the god sends the demons away, letting the traumatized peasant bleed to death in the grass
>news reaches the capitol, and soon temples are established everywhere to soothe the god
>every now and again someone uses language in a creative or subjective manner and disappears mysteriously

>>52411370
>humans make a new invention
>since language is objective, and a word does not already exist for the invention, they cannot name it
>come see my fabulous invention number 31234!
>artists and poets cannot be too creative or the god murders them

In my setting the most common language is Muan, because halfling catfolk (no magical realm I swear) are the most numerous people and that's what the wizards of Mu who created them taught them back in the day. Any time I play or link halfling music for the party it's in French just for consistency.

Most people who travel speak coastal common, which is a pidgin of reef elven, modern Muan, and Cannault, the dwarven "public language" of trade.

Most dwaves speak a clan language on top of trade dwarven. Most elves speak elven but are illiterate because they live in reef villages or in the jungle. It's not easy to keep paper in either place so only sages and mages really read, and it's mostly skin-scrolls.

The !Greeks that I have to the north speak mostly an offshoot of Muan that they've named after their own country Pelopar. Halfling Muan and Pelopar are mostly mutually intelligible but pronounced pretty differently.

The lost tiefling city and the wild people that they keep watch over speak some other language that I haven't thought much about. It's not related to Atlantean/elven or Muan although they have coexisted long enough with other people that there are some borrowed words and maybe 10% mutual intelligibility.

It can be cool, but it can also be frustrating, especially in settings where language skills are difficult to get (Like Iron Kingdoms, where they're on the same tier as combat skills or super feats instead of other noncombat skills.)

My current DM handles it Star Wars-style. There are many different languages intermingling, but people just generally understand each other (somewhat inexplicably) unless it's a plot point. Feels lazy and inconsitent, but it works smoothly enough. Better than getting bogged down in some armchair linguist's conlang lecture.

>>52411911
Put a golden goblin in your ear

>>52411911
I'm pretty sure in star wars, it works because almost all of the living languages have drifted a bit and have many words in common with each other, and everyone hoping to get to space has to pick up a lot of words in a lot of languages as a bare minimum requirement of social functioning. If you don't learn how to understand a wide variety of languages, then you're basically crippled if you go to a spaceport.

>>52411370
I think in his setting it's more like that peasant wouldn't even be able to invent new words and so wouldn't be able to even use slang

alternatively, if you still want slang in that setting, the god of language simply bestows said slang upon you when it's appropriate.

>>52380499
as long as the players knew about this beforehand, this is fine. If anything if justifies those players who took the effort to put ranks into their language skill.

>>52380499
Alright, I sort of did this. There's a common, but each race has their own tongue. However, the racial tongues have no connector words and can't really be spoken. The creator god or whatever didn't think things through. Goblins speak a sort of bastard version of Goblin and common, most humans only know a few words of Human, and Elven and Dwarven are 'second languages' for their respective races.

>>52411327
Yurp, yowt now wat ye sayyain

>>52411282
filename roflmao

>>52411370
>Australia suddenly ceases to exist

>>52399123
????????????????????????????????????????

>>52382021
I'm glad I'm not the only one who gets bothered by this, even if I wasn't in the thread to see this specific examples. It always seems shady to me, like you can't prove it but it feels like someone is subtly samefagging their point when it happens.

>>52381356
>is spoken only by a small percentage of planet earth.
Yeah, only approximately 25% of the world's population, enough so that you can get service and help in every major city on earth.

>>52422854
there's also significantly more travel in our world than would exist in even a decent chunk of fantasy settings. I mean think about it, who is carrying a language any serious distance in a fantasy setting?

Traders (to an extent), mages (if teleportation/portals are a thing), and sociopaths. Hardly have the flow of people to get to those numbers.

>>52423172
Well, kinda. During the migration era, basically all of Europe knew enough protogermanic (Frankish) that the Romans invented the term lingua franca to describe the idea of a universal barbarian language.

Despite this, it isn't like the barbarian tribes were anything like ethnically or culturally unified.

>>52404614
>It's totally easy if you have a few months to get the basics down.
Not helping your case.

>>52391025
>Implying the Wizard didn't learn Tongues and prepared scrolls in the off chance that the Cleric runs out.
Do you into mage?

>>52380604
>Know a polish guy
>Occasionally slips into polish
>Heard him count in polish once
>Sounded like something wet passing through pipes

No wonder your dialects are impenetrable

>>52387620
>they weren't told about it at the outset
D&D is the only game I have played that does it any other way.

>>52397191
It's real, and I've heard worse. Further north is a lot worse, or the little weird villages that have slang words and verbal ticks that only they understand.

>>52393961
>What's the bare minimum kind of training one needs to fully understand that post
None. You only need to be capable of reading a few relevant sections of Wikipedia articles and not be literally retarded to get everything in his post.

>>52404860
>>52428016
I mean, it's not incomprehensible. When I said "fully understand," I don't mean that it's gibberish to me. I deduced easily enough that SVO stands for subject-verb-order and that "morphosyntax" had something to do with grammar, and I've heard of lexical tones before. But even knowing that Wikipedia-level of knowledge that I do about this kind of thing, that's nowhere near enough to have the kind of breadth of knowledge necessary to completely understand what's being discussed here: for example, how vowel systems in general work, not just the ones used in Slavic. I don't have any idea about that, and the idea that somebody could just skim Wikipedia and accurately believe that that they know enough to make a realistic language is what's actually retarded here.

>>52411257
And North America

>>52415244
ah dinnae ken pal ahm jus hingin oot here til mah maws got mah tea ready

>>52380499
I do this as well. Some of the areas share common language structures (i.e. Romance Languages) that players with high INT can roll for to see if they can "understand the basics". But some areas are just so exotic nobody speaks their language.

It makes taking different languages vital! Also, I usually allow players with high CHA to be able to find a "translator" of sorts.

>>52386418
But of the two languages, I'm sure that English is more widespread, and therefore closer to common. Chinese is more likely to be known solely in China.

>>52430243
what are diasporas?

>playing Shadowrun
>getting set in Scandinavia
>turns out only a few players took knowledge skills for Scandinavian languages - most just took English and another language, probably from their country of origin
>GM has to handwave us having linguasofts on the first session, even the character who doesn't have a commlink

>>52430275
Why? Almost everyone in all of Scandinavia speaks English.

Shitty English, but still.

>>52430378
We're amerifats, so we didn't know that. And even then, we were in a heavily Viking-themed place, so there might have been some sort of traditional focus.

>>52430461
>We're amerifats
Don't drag me down with you, unworldly pieces of shit.

>>52430461
>we were in a heavily Viking-themed place
Well, if it were Denmark, you're forgiven. Those guys can't be expected to know anything.

There doesn't need to be Common if your players don't go to other countries (unless you're super anal about realism)

For example, if my players started out in the Holy Areonetian Empire, which speaks Dootch, they could reasonably expect everyone they meet to speak Dootch. Unless they went to the west to the orc land of Tai Fei, in which case they better find someone who speaks both Tai Fei and Dootch. And if they went even further, they'd need to know Porcian.

But the tech level is early 1500's, so unless they board a ship they're not getting to Porcia any time soon. So they only really need to know Dootch. Kobolds can speak Yippish for free, just like Elves can speak Esme, but if nobody else does, all that means is that Kobolds keep referring to people as "Goy" and Elves favorite curse is "Merde".

>>52430572
Hey, come on, how am I supposed to know that people in countries half a world away that I've never visited speak English as much as their own language?

>>52430739
It was some made-up island in the Baltic sea, but it was classic Viking stuff.

>>52382230
It's saying he won't die till 2100.

>>52380618

To get the juices flowing with all their FALSE rumors.

FAKE NEWS

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>>52422805
fun times anon

>>52429552
>But even knowing that Wikipedia-level of knowledge that I do about this kind of thing
But that's not Wikipedia-level knowledge though. That's "I quicklys skimmed through a few articles because you called me out on it"-levels of knowledge.

>>52380499
Why are you upset? This is great, as long as the DM doesn't make it an endless chore without resolution.

Also, languages ARE distributed geographically. Your understanding of dialects and vernacular might be lacking in this context.

I'm also quite positive that even "Common" was never meant to be anything more than: ordering a meal, asking for directions, and other menial things.

It's like in Star Trek, or Stargate, when all the aliens seem to speak English. It's just to make it easier on the audience, and to get to the good stuff faster.

>>52390925
He could just take one that none of the players know?
Player knowledge is already forbidden, so it's not like a web translator is a threat.

>>52429552
SVO stands for subject verb object. It's an abbreviation for the way sentences are constructed. SVO is the way we do things, but for instance Japanese does (more or less) SOV.

>>52427558
>he doesn't spend years slowly creating his campaigns and settings he'll never run
Though I wouldn't even think it'd take that long. I mean, maybe if you wanted to give the language some history or something, show it being impacted by other cultures, but even that isn't terribly hard imo.

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I rejected the notion of Common a long time ago (1986, to be precise). Players didn't blink as that's how shit works.

>>52444873
And Irish, and most other Celtic languages I believe, is a VSO language. Spanish is also pretty weird in that it is an SVO language but the subject is often dropped entirely due to verb declensions providing that information regardless and sometimes when they are used they are placed behind the verb, causing the illusion of a VSO structure.

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>>52389780
>go to a new part of the world
>people speak a different language than you

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THEY'D NOT UNDERSTAND THE LANGUAGE OF OUR HOME WORLD???

WHY CANT EVERYONE JUST SPEAK COMMON???

THIS GAME IS FUCKING BROKEN PLEASE FIX THIS SHIT DM

>>52448003
If the "common" language didn't exist, I'd understand your autistic shrieking. However in a setting with a supposedly common language, suddenly throwing a place that can't speak it at the players seems unfair. You'd think the characters themselves would have known, even if the players hadn't thought to investigate.

>>52449127
In the real world lingua francas have still been limited in the scope of their usage. The idea that there could be a language spoken over the entire world by everybody is not only silly but outright dumb.

>>52449649
Then the characters would probably know that, right? Still feels like a dick move by the GM to just drop them into it.