Enter new town

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

>other areas all speak common

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

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.

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.

Thats because a large portion of earth is uninhabited.

>not just speaking common loudly and slowly

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

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.

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

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

>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.

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.

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.

>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

>american hegemony
>AMERICAN hegemony

BRITISH. YOU MEAN BRITISH YOU FUCKING WANKER

Rad.

>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.

>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.

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.
"user!" they cried. "Do you speak (local language)?"
"I'd better," I replied. "This is my home town."

...

RIP

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

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.)

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

My fellow necrotic infused and melanin-enriched friend!

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.

>medival fantasy europe
>"why does nobody speak my language?"
>kys

This comment is criminally underrated.

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.

how the fuck can someone like that possibly exist?

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

>Chinese is a single language
oh wow

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.

...

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

>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.

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

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.

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?

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)

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".

>Change common to human
>Assume starting area is predominately human, even though there are nearby cities and civilizations of 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.

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.

That's pretty good, actually.

>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.

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

Fuck the both of you

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

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.

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

youtu.be/le_uNGdpa4c

is this real

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.

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.

"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."

>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).

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

The British Empire was never hegemonic.

Yes it most definitely was, go learn history.

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

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

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

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."

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

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

> 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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

What is a pidgin?

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.

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

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.

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.

>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

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.

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

And India.

Good thing I prepared Tongues this morning!

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

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