"the common tongue"

>no common tongue
>players cant understand what anyone is saying
of all the crap you can hate, why hate the one that makes playing the game easy?

>"the lingua franca"
>its pidgin english in a region unconnected from any naigvely english speaking population.

I bet you you sick fucks play games to have fun, don't you?

The common tongue , The long sword , I know my friend

The alternative of wasting a bunch of time on the subject of regional languages is generally worse

Imo I'm fine if in setting there isn't a common tongue, but if there isn't the player characters have to share the same language, unless of course the language barrier is the point of the game

No, but even in lotr the common tongue was actually a watered down Adunaic called Westron.

Depends on how the GM handles it

They tried that. William Shatner stared in a black and white movie where everyone spoke it. It went no where and English became the common tongue at places like airports

For me at least taking the game seriously is how I get my fun

>everyone doesn't just speak elven

Is everyone else just stupid?

Considering how it's possible for human individuals to be the peer in skill to elves that usually have hundreds of years on them I'm pretty sure elves are mentally deficient

This is my preference as well. I'm a fan of a regional "relative" common tongue. Other languages exist in small amounts all over, but each large area has a single tongue that most everyone picks up out of a simple need to communicate.

Would you play in a campaign that heavily emphasized decoding a foreign language

>not just star warsing it to the point where everyone whos anyone knows every language theyll ever come across

This is a new low. I know its bait but jesus fuck me is there NOTHING you joyless grognard fucks can't spin into a problem?

?

Considering that those humans are one in a million, I'd say it just goes to show how superior elves are in general.

>He doesn't play in a setting with fully realized language families

I'm not sure how the GM would frame the conflict (OOC puzzle-solving? IC hunting for words? what does the actual adventure look like?), but I'd be willing to give it a shot, yeah.

this got funnier when i thought about it and realized malay itself is a lingua franca

The average elf isn't adventurer teir either, elves might be better than humans than average but if the gap isn't large enough to make them not playable they're severely unintelligent considering the amount of time they have to better themselves

>system has like a dozen useless stats for languages

You could speak in syllable salad and then use description as the GM to help your players interpret the npc's, that or you could create an entire con-lang

>hey guys so to keep this game accurate and interesting I've written these five different languages common for this setting. Go ahead and spend a few hours studying them and memorize them before you come to the table next time :^)

>thing that never happens

That time is spent on things such as mastering various arts, learning how to trance and to understand the deeper meanings behind their dreams, mastering the elven weapons, and generally how to be someone with culture, while the average human is learning how to not shit in the same place it eats and often failing in that regard.

The average elf is hardly comparable to the average human, and the only reason they're both playable is because most of what an elf learns are just ribbons and not directly useful to adventuring.

> t. pic related

I'm pretty sure at least one edition of shadowrun has a bunch of skill levels for languages and takes fluency into account. I'm not really familiar with many other systems that make them any more than a box to tick or just another skill though

While we're talking about, what do people think of this language system?:

1. Relative common-languages (I'm ) where each major region has a language, but the other regional languages can be found in niche circumstances.
2. Players all begin fluent in the local regional language
3. Proficiency is on a 0-5 scale, where 0 is nonproficient, 1 is "phrasal" (memorized words+phrases), 2 is elementary, 3 is intermediate, 4 is advanced and 5 is fluent.

Each of these grants knowledge of different sections of grammar/vocabulary, with the exception of 4 which grants access to the Favored Topics of a language. While using a language for the purpose of one or more of its Favored Topics, you need only half as many words to convey the same information (speak faster, takes less space on a page) and you get a bonus for any social checks.

Didn't he also just have everyone speaking common?

> Space common

Oh, important detail: Gaining proficiency levels in a language is pretty dirt-cheap as far as progression goes. And the whole "favored topics" things mean that individuals deeply routed in certain topics/professions will use the appropriate language when not dealing with customers/people outside their field.

That's probably more valid in a lot of ways. If everyone has easier access to the same information I doubt languages would branch off as radically

How come elves don't have enormous bonuses to mental stats and knowledge skills then? Seriously elves aren't portrayed as skill and knowledgeable enough for them not to be retarded considering their longevity

Skilled*

> Human adventurers are the best humanity has to offer
> Elven adventurers are the worst elves there is

>half of them are bugged and do literally nothing

Source?

>"the common memes"

That's one of the more practical ways to explain the racial stats. Elves are only the "worst elves there are" at the very low levels though, and the very high levels are a matter beyond normal limitation for just about anyone who isn't a PC

For the sake of game balance, obviously.
They're still pretty skilled, it's just in a lot of stuff that doesn't have a direct mechanical effect on the game. The ones that choose to focus on things aside from poetry and plant care and dreaming end up as adventurers.

And, you shouldn't really think of the stats as some sort of simulation. They're for representing typical adventurers, not the bones by which all of the race are built from.

It's simple.
Give the Elves a FUCKTON of social skill points.
Then make him never be able to use them as elves are killed on sight by most other race in the world, and that you are only allowed to play cast away elves

Does no common language actually affect games in a way that's meaningful or enjoyable?

It helps set the tone if the game is supposed to be high realism

The one time I played a game without a common language (or common-equivalent) was an Exalted 3e game. Different players hailed from different regions, and while everyone spoke a language that at least one other member spoke such that the group could technically communicate, there were weird disconnects where one player shared a language with only one other player and thus required them to act as a translator, and so on. It was a real pain in the butt to handle basic group discussions.

That's how I do it. A trade language is well known all around the world but it reduces rolls in any social situation. Knowing a trade language is enough to buy bread, but not enough to convince the king not to cut off your head.

Languages count as knowledge skills in SR, yes. You get at least 1 (two if you take a 10 karma advantage) language as 'native' which means you're fully fluent. Shadowrun has a skill for fucking everything, char gen is a huge undertaking, especially once you reach gear since there are multiple types of ammunition and they only work for the type of gun you buy it for not to mention fake liscences for all the (R)estricted stuff you buy and reeeee

That being said, languages can be 'bought' in game with money via Skillsofts.

Think of words that end in g-r-y. Angry and Hungry are two of them. There are but three words in the common tongue. What is the third word? It's something you use every day, and if you have listened well I have already told you.

>inb4 xkcd
>Riddling Skeleton was kind of a jerk anyway.

Pretty sure the intended answer is "tongue" in this case (1. The, 2. Common, 3. Tongue, it's something we use everyday, etc.). However, this relies on poor grammar and being intentionally ineffective at communicating and thus makes it feel like a fairly cheap riddle.

Also "There are but three words in the common tongue" is just wrong, unless your language literally has only three words.

KYS.

So kind of like how most of the world understands English to some degree?

>his character speaks prissy faggot

Learn a real language like Dwarven

>"Universal Translator"
>"Tongues"

Latin

>he thinks orcish with a little more sentence structure is a civilized language
Going from speaking soft gay to hard gay isn't actually a huge improvement.

>High realism
>Fun

Pick one

>not using private messages, so that the players who took the language as the background knowledge get the normal English, and the players who didn't take the language get gibberish
absolutely plebeian
i bet you don't even separate IC from OOC

Bingo. Just because Tolkien came up with dozens of highly detailed languages for middle earth doesn't mean every fantasy setting should. Unless you actually gonna commit to it linguistically and write up every dialect along with a fictional set of customary units and days of the week you're not adding anything of interest apart form extraneous details.

Is it really matters just simply pull a reverse Babel. Long ago the people of the world got together and build a really big tower reached the heavens, and the Gods was so pleased with them they taught them their own heavenly tongue which could be heard and understood by all.

Esperanto.
Too bad English blew it out of the water - in out setting we basically abandoned Common and everyone learns Gnomish.

What, you mean a lingua franca or trade language? Those are real things.

Hell, English has been pushed to be used as one.

Learning bridge languages is a required curriculum at adventuring schoolhouses across the Grand Continent. With the large number of regions with different languages and the number of adventurers travelling between them, it's kind of obvious to have basic knowledge of such a language in order to communicate in foreign lands.

Esperanto is a shitty language invented by an ophthalmologist with no real understanding of linguistics and absolutely no knowledge of languages outside of Latin and Germanic ones.

It's just as "Gnomish" as English is, as far as viability as a universal language goes.

I like this system a lot. Ars Magica and RuneQuest do something similar, where each language is a separate skill.

It makes sense to have a lingua franca that is spoken within a region by certain classes, such as the nobility, and/or the merchants. It does not make sense to have every single peasant in the world speak that lingua franca without an enormous dialectal disparity.

That's not at all how it works.

>Orcs speak Orcish
>Elves speak Elvish
>Gnomes speak Gnomish

I see no reason why the Human language can't be called Humanish

>Orcish for orcs
>Elvish for elves
>Gnomish for gnomes
>Humanish for ALL

How much longer will humans be forced to put up being the "Common" tongue, mercilessly misused by all the degenerate races.

>a shitty language invented by an ophthalmologist with no real understanding of linguistics and absolutely no knowledge of languages outside of Latin and Germanic ones.
Yeah, my native was made up by bunch of upper class drunkards by combining the worst parts of German, French and assorted slavic languages (mostly Russian) for the sole purpose of spiting government yet millions use it today.

Esperanto just sounds like shitty Spanish. It's pretty exclusionary to English speakers because it has nothing in common with English, and when English is the most commonly spoken language, that's the death-knell to your attempt at a universal language.

>English is the most commonly spoken language
Chinese exists. And whatever it is they speak in India.

>whatever it is they speak in India.
That would be English.

Chinese isn't spoken commonly outside of China, so it's not as widespread as you think. Plus all the upper class and most of the middle class in China learn some English anyway.

I had to take the struggle of cooperation with Indians on couple projects, whatever it is they speak it sure as hell ain't English.

Its a bunch of regional dialects that may seem foreign to someone who is not from the region but the shared english root has allowed the entire subcontinent to communicate with each other, in other words english is their "common tongue"

Why not just assume everyone around knows the local tongue? I mean, it would be pretty retarded to willingly come to an area where you can't communicate with those around you.

This. India is still a bunch of different states pretending to be a country within the old Imperial boundaries.

Military, business, etc reasons frequently bring people into regions where they don't know the local tongue. You think a trader's going to learn every language of every port he may ever dock in? There are reasons why these languages become used commonly among international travelers.

I avoid playing anything with Veeky Forums for a reason.

>still a bunch of different states pretending to be a country
Fake it until you make it, worked for Germany and Unite States

Have you tried not playing d&d?

Germany was essentially conquered/co-opted by Bismark who took advantage of a shared language and history while the United States was a fairly concentrated core that had been unified by war (which also served to largely remove the loyalists) and consisted of a common Anglo-Saxon culture and identity and expanded out from there.

India only stopped fighting among its constituent states after the Indian Mutiny and largely only became independent because of a concentrated movement of nationalists, a Britain no longer solvent enough to afford to keep it and a shift in British politics with the rise of Labour.

There are more English speakers in China than there are people in America.

>all orcs around the world speak the same language because they're the same species
Fuck that, every race should have at least a dozen dialects and variants of their respective racial languages and the far ends of the spectrum shouldn't even understand each other

Have you tried not being a shit meme forcing faggot?

Yes humans can learn baby talk elven, It takes 30 years to learn to speak it right.

If there is a large and capable foreign speaker base for a natural language, their speech is often regarded as especially "accent-free", neutral, and high prestige. See Prague German or present-day Standard German, which is based upon the pronunciation of Eastphalians who learned it as a foreign language.
Lawl. Zamenhof had extensive knowledge of linguistics for his time and spoke Polish, Russian, and Hebrew. Maybe even some Lithuanian or Tatar.
There are hundreds if not thousands of different langauges used in India today and English is one of the most commonly known languages, next to Hindi.

Stealing this.

What, you've never heard of the tongue of the natives of the island of Giber?

>"the common tongue"
Joke's on you. We all speak Basic.