The fantasy trope that everyone of a given species shares the same language always seemed a bit funny to me.

Co-author credit on this comic to my daughter, who came up with the concept. (She makes a lot of comics about dragons, but she’s too young to share them publicly.)

  • nocturne@slrpnk.net
    18·
    15 hours ago

    One thing I like doing in my games is removing common. I have each player a stack of note cards and they write each language they speak on a card. When anyone talks they have to hold up a card.

    Always interesting when you have a party member that speaks no languages the rest of the group does.

    • PoastRotato@lemmy.world
      19·
      15 hours ago

      My DM had a similar problem with Common, but instead of removing it entirely he basically nerfed it. The in-game explanation is that it’s basically a cobbled-together system of hand signs and syllables that are supposed to be used to make trade possible between traveling merchants who don’t speak each other’s language; as a result, you can’t really use it to express anything more complicated than “I want that” or “give me this.” Rarely, he’ll let us roll if we want to try to convey some important information via Common, but otherwise we’re stuck behind a hard language barrier. It’s made the game more interesting, not least because of the charades-esque mini game we get to play every now and then lol

      • terranoid@lemmy.cafeEnglish
        21·
        15 hours ago

        You might tell your DM to look up Sabir, where the term Lingua Franca came from, the “Frankish tongue” which wasn’t really from the Franks.

        This is where the idea of a common language comes from. Sabir was a simplified pidgin mix of Mediterranean languages so traders could communicate. They still spoke fine but didn’t conjugate verbs, used Me/you a lot without different forms (myself, I, yourself, them, they, etc).

        Sabir was a Mediterranean lingua franca, then Latin for 1500 years throughout Europe. Now it’s English. The idea of Common in D&D comes from Westron or “the Common tongue” in LotR which D&D was heavily inspired from, which was basically written by Tolkien so that his constructed languages had a reason to exist. He was a scholar of languages, and the idea of a common tongue comes from actual history. He wasn’t just making it up. Something like that would likely exist in a Fantasy world with lots of trade.