Schrödinger’s Chat: Improving Language Rules in RPGs
The lion, fluent only in lyonnaise, is at a stark disadvantage in this negotiation. The boar’s linguistic acumen, on the other hand, allows him to eavesdrop with ease.
D&D’s language rules suck. They aren’t realistic - your languages are largely determined by your race (ew), and knowing a language is treated like a binary distinction. The main way to learn languages is by taking a feat. You level up and wake up the next day speaking Spanish, French and Draconic. In real life, languages are somewhat hard to learn, and it is rare (dare I say impossible) that one wakes up able to read, write and speak three new languages.
There are lots of ways to fiddle with your language rules. When I ran the Fifth Edition (and the Third and One-Half Edition) of D&D, I tried to add a bit of nuance to languages. I had everyone make an intelligence test at the start of the campaign for each language they spoke to determine whether they were also literate in it, with class-specific difficulties so that Wizards almost always were literate in their languages while only a clever Barbarian could read and write. Language rules based on class seemed a tad less problematic and a tad more realistic than race-based rules. But now that I’m developing my own system and am many years wiser, I handle language differently. Here are those rules thus far:
PRISMATIC WASTELAND LANGUAGE RULES
All Heroes at least speak the common trading tongue or another language of their choice, but may know more languages. When a Hero comes across a language (spoken or written) for the first time in the campaign that the player has reason to believe their Hero might know by dent of their background, ancestry, skills or any other reason and the Arbiter agrees, the Hero makes an Intelligence test. For a common language, the difficulty of the test is moderate. For an uncommon language, it is difficult. For a dead language, it is extreme.
On a full success, the Hero can understand, speak, read and write the language.
On a mixed success, the Hero can understand and speak the language well enough to convey simple ideas but lacks nuance.
On a failure, the Hero knows only enough to believe that they understand what they hear or read, in a way that leads to a comedic misunderstanding or dangerous escalation.
On a critical success, the Hero is incredibly erudite when using the language, which may grant advantage when they use it, depending on the circumstances.
On a critical failure, the Hero badly misunderstands the meaning or grievously offends the listener enough to cause them to behave with hostility to the group.
This scene is greatly improved by a failed language test.
These rules determine language-knowledge on the fly instead of during character creation. When running D&D, new players would agonize over picking their language and wizened players would just pick something likely to be useful before they learn the spell “Circumvent Language Rules”, like Draconic or Goblin. This highlighting of language during character creation can be cool, however, if a lot of the important world-building can be extracted through linguistic differences, but I am not, nor have I ever been J.R.R. Tolkien. And in nearly a decade of running the game, I can’t think of a time where knowing or not knowing a language caused something fun or interesting to happen in D&D. Which isn’t a criticism because D&D isn’t written for cross-culture diplomacy. If you come across someone with whom you don’t share a language, the answer in D&D is usually to roll initiative (same as if you did share a language).
The best rules about language may be to ignore it. Games complicate the lives of their characters, but not every complication is a good fit for every type of game. There are few games where characters must prepare their income taxes, although this would certainly complicate their lives. Before foregrounding a complication by including mechanics for it, ask yourself whether it (a) offers a potential for fun or meaningful play or (b) reinforces the themes of your game. If the answer is no, best just to skip it and come up with on-the-fly rules if it ever comes up, just like you would if one of your players asked if they could prepare their income taxes. Uh, sure, make a Wisdom saving throw or lose 1d6 Sanity.
Language is important to the Prismatic Wasteland. The Prismatic Wasteland is a highly Balkanized setting and varied languages assist in depicting that. But more importantly, the rules outlined above tend to lead to fun, memorable results. Because it only comes up when the player has reason to think their character knows the language, it isn’t a bunch of useless rolling with boring results like “you don’t speak the native tongue of the tiger princes.” Instead, it first encourages the player to think of their character in the context of the world. Like when the caravan encountered steel-eye nomads (basically Tusken Raiders from STAR WARS meets Baptist fundamentalists from my upbringing), Hakon said he had encountered them before during his nomadic youth. Or when they came across armadilloid miners, Grillgamesh told us about one of his best patrons who was a varmintfolk and taught him a smattering of varmish slang over the years. Success means the party has an opportunity for solid negotiating and failure tends to lead to slapstick negotiating, both of which offer roleplaying opportunities and plenty of laughs.
Varmintfolk negotiations with the neo-pterodactyls are going swimmingly.
This was a quick, little post, written under malign circumstances. I had wanted to do a year-end retrospective of all the RPG products I’ve got a chance to run or read this year, but unfortunately, when going home for the holidays, my parents gave me a very unwelcome gift: the plague. So a lot of my best-laid plans have gang aft agley (gone oft awry), but hopefully I have some useful posts in store for 2021. Happy New Year to you all!
