Eliminate Humanish

[hcobb]

Goblins only get disadvantages, not the swiftness of elves, the load capacity of dwarves, the likability of Halflings, or the claws of Reptile People.

This is why Goblins are the most OP race in the game.

[Helborn]

Originally Posted by hcobb

Goblins only get disadvantages, not the swiftness of elves, the load capacity of dwarves, the likability of Halflings, or the claws of Reptile People.

This is why Goblins are the most OP race in the game.

Well, that's why they're Goblins.... ;-)

Nasty sneaking no-goodniks....

[larsdangly]

I often run campaigns with a fair amount going on, but to be honest I usually let the details of languages slide, other than the obvious racial tongues.

[David Bofinger]

Originally Posted by Axly Suregrip

Whenever a new character is create (player or npc) roll 1 to 6 to see how many languages he knows to start with. Free that is. Or 1 to 3 if you want it more controlled

No! One of the good things about TFT is that you can generate a character without touching dice. Having some characters better than others by like just sucks.

[KevinJ]

Originally Posted by David Bofinger

No! One of the good things about TFT is that you can generate a character without touching dice. Having some characters better than others by like just sucks.

I have no problem with one character or another being a little better one way or another, it's the 'balance' of games like modern D&D that annoy the hell out of me. Personally, I think that every character being able to speak 2 or 3 languages, even if another character only speaks 1, is fine. I've even created game worlds where there are no 'racial languages.' The languiages you know are the ones spoken where you grow up, nothing more.

[KevinJ]

Originally Posted by larsdangly

If this is something that is important to the way you run your campaign, I would recommend putting in the elbow grease to simply define which languages are automatically known by people of various backgrounds, and engineer it so that it makes sense to you.

Hero System has a good language chart that shows how languages are related. You could steal it and just plug in your own languages and be ahead of the game.

[Anomylous]

Originally Posted by David Bofinger

...it would make just as much sense for other races to speak a variety of languages as it would for humans. Though the Mnoren do seem to have liked humans, probably because the Mnoren were humans.

If there's a single language, which everyone speaks, it's probably the native tongue of Jen Mnoren, or some other language the Mnoren taught everyone in their empire.

I agree that the Mnoren are an excellent excuse to have a "Common Tongue" spoken natively by many, especially humans, and by everyone else as a second language. I also like Helborn's implementation of a "Common Argot", available for free to everyone. (Maybe the real house-rule here is that you can "study" a language indefinitely and never actually pay the points for it, but still be able to use it to communicate, if sometimes poorly.)

As far as having different languages in different regions, it makes sense but also is probably more complicated than necessary in most campaigns. Maybe the local dwarves all speak Gray Mountains Dwarvish, which is very different from Red Hills Dwarvish, but you've never been to the Red Hills and, unless you're a Scholar, you probably don't even know that there's more than one Dwarvish language. Similar to how us westerners tend to lump Mandarin and Cantonese and a bunch of other languages, many of them mutually incomprehensible, under the blanket term "Chinese", and rarely get in all that much trouble over it.

Grandaddy Tolkien got to this question way ahead of us, being a linguist by training - there are a LOT of languages scattered throughout his mythos. For a while, I was working on a hypothetical Cidri Elvish dialect, based on the idea that Cidri Elves are colonists from Middle-Earth. This was supposed to be the everyday "Elvish" language in that region, with Quenya ("High-Elven") used for ceremonial purposes and as a "lingua franca" among different groups of elves. Then I realized that nobody else was ever going to care, and I needed that mental disk space for other things anyway, and the project was abandoned. (I'm keeping the concept of Quenya as "High-Elven", though; it's too cool to pass up.)

A practical note: whatever you do, make sure your party can all talk to each other, by fiat if necessary. Forcing a player to constantly mime messages in-character can be hilarious, but gets old quick for the player in question.