Some races - Halfling, Half-Orc, and Half-Elf - for example start off speaking Common and their racial language (Halfling, Elvish, Orc) but what, if you had a character that was not raised around members of that race?
Language IRL is acquired, so despite being from Germany or China, for example, if you are not raised in an environment where German or Chinese is spoken, you would not learn those languages as your native language.
If you had a Halfling, or Half-elf raised only around humans, do they just pick up the racial language as some innate trait or would that be lost and they have an extra slot for another language or would human language rules apply?
Yeah, it can be a bit strange, but examples of this can be found even within the default options.
For example, tieflings can learn either Abyssal or Infernal. But where do they learn it? The best guess I can come up with is a vague curiosity about their origins.
That would be a simple enough excuse for an adopted dwarf, wishing to someday interact with others of his race.
This has always been a bit wonky for me. As far as I know, the rules let you start with some automatic languages and with Intelligence bonus, you can have extra languages taken from your list, even if it makes no sense at all. Put a point into Linguistics, and you can learn ANYTHING, even without a teacher. I've had players in a landlocked dungeon spontaneously learn how to speak with fish because they put a point into linguistics.
I now houserule that you must have SOME kind of access to the language you want to learn, including something in your backstory for starting languages. I'm not picky about it, I'll accept one liners like "I hung around the marketplace and picked up foreign languages easily" or something simple like that, but I want players to at least explain how they learned/learn new languages.
Along with this, I also freely allow players to alter their available starting languages if their backstory justifies it - an half-orc raised by gnomes would select from the gnome list of starting languages because that's all he had access to, but he might or might not know orc depending on how old he was when he was orphaned (did he learn orc before he was adopted by gnomes?). Etc.
This has always been a bit wonky for me. As far as I know, the rules let you start with some automatic languages and with Intelligence bonus, you can have extra languages taken from your list, even if it makes no sense at all. Put a point into Linguistics, and you can learn ANYTHING, even without a teacher. I've had players in a landlocked dungeon spontaneously learn how to speak with fish because they put a point into linguistics.
I now houserule that you must have SOME kind of access to the language you want to learn, including something in your backstory for starting languages. I'm not picky about it, I'll accept one liners like "I hung around the marketplace and picked up foreign languages easily" or something simple like that, but I want players to at least explain how they learned/learn new languages.
Well, you could always go Rosetta with it and just say that you have a novel written in several languages (aquatic creatures just love Douglas Adams from what I hear)
Well, you could always go Rosetta with it and just say that you have a novel written in several languages (aquatic creatures just love Douglas Adams from what I hear)This has always been a bit wonky for me. As far as I know, the rules let you start with some automatic languages and with Intelligence bonus, you can have extra languages taken from your list, even if it makes no sense at all. Put a point into Linguistics, and you can learn ANYTHING, even without a teacher. I've had players in a landlocked dungeon spontaneously learn how to speak with fish because they put a point into linguistics.
I now houserule that you must have SOME kind of access to the language you want to learn, including something in your backstory for starting languages. I'm not picky about it, I'll accept one liners like "I hung around the marketplace and picked up foreign languages easily" or something simple like that, but I want players to at least explain how they learned/learn new languages.
Heck, if the player lets me know in advance, I might even arrange a Rosetta scroll for him.
While IRL languages are acquired via some method, no such justification is *strictly* necessary for a PC. In particular, you can level from 5 to 6 and dump 6 skill ranks into Linguistics, suddenly understanding six completely disparate languages. As a player, feel free to roleplay whatever justification you like.
I always got the impression hat there is some understanding of 'alot of things happening in the background' that are never addressed. OOtS makes fun of this in one of the conversations between elan and belkar about multiclassing.
So, even though Bob never addrssed a desire to talk to fish the moment he takes a dot in linguistics its assumed the whole time he was sticking his head in ponds and going glub glub glub. even when Bobs player only decided a minute ago to take the dot in linguistics.
Yes, along with eating, drinking and going to the bathroom complex task that take people months to grasp get filed away in the background as unimportant :P