They would speak the Commkn that would be best for your narrative. There's 3 different Commons that I know of in Golarion that's been revealed.
Really? There's Taldane and...
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Because Taldane = Common, and if there's not a common language shared between the PCs and most of those they interact with, the game transforms from an interactive roleplaying game to something less interesting.
When you see something listed in a book as speaking "Common," that's code for you to substitute in the common language of the region you're playing your game in, be that common tongue Taldane or English or Aklo or whatever fits that bill in your game. In our setting, which focuses on the Inner Sea region, Taldane = Common.
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They would speak the Commkn that would be best for your narrative. There's 3 different Commons that I know of in Golarion that's been revealed.Really? There's Taldane and...
The Darklands have Undercommon.
Tian Xia has Tien.
All other regions have their own trade "Common" tongue, but I don't believe we've officially nailed those down yet since we haven't done big gazetteer setting books for regions beyond the Inner Sea and Tian Xia.
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Common-in Golarion, as a rough toss-up, depending on where you are, could be Taldane (as the Avistan-focused campaign setting books clearly say) or it could be Tien (Tian Xia), Polyglot (Garund, especially southern Garund), Kelish (most of Casmaron), Vudrani (Guess where. Go on. Guess.), some as-yet-undescribed Arcadian trade language...
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If you want to get more technical, Taldane is to Common as R.S.E. (what most people think of as "British English," but there are other flavors of English even within Britain) is to English.
Common (Taldane) is similar enough to Common (Avistani) or Common (Chellaxian) that all three speakers wouldn't have too much trouble understanding each other for the most part, just as British speakers of English and American speakers of English can mostly understand each other. However, some idioms and word choices/uses will differ, the variants will borrow different words from other languages, etc., so that they will not be exactly the same.
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But ehats the in universe significance of nightcrawlers knowing the trade language of avistan? Does it have to do with the fact that rovagug is on golarion? I mean its not like rovagug is chilling out in taldor.
Most wxtraplanar beings have a reason to have common in their stat blocks, since they are probably planning on visiting avistan, so they would learn it before going out to it, but this book clearly states that nightcrawlers are born knowing the language
So is this thread "why Nightshades speak Common" or "why does everyone know Taldane", I'm confused :)
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Because so many Humans are so bad at learning other languages that almost the entire rest of the Galaxy Multiverse has to learn English Taldane just to be able to communicate with them at all . . . .
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But ehats the in universe significance of nightcrawlers knowing the trade language of avistan? Does it have to do with the fact that rovagug is on golarion? I mean its not like rovagug is chilling out in taldor.
Didn't you originally mention that the languages the nightshades know may be based on the languages known by the first nightshade? If so, there's your answer. They know Common because the first ones created did. That "Common" language, for campaigns set in Avistan is Taldane.
Ultimately, Common, in D&D and Pathfinder, is a convenient way to enable PCs to communicate with a broad range of NPCs and intelligent monsters without having to resort to complex language rules. Don't sacrifice too many brain cells over it.
Because Taldane = Common, and if there's not a common language shared between the PCs and most of those they interact with, the game transforms from an interactive roleplaying game to something less interesting.
That every single critter in existence speaks common makes language completely moot, and only come up in "spying on the enemy while they speak in code" situations.
Language rules aren't complex. Characters already get a bonus language per intelligence modifiers. And you can learn a language by putting ranks in linguistics. Making everyone speak common (and that there even is a "common" tongue to begin with) just makes for a poor setting and penalizes skill monkeys for no reason.
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Because Taldane = Common, and if there's not a common language shared between the PCs and most of those they interact with, the game transforms from an interactive roleplaying game to something less interesting.
That every single critter in existence speaks common makes language completely moot, and only come up in "spying on the enemy while they speak in code" situations.
Language rules aren't complex. Characters already get a bonus language per intelligence modifiers. And you can learn a language by putting ranks in linguistics. Making everyone speak common (and that there even is a "common" tongue to begin with) just makes for a poor setting and penalizes skill monkeys for no reason.
No, everyone speaks A Common.
Taldane is the Avistani Common.
Tian is the Tian Xia Common.
Polyglot is the Mwangi Common
Undercommon is the Darklands Common.
And there's plenty more.
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To further echo what Rysky said... The creatures in the game you run speak common. Think of that as code for "This monster speaks a language that your player characters speak, so you can do role-playing with the monster, even if it's nothing more than trading threats in combat or to help keep language-dependent spells viable."
This is not the same as "everything speaks the same language."
I understand that some folks find the idea that there's a single language that's so widespread breaks verisimilitude, and if that's the case, feel free to fix it in your game. But be prepared for your game to slow down and lag in unexpected ways when language barriers become overwhelming and prevent progression of play or require players whose characters can't speak the language being spoken have to do awkward player-knowledge-vs-character-knowledge separations.
In a lot of ways, this simplification of language is in the same category as not having different coinages for every nation. It's a simplification put into the world to ease game play. If you don't mind your game being more complicated, change as you will, but that's not the baseline of the game we publish.
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..., just as British speakers of English and American speakers of English can mostly understand each other. However, some idioms and word choices/uses will differ, the variants will borrow different words from other languages, etc., so that they will not be exactly the same.
As you know, the British and the Americans are two people separated by a common language. :)
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In a lot of ways, this simplification of language is in the same category as not having different coinages for every nation. It's a simplification put into the world to ease game play.
But it's also not that unreasonable a simplification (in either case).
For most of the history of the world, every country used its own coinage, but people would cheerfully accept almost everything, based largely on its weight (and purity, as far as it could be assessed). A silver coin was a silver coin, and a big silver coin was worth more than a small silver coin. (And that iconic image of a pirate biting a coin? Yeah, gold (and silver) are both really soft; if you can't dent a "gold" coin with your teeth, it's probably fake. Cheaper and easier than using the aqua regia test on it like a real alchemist would.) Even today, there are lots of spots where i've been able to pay for something that I wanted with a mixed handful of US dollars, British pounds, and Euro's -- basically, the shrapnel at the bottom of my pockets after a long trip.
Similarly, the idea of a trade language is hardly new. Every educated European in the Middle Ages spoke Latin, and every educated or well-travelled person in the early modern period spoke French (hence the term lingua franca). Today, "common" is English, and it's estimated that more than 25% of the world's population speaks English. It's gotten to the point where it's hard to find someone in Europe who doesn't have at least a smattering of English, precisely because it's so useful for talking to travellers -- and the travellers themselves are learning English for the same reason. I'm no longer surprised when I go to Antwerp and see a Japanese customer talking about a meal with a Dutch waitress, and they're both using English. Four hundred years ago, it would have been an English customer talking to a Flemish innkeeper, and they would have been speaking French, but the principle remains the same.
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In a lot of ways, this simplification of language is in the same category as not having different coinages for every nation. It's a simplification put into the world to ease game play.But it's also not that unreasonable a simplification (in either case).
For most of the history of the world, every country used its own coinage, but people would cheerfully accept almost everything, based largely on its weight (and purity, as far as it could be assessed). A silver coin was a silver coin, and a big silver coin was worth more than a small silver coin. (And that iconic image of a pirate biting a coin? Yeah, gold (and silver) are both really soft; if you can't dent a "gold" coin with your teeth, it's probably fake. Cheaper and easier than using the aqua regia test on it like a real alchemist would.) Even today, there are lots of spots where i've been able to pay for something that I wanted with a mixed handful of US dollars, British pounds, and Euro's -- basically, the shrapnel at the bottom of my pockets after a long trip.
I see the universal coinage as being a result of the Church of Abadar's influence. Having a god whose churches are also banks goes a long way to the standardization of monetary systems.
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..., just as British speakers of English and American speakers of English can mostly understand each other. However, some idioms and word choices/uses will differ, the variants will borrow different words from other languages, etc., so that they will not be exactly the same.As you know, the British and the Americans are two people separated by a common language. :)
Yes. We poor Americans can't even speak the language "properly." <grin>
Although that's actually an issue that Americans have when speaking with people from other countries: Americans have so many modifications, jargons, and different ways of speaking (many of them specific to certain backgrounds, sub-cultures, or even small informal groupings) that they can be very difficult to understand.
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Heroic adventure gaming is much like heroic stories, or heroic movies. Would you really want your Star Wars, your Star Trek, your Babylon 5, your Lord of the Rings to be taken up with characters trying to make language translations?
The answer of course is that... it's not something that you want to spend 20 bucks seeing a movie, or that much of your 4-8 hour playing time devoted to things like this that get in the way of a story without adding to it.
So yes, your Vulcans, your Smurfs, your Elves, Your Orcs, and your Dragons and Nightgaunts, will speak a common tongue.. a conceit that's done so that you can get to what's important in the story.
I wonder what this is like in a gaming group in which all the players and the GM have at least 2 languages in common?
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I wonder what this is like in a gaming group in which all the players and the GM have at least 2 languages in common?
Everybody uses their native *zing* common *ziiiing* language. Been there, done that.
We've tried "roleplaying in English" (too bothersome unless you are doing as a language learning exercise) and "roleplaying some elements in English" (to fiddly). Heck, I even translate all read-outs and hand-outs to Polish on the fly because switching between both languages feels weird.
I suspect this might be different for groups where there are 2 common native languages (say, a bunch of Quebecois or Swiss) and switching between them is more natural.
I always figured that monsters whose stat blocks inckude "common" soeak Taldane when playing in the inmer sea region. The problem with that comes from Undead revisited. It states that Nightshades are created knowing abyssal infernal and Common and that the languages they know may be based on the first nightshade ever created.
So, if a nightshade is created knowing taldane, is it going to sttack the inner sea at some point? If it knows tian, it will attack the dragon empires, and if it knows russian, it swill attack siberia?
You know those Taldan Armies of Exploration? Turns out some of them found planar rifts.
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Almost everyone in PFS scenarios speaks common though. At least enough for experienced players to make joke about that.
BTW, monster languages are rather funny in PFS since monsters usually come directly from bestiaries meaning they speak only the listed languages... Which results in, well, for example, from what I know, original 3.5 sinspawn only knew thassilon, but since thassilon isn't setting generic thing in bestiary they speak aklo, so sinspawns in PFS scenario can only speak aklo even if they are found in thassilonian ruin.
I once ran a campaign in 3.5 where I abolished "Common" and "Undercommon".
Instead "Common" and "Undercommon" were floating language slots, with the only restriction being that every member of the party had to share at least one language. Humans learned Common and Human (instead of just Common). In Golarion it would have been "Common" and the appropriate ethnic language (such as Taldane)
The monsters/enemies replaced it with whatever I wanted, which may or not have been a language known by someone in the party.
Instantly what languages the players knew had impact, because although they could speak to one another without issue, speaking to NPCs was sometimes difficult. Characters would cycle through greetings trying to find one that didn't get gibberish in response, Spells such as Comprehend Languages and Tongues became important. It was great for that campaign; however it did require a little more work on my part.