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I know that much of the Inner Sea generally has Taldane as its common tongue, and the Mwangi Expanse has Mwangi as its common tongue, and Tian Xia has Tien as its common tongue. I also recently discovered that Osiriani is the common tongue of Geb, per the Blood Lords Player's Guide.
What other languages are known to replace Common, and in what regions?
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Hallit is the traditional Kellid tongue, and overtakes Common in places like the Realm of the Mammoth Lords and parts of Numeria.
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There's essentially as many Common languages out there as there are languages. The whole point of Common is to enable communication (and thus roleplaying) to take place without complications, primarily between PCs but also between PCs and the bulk of any NPCs that are encountered in any one adventure. At the start of any campaign, the GM should let the players know what language serves as "Common" in that particular game.
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Like the Common language on Eox is Eoxian, the Common Language in Russia is Russian. These are both places your Pathfinder character could go (or maybe even be from).
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Like the Common language on Eox is Eoxian, the Common Language in Russia is Russian. These are both places your Pathfinder character could go (or maybe even be from).
I dare say the common in pathfinder is more akin to english in europe/north-america
while every country has their own language, many people know english for easier communication|
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Put another way, the reason we lean into a Common language for the game is the same reason we don't give every society a different type of currency. It's not fun for most tables to have to navigate exchange rates and translator services over and over and over again in a game... and it's also not fun for most tables to have players be forced to sit quietly and do nothing while the rest of the table gets to play the game in a social encounter simply because they don't know the language in question.
All deliberate game-facing choices to make PLAYING the game fun. If we were creating a non-interactive fantasy world for people to read about, we might have made different choices.
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Like the Common language on Eox is Eoxian, the Common Language in Russia is Russian. These are both places your Pathfinder character could go (or maybe even be from).I dare say the common in pathfinder is more akin to english in europe/north-america
while every country has their own language, many people know english for easier communication
It's also handy that many of the language puzzles in ruins correspond with English patterns. There are a lot of 26-letter alphabets out there. :-)
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We do try NOT to use language puzzles in adventures that must be solved by the players. Just as we don't expect players to be able to fight an ogre or cast a fireball when their characters are expected to, it doesn't make much sense to me to expect a player to be as smart as their character when it comes to solving puzzles. So usually if we do something like this, there's rules for how to solve the puzzles by making skill checks or accomplishing certain other things in the adventure.
And none of that even touches the complications and weirdness that arise when you have someone trying to translate your adventure to a different language.
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We do try NOT to use language puzzles in adventures that must be solved by the players. Just as we don't expect players to be able to fight an ogre or cast a fireball when their characters are expected to, it doesn't make much sense to me to expect a player to be as smart as their character when it comes to solving puzzles. So usually if we do something like this, there's rules for how to solve the puzzles by making skill checks or accomplishing certain other things in the adventure.
And none of that even touches the complications and weirdness that arise when you have someone trying to translate your adventure to a different language.
I absolutely hate riddles and language based puzzles for all of the above reasons.
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I absolutely hate riddles and language based puzzles for all of the above reasons.We do try NOT to use language puzzles in adventures that must be solved by the players. Just as we don't expect players to be able to fight an ogre or cast a fireball when their characters are expected to, it doesn't make much sense to me to expect a player to be as smart as their character when it comes to solving puzzles. So usually if we do something like this, there's rules for how to solve the puzzles by making skill checks or accomplishing certain other things in the adventure.
And none of that even touches the complications and weirdness that arise when you have someone trying to translate your adventure to a different language.
Meh. I don't mind language-based riddles and puzzles unless they get too cutesy. I am not a mind-reader so I won't even attempt a puzzle that I know the GM put in there that tickles HIS/HER fancy instead of the antagonist's.
Yeah, I've seen puzzles pulled from pop culture such as
"One of us always lies, and the other always tells the truth..." or "Speak friend and enter" and I hate those because they rarely fit in the adventure they're brought into.
I hate most puzzles because I as the player need to interact with it, rather than my character.
Then there's also a GM coming up with something they find interesting, which is again completely unrelated and likely to be something incredibly innocuous that you wouldn't be able to solve unless the GM had told you before.
Sometimes language based challenges can be fun. Like encountering someone/something that has a language that no one in party can speak, and trying to communicate with them in a rudimentary way. Or using magic to overcome it. Leading to interesting lore and interactions. That can be absolutely fine, when used very occasionally. If the game becomes a constant issue of stopping to find a translator or using magic to speak to people it quickly wears thin.
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This reminds me of how Robert E. Howard stated he hadn't wanted to be forced to craft cunning puzzles for cunning heroes so he created Conan the Barbarian and other brute heroes. Except as uneducated as Conan was, he was so multilingual that Howard also didn't have to deal with translation issues. That would've grown stale with how much travel Conan did. So that solved it much like how Common eases issues in RPGs. Not that Conan wasn't cunning, often using that multilingualism to outwit enemies, but it was on Howard's terms, much like puzzles & translation issues in RPGs should be unforced and on the RPG's terms, which include the PC doing the work on behalf of the player.
I think there's a place for a certain amount of crunch. In a game where people want to play skilled characters whose ability to speak a language can have a lot of importance, the fact that one character speaks Andoran while the rest speak Taldane could make a Party Face character feel pretty satisfied in a situation where you can't reasonably justify a character who would even know the language of another country, or a second language at all. Learning languages used to be a lot easier, just putting a single skill rank into Linguistics, but spells like Comprehend Languages or Tongues would be absolute game-changers in such a scenario. But it does require the players to be willing to engage with that level of crunch, and understand and be fine with playing characters who will simply not be able to engage in certain scenarios. I played a character once who started not knowing any of the local languages and had to communicate through body language, and while there was some charm there it eventually wore off and became a frustration.
Even just changing what "Common" is can add nuance - in my Mummy's Mask game, the "Common" of the Golden Road and Impossible Lands is Kelish, since those regions had a much longer and closer trade relationship with the Satrapy of Qadira than they did with the Empire of Taldor and its successor-states, with mutually intelligible but distinct dialects of Osirian spoken by the individual nations. All my players' characters speak Osiriani, many speak Kelish, but none of them speak Taldane, the "Common" of Avistan, and it's made their run-ins with Taldane-speaking characters who have to switch to one of the other two feel like their region is its own thing. Especially given the level of exoticisation that non-Western coded nations are subject to, it's felt satisfying to them to see perceived outsiders have to adapt to them, rather than the reverse.
I have had two campaigns which began with planetary travel (w/ different tables). The language gap led to some interesting roleplaying for that limited chunk. PCs made sure to invest in the lingua franca ASAP, and we moved into deeper relations. Funnily enough, in one of them a few PCs permanently lost their hearing (due to 1/400 flukes!), so that led to similar obstacles. Unfortunately they later hadn't recognized the cure for their deafness, perhaps being so absorbed in the alien culture? *shrug*
I'd dislike perpetual language issues. Those typically aren't the sort of obstacles one loves to overcome and regale other RPGers around the fire with. Hence, Common, whatever base language that might be. Speaking of which, I did have an imp speak English to the earthlings, because yeah, Common. Their interactions developed so well I wedged the imp into the finale. :-)