How much does language actually come up in your D&D game?
If it’s anything like mine, it periodically appears as a “secret” communication channel for characters who both speak dwarves/elvish to talk behind the other characters’ backs, and occasionally features when a demon/devil happens to speak Abyssal/Infernal, and otherwise has very little impact on the game. After all, everyone speaks Common.
(Admittedly, the character speaking Abyssal with a trapped aspect of Yeenoghu in front of a Paladin Watcher of the Seals did lead to some interesting (and good) role-playing between the two players across multiple sessions, where the Paladin was very sceptical of/cross with the Abyssal-talker and what deal they might have done with the Demon Lord. But apart from that it didn’t really affect the story.)
And another question (bear with me): how do you handle a character’s knowledge of a town or city? It’s not Arcana, Religion, History, Nature or Survival. Investigation, Perception and Insight all feel too “in the now” as well.
I recently came across a blog post suggesting an approach which might help with both of these questions.
Full Moon Storytelling’s suggestion
In Adding Culture to your game: A new tool, Dave Clark (Full Moon Storytelling, @bedirthan) talks about the same problem with language, and suggests an alternative.
As he says:
Languages in most Dungeons & Dragons settings are rather rudimentary. There’s the pidgin-trade tongue of Common (and sometimes Undercommon). From there, the typical known languages are based on races and the planes.
A character might know Common, Elvish, and Primordial for example.
This is bland, unnecessary, and lacks verisimilitude (people don’t either know or not know a language).
… For most tables, languages are simply “You can communicate” or “You must use gestures.” Few encounters are successes and failures based on the 3-7 languages a character knows.
His suggestion is to replace a language with “culture: NAME”.
That defines more than just a binary “can you communicate with them or not”. It actively affects your interactions. His suggestion:
Use Culture like you would use History, but apply it like a tool. Most often it would connect with Intelligence, but there are times when your proficiency in a culture would apply to a check based off of Wisdom (if a character isn’t proficient in Insight their awareness of the opponent’s culture might help them) or Charisma would apply.
Knowing a culture of a peoples with which you are interacting is particularly helpful in social encounters. A character familiar with a particular empire should be able to take advantage of that knowledge at the table!
Are you familiar with the Dalelands? Then you would recognize their heraldry, for example. Hidden societies, or subsets of a culture may require a check (DC: 15) to see if you have studied or are aware of that aspect.
Taking this and running with it
I really like this idea, although I’m not completely sold on making it a version of History. Here’s what I want to get from it.
First, Culture would modify character interactions with NPCs. If they share a culture, their social interactions with NPCs from that culture should go more smoothly. It might be easier to Persuade them, or to gain Insight. Performances might be received better.
On the other hand, if the characters are of completely different cultures, it could make things harder, as they end up talking at cross purposes, or inadvertently causing insult.
Not sure about Deception – I can see the argument that sharing a culture might make a con easier. I can also see the argument that someone from a different culture might have fewer defences against the deception.
Moving away from social interaction, Culture proficiency could also help determine how much a character knows about a place – where to find certain shops, whether they know someone useful, what the common religions are, recognising their heraldry and so on.
Culture seems a very powerful alternative, which addresses both my issues. It gives a purpose to the skill which actively feeds into what happens at the table, and it fills that gap of what to use when a player asks whether their character knows something about the current location.
Applying cultures at the table
So, we’re going to use cultures instead of languages. How will that work?
Dave suggests it replaces the History skill, and any time you can take a new skill, you can take a culture instead. As I said above, I’m not convinced by that. I think History is separate from Culture, and both have their place.
As a starting point, I think each character would be proficient in the culture of their local area (whatever that is), and have expertise in the aspect of that appropriate to their upbringing.
For knowledge checks related to the culture, this would just act normally (since there isn’t really a skill). Proficiency allows them to add their proficiency bonus to the check to find out if they know, and Expertise allows them to add their proficiency bonus twice.
For interactions, I think it would need to act differently. After all, some acquaintance with the culture is the grease that makes interactions work. So…
- Proficiency with that culture allows interactions to happen normally.
- Where they have expertise in a culture, either they have Advantage in interactions or they get to add their proficiency bonus again to any modifiers from other skills.
- If they don’t have proficiency with that culture, that needs to impose some disadvantage on their interactions – er, maybe Disadvantage?
Side note: I considered adding their proficiency bonus for expertise and subtracting it for a lack of proficiency, but that has the odd effect that as they get more powerful as characters, their interactions with cultures they don’t know get more penalised.
Let’s consider it through some concrete examples.
Jinnie, who grew up on the streets of the city of Akorros in the Republic of Darokin, would have expertise in navigating the streets of Akorros, knowing where to find things there, knowing how to talk to the other street people, knowing how to read the graffiti on the walls and where to find an alleyway to duck into or a short cut. She would be proficient at navigating the bylaws, talking to shopkeepers, town guards, but maybe wouldn’t be proficient in talking to the nobility. Looking further afield, she would probably be proficient in general Darokin information that everyone knows, but not specific information about other cities she hasn’t visited.
Jinnie would have proficiency when interacting with other Akorros street people and expertise at persuading them (she is already proficient at Persuasion). She would be able to talk with merchants from Darokin city as normal, but interacting with people from Ylaruam, Glantri or the Ethengar plains would be at a disadvantage.
In our party, we now also have two characters who have come from Ylaruam (via a magical portal), and has never been in Akorros before. Ylaruam is a very different world of desert dwellers, with a very different culture. Let’s talk about Sami.
If navigating the deserts, dealing with a sandstorm, finding an oasis, sharing water with another tribeperson, or discussing Al-Kalim and the vision of the garden in the desert, Sami would definitely be Proficient, probably with Expertise in most cases (though the cleric with her would know more about Al-Kalim). She may only have Proficiency in talking with the merchants in Kirkuk or the bureaucrats in Ylaruam City, since she’s more at home roaming the desert than in the towns.
She’s going to get a rude shock once they escape the pocket dimension they’re currently trapped in and come out into the snow-covered land of merchants, where everything has its price, the streets are cobbled and steep, and the city is large and ruled (behind the scenes) by the Thieves Guild. She will be able to speak with the locals, because they all speak Common, but everything she does will come across as foreign, and she will probably find them wary and off-kilter (and likewise they will find her an unknown quantity). Just buying a loaf of bread might be a challenge.
If the party ever travel to Ylaruam, the roles will be reversed. Suddenly it will be Sami who knows what she’s doing, and Jinnie who is all at sea (clever in a desert…).
Gaining cultures
So, everyone has their basic culture proficiency and expertise, which comes from their upbringing. In some way, it’s a way of quantifying their background.
How many other cultures might a character have?
To be fair, I think every language they currently have ought to translate to proficiency in that culture. So Jinnie is also Proficient in communicating with other Halflings, and maybe Proficient in the culture of the Five Shires (though definitely no Expertise). She is also Proficient at working with Thieves.
Gergran, a dwarf paladin originally from Rockhome, has been around Akorros long enough to have Proficiency there, but probably not more. He grew up in Rockhome, so his Expertise is with dwarves from there. He has fought enough with the orcs of the Broken Lands to have a working knowledge of their culture, but maybe orcs from beyond the Sind Waste might be more strange. And it appears he has spent enough time working with halflings that he has gained some familiarity with their ways of working.
Sami has clearly encountered elves while in Ylaruam, but what sort? Are these the forest elves of Alfheim? Or are they the shadow elves from the territories beneath the ground? It also appears she has had some familiarity with demons, since she knows some Abyssal. So that suggests that not only can she speak in their language, she has a level of familiarity with how they think.
But those were all defined at character creation. How can characters gain cultures?
Is it a binary choice, or degrees of familiarity?
The D&D rulebook would suggest that either you know a language or you don’t. In 5e, your class, species and background may give you additional languages. In older editions, the number of languages you knew was based on your Intelligence – in BECMI, for example, if your Intelligence was above average, you knew 1, 2 or 3 additional languages based on your Intelligence bonus. In AD&D (1979 edition), you might know up to 7 additional languages.
In reality, learning a language is not all-or-nothing. I can hold a conversation in German, but might struggle if it drifts away from areas I’m familiar with, and while I have a basic familiarity with the culture, a native German would almost certainly be surprised by things I don’t know about. I can get around in France, but would struggle to hold a conversation with a French friend. And I recently discovered I can just about navigate in Italian with basic concepts (thanks in large part to music!), but I had to lean on Google Translate for more detailed concepts, and there were some awkward moments like when the guy in the post office was asking me where I wanted the stamps I had looked up just beforehand to go, and I didn’t know what “dove?” meant (I’ll never forget that now). I also definitely felt like an alien from the point of view of navigating the way things were done there.
Linguists say you need to learn a language before you are about seven to be natively fluent. You can become fluent later in life, but a native will always be aware you’re not a native. So I understand, anyway.
Is it worth trying to model this? Maybe characters can get points in cultures, and a certain number of points unlocks the Proficiency. Gaining points should require living in an area for a length of time. Or maybe these points are the bonus on your checks. And maybe you need a certain number of points in that culture to be able to do certain things.
Hmmm.
I have drifted from Dave’s proposal, but I think I’m drifting towards something that feels more natural.
What next?
I need to try something, and I really like the tools that considering language as culture gives me at the table. So as a starting point, I’ll maybe try converting the characters languages to cultures, and consider Proficiency/Expertise. After seeing how that works, then I can start tweaking.
I’ll report back in a while…
