Languages – further clarification needed

My concern would be lack of choice for some characters. Your average (pas. Lo 2)human from the Hinterlands gets no actual choices as they are forced into picking national languages. The Hinterlands is the only current region that has this kind of issue, but I do think it needs to be considered.

why this limitation? i feel that it is in some way taking away the ability to freely choose what your PC knows. if i’m going to be able to choose what languages my passive logic gives me i don’t want to be pigeonholed into having to take languages that I as a player would think that my PC would have no desire to know
i understand requiring a nations/race “primary” language, but if your yhing hir from the hinterlands and want to learn Milandisian (which oddly enough milandier has yhing hir as a national language), if im understanding the changes you would have to first learn 4- 5 other languages most of which may or may not be useful, then take milandisian, forcing a pc to have to take the linguistic skill. same could be said for any nation that has more then one “national” language. (as a real life example if i live in canada where some areas have both english and french as national language, and i speak primarily english i don’t think i would be required to learn french before i learned spanish or german.) there are also some languages that just may not make sense or desired by a particular pc to know. the first stroy arc withstanding, there could be pcs who are milandisian that have no desire to learn yhing hir and vise versa, or humans from league of princess that would rather know high coryani rather then unden. i

if i remember correctly the universal trade language is Low Coryani yet only 4 of the legal starting nations have it as a base language. as such i think it would be more beneficial to say that all nations/races start off knowing the universal trade language.

I have to also disagree with this rule as written for RP reasons, but can back it up with an in-game example. Forcing the character to learn all of the languages spoken in their nation before being able to branch out doesn’t make any realistic sense and is unnecessarily restrictive. If my character were to be from Milandir and live on the border to Almeric…why on Onara would he have been exposed to Yhing hir enough to learn it?

Example:
Exile/ Expatriate
Original nation: Hinterlands
Adopted nation: Unsealed Lands (could be allowed soon)
Now forced to learn all of the Hinterlands languages before you could learn the second Unsealed Lands’ language.

I think the effective result of this change in ruling will be to have extremely few PCs from home nations with lots of national languages. Most (playable by PCs) nations have 1 or 2 national languages. The Hinterlands is the exception with 4 national languages.

So except for PCs whose concept is tied to the Hinterlands (e.g., Yhing Hir Shaman), we’ll see extremely few (zero?) PCs from the Hinterlands.

I guess I’m curious why the original rule (you must take at least one language from your home nation) was insufficient… I think the above real world example was perfect – just because parts of Canadia (the ‘i’ was intentional) speak Canadian French, a citizen of Canadia isn’t required to learn English and French before they can learn German.

Different world

In most cases, at least in ancient times, people had little exposure to different languages…
You leaned what was around you, not out of any desire to master a new language, but out of nessesity, the nessesity to communicate with those around you, those you have contact with.

In Southern Africa tribel would master several distinct dialects…. Long before one would travel north to learn more.

That’s why we have a linguistics skill….

This rule came about to provide one clear ruling on how languages were acquired, I think its wonderful and simple enough to not be taxing during character creation.

where the hell is my LIKE button!

I am against the change. It might be ‘simple’ but I think it results in a lot less variety in what languages people speak. Requiring that 1 of your languages by your National Language is sufficient to show ‘national solidarity’ but requiring you learn all of them results in cookie cutter characters speaking the same languages. Linguistics is not an archetype skill for anyone but Experts, and while I think Experts can and should take it whenever possible, it shouldn’t be required to speak another language or two.

From a game balance perspective, it certainly penalizes several starting nations over others (i hope unintentionally).

John