Ah 5E, Here We Go Again

After a year of running other games, I was asked to run D&D 5E again. While I have one big problem with 5E as a system, and many more particularized complaints with specific mechanical executions, I think 5E is a decent system. I have run hundreds of sessions with it. Thousands of hours. If I hated it, I would have found a way to get off that train. I said that I wasn't sure if I would run it again, but I'm not surprised that I am. My desire to run D&D outweighs my disdain for any particular D&D system. I have voted with my feet.

All that said, I am skeptical of the implicit presumption that 5E is the default choice for fantasy TTRPGs. When I have run other systems, with cleaner, more concise mechanical designs and ludological execution, I’ve been consistently impressed with how quickly players – whether versed in 5E, or entirely new to TTRPGs – grokked the system. I’m skeptical of the common belief that seems to exist in the TTRPG world, that 5E is the natural starting point for fantasy games, and players can then opt in to other games after they have tried out the industry standard. I don’t usually write about the 💿🐴 on this blog, but a kerfuffle over a popular actual play streamer’s defense of using 5E for games that don’t strictly fit its explicit and implicit system is instructive on this question.

I haven’t watched Brennan Lee Mulligan’s games, but I’ve wondered about the “5E as universal system” idea in other media that I have followed. I’ve been an on-again, off-again listener of the Adventure Zone, the TTRPG wing of the McElroy brothers’ podcasting family. They’ve run a variety of campaigns, some lasting dozens of sessions, and have shown a commendable willingness to experiment with different systems.

When they announced a campaign titled The Adventure Zone Versus Dracula, I thought “Ah, interesting! What system will they use? The Dracula Dossier… or something homebrewed, but still set in Night’s Dark Agents? If not, Urban Shadows perhaps? Undying? Maybe even a Vampire the Masquerade game, steering into (but also dissecting) the ‘90s edgelord reputation of that storied game?”

No. They chose D&D 5E, for… some… reason. It’s strange, because their style of play, and the podcasting format itself, really lends itself to PBtA and other story games. And the best Adventure Zone moments really sing with PBtA energy. Listening to their 5E episodes really grates my bacon, as the players, versed in PBtA play culture, wander around spamming 5E skills as if they were playbook moves. Every time someone on the Adventure Zone says “I’d like to make an Arcana check” without first framing their character’s actions in-fiction, a fairy flies into a bug zapper.

So the McElroys keep coming back to 5E. If they’ve explained why in an interview or blog post somewhere, I haven’t seen it, just like I haven’t seen that degree on Travis’ wall. I only know that it is a pain to listen to an engaged, creative, often laugh-out-loud actual play group struggle against the system they chose to play.

Fantasy Language Review: Delver Cant, Tremorspeak, Lyrical Language, and Shouting at the Smallfolk

Previously: Mapping the Fantasy Languages – How and Why 

The following approach is very intentionally “vanilla fantasy”, hewing as close as possible to D&D qua D&D. Most games should tweak or change this approach considerably to fit the setting and campaign concept in use. But as a starting point, the generic treatment is more useful than a tailored version.

Common

Common is pretty obviously a solution to a gameplay problem rather than a worldbuilding detail that emerges naturally from the fiction. The party members need to talk to each other and the game designers don’t want every session devolving into frantic pantomime. Can we do better? 

Variations: Dialects. Fantasy games have a bad habit of suggesting that human nations have cultures that vary just as much as they do in the real world… yet these cultures speak the same common language. Use the close and familiar gaps (defined in the last post) to articulate dialect differences. Human languages don’t just have to be limited to people from far-off places. Two towns separated by a handful of miles of difficult geography may have very different languages; it certainly happens in the real world.

An alternative approach: Delver cant. Common is a lingua franca, but as real-world lingua franca was used by groups who needed it for their profession (e.g., traveling merchants) fantasy lingua franca would not be the common language of, uh, commoners, but rather adventurers. This means the party can easily talk to each other, but they can’t necessarily communicate with every Tom, Dick, and Harpy they encounter on their travels. Bonus points if the players want to invent their own slang, unique to just their group.

Get weirder: Memo-virus. Use Noise Sans Signal’s idea of common as a memetic virus (this idea is very Snow Crash).

Dwarvish 

Dwarves and their ancient language are a familiar part of the common fantasy vernacular, and their written script (often flavored as runes) appears a lot in the game. We'll revisit Dwarvish script in some of the following entries in this series, as D&D uses it a lot.

Variations: Mountain homes. There’s no particular reason that dwarves should have any more lingual unanimity than humans. Rather than tying their language to nation states, like most fantasy human languages, perhaps each range of mountains has its own Dwarven tongue. Dwarven adventurers exploring a mountain home that was completely abandoned (like Moria) might need to navigate a close or familiar language gap. 

An alternative approach: Terran dialect. One way to tap deeper into the mythic nature of dwarves, and get them away from the bad Scottish accent cliche, is to tie their language directly to the capital-E earth; make Dwarvish and the elemental earth language Terran related languages, so dwarves are not just those who dwell in the earth, but those who descended from it.

Get weirder: Tremorspeak. Take the above idea one step further. Who says Dwarves have to speak their language in a conventionally verbal manner? Instead they could communicate through complex vibrations and tapping; a tactile language formed deep underground. This opens up all kinds of interesting opportunities for non-verbal communication, subterfuge, and strategy.

Elvish

Vanilla fantasy typically posits Elvish as the other very ancient language among humanoids, besides Dwarvish. 

Variations: A tongue for every terrain. Many real-world languages have different tenses and word choices for different social settings. A person speaking their language to immediate family members may sound completely different from how they sound when at work, or speaking to a stranger,  or participating in a religious ritual. Consider giving elves dialects that vary based on the place where they are. PCs may be surprised to find that the elf who is perfectly grokkable in the streets of the human city speaks a difficult-to-understand dialect when deep in the forest.

An alternative approach: Sylvan cousins. The Elvish language itself is a descendant of the Sylvan tongue. Elvish brings rigor and structure to a language that is famously mercurial when spoken in the fey lands. This complexity is not arbitrary. It holds back the inherent chaos of the mother tongue, allowing elves to maintain the connection to unadulterated magic and the natural world, without succumbing to the satyr’s bacchalia, the abandon of the Wild Hunt, or any other manifestation of Sylvan chaos. “You’re speaking Sylvan'' is an Elvish expression suggesting that someone is saying something irrational.

Get weirder: Musical meaning. Most lore about elves suggests a propensity toward art and music. Why not make it explicit, and make their language musical? Elves literally speak in metered prose or loose, interwoven melodies. This doesn’t mean that elven PCs have to constrain how they speak or come up with song-speeches (although an ambitious PC absolutely should feel welcome). It’s more just a way to drive home an alien or foreign language gap. 

Giant

D&D 5E treats Giant as one of the "standard" languages, even though the lore suggests Giant is older than any other language besides Draconic. We’ll interrogate that contradiction in our treatment.

Variations: Planar fugitives. If giants trace their origin to other planes of existence, then their languages could reflect this. Fire giants can speak Ignan, of course, but we should avoid just slapping elemental affinities on everything; elements are already overused in D&D's cosmology. Perhaps some of the connections are less obvious. If stone giants don’t speak Terran, but instead speak a language of the Dreamlands, isn’t that more interesting? If cloud giants are cagey about their native tongue and refuse to speak it in front of outsiders, doesn’t that create an interesting mystery behind these tricksters?

An alternative approach: Bound by the word. Why do the giants use dwarven script? They are among the oldest creatures, peers to dragons. Shouldn’t they have their own script? Perhaps in mythic times, they had a spoken language, but no writing. The Monster Manual seems to at least suggest this would be a reasonable inference; in one aside, the 5E book notes that fire giants “work through insight and experience rather than writing or arithmetic.” Perhaps in that mythic pre-history, when the giants were more common, they had no need to write. One day, a clever dwarven smith came to the king of the giants and asked to learn the ways of the giant metalworkers. The haughty giant king scoffed, asking what the dwarves could possibly offer in return that would equal the value of this rare knowledge. The dwarf said that his people had a form of “magic” that could compel armies to battle or stop kingdoms in their tracks; "magic" that would make warlords weep and turn modest maidens into military marauders. The “magic” was, of course, writing, and ever since that day, dwarves have known the ways of the giant smiths, and giants have written in dwarven script.

Get weirder: Deafening declarations. A giant’s size can be hard to communicate in a TTRPG. So many other D&D monsters are very large, so the idea of the giant as “really big bearded guy” can lack narrative oomph. It helps for the DM to channel the giant’s size into something besides just a height measurement and commiserate strength score. Imagine a giant who whispers and is still so loud that her voice shatters glass. Imagine giants reveling in the mountains, with the echoes audible hundreds of miles away. It is difficult to parse their language simply because it is so loud. Massive lung capacity can really play up the true size of a giant. Wouldn't it be more evocative if a cloud giant was literally blowing a PC over with a sneeze, rather than the boilerplate X/day wind and weather spells from the PHB?

Next time: Fantasy Language Review: Building, Stealing, Adopting, and Conquering Words

Mapping the Fantasy Languages – How and Why

Language is an interesting part of TTRPGs, but many games treat it as an afterthought. Other media have amply demonstrated that it’s entirely reasonable to put language at the center of a game or story. It’s been done in video games (Chants of Sennarr or Tunic), books (Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, and Snow Crash), and movies (Arrival or Pontypool).

If there’s a TTRPG out there that has done language well, I haven’t seen it (as always, pointers appreciated). Other blogs have done the hard work of unpacking various aspects of TTRPG languages (for example, see here, which also links to other interesting examples).

I have written a few posts that incidentally deal with language, but only in specific, niche cases, like using an unusual tense to flag important information, or thinking about how D&D’s old alignment languages implied interesting things about the game’s setting. But I have not done a holistic TTRPG language post. That starts now. 

Defining Interesting Degrees of Separation

Languages in TTRPGs are generally yes/no, on/off propositions. You either speak Elvish or you don’t. You understand the aliens perfectly, or not all. Many games end up with a “common tongue” or universal translators simply because such black-and-white treatments are not interesting to engage with, and are thus easier to simply gloss over.

Take a look at the Mausritter language rules, as summarized in the Knight at the Opera post linked above. Languages are defined as much by the degree of separation between them as they are by anything intrinsic to each tongue. So if we focus on the gaps between languages in a TTRPG setting, rather than the languages themselves, we can come up with three or four categories, like so:

• An alien gap between two languages means that those who do not speak it don’t just find it unintelligible; they may not even recognize it as language.
• A foreign gap means that the listener knows it’s a language, but they can’t intuit any specific meaning from the words. At best, they might infer broad intent or very, very simple concepts, as much from inflection and body language as the words themselves.
• A close gap means that the languages have some overlap or common interoperability, whether through a shared language family (see below), an abundance of loan words and social exchange, or simple cultural osmosis. Everyday conversations and simple exchanges can be understood, but nuanced or complex ideas get noisy fast.
• A familiar gap means that the languages are nearly related or intermingled, and the difference may boil down to dialect or patois. The large majority of ideas can be clearly communicated. Only concepts and conversations closely related to whatever differentiates the two languages may be difficult to parse.

Why Making Comprehension Harder Is Worth It

It’s fine if games decide they are not about language. When I’ve been a player in Urban Shadows or Delta Green games, everyone is pretty much speaking English, and unless we find some eldritch runes or something, language is not going to come up. That’s fine. But if a game is going to include language, it shouldn’t be handwaved. Language should present challenges and obstacles that make the game more interesting, just like monsters and traps and fronts and stress points do.

How can it matter in a game like D&D?

"Languages known" matters more. In modern D&D, characters receive generous additional languages from their ancestries, classes, and backgrounds. Many of these never come up in the game, because most communication is happening in Common. Emphasizing differences rewards characters for selecting interesting languages.

Spells and abilities that translate matter more. Comprehend Languages and Tongues become much more viable choices for precious spell slots when communication could hinge on their availability. Telepathy powers become much more potent. 

Pantomiming, drawing, and other methods of non-verbal communication matter more. While not every session should devolve into charades, it can be a good prompt for some creative, physical roleplay.

Hirelings, guides, and translators matter more. Absent a fluent speaker in the party or relevant magic, PCs can do what real-world people did in the ancient world; hire someone who does know the language to translate. This can provide a good hook for incorporating support NPCs into a modern game that has largely shed them.

Next Time: Fantasy Language Review: Delver Cant, Tremorspeak, Lyrical Language, and Shouting at the Smallfolk

Make Ancestries Distinct By Giving Them Mastery of Their Domain

What do dwarves like? Brewing beer and mining gold out of the earth? Yeah, so what. Humans like those things too. 

What about elves? Music and magic? Humans. Love. That. Shit. Too.

If you want ancestries to stand out, don’t just make them the best at their thing. Give them exclusive dominion over it.

Dwarves 

Of the surface peoples, only dwarves can mine beneath the earth. They are not just the best at it, or the ones who do it most frequently. They are the only ones who can do it. The earth quite literally rebels against the efforts of surface folk to excavate its riches. Cave-ins, monster attacks, and even earthquakes greet those who try. But dwarves enjoy a mutualistic relationship with the earth, like plovers cleaning crocodile teeth. They can burrow into the ground and sense which riches can be removed without agitating the angry earth. Only dwarves can mine.

Elves

Of the intelligent creatures of the world, only elves can play music. They’re not just the most talented; only they can do it. Other creatures literally can’t carry a tune. Musical notation is gibberish to them. Instruments are like alien artifacts. Music is a force as much as magic is, and like magic, it can be a demanding master. Elves have some gift for it, reaching back into the prehistoric past, when the gods divided up their gifts to the peoples of the world. Only elves can make music.

Humans

Of the civilizations of the world, only humans can build cities. The dwarves have mountain strongholds and the elves have forest sanctuaries, but only humans build cosmopolitan gathering places defined by cultural exchange and mercantile trade. Only humans build cities.

Gnomes

Of the craftspeople of this land, only gnomes can build machines. For other ancestries, inherent process inconsistency means that ideals of engineering rigor and industrial production elude them. But only in the hands of gnomes can machinery work like it does in the real world. Only gnomes can build machines.

Tieflings

Of the peoples native to the prime material world, only tieflings can travel the planes. The otherworldly blood flowing through their veins is the ink on an invisible passport each of these plane-touched strangers carries with them at all times. Portals open only to their touch, and Plane Shift reliably sends them where they want to go. For other creatures, planar travel is an uncontrollable (and usually deadly) misadventure. Only tieflings can travel the planes.

The Player Rebellion

If you tell a group of players that things work in a certain way in the game world, at least one player is going to immediately want to create a character who breaks that rule. They may bristle at restrictions as a matter of principle, or find that ancestry-exclusive cultural or societal domains are too close to real-world stereotypes about nationalities or ethnic groups being "best" at something. So it’s a matter of when, not if, a player will want to break the rules.

And… that’s great! Let them! 

The first human in living memory who can perform music? A great hook for a character. A group of elves and humans and dwarves who embark on a quest to travel the planes, the metaphysical constants be damned? Those are some stakes for an adventure.