Saturday, May 8, 2021

Alignment Language

After two-and-a-quarter pages dedicated to alignment, Gygax adds a third of a page to this subject.  And then another half page to "changing alignment," which unfortunately I'll have to tackle later.  In toto, Gygax dedicated 1% of the DMG's content to alignment here; and later, he'll talk about it more.  I can't imagine any subject of less relevance to D&D; or any content that is a greater waste of my time.  But this isn't "my" time; this is the reader's time ... and with alignment continuing to be a central theme in D&D, with hundreds of thousands of DMs, I'm stuck.

Right off, Gygax states,

"Alignment language is a handy game tool which is not unjustifiable in real terms. Thieves did employ a special cant. Secret organizations and societies did and do have certain recognition signs, signals, and recognition phrases — possibly special languages (of limited extent) as well. Consider also the medieval Catholic Church which used Latin as a common recognition and communication base to cut across national boundaries."

He hasn't explained what it is yet and already he's defending its inclusion.  He stresses that the thieves "did" have a cant, clearly having argued with people about it, since he's anxious to hang the concept on it.  Thieves didn't, not really; the essential reliable sources suggest more of a slang than a "language," which we have today and which children still habitually develop.  His phrasing that special languages "possibly" existed doesn't make a strong case, either.  But most idiotic of all is that he thinks "personality" is a logical basis for a language, rather than the examples he gives of societies, cabals and professions.  But then, in his system, all the druids would be of like alignment and all the thieves as well.  As if this were sensible, given what we know of thieves, criminals or other groups that gather.

This language was supposed to be secret and limited to a few score words (again, obviously slang).  In places, the way it's presented is rather ridiculous:

"Druids could discuss at length and in detail the state of the crops, weather, animal husbandry and foresting; but warfare, politics, adventuring, and like matter would be impossible to detail with the language."

My, that's useful.  It's ever so important to keep those needful details about crop growth from becoming common knowledge!  Good thing there are no farmers around to witness the weather and husbanded animals — they might spill the beans.

Consider this line that starts the third paragraph:

"Any character foolish enough to announce his or her alignment by publicly crying out in that alignment tongue will incur considerable social sanctions."

Clearly, Gygax felt the players should metagame their alignments In Game as part of their character's make-up.  It's all so strange, it's no wonder the section has dropped through the cracks, as it were.

I feel an apology is warranted.  It's hasn't been my goal in discussing the DMG to cut into Gygax point-by-point ... but the previous content, spanning four pages, deserves nothing else.  With so many useful and concrete aspects to set up and make practical in my game world, I don't have any interest in devising languages that will enable players to talk about crops or inquire about the health of someone else of the same alignment.  Since when is openly stating in a public forum, "I feel fine, thank you," considered a subversive statement?  I find myself pounding my head on the table.  Any game-writer foolish enough to announce his or her dumbfuckery to this degree by publicly crying out in English words should incur considerable written sanctions!

I'll probably come around to the subject again, when reaching that point in the DMG, but language is very limited as a game feature in role-playing.  The game is communication, between players and between the party & DM.  Any information critical to the game that's stated in another language by another race, or written on a wall, will eventually have to be stated in the language used by the players; so the only real use of an unreadable language is to suspend the time between when the party sees the lettering and when the party discovers what the lettering means.  This is sometimes useful; but very, very rarely.  I suspect it is overused among DMs, as I've had an online player enter my world as a 1st level mage, taking Comprehend Languages as one of his initial three spells.

This baffled me, though I let it slide.  A low-level mage is a spongy punching bag where combat is concerned; they can't fight, they can't take damage, when they do hit it's a pin-prick.  Yet, with three well-chosen spells, cast at critical moments, they can turn the tide of a losing battle and preserve the party.  This takes skill: to recognize WHEN to cast and WHAT to have in one's arsenal.  Stripping that arsenal by one-third in order to take an expositional spell, which will only reveal information that will ultimately become revealed in time anyway, is like my saying you can have only three apps on your phone, period, and you choose one that will tell you when the bus comes.

From the choice, I must extrapolate that the "you don't understand their language" is a well that other DMs go to constantly, so much that it's desperately needful because the experience is so fucking annoying.  When I first began to play, we dutifully wrote down that we understood elvish, orcish, goblinish and gnoll, or whatever the hell else ... which played out as a redundancy whenever we would talk to elves, orcs, goblins or whatever.  "Oh, I speak (blank)," we would say, and then an ordinary conversation would commence, in our table's language ... which spoiled any sense of "specialness" that pretending to speak in another language provided.  I quickly understood what a waste of time this was; why go through the pretense of other languages when we were going to say everything in English anyway?  So I dropped it from my game, never looked back, and never had a player express any wish for me to reinstall the language concept.

Occasionally, I put something on a wall the players can't read.  It makes a nice decoration.  They know they're going to find out what it says anyway, so they don't fret much.  And if someone happens to have a scroll of comprehend languages (who the hell would waste a spell-slot with it?), then it's nice.

That's most of what I have to say on language.  I've said it before, but hell, never hurts to re-iterate a relevant point.

11 comments:

  1. This sparks a thought. Why include Comprehend Languages on the spell list to begin with then? There's not a small number of spells, but by and large I'd say a case could be made for most if not all of them. Jesus, I just took Purify Water, and how often have will that ever come up? It's solving an imagined problem before it even comes up.

    Here you argue that language is essentially set dressing at best, and yet -you include the spell to be chosen-.

    Moreover, you have Languages as a Sage ability for Clerics, and while it's never been given any abilities, what would you imagine such a skill to contain?

    For that matter, why not just lean into the handwave? Say "Tower of Babel never happened, every can and has always been able to understand each other just fine, it's magic, it's a game conceit, get over it".

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  2. Spells like "comprehend languages" and "purify water" remain on the list because these are good spells to obtain as scrolls. One off things that can be carried around for a year of game time before it's employed. No one I've ever known OFF-line picks spells like these as their base character spells, but EVERY online spellcaster I've had since 2009 does. The obvious 1st level druid spells, that will be used every session or near to it, are shillelagh, faerie fire, entangle, pass without trace, speak with animals and detect snares & pits. Detect magic and animal friendship are useful, but far inferior when it comes to keeping your druid alive until 2nd level. Yet I see druids take purify water, predict weather and precipitation, for heaven's sake. I don't understand it. It's like taking a butter knife when a hatchet is available.

    There are cases where comprehend language can be reversed, to "confuse language," so that private messages can be sent to other persons. The party encountering such a message would be highly unlikely, but USING such messages could be an every day thing, IF the party planned for town adventures and intrigue; only, players who take comprehend languages as a spell never, ever do this, and online players avoid town adventures like the plague.

    Like spells, SOME sage abilities exist as a choice for NPCs, such as Language and Heraldry. I'd be very surprised to have a PC choose "language" as their primary study, but it makes sense for them to pick up an amateur level of it as a sideline. As far as its use goes, consider the first scene of Pygmalion, where Higgins is able to identify where people are from by their accent; or consider its applications to convincing people of an argument, as I'm doing now. "Language" is more than dialects. Additionally, when a character reaches "expert" or "sage" level, the study begins to provide certain magical effects - which for the moment can be left to the imagination.

    Finally, I have leaned into that handwave to some extent. Everyone, from goblins to gnolls to orcs to elves and humans, speaks "Common." The gods got together and agreed, millennia ago. However, today's "common" is not the same "common" from the time of the Sumerians, or from the Hyborian Age (yes, deep below my 17th century earth, there was entire other age, with an entire other culture, that occurred 40,000 years ago and has left virtually no evidence of its existence, with Ice Ages and all). So, when running across something very, very old, such as the writing on the wall in the frogling lair, it isn't comprehensible without the spell or the sage study.

    Anything I missed?

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    1. The one use case for comprehend languages and language skills that I've actually seen in play is talking to monsters who were "supposed" to be killed; to bargain, interrogate as to later hazards, make mind control more effective, etc. If the players can't do this, that's fine, they were never "meant" to know what the goblins were saying.

      That is, a player taking these things might be saying: I want to lean into talking with the bad guys, even when that wouldn't otherwise be possible, that's part of my "thing". (Or not, it might just be a dumb choice, like Predict Weather - I can't justify that one.)

      Of course if literally every enemy speaks Common this won't come up; and if they don't then it means that any interesting complications as a result of language barriers can't happen if one of the PCs has the spell.

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  3. I feel I should defend my choice here; what I had seen in the online campaign was a lot of dungeon delving and seeing unknown languages, so I picked up that spell. I found uses for it, though that was probably you placating me.

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  4. In D&D, what's come before is never a good measure for what's ahead. You'd have done better with a more practical spell.

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  5. I'll keep that in mind should I rejoin your campaign ever again

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  6. Don't take it hard, James.

    The goal in D&D is the same goal as in life. The goal is to live. We spend our time communicating, having fun, making art, etcetera ... but every minute, unless we want to die, we commit ourselves to the time and trouble of surviving. For us, we're not doing that in the face of monsters and other enemies; we're not burrowing underground into insanely dark places. The people who do things like that, the military, they're VERY EXACT about their equipment; they don't take along anything that isn't of immediate, desperate use.

    In my experience, a great many D&D players have been trained by game systems, modules, the company rhetoric and the confusion of earnest rhetoric that causes them to ignore their safety and survival, because there's always some kind of "out" that's there to save them, to restore them when they haven't got every tool they need.

    I don't run that sort of world. And it is a shock to most.

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  7. I think alignments often make more sense when considered as factions. They began as a way to include Moorcock-esque cosmic Law and Chaos factions defining the world, and then Heaven and Hell factions were added to do Christian-y stuff.

    If you want to play a game set in a world defined by this kind of cosmic Cold War chess game, then maybe it makes sense to have mechanics where everyone declares their allegiance (which may not be the same as the party), code phrases and secret languages, members of certain groups being Neutral towards the conflict (although not literally neutral about *everything*), etc.

    (One might imagine a Warhammer game with secret Chaotic and Imperial tongues, or a Star Wars game with snatches of ancient Jedi and Sith languages allowing them to identify each other. Those are probably the only two major modern fantasy franchises that still go down this route.)

    Even in this frame, I think there are serious problems with the mechanics, but at least it helps me kinda see what they were going for.

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  8. An example occurs in my Juvenis campaign.

    James's character had the spell when they were moving through the frogling lair, so I put up frogling writing just so he could use the spell usefully. Of course, it also meant I was able to give the party exposition is a slightly different way.

    Sorry James.

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  9. No reason to apologize. Comprehend Languages at the end of the day exists only to give DMs another way to dole out exposition. As you said, if it is infornation the party needs, the DM will provide the information in some way.

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  10. Ha...funny story: yesterday morning I sat down and started writing (on my blog) about language in D&D, its importance to game play, my dissatisfaction with the system as written for dealing with languages, and my idea for "fixing" the system. However, events conspired to postpone the post...the usual explosion of family activities, athletic events, etc...which, you know, was fine. I was, in fact, having some struggles ARTICULATING my thoughts on the idea anyway ("articulating thoughts on language"...go figure).

    Then I read this.

    I hate butting heads with you on subjects. And...well, I agree with much of what you've written here. But regarding language IN GENERAL (not alignment language in particular, nor some of these other "cants" and "tongues") I think you've given it shorter shrift than it deserves.

    I understand why YOU don't use a multiplicity of languages in your game; your points are quite clear and I get it. But I've gotten a lot of mileage out of languages, both as a DM and as a player in other folks' games. It's another arena of challenge to be navigated, another opportunity for players to contribute to a party, another way to interact with the environment. For my game, it's more than just a means of providing exposition to the party.

    Anyway...I'm not trying to change your mind on languages. Your world already has such richness and depth that issues of communication may not add anything other than needless complication to an environment already rife with challenge and interactivity. My own life experiences...fraught as they have been with the challenges of communicating in other languages...lends a bit more importance to the subject, and I like having it in my game world.

    But not alignment language. Ugh.

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