Excel to Help Your Game

As promised, I’m taking July and August off from running a campaign, and putting to use the time I would otherwise spend on preparing adventures, to tweak, revamp, and streamline some things that will improve the game when we start playing again. The first of these is a better way to keep track of the weather and date compared to what I had before, which wasn’t much. 

I had some simple weather tables in Excel running really simple code, but what I really needed was a comprehensive spreadsheet that would have all the information I needed right in front of me: Not only the current date and basic overall temperature and whether or no there would be precipitation on a particular day, but that would allow for temperature fluctuations throughout the day, tell me precisely when it would start raining, how strong the wind was and from what direction, what the sky overhead looked like, whether there was fog, how humid it was, and—perhaps best of all, because the party is bound to attempt sooner or later to do something by moonlight, and because there might eventually be werewolves afoot—what phase the moon was in. 

Finally, having just this morning finished coding a spreadsheet that does all of these things, I can see with 20/20 hindsight what an absolute fucking mess it has been running without it. 

Shropesyre Campaign Weather and Time.xls

The screen capture above shows a not atypical day in the West Midlands of England—this particular one 24 March 1377. The 24-hour period is divided into seven sections, beginning around sundown, because medieval custom recognised this as the beginning of the following day. It’s cold and cloudy but dry from evening onward, the gathering clouds providing a light rain around daybreak, with the skies remaining threatening and bringing a thunderstorm at the warmest part of the day, which quickly passes and leaves a clear blue sky for the remainder of the day, bringing the humidity down sharply by evening. 

Incidentally, one of the obvious bad habits players bring to the game, living as they do in the 21st century, is asking what ‘time’ it is. If I have anything to say about running adventures in 14th-century England, players  should be able to get used to thinking of a day in terms of prime, terce, nonce, sext, and vespers, and night as that nebulous period of darkness when they’re supposed to be asleep. (That last bit alone is enough of a challenge; I don’t believe most of us can really imagine what it’s like to live with no electricity at all.) Considering the relative number of daylight hours this time of year, we can predict that an adventuring party might typically spend the time from prime to terce breaking camp and getting ready to get back on the road—less time if they’re traveling light and don’t have any horses to equip—they would understand late morning as the period between terce and nonce, with midday being from nonce to sext, and that they would have until vespers at the latest to find lodging in a town, especially if they wanted to make the evening church service and enjoy a meal before the town gate closed at curfew. They would have little use for knowing ‘time’ beyond these designations, and even if they happened to be carrying an astrolabe few NPCs would ask them what o’clock it is. 

Now then. You can find a brilliantly detailed Climate Generator at Tao-of-DnD Wikispaces, but I’m finding that, both in my immediate acquaintance and in descriptions floating about the cyberworld of the efforts of DMs and players, there’s an awful lot of people who are either too intimidated by Excel to do anything interesting with it, or who just don’t grasp how much it can improve their running. (Ideally, every player would bring his own laptop and constantly update XP, damage, equipment including encumbrance calculated automatically and so on, but as it is my campaign still mostly uses paper. I normally have two computers running: a desktop on which is displayed images relevant to the players, and a laptop on which I privately view area maps and other information to which the players do not have access.) I’m going to devote this post, then, to the utility of this resource, and break down some of the code and explain what it does, for the benefit of DMs who think they might like to build their own spreadsheets for their own worlds but don’t know exactly how. 

First, the absolute easiest and most reliable starting point for a game setting is the real world, because there’s plenty of information online that tells us what climate any given area has and why; and since we have one moon on a predictable cycle, this is a snap to program in. Of course, any fantasy world can be programmed as well, but the DM will have to be a bit more creative in coming up with astronomical features for the planet and its satellites, climate for different areas, and so on. (Or he could just say screw it and decide all weather events, lunar cycles, and the like by fiat, which sucks.) 

In my case, I picked up information for modern Shropshire on high and low extremes of temperature for each month of the year, typical wind directions by season, amount of precipitation by month, variations in humidity, and chance of fog. With all that information in the top half of the screen, the rest is a matter of getting things to change in a reasonable manner over the course of a given day within a given month. 

The moon is a separate matter, and it’s as good a place as any to show how Excel can give you the phase for a particular calendar day. I’m going to try to explain this in simple English rather than Computerese, because the amount of questions I get at work from people completely befuddled by far more elementary operations tells me that most people go through life without using this software very much at all. So. We need a date for the last full moon, and I want to put that off to the side in cell K26. (There are plenty of web sites offering conjectures or formulas for discerning this sort of information for any date in history; I don’t need to link to any particular one. Suffice it to say 24 March is the current full moon. I need cell C15 to show the current moon phase, C17 to show the date, and B17 to show the day of the week. 

In order to get the day of the week to display correctly, we need a year close enough to a modern year that Excel won’t completely screw it up. My sources tell me that, coincidentally, the weekdays of 2015 match those of 1377, so I don’t have to do much other than format the cells to show the date without the year. Then we want cell B17 to show the day of the week based on the date in C17, so we enter the command:

=TEXT(C17,”dddd”) 

…with the first word required because by default the day of the week would be displayed only as a number. Now, to display predictions for the next full moon in cell I15, we need to link to the date in K26 and add 29.53 days, the number of days the moon takes to complete a cycle. So we use the following code:

=DATE(YEAR(K26),MONTH(K26),DAY(K26)+29.53

I also want the date of the next new moon displayed for convenience’s sake, so for the formula cell C15 I divide the lunar cycle in half and use:

=DATE(YEAR(K26),MONTH(K26),DAY(K26)+14.765

To get the moon phase in cell C15, I need to compare the date of the next full moon in I15 with the current date in C17. The code is a bit longer here, and requires multiple conditions. I want eight different moon phases, but Excel is limited to seven nested ‘IF’ functions, so I make the ‘Quarter’ phase the default since it occurs twice. Somewhat arbitrarily, I’ve made the moon full either three days before or twenty-eight days before the next full moon. Afterwards I set each phase to occur within a specified range of days. I’m fond of writing code, like my blog, in whatever text editor I happen to have open so that I can catch mistakes, so in MemoPad it looks like this: 

Moon phases Excel code

Most other formulas on the page operate similarly. Most of the cells are linked. For example, cloud level at each part of the day is partially contingent on whether it’s going to rain in the next part, so that the party gets at least some warning before they get soaked. Temperature is set to generally be highest at midday and lowest at midnight. Since the high and low temperature columns in the upper half of the sheet are already randomly generated, cell D22 takes the high temperature number from C4, D19 the low temperature number from D4, and the temperature cells for the other parts of the day are set to fall within a range that rises after the wee hours and falls after sext—usually. I did throw in a trick that can sometimes change this pattern, but I’m not going to reveal it here because I want players to be genuinely surprised when a warm or cold front comes out of nowhere. 

Humidity varies within a range by month, with the exception that when it’s raining humidity is always 100%. Wind is coded to follow the patterns listed in column E, ‘Typical Wind Origin’. This means that when there is reasonably strong wind, it tends to blow from the directions listed. Gentle breezes may be more random in direction, and ‘Calm’ conditions always default to no direction. 

Lastly, the ‘Chance of Fog’ percentages in column I are taken to mean the percent change that fog can occur at some point on a given day within the month listed. These percentages are used to link random d100 rolls at the right end of row 15, where, for example, rolls of 20 or lower result in fog for a day in March, with lower numbers indicating thicker fog. For simplicity’s sake, fog is assumed to last all day, but if this should require more gradations when we actually start playing, I can fine-tune this aspect later. 

There’s plenty more happening randomly at the right side of the sheet, but to explain everything would be superfluous. Before closing, though, I would like to call attention to the sections for notes, particularly at the bottom of the page, where I hope all the important information will be at hand for the following session—including the upcoming feast and fast days listed in the Shropesyre calendar, and which markets and festivals are happening in nearby municipalities—because it’s been in different files up to this point and things inevitably ended up getting lost or overlooked. I’m hoping that this will be enough to get the party off to a smooth(er) start at the beginning of each session. At any rate, this will free me up to just think about…well, everything else that hasn’t got a spreadsheet yet. 

If anyone wants more detail about code, I’m happy to answer any questions. If anyone already making good use of spreadsheets wants to tell me some ways to make mine better, I’m happy to hear that, too. 

A Ray of Hope

After the last unhappy post and in light of how well yesterday's session went down, I have to take a moment to give my party the props--or rather, the three members of the party who showed up and made DMing worthwhile.

 

After a skirmish with a sorcerer and his guards that left some of them dead and the party badly wounded, they made plans to restock and return to the sorcerer's lair to finish things. When they returned, the enemy had already vacated the premises, taking their valuables with them and most of the rest in the front yard. The party found some pythoi of wine, grain, and olive oil, a few empty wooden crates, and a few scrolls containing random bits of information. They also found a grate in the tower floor, below which a carrior crawler waited to paralyze and subsequently mangle to death the character whose player flaked on the session, and which character was sent by the others to peer into the darkness and find out what was there.

 

(If I ever make an FAQ for our campaign, one of the top items would be a warning to new members to be consistent in their attendance, because when someone doesn't show up when they're supposed to, the players who do show will play that person's character, and they will [I]not[/I] be as careful as they are with their own.)

 

Now, the party could have done anything, and I hadn't even bothered to consider what they might do. Normally I would make some notes of what certain objects might possibly mean, but all I did this time was consider what a fleeing enemy party might leave behind. My party, bless their hearts, put their heads together and found a way to destroy the carrior crawler. With a noose around the curved mouth of the pythos of oil, they had two men lower it down the ladder with the third underneath to guide it, until they got it to the bottom floor, where they dumped it onto the beast. Then they fashioned a torch of scrolls and rope tied to a broken piece of wooden crate swiped in remainder olive oil, and tossed it lit onto the carrion crawler.

 

They rolled a natural 20 on their attack with the torch, and the monster burst into flames.

 

After the fire died down, they yanked at the grate in unison, and their roll with combined BB/LG percentage was sufficent to tear the iron bars out of the floor. One of them went down into the basement and cut open the monster's gizzard to search for treasure. In actuality, the DM had made no provisions for anything like this happening, and had to think quickly as to what sort of valuables the creature might have swallowed along with whoever the sorcerer had fed to it.

 

It's a little thing, but it's the sort of strategy that warms a DMs heart, or at least it does this one's. It also inspires me to go back to putting as much thought into details like this as I did before, for all the hidden valuables, clues, and adventure hooks that the party ended up passing by without notice in the past.

 

We also spent the first hour or so of the session discussing ways to improve the game, and a few new house rules will be introduced in the next update.

 

For the moment, I'm at least interested in the game again.

Disbanding the Campaign

As of today I am officially 40, and I am more confident, competent, positive in outlook and solid overall than I have ever been before. My body fat is just around 10%, and I live each day in a focused and disciplined manner from the moment I rise, attempting to make the most of every moment. 

I am also less willing than ever to indulge those who waste my time. 

As is my wont, I'm going to lead up to a discussion of D&D with a work-related analogy. For the past several years, I have been a card-carrying member of JALT, the Japan Association of Language Teachers. I joined when I was asked to treasure a certain forming special interest group, a role I faithfully continue to fill to the present moment. I paid my dues dutifully, receiving two things in return in addition to the opportunity to get really good at bookkeeping. One is the monthly publication, chock full of mop-up remedies, mealy-mouthed justifications and paradigmatic overdevelopment expounding ever-more technical approaches to the Sisyphean task of force-feeding English education to unwilling subjects, none of the articles ever addressing the core issue which by the nature of their business they cannot touch: Namely, that the majority of students will continue not to make the effort required on their part, and if students are willing, teacher technique is almost irrelevant. 

The other benefit to my membership has been reduced admittance fees to the national and regional conferences, in which half-baked research is showcased by people wanting to pad their resumes.

JALT is raising its membership dues this year, a measure against which a number of members in my acquaintance have loudly protested. I perfectly well understand that this measure is necessary to keep the organisation afloat, and that JALT serves what for many is a noble and essential purpose. It’s simply that for me, personally, there has never been any tangible merit, and in looking into the future I can see that there never will be. So it is not that the small increase in dues that is unbearable, it is simply a reminder to me that it is time to quietly bow out.

This semester at the university, I've been teaching special section in business English for a handful of supposedly dedicated third-year students. I've already lectured them at length about making the same mistakes that should have been remedied in junior high school, and for a while they got a bit more serious. But several weeks have passed since then, and as this Friday they’ll have to make their final presentations, worth 25% of their total grade, I put aside time in last week's class for them to show me their PowerPoint and whatever else they had finished so far, so that I could give them some last-minute advice and assistance.

No one student in the class had done a damned thing. Nothing. With one week to go, even the most stellar students, relatively speaking, hadn't so much as begun a rough draft of a crude outline for the most important project of the semester.

Now, it may well just be that I’m feeling my age in such frustration and impatience with people unwilling to help themselves. The way I see it, though, every day is a precious gift which is solely in our hands to use, abuse, or piss away.

For scores of months I have put into this D&D campaign what amounts to untold hours unpaid work. The world-building aspect of it, of course, was a labour of love, but the actual runnings have generally been torture, and the returns for my effort have fallen far short of justifying it. In the height of my passion I offered the players a choice of worlds, and they chose Ancient Greece which, while it wasn’t my favourite, I could certainly have fanned the flames of ardour under the right circumstances. What I got, though, was irrelevant banter derailing the sessions, players coming late and leaving early—with their character sheets and notes carelessly tossed in a pile and left for me to put away—with the added disruption that when one person suddenly decides he has to leave soon, the rest of the party then decides it’s time to pack up, too, regardless of where the game is.

I ranted about my doldrums at length in my last post, only to read this the next day and force myself to admit that it can’t continue. It’s not easy to admit. But then, my hero is ten years older than I, and has many more years of experience as a DM. I’ve known that our sessions are quite enjoyable for the players, to be sure, but for at least some of them it was for very different reasons from those that make the game worthwhile for me. Nonetheless, I did my best to provide them all with a meaningful and engrossing experience. I’m tempted to think there might be people who pay to see a film but then talk through it, take breaks at the best parts, and decide to leave half an hour before the climax; but really, this is unlikely to happen when people pay money for something. If they know they can enter a cinema and watch as they like any time they like, for free, they might do. I suppose I have been providing the equivalent of unlimited free cinema access. In the long run, though, nothing is free. In this case, as it turns out, the price of admission is a modicum of focus and dedication.

I will provide the party with one last session, this coming weekend, because I had promised to do, afterwards I will go no further with the present campaign. At some point in future, after a hiatus for a sprinkling of world-building mixed in with my myriad other interests in life, I might invite the most serious members of the group to start a new campaign. At any rate, the ones who aren’t invited back are unlikely to have ever read anything on this blog in the first place. 

What'sUp with the Blog?

In my current acquaintance, I have one friend who consistently challenges me to the extent of my intellectual capacity, constantly deconstructing my views on nearly every topic of any depth we discuss, and forcing me to view things from different perspectives. He and I have very different political viewpoints, and our arguments are consistently stimulating and fulfilling. He lives quite far away, requiring that we correspond almost entirely by email; and he recently fathered a child, which puts further constraints on the time we have to engage on a meaningful level.

 

In my everyday life, I have precious little opportunity for that sort of stimulation. I recently joined an online forum—after having forgotten that I did several years ago—because certain ideas discussed therein proved to be of some interest to me, and after I’d reached a certain required post count, I was allowed to enter one of the subforums for discussion of religion and theology.

 

In this subforum, I directed a question of by what thought process certain members of the forum who described themselves quintessentially rational and coldly logical came to subscribe to the belief system of any organised religion; the question was directed in particular to those members who professed to have ‘reasoned it out’, independent of any emotion, and claimed that belief in a deity was the most logical position given the evidence. I was truly intrigued, and could not bring myself to imagine the line of reasoning required. I asked them, as politely as I could, to spell it out for me that I might grok how they reached this conclusion.

 

An interesting, though not unexpected, thing happened. Veteran members of the forums voiced concerns that such discussions would most assuredly degenerate in short order into bouts of obstinacy and name-calling. I did receive some garbled and incoherent responses, along with some who politely explained that they adhered to certain forms of faith but were not particularly interested in debating about it. I was ready to shrug it off and move on, thinking the thread was a dead end, until one user asked for my beliefs. I said that the beliefs I hold which are pertinent to this particular conversation were A) That logic and reason are the best tools available to us for determining what's true; and B) That the evidence for the existence of any gods is not forthcoming. Based on these tenets, I refrain from accepting the proposition that any gods exist, until such time as sufficient evidence is presented. The response I got was the interesting part:
 

I agree. But reason and logic are just that, tools. They are mechanical tools that come to work once you have defined your premises (here, the basic statements you hold to be true without arguing them too much, like axioms in maths). And exactly here lies the issue. People here just don't agree on the possible premises and the level on which to handle this question (materialism being one of the potential pebbles in the machinery) and so since we are not talking neither on the same level, nor sharing the premises, any discussion even with reason is vain. Hence the idea that one side is pedantic and narrow-minded, and the other insane, moronic or delusional. If you are willing to discuss your belief, please state your premises and maybe there could be a discussion if all refrain from dismissing them without argument because they don't agree with it.

I replied that I suppose I could include premises such as: That existence is defined as something composed of either matter or energy; to argue that God is something composed of neither is to argue that existence equals nonexistence. I mentioned that to this a theist might respond that God is something else entirely, or beyond our comprehension; to which I would reply that if that is the case why bother even thinking about the matter at all, and so on down the rabbit hole. I was operating on the assumption that the individuals in question had already analysed these conundrums and came up with conclusions different from mine; and that rather than make assumptions or strawman, I wanted to hear it from them. The reply came:
 

If you want to define existence in this way, fine. My role here will just be to ask questions. Like: Do you deny any objective existence to abstract mathematical concepts? Even when they turn out to explain some physical properties? But those concepts are made of neither energy nor matter. How about other dimensions (I am not saying 'higher' because it denotes a biased point of view of a third dimensional being) and what could be there, can we know for sure that it would follow the same rules and be constituted of the same thing? Why shouldn't we be concerned by a being that has potentially had a crucial role in the existence of our universe and the only we currently suppose to exist outside our realm?
 

On reading this, my interest was piqued, and I replied:
 

No, I don’t expressly deny the possibility of other dimensions, but I question their influence on what we currently know to be reality. If a being consisting neither of matter nor energy were manifest in some other dimension, by what means would one suppose it has any influence over our dimension? But the phrase ‘we currently suppose to exist outside our realm’ is particularly curious. I infer that such a being could hypothetically exist within what we define as the real universe but that we don’t yet have the means of detecting it. If this is the case, is there any reason to bank on its existence, much less assume that it had any role at all in the existence of our universe?

As far as the existence of mathematical concepts, I would say that mathematics is a tool humans use to measure and define things in the physical world, and doesn't 'exist' in the same way as matter or energy, i.e., a physical body is present whether or not human minds are present to apply mathematical concepts to it.

 

When the following response came, I grew genuinely excited.

 

Higher dimensions suppose that there is a potential being for which time is the surface on which it lives for example, if such a being shared our dimensions it could affect them without having the restrictions we experience or potentially having an easily provable impact on our reality. If you want to restrict yourself to a god that exists within our physical world, then he can't have created it since he exists in the context of our 'reality'. Such a being is just another curiosity of nature in this case and proving it's existence would mean another field of research for science, but certainly not a proof for the existence of god. For your take on mathematics, you have the point of view of a physicist because you think maths are developed for our understanding of the physical world, while these applications are very often found after their development and some maths field may very well have no practical consequences or reality. But since separate people can discover them independently, can you really argue that they are strictly related to the human mind and have no existence outside of human thought?

 

I replied again:
 

I'm very interested in exploring that possibility. If time were the surface through which (or means by which) this being interacted with our dimension, could it do without the chronological restrictions to which all entities in our universe are subject? Creationists, for example, are fond of asking what was before the Big Bang, but the question seems to me nonsensical because what we know as time began at the instant our universe was formed.
 

[snip]

 

Well, but they consistently describe manifestations in this plane of existence and are reliable because they conform to the rules of physics as we currently understand them. It's my understanding that theoretical branches of mathematics are nonetheless based on concrete realities; we can't resolve the Banach-Tarski paradox, for example, because an infinite scattering of points isn't physically observable. I would answer that different individuals with no relation to each other can make similar discoveries because they're operating from the same position of interpreting an imperceptibly larger reality through the limited filter of human cognition.

 

And there the conversation died. I thought we had just begun the probing, weeks have passed and I am persuaded that this thinker has found other ways to occupy his time.

 

In the interim, I was asked by one of the players in our campaign, ‘What’s up with the blog?’

 

I relate the incident above to explain the mindset from which I approach D&D.

 

The reason I seek out and develop so much background information for the worlds I create, and that I so much time preparing for each session, including trying—often in vain—to predict what decisions the party might take in order to formulate at least the skeleton of a plan for each contingency, stems from my geekish obsession with history, fascination with the human condition, and delight in the psychological and anthropological interest that comes of role-playing.

 

This, I think, is a fundamental divide from the motivation that brings most players together to experience these sessions. When I was still in the process of creating test worlds, I asked my party directly what aspects of the game they found most interesting, enjoyable, or fulfilling. More than one answered that D&D is simply a reason to spend time with people they don’t normally see.

 

For my part, I don’t enjoy social events, and I never have. My reason for playing D&D is what the game itself offers, with ‘hanging out’ a sort of side effect. On occasion I am able to bring myself into situations of pure socialising in a group setting, and I find the discussion generally deteriorates into irrational talking points on politics, or worse, particularly if the group is entirely male: The most abhorrent aspects of juvenile locker-room conversation coming to the fore. That the caliber of the conversation then remains at a fairly respectable level simply because people are more polite in mixed company, does not speak well to my mind of the value of ‘hanging out’ for its own sake. There are, in fact, few humans with whom I can spend more than an hour just ‘hanging out’ before suspecting that gnawing my own arm off might be a more constructive use of my time.

 

I say things not with any intention to offend, nor of any desire for sympathy for what could easily be construed as misanthropy; but rather, to illustrate that the game itself is primary, and when sessions prove disappointing for the aforementioned reasons, my inspiration to even think about the game, much less spend time preparing for it, wanes considerably. Distractions from the game, including banter about films and video games, the constant interjection of barely-witty jokes, and unilateral decisions to take smoke breaks during combat, ultimately chip away at my passion. Particularly irritating is the realisation that the opponents and challenges placed in the party’s path could most certainly be overcome with a clever application of strategy, which is incomplete or absent when priority is placed on socialising.

 

Sadly—at least for me, though perhaps only for me—our last session was again along those lines. Part of the problem, of course, is that while I’m certainly interested in Ancient Greece, I’m not nearly so much as in medieval England. But Minoa is the setting the party chose; I gave them an honest choice, and I’m not about to take my ball and go home. Besides, to change worlds again now, even if it turns out the party wouldn’t actually mind, would make me fickle to a degree for which I couldn’t forgive myself. Nonetheless, I’m uninspired. The next session is a few weeks hence, and I’m frankly grateful for the respite. I can spend my down time practicing my flute and harp, putting up tiles in the new bathroom, trying new recipes, planting trees around the perimetre of the property, and thinking about the Banach-Tarski paradox. I might come up with something to inspire me again.

Languages

Once again, the dearth of updates makes it appear that I’m neglecting the game, and in this case that would be correct. Unfortunately, my brain only allows me to be obsessed or uninterested, and at the moment it’s not D&Ds turn. I can only handle a couple of obsessions at a time, and right now it’s remodelling my house and relearning all the Spanish I forgot twenty years ago. Since this is a D&D blog, though, I owe it to my three subscribers to at least try to relate these things somehow to the game. All I can say about the former is that, as a first-level mage, I’ve become proficient in the angle disk grinder, so I can deal 1d4 damage to ceramic and porcelain with no saving throw permitted; it’s the latter I’ll focus on.

(Side note: Whenever I sign up for an online language course, there always seems to be a questionnaire at the beginning asking why I want to learn the language in question. The options always include things like ‘for work’, ‘for travel’, and so on. Why is ‘for fun’ never one of the options?)

Our party consists of individuals from Canada, France, Indonesia, Puerto Rico, UK, and US. Almost all are able to at least converse in more than one language, and some are fluent in multiple languages. Mostly, in the real world, there is a spectrum; but in D&D we’re somehow content to say our characters ‘know’ three or more languages and leave it at that.

Today I’ll explore what sort of communication the PCs might actually be able to have in the broader campaign setting, given what they ‘know’.

'Language' versus 'Dialect'

 

Wikipedia map showing classical Greek language groups

Our initial domain being Crete, the common language is Doric. There are few differences in word use around the Kingdom of Minoa, and our party has thus far been able to communicate perfectly with everyone they’ve encountered using this language only. When the characters were rolled, though, I allowed players to choose as many languages (‘dialects’) on the map as their INT scores allowed; with justification, some were allowed to choose from outside the Greek language family.
 

The use of ‘dialect’ here is obviously misleading. When a common language, Koine, was finally developed in the Greek territories, its vocabulary did not distinguish language from dialect the way we do in modern English. In our society, we usually use the terms politically: differences within countries are more likely to be described as ‘dialects’ than languages regardless of the degree of difference. Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, are called dialects of Chinese even though they are less mutually intelligible than Spanish and Portuguese. Here in modern Japan, ‘dialect’ refers to anything with a couple of odd vocabulary choices and a few different verb endings here and there; a few centuries ago, the languages of Kobe, Kyoto, and Osaka were so different as to be mutually unintelligible.
 

It’s difficult to know now the depth of linguistic disparity between the coloured areas on the map, but research indicates that there were more significant differences in vocabulary and pronunciation than in grammar, although grammatical differences were also present.

 

Some years ago, I bought a copy of Propaganda by Edward Bernays online, and then left it unread on my shelf until last week. I had placed the order through a Japanese-language firm, and in doing so didn’t look carefully enough to realise that the book I was ordering was a Spanish translation. Now, having continued studying Italian for several years, I had enough background in Romance Language structure that, after refreshing my memory of basic Spanish vocabulary, I was able to pick up this book and puzzle out the meaning of more than half of what I read.

Clearly, a similar process should apply when D&D characters are exposed to an unknown but related language to one in which they are proficient.

 

Allowances for Proficiency

 

The map indicates three language ‘groups’ within the Greek family: Western, Central, and Eastern. Within the Western group are Doric, Northwestern, and Acheaen; Central includes Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot; and Eastern, Attic and Ionic. As I said previously, all our Doric speakers understand each other completely; they will have some trouble understanding either of the other Western group languages, but some basic communication will still be possible. Tentatively, we might say that with effort they can understand about half of either of the other language. Outside this group, there will still be similarities and a person of average intelligence might be able to pick out a fraction of the words, but communication will be difficult. We might halve this again for possibility (or degree) of communication between monolingual speakers of a different group.

 

Beyond the Greek language family, commonalities will represent only a small sliver of total language, but a history of trade and migration should have introduced certain influences that still allow for the possibility, however small, of figuring out the meaning of some portion of text or spoken language.

 

Thus when characters overhear a random shout in a different language, or stumble upon a fragment of parchment, they should instinctually apply their knowledge of whatever languages are written on their character ability sheet to their interpretation of the spoken or written portion of language they encounter. For game convenience, percentages of total comprehensible similarities may be converted to percentage chance of comprehending a given specific utterance.

As a d20 table, potential for comprehension might be expressed thus:

Mutual Intelligibility (roll number indicated or above)

	Western			Central		Eastern
	Doric	NW	Achaean	Aeolic	Arc-Cyp	Attic	Ionic
Doric	0	10	10	15	15	15	15
NW	10	0	10	15	15	15	15
Achaean	10	10	0	15	15	15	15
Aeolic	15	15	15	0	10	15	15
Arcado- Cypriot	15	15	15	10	0	15	15
Attic	15	15	15	15	15	0	10
Ionic	15	15	15	15	15	10	0
Carian	19	19	19	19	19	19	19
Lydian	19	19	19	19	19	19	19
Thracian	19	19	19	19	19	19	19
Macedonian	19	19	19	19	19	19	19
Illyrian	19	19	19	19	19	19	19
Cartaginian, Farosti, etc.	No comprehension possible without proficiency in related language

 

Rolls should be made based on the closet language to any of those listed on the character record sheet, not necessarily the character’s native tongue.

Players might roll the d20 themselves if they know for sure what language they’ve encountered—perhaps someone told them, or they would be able to guess based on their geographical location—but for a really exciting scenario, the DM might conceal this information and roll the die in secret to tell the player which words he could make out. In this way there is also the possibility that he isn’t sure, or may have misinterpreted.

 

Just for fun, we might like to further complicate the process by applying bonuses and penalties for intelligence. The numbers in the chart above are, as I said, for characters of average intelligence. As our discussion of INT scores always came around to foreign language ability, we’re almost obliged to provide adjustments for communication potential based on this number. We might give a bonus to the rolls above, perhaps of +1 for every two points of INT above 10, and -1 for every two points below, giving us this table:

Communication Probability Adjustments

INT Score	Adjustment
Below 3	-4
3-4	-3
5-6	-2
7-8	-1
9-11	0
12-13	+1
14-15	+2
16-17	+3
18 +	+4

 

In this way, when the party travel outside the initial domain and have a chance to be exposed to other languages, we have a slightly more concrete idea of how their skills apply in this department.

 

I have no intention of ever using these tables, but if any player at any point in the future wants to remind me that I created these, and insists on using them on the grounds that they will give him some advantage, fair or unfair, over DM fiat, he will most certainly have my blessing.