Shattered Kingdoms

I really have to strongly agree with Orac on this.

I have always, since day one of playing Shattered Kingdoms, have envisioned what each language would actually sound like. I always imagined Zhensh to sound oriental (Chinese or Japanese perhaps), Empire something along the lines of German, Sylvan has a great representation through the Tolken Elvish language (very whispy and light), Uxmaln would sound very rough and harsh (perhaps something like Russian?), I think Taslamaran would be very close to English. I think you get my drift.

As much of a pain in the butt it can be to have to learn them, there has not been a single serious character I have rolled, since the day I was adept at playing the game, have I NOT learned every language and writing form there is as soon as possible. Even Firmyrn. And I don't care what anyone else thinks. It took me NO time with my halfling Marfik-HF harlequin bard to master every language and writing. It was so damn handy after that.

I think we just need common. Considering we've been going kind of 3.5 anyway...

I think the idea of languages presents a wide variety of roleplaying opportunities, full of rich possibilities and enchanting times.

When I was a newbie, the reality of languages was being spoken at by people who had no idea I couldn't understand them, missing large chunks of the roleplay, and someone getting frustrated at me and mentoring me in every single language until I a) became very good at them all or b) ran out of experience.

It took me 5 characters before someone finally mentioned there were language trainers available. After that, I was ALWAYS stupid enough to train all languages at a very low level because I didn't want to be left out of conversations.

Languages are one of the first things I train... I know I pay for it, but I never thought it was stupid. I just thought it was a measure of what was important to me about the game.

This begs an interesting question... Who DOES NOT train the majority of their languages up as soon as possible?

I've met two or three characters who didn't. I assumed training up as fast as possible was more important to them than the role play...or that their idea of role play and what they got from it was different than mine. Seems to me that it's a valid perspective. Most veterans switch languages to whatever a young character speaks.

When you can hit champ in 30 hours, you don't miss out on a whole lot of roleplay as a result of waiting until then to train your languages.

I think to answer your question, anyone who plevels is likely to ignore languages early on in their training, since learning them early does slow you down a lot.

I never train languages til at least veteran, if not higher. Don't need 'em.