Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends that have been playing D&D a long time, and podcasting for two years as of this episode! While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D speaks our language.

Many fantasy stories revolve around lost and arcane languages, or characters that can speak for their party when they encounter creatures that don’t share a language with anyone else. One of the most consistent elements of character creation in D&D has been determining what languages a character knows, but what does that mean at the game table. We’ll be talking about language and seeing if we share a gaming dialect.

In AD&D 1e, in addition to other languages, each character knew the alignment language that matched their alignment. That means that if you were Lawful Good, you know a language known as Lawful Good. The 1e Dungeon Master’s Guide proceeds to explain that people are socially stigmatized for speaking alignment languages in public, and no one will risk using their alignment language with people that aren’t their alignment around them, which explains why later editions no longer had alignment languages. If you can only speak to people that you know already speak your language, but you can’t speak your language to ask them, I’m sure the gods of logic babelled them since they were completely unusable.