You say..."It takes away the challenge of roleplaying something other than a human in a funny suit and gives you a mechanical way to feel like you're doing something." And..."If you know a language or two (or at least smidgens), consider how it is possible to understand some but not all of what another person is saying. And then there is the question of even recognizing what language is being spoken. In addition, in our world there is no guarantee that a dark-elf raised in Galadon would even know the dark-elf tongue."


However Valg says...'More importantly, goofy-web-language-speak fails both the playability and IC tests. We don't want to add "You must memorize or install triggers for hundreds of words in order to communicate with members of your own race." to the CF learning curve. Key words for color/emphasis are fine for the reasons you give- context can be used to grab them, and people can keep track of a common couple things like that without a problem, just like I know how to say hello and good-bye in a ton of RL languages.

It doesn't make IC sense either. If you were speaking elvish IC, other elves would understand you if their role specified they should. If you're speaking some goofy-web-language, you're taking an IC (character) skill and turning it into a OOC (player) skill.

Also, what if one elf is using some Forgotten-Realms derived dictionary, and another one is using Tolkien-elvish? IC, we've never given reason why two elvish languages would exist.'

Your points are completely different. You say you don't want to institute languages, in part, because not every person of that race will speak the same language. Valg says he thinks all people of a given race should speak the same language. I'm not trying to start flaming here, but you two have completely different opinions of what makes good RP here. How are we, as a playerbase, supposed to know what is acceptable and whats not, without resorting to looking through the OOC forums to see how each immortal feels about racial languages IC?