Probably, many of you have seen something like this:



 I wonder what it would look like from an RPG point of view?  I've seen one for earlier D&D, but I wonder if you could make one for RPGs more in general?

The d20 branch alone would be pretty heavy.

Elliot and I were just speaking about this earlier, as a post I was responding to had taken the viewpoint that any action that happens in a 'roleplying game' was roleplaying because it was happening during the game...

And without getting into a discussion of logic, the upshot Elliot put forth was that the language was one of the problems.  

Our hobby was called a roleplaying game due to the inclusion of what roleplaying was/is defined as previous to the inception of the hobby.  Many other phrases (Elliot has a great post on the term 'Immersion') I think suffer the same way; people see things from their own viewpoint within the hobby and not from their greater 'real-world' definition, and the more games change and grow, and the more people experiment, the more the language can drift.

StarCluster would be over there somewhere under Manx...

-clash

English is an Anglo-Norman language, which is not very clearly represented in that map.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;353617English is an Anglo-Norman language, which is not very clearly represented in that map.


RPGPundit

I thought it was Germanic....live and learn!

Weren't the Normans Danish? I would have thought that would have made the language Germanic in origin.

Quote from: One Horse Town;353620Weren't the Normans Danish? I would have thought that would have made the language Germanic in origin.

Well, I thought Old English was Germanic (Anglo-Saxon), and later borrowed from the Norman/French connection.

Quote from: One Horse Town;353620Weren't the Normans Danish? I would have thought that would have made the language Germanic in origin.

The Normans gave up speaking Norse and began speaking French very soon after taking Normandy.

-clash

Quote from: RPGPundit;353617English is an Anglo-Norman language, which is not very clearly represented in that map.

RPGPundit

It's tough to do a merge with a tree paradigm.

-clash

pardon the divergence

Quote from: flyingmice;353687The Normans gave up speaking Norse and began speaking French very soon after taking Normandy.

And then gave up speaking French around the time they gave trying to hold onto their lands in France or expand them.
re: Chaucer and Malory et al

p.s. Lars Brownworth, the 12 Byzantine Emperors podcast guy, has a promising new podcast on the Normans.

http://www.normancenturies.com/

John Julius Norwich (who was the main source for the Byzantine podcast) wrote a very good book on Normans in Sicily. His books are huge but very fast and entertaining reads.

As for an RPG tree, you could have the various threads that resulted in OD&D, and then have the next generation branch off of it (along with some threads to other stuff, like how Glorantha also has wargame ties).

I've seen some convoluted family tree type charts for D&D alone, and that got very inbred fast.

Chaosium influences d6 (or rather co-designs it) and IIRC d6 and Ars Magica and (arguably) Chaosium's Prince Valiant influence Storyteller and so forth.

I'm getting a headache just thinking about this chart.

The point is that unlike German, English has far more Latin and French influence. And yes, I agree with clash, that's hard to put in this type of diagram.

Incidentally, if the OP was "have you ever seen these sorts of maps in an RPG book", I do believe that there was one in 1e Shadowrun, if I'm remembering correctly. Its been a while.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;353617English is an Anglo-Norman language, which is not very clearly represented in that map.

No such thing.

Quote from: Zachary The First;353619I thought it was Germanic....live and learn!

And you were right, English is a Germanic language.

Quote from: RPGPundit;353824The point is that unlike German, English has far more Latin and French influence. And yes, I agree with clash, that's hard to put in this type of diagram.

Yes, English borrowed a lot of things from French and Latin, but in "genetic" terms, it is a Germanic language. It evolved from the proto Germanic language, a language spoken in prehistory.

Sometimes it happens that a language borrows so many things from other languages, that the alien elements (words, gramatical constructions, etc) are more numerous than the native elements.

I actually made a simple language tree for a campaign I'm working on. I didn't bother with the dozens of additional dialects I'm sure would exist, but it was sort of fun to think of how they would interact with one another, rather than have Common and no reason why: