As you may know, D&D offers an extremely simplified way of handling languages, with a one-language-per-point Speak Language skill, a racial language for nearly everything that moves (and a few things that don’t), and a common language that anyone smarter than simple cannon fodder knows.

Enjoying role-playing games means accepting, glossing over, or simply ignoring quite a bit of silliness, but this turns out a bit too silly for me. I prefer regional languages over racial ones—nations over races, if you will—and the concept of Common is just absurd.

I’m not the only one objecting to this simplified system. There’s a few fan-made solutions to be found, and even a few published ones – the Kingdoms of Kalamar Player’s Guide offers a complex set of optional rules to handle languages in a more realistic way, with no less than 12 degrees of fluency.

While the original system is too simplistic, the variant rules available are too complex. In my game, I have attempted to introduce a middle ground.

In the core rules, Speak Language looks like a skill, but it actually isn’t. Why shouldn’t it be? A person speaking five different languages should have at least some feel for how languages in general work, and while he may not be able to provide a proper translation of a sixth language, he may very well be able to understand enough of it to grasp the general meaning. I know I can do this for, say, dutch through my limited knowledge of german—why shouldn’t my character be able to do the same?

The solution: Turning Speak Language into an actual skill. We’ll still accept quite a bit of simplification, and one point in Speak Language still buys a working knowledge in one language. The main difference is seen when encountering a language the character doesn’t know: He can now make a Speak Language check to grasp the basics of what is being communicated, with the DC being based on how different the language is from any he knows.

This change is simple enough to not become an issue in play, without being so simple it sets off the stupid alert.

The party, being stuck in the dream realm for the time being, stumbles across what looks remarkably like a treasure chest – in the middle of the forest. If you’re a player, right there and then, you will cross your fingers and hope it’s not a mimic – but it is, of course. It couldn’t possibly be anything else.

So there’s a fight. A surprisingly easy fight, considering the party left a sleeping member behind, but weapons and even body parts sticking to the mimic’s skin does give them a few headaches.

After slaughtering the poor thing, they open it up and find a heap of shiny stuff – along with a small, elaborate box. This gives the party’s wizard, by far the smartest of the bunch, pause. After a few moments, she carefully puts a finger on the box, the player wanting to know if the box sticks to it. Puzzled, I tell him no, and he sits back with a loud sigh of relief.

It’s not a baby mimic, then!

I killed a PC in this evening’s game. This was not intentional; the party should have been able to handle the four ghouls just fine. They weren’t acting bloody stupid, either, like the last time I killed a PC. It’s just that my dice got very, very lucky. Three natural twenties in a row? Combined with paralyzation and ghoul fever? The party’s rogue and wizard was bloody lucky that the three paralyzed party members blocked the way, effectively locking the ghouls in, while they picked them off with ranged weapons.

So a PC died. A critical hit brought his paralyzed ass from two hitpoints to -10 in a single blow. Raise Dead is a darn expensive spell when you’re a third level party…

...and a really neat point to bring in the elaborate backstory the player made for that character. The party is now in a serious debt to one of the richest and most influental families in the country. Granted, the family has reasons of their own to keep the PC alive, but that doesn’t stop them from being very much pissed at the rest of the party for “getting him killed”.

I just love roleplaying games.