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.