Language and Crafting Tool Proficiencies

[Tiadoppler]

How would you handle PCs who want to spend downtime and money to hire people to train them in languages or the use of crafting tools (specifically, Carpenter's and Masonry tools)?

None of the PCs in my campaign know Orcish, but we have a number of long-term Orc allies who (mostly) do not speak common. 2 PCs are interested in learning Orcish. They have a fairly well educated hireling who's fluent in Orcish and Common and is willing to teach them (for pay) for the next month or two (interrupted by adventure, naturally).

Another 3 PCs are interested in learning Carpentry or Masonry for constructing a player home/base. At the moment we have no "trainer" lined up, but the PCs are on the lookout.


Would you allow this to happen without spending a feat or retraining a backstory to "pay" for the proficiency? Honestly, none of these options seem game-breaking. I'm not considering allowing people to train in the normal skills the same way, and there likely won't be enough downtime to train more than a single new proficiency any time soon.

How long should it take? How much should it cost? Do you have any other suggestions?

[Greywander]

Both the Player's Handbook and Xanathar's Guide to Everything have rules for this. Thing is, the rules aren't the same.

PHB states that learning a language or tool takes 250 days and costs 1 gp per day (so a total of 250 gp).

Xanathar's states that the default learning time is 10 workweeks (70 days) and costs 25 gp per workweek (250 gp total).

Right away you'll see that Xanathar's has the same gold cost, but with less training time. But here's the kicker. The training time from Xanathar's is reduced by a number of workweeks equal to your INT mod. So say you have an INT of 16 for a +3 mod; that would mean training would only take 7 weeks and cost 175 gp. (A negative INT mod doesn't affect learning time.)

Most of the extra downtime rules in Xanathar's also have a small chance of causing a "complication", but I wouldn't worry about that if you don't have Xanathar's, or just don't feel like messing with that aspect of the rules.