Quote Originally Posted by Amechra View Post
I can actually buy people being polyglots, given that the average person in the EU apparently speaks anywhere between 1.5 and 3.6 languages. And PCs would definitely be the kind of people that'd increase that average, since they travel around a bunch and talk to and/or stab a lot of interesting people.

That being said, the fact that D&D makes you fluent in every language you can speak is a little bit much...
I think the being fluent is more because there's no good way to represent the mechanics of being partially fluent. Handing out say Disadvantage on say Persuasion/Deception checks is both extremely harsh and not particularly realistic as it all depends on the situation, sometimes it would be a penalty and sometimes it would be an advantage. And for example eavesdropping on a conversation in a language where you are only semi-fluent wouldn't technically impact the DC but instead what information the DM gives out.

So I understand why the default is the way it is in 5e, even though I do think you can make fluency/languages/dialects more important.