Quote Originally Posted by Amechra View Post
Yeah, I think a smoother system would be to just take a note of how you picked up your languages, as a flavor thing.

You're a Sage? Your grammar is a overly formal, and you might mispronounce a few words that you've only ever seen written down.

You're a Sailor? Your vocabulary in your additional languages is probably going to be pretty darn vulgar.

Stuff like that.



I actually have a rule for this in my current campaign — High Ingfaltish is a creole between Low Ingfaltish (the language primarily spoken by the common folk) and Sietok (the language primarily spoken by the ruling class). Someone who speaks High Ingfaltish is capable of speaking with speakers of the other two languages (and vice-versa), but you might run into Disadvantage on Deception, Insight, or Persuasion checks that hinge on wordplay or precise wording.

Hilariously, this has allowed my party to communicate with each other despite not actually having a single common language (the Rogue, Ranger, and Sorcerer all speak Low Ingfaltish, while the Ranger and Bard speak High Ingfaltish).
That's exactly it, players should determine how they know the language and what dialect/accents their characters have and then depending on the situation the DM determines when advantage/disadvantage applies to speaking with a particular accent/dialect. Trying to talk your way past the city guard then speaking Sietok gives advantage, interviewing commoners as part of a murder investigation and speaking Sietok gives disadvantage. Making languages matter isn't about fluency, it's about NPCs believing you are one of "them", so long as there are multiple "thems" then there's no optimized choice there's simply who do you represent/come across as.