Alrighty...  This is an idea that has been successfully used in our group for a couple of years now...  It's gone under a few modifications since then, and thus, without further ado, I present to you


                           THE LANGUAGE SYSTEM THINGY

                                       by

                                 Cullen Sedaris
                             <raistlin@cloudnet.com>


Basically, this system was started by our first DM.  This was the sort of guy that pitted you against various gods in human form when you were at 4th level or lower.  He decided that it wasn't right that people could start their careers with a handful of languages and be able to speak them all perfectly.  This was, in his opinion, sick and wrong.

So what he did was he basically changed the rules for learning languages. Theoretically, a person could still start knowing a language perfectly, but it did limit how many languages a person would take at any one time. The rule is, you spend one half of a proficiency slot in a language and get a point for it.  The total number of slots you can ever spend in a language is 2, and thus the highest number of points you can get in a language is 4.  These points are a rating of how well you speak that langauge:

     A person with a 1 speaks only a few words at a very slow speed.

     A person with a 2 speaks somewhat faster, but still very choppily.  He has
     an increased vocabulary.

     A person with a 3 speaks the language as the average person on the street
     might.

     And a person with a 4 is like a super-master of the language.  This is the
     sort of person that corrects your grammar all the time and makes you want
     to hit him.

That's a good system right there, we used it throughout an entire campaign with much success.  Our next DM, however, felt the ratings were a little vague, so he decided to impose some rules on 1 and 2.

     Basically, as a 1, the player couldn't say words with the letter "e" in
     them. A person couldn't say "My shield is broken", for example, they would
     have to say something like "My big blocking thing not work good."  There
     have been some extremely strange synonyms found in our campaign.

     People with a 2 could now speak "e" but could no longer speak "m".  A
     person couldn't say, for example, "My friends and I have been to the moon
     many times," they would have to say "The guys and I have been to the big
     space sphere lots" or something along those lines.

And that is how we've been using it in the new campaign.

A player may gain as many languages as he wants in this fashion, but the system does tend to eliminate people being fluent in just about every language out there.  The average (for our group anyway) seems to be one or two languages spoken at a 3, and a few (usually no more than three) at a level 2.

This, then, is the system.  Use it or don't. :)
