The Quick Rules: Running Fluency at the Table
Stop telling players they "understand 30% of what was said." It halts play, forces the referee into bad improv, and gives the player nothing they can act on. Instead, treat fluency as an information filter.
When an NPC speaks in a tongue a PC only partially knows, drop the dice and use these three operational thresholds:
Basic (Pidgin): Nouns & Numbers Only
What they get: Concrete items, directions, and quantities. No tenses, no conditions, no intent.
The Rule: Strip the dialogue down to three or four raw keywords.
NPC says: "If you pay five silver pieces now, you can hide in the hayloft until the patrol leaves."
The Referee says: "Silver. Five. Hay. Soldiers."
Conversational: Pure Literal Meaning
What they get: The entire sentence and direct facts, but zero idioms, sarcasm, or cultural metaphor.
The Rule:* Deliver the statement deadpan at face value.
NPC says: "Keep digging that trench, friend, and you’ll find yourself sleeping with the worms."
The Referee says: "He warns that if you keep digging, you will literally be put underground dead."
Fluent: Full Subtext
What they get: Everything, including regional accents, irony, veiled threats, social class markers, and deliberate slips of the tongue.
The Breakdown: Why Percentages Fail & How to Filter Speech
Telling a player their character understands a specific percentage of a sentence is one of the oldest bad habits in tabletop role-playing. In practice, a referee faced with communicating "30% comprehension" inevitably resorts to linguistic gibberish, speaking in broken syntax, skipping every second word, or mumbling phonetics until the player rolls their eyes. It turns dialogue into a guessing game of bad grammar rather than a test of wits. Real language does not function like a progress bar where a speaker gradually unlocks every third adjective; human comprehension operates in discrete structural registers based on vocabulary type and cognitive load.
Basic: The Concrete Anchor
When someone learns just enough of a tongue to survive on the borderlands or avoid getting gutted in an alley, they do not acquire a scattering of random conjunctions and prepositions. They pick up the concrete things that keep them alive: food, coin, weapons, numbers, and physical threats.
When running a Basic speaker, do not attempt to speak broken Common. Simply pull three or four load-bearing words out of your prepared dialogue and drop them onto the table as a blunt list. Let the players at the table do the heavy lifting of figuring out context.
If a dungeon guide warns, "Beware the northern corridor after the bells toll, for the drowned dead rise from the cistern," the referee delivers: "North. Bell. Water. Dead."
This immediately shifts the gameplay back to deduction. The players know there is water, they know something dies or is dead to the north, and a bell triggers it. The operational facts are preserved, but the nuance, timing, and conditions are left for them to piece together or verify through scouting.
Conversational: The Trap of Literalism
The vast majority of bilingual wanderers, sellswords, and travelling merchants operate at a conversational level. They have the mechanics down, they know the verb tenses, and they can barter over trade goods without getting cheated on the exchange rate.
The fatal weakness of the conversational speaker is cultural insulation. Every culture coats its speech in layers of metaphor, historical allusions, proverbs, and dry irony that sound completely unhinged when translated literally. A conversational speaker takes everything at face value.
When an NPC uses a colloquialism—such as saying a local lord "has deep cellars" to mean he has extensive criminal connections—the conversational listener takes it literally and assumes the man is merely wealthy enough to store immense quantities of wine or grain. Misunderstandings at this level should never be a dead end; they should generate actionable, plausible mistakes that complicate the situation naturally without feeling cheap or arbitrary.
Fluent: Reading the Social Current
Fluency is not merely about an expanded vocabulary; it is about detecting what is not being said. A truly fluent speaker catches the slight shift from formal to informal pronouns that signals disrespect, the sudden drop in a merchant’s cadence when an illicit cargo is mentioned, or the archaic turn of phrase that reveals a wandering beggar was actually educated in a noble court.
At this tier, the referee can hand out social leverage. You do not just convey the plain text of the dialogue; you give the player character the subtext and emotional register behind it.
Instead of an NPC simply delivering a rumor, the referee can tell the fluent character: "He's speaking the court dialect of the capital, but he's intentionally trying to disguise it with dockside slang—and he’s sweating while he says it." That turns language from a simple barrier to clear communication into an active tool for intrigue and social deduction.
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