D&D 5E More granular skills and proficiencies

The racial and skill feats made me thinking once again about more granular feats and proficiencies.

Idea: double proficiency

If you are chosing a background that gives you proficiency in a skill you already chose from your class or race, once you can forfeit chosing a different skill and instead add double your proficiency bonus.

This way it may be possible to have expertise in a single skill.
(I limited it to once, because otherwise a rogue could have more expertises than skills later on. You may instead allow a rogue to pick a new skill if there is no skill left to apply expertise on).

I don't think it devalues the rogue's expertise because it just translate in another skill which is worth as much as expertise.

Idea: illiteracy

1) at character creation you may chose to be illiterate. Chose a proficiency in a tool for each 2 languages you are proficient in.

2) if you are literate and chose a background that gives you proficiency in a language, you may chose 2 languages written in a different alphabet than the languages you know. You can only speak and understand those languages.

Hmm. I've been thinking about languages and how many of us know some snippets of many languages - I can't speak Spanish, French or German, but it is sometimes possible to get a general "gist" of what is being said or at least to know a few words or phrases.

You touched on illiteracy. Maybe another way to add granularity could be "Partial Languages". They are very binary at present. It would be nice to do away with "Common", I think. People near a lizardfolk settlement might get to learn a small selection of useful Draconic - enough to communicate with them in a very basic way and vice versa. Maybe different levels of fluency. 1 fluent language could be swapped for 2-3 "partial languages" (can't think of a better phrase right now.)

Then again, it might descend into Tolkien levels of complexity.

I would not hand out expertise by this cheap way of getting it.

Another skill to chose is good enough.

Expertise should be limited by class features and feats.

As for languages, basic knowledge of two languages instead of one fluent is good idea.

Horwath said:

I would not hand out expertise by this cheap way of getting it.

Another skill to chose is good enough.

Expertise should be limited by class features and feats.

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I agree with Horwath. At my table, at least half the players would go for this, possibly for both background skills, in order to succeed more often. You get less well-rounded characters. And you throw off the DCs - either it's challenging for the expertise characters and very hard for those who did not uber-specialize, or it's too easy for those who take this. Many people would only take background that overlap their class, leading to less variety and therefore less interesting characters.

In other words not only would I not use the rule when running, but I find this actively harmful and if I was a player I would lobby the DM not to use it.