The "Common" tongue is one of the great conceits of many old-school role-playing games (well, in the D&D I remember) and Fantasy/Sci Fi novels. It's a simple cheat acknowledged delightfully by Douglas Adams with his "babel fish". When everyone can understand everyone else, it becomes much easier to get on with the action. As a writer, how many pages do you want to devote to linguistic confusion? Is it interesting? Will your readers make it with you to the other side?
In a much earlier post (some time in 2013), I compiled a few ideas on how to write non-native speakers. It included dropping articles (a, an, the), tense confusion, idiomatic phrase issues (most recently executed to perfection in Guardians of the Galaxy), and so on. Using those ideas, you can create a clear voice for a character who has spent a significant amount of time learning a new language (or in Drax's case, one who just can't quite wrap his brain around certain modes of expression). However, most of the time when you encounter a new language, you have not had years of study in preparation for the experience.
One way to circumvent this difficulty is in having a character who is familiar with a language that is derived from the same source. My girlfriend is a fluent speaker of Italian, so when she encounters any of the romance languages (especially in the written form), she can generally get along. Similarly, friend who have studied Slavic languages generally say that it's easier to hop from one to another, rather than jump to a new language group. Thus, characters travelling to neighboring lands would probably have a much easier time communicating than those who have journeyed far or sailed the trackless seas.
Merchants and sailors (possibly even mercenaries), who routinely travel long distances, are another way to get around some of this problem. Communication is an essential tool in the work of these trades (at least when they are ashore). Once foreign trade becomes common in a certain port/city, the sides begin to develop a "pidgin language" shared by both sides, incorporating elements of each. Members of these professions would also be more likely to be able to communicate when encountering new cultures, simply because they've done it many times before (assuming they've been at it for long enough).
There are a variety of cases where the inability of one character to understand another has been used specifically as a plot device. The tv show Vikings deals with this early on and regularly. Patrick Rothfuss uses it to nice effect in his ongoing work. I seem to remember one of Joe Abercrombie's characters pretending to not be able to understand for a while (or was that just being surly?). Robin Hobb uses it to keep her seafaring reavers dangerously "other." I'm sure there are plenty of other examples in the literature, just not springing to mind. Even within these exceptions, though, the majority of the characters encountered in these novels are of the easy-to-understand variety.
Perhaps the reason why this issue is so easily gotten around is the simple fact that most of the individuals written about are "exceptional." These heroes are simply smarter and more clever than we are. They can learn a language in six months (or hours) and then proceed to defend themselves in the highest court, with aplomb. This perhaps is another symptom of my own personal annoyance with genre fiction. I like reading about regular people living/thriving in these fantastical settings.
Maybe it has more to do with having lived in other countries where I haven't been fluent (or even reasonably conversant) in the native language. I know what you learn first (food/water/toilet) and how long it takes to get it right. Not every story needs to be a comedy of errors stemming from linguistic misunderstanding, but every traveler has experienced embarrassment from some linguistic lack. Furthermore, in the history of mass conflict, how many mistakes have been made, or acts of violence perpetrated, because of pure misunderstanding? Language can be a powerful tool or a seemingly insurmountable barrier. In these epic stories of clashing nations, it should play a more prominent part.
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