Backgrouds Instead
On paper this is good,except in execution there are two problems.
Firstly, backgrounds are very much secondary skills or occuations and seldom where you were raised. They're what you do for a living.
Secondly, Backgrouds have to be options usable for all the other races. You can't add a bunch of human-only where-you-were-born human backgrounds.
This is something that we should try to keep in mind always.
A 5e background is NOT culture.
"Cultures" are what classes, specialties, spells, equipment, and why not also backgrounds, are
more common
on average. Not "common to everyone".
It might be possible to define a "cultural background" which in fact tries to capture the average. But it will fail on two accounts at least:
- since a background is 3 skills only by default, a "cultural background" has only a limited room to capture that average, and risk of cliche
- fails at answering the question "what do you do for a living?", answer: "I'm a French!"
Except backgrounds and specialites are optioal sub-systems. So they can't be used.
Technically true: it's been stated at nauseam by the 5e designers that the game works perfectly without specialties and/or background.
Practically false: just because it can work without them doesn't mean that people will not use them, and I can bet that 99% of the gaming groups will, for the simple reason that both skills and feats (rather than backgrounds and specialties) add a
very minimal complexity to the game, but increase variety a lot.
If humans were given bonus skills and feats, this would work for 99% of the groups, and it would be a piece of cake for the PHB to suggest an alternative for the 1% gaming groups that don't use them.
