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Sorry to see you go Blue. Eoghan will be missed! Hopefully, Bible won't have to fight anyone for his body. 🙂 I've been meaning to post a follow up to my last post after hearing crickets in response, but yeah, I'm in.

The feature (Criminal Contact) doesn't specify a timeframe for the message's delivery. If time is critical, the player could declare an action to look for a messenger who could get it to its destination faster than normal, and I think a check would be in order.

I was more asking if courier or messenger is a normal job a Vistana might have in Ravenloft, just for the people who live there to send each other messages, but I appreciate the information!

As @Lanefan said in the post to which I was replying, the “how” is easy to answer once, and as I said in my response, it doesn’t happen all that often.

So the fact you probably don't know somebody on every single plane of existence means it's completely unbelievable that you know somebody on one of them?

Quoted for truth!

Well, at the risk of stating the obvious, the alternative is the messengers are local to the place in which you are.

I'm not following the logic of what you're saying. You seem to interpret the clause after the semicolon as a set of conditions to be met before you can communicate with your contact, whereas I'm reading it as reiterating and elaborating on the "how" in the first clause. I'm not sure how to...

Your 2) doesn't follow. I can know (and/or know about, which I think is a fair gloss of the word know as used in the features) people in places I've never been, so that's what's illogical in what you've posted here.

Well, the criticism was the feature could be used without the PC talking to/convincing any concerned NPCs. I think, if the table is imagining those interactions taking place, that's a huge improvement!

This isn't true. I've advocated for no such thing. In a previous reply I believe was in response to one of your posts, I stated I don't know what you mean by "the feature always working" because that sounds like the criminal would be constantly sending messages, one after another, 24/7/365, and...

This response doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I know this thread of the conversation has been stretched out over many days, so maybe a brief recap is in order: On April 7, you proposed the abilities granted by the background features be removed from the player-facing backgrounds and inserted...

These are rules for playing an actual game. If a problem doesn't arise in actual gameplay, then a problem doesn't exist.

Sure, that can happen in any game, but the answer isn’t for the DM to do a lot of extra work. It’s for the table to pause the game and have a discussion about what’s going on in the fiction, so everyone’s on something like the same page, because until they are, the game cannot proceed...

That might be the issue for you, but @UngeheuerLich characterized them as “big circumstantial abilities” and contrasted them with “light abilities that are always useful”, so that’s what I was responding to.

Correct, and it making sense is something that relies on table consensus to establish. If it doesn’t make sense, either the player isn’t going to do it in the first place or something has gone amiss and the table needs to get on the same page about what’s going on. Yes, the 2014 backgrounds...

I’m saying a hypothetical example of gameplay in which it has been established in the fiction the party is in a place where there are absolutely no ships with which the sailor is familiar is not part of my hypothetical example of a player making an action declaration that uses the feature...

Why does it matter when the DM makes this stuff up, and why doesn’t the player of the sailor know any of this?

Is anybody saying this? Because I’m not sure why this is being posted in response to me as if it’s something I don’t know or with which I don’t mostly agree. What I would add is the player should know when their feature will be useful and when it won’t so they can play their character...

Well @Scott Christian claims it would be some amount more than "very little" extra work for the DM unless they are allowed to have all kinds of secret reasons to tell the player they were wrong about what their feature does, so that's what I was responding to.