Every example seems to have learned what Arcana would teach
He may know how to produce an effect, but not know why it works.
Every example seems to have learned what Arcana would teach
D&D Beyond said:Arcana
Your Intelligence (Arcana) check measures your ability to recall lore about spells, magic items, eldritch symbols, magical traditions, the planes of existence, and the inhabitants of those planes.
...which immediately limits the backgrounds I can pick...
Are you using a house rule that removes the core basic player-side option to customize backgrounds by choosing *any* two skills and *any* combination of two languages or tool proficiencies (among other things)?
Because that is, by the Basic Rules, as core of a player option as being able to choose a human fighter. There’s no problem with a DM house ruling any of those options away, but they need to realize they are removing an option that is considered to be more core than the ranger class itself.
Every example seems to have learned what Arcana would teach
I just skimmed all the classes, and aside from the rogue's Hide function of cunning action, no class other than the ranger gets class abilities that utilize a particular skill. Plenty of subclasses do, but not the basic classes. This is really interesting to me.
It seems to me that, unless you want to "punish" lack of system mastery, you'd give a class with an ability that directly built on a skill that skill, up front, and if a sub-class had such an ability, make the skill in question a preq or perk of the subclass...
...But I don't feel like 5e design was nearly that exacting.
Every example seems to have learned what Arcana would teach
No, but there is definitely some confusion in the context that you were using it, and you opinion as to what the D&D mechanical implementation represents.As hard as you're trying to be "right on the internet", nobody in this thread is confused about the DnD mechanical implementation of proficiency.
No, unless there is confusion about what a wizard actually is. They use rote spells involving specific verbal incantations, gestures etc to create effects. That sounds more like a technician to me. The only part of the wizard class that would appear to show specific knowledge is the ability to come up with new spells every level. Given that spells are only one part of what Arcana covers, this does not seem conclusive that all wizards are trained in Arcana, rather than other options.We're trying to discuss what it would even mean for someone to devote their life to being a math professor, being good at it, and somehow never becoming skilled at math. As others have rightly pointed out, it's a bit nonsensical.
No inherent class feature of the wizard keys off Arcana proficiency as far as I'm aware. There also seems to be a little confusion around a D&D wizard vs one specific stereotype of the D&D wizard.That's the premise of this entire thread, in fact, so I can't discern what sets you off against my comments in particular. If you don't like the idea of inherent class features, you may as well get angry that wizards have predefined numbers of spell slots and complain that it holds you back from playing a very specific, suboptimal, theorycrafted wizard you dreamed up that you feel has more flavor than the wizard-as-described in DnD lore.