In 5e Classic feats were officially an optional rule played by 90% In 3.X Prestige Classes were officially optional. In 5.24? I predict custom backgrounds.
100% agree - I said so earlier - the vast majority of groups will use Custom backgrounds. But this will remain an issue for three reasons:
1) Some DMs are just difficult about this sort of thing. Some people flip genuinely lazy and ridiculous comments like "Just get a new DM if they won't immediately allow a Custom background!", which is just no real-world behaviour. Some DMs can be very good but very nervous anything optional or custom - especially newer DMs, in my experience.
2) Increasing numbers of people are using digital character management, and depending on how services, particularly Beyond, implement this, it could be fine or a huge pain. Right now, in Beyond, because Custom is player-side and always an option, it's literally the first option and the player can configure it. However, I'd be unsurprised if they changed that, and indeed took away the ability to create Custom backgrounds as part of the chargen process (for 2024 characters anyway), and instead forced you to build them, send them to the DM, have him manually add what you built to his campaign, and so on. Again this could go either way - it could be simply laziness from Beyond actually helps us and they just leave Custom in place and update it to give you a Feat instead a Background ability.
3) AL and other similar situations, depending on how they rule.
Nope. Other than the minifeat. Suboptimal, yes, but that's a long way from illegal. And 5e characters can keep playing as is.
No, you're missing my point. They couldn't build the same character again, because your backstory determines what abilities you're allowed to pick. If you backstory was you were an street urchin who stole a spellbook from a wizard and learned magic that way (not theoretical, this is a specific character a player had a while back), and you took the Urchin background (or whatever) and it doesn't allow INT to be boosted, you literally
could not legally have your 16 INT character.
Sure existing characters can continue, but old ones could not be recreated under 2024 rules.
No you haven't. There's no stat anyone is forced to take and no penalty. "All elves are less tough" hasn't been part of official current D&D since 2008 and even if Con is an urchin stat you will get some (not many; it's Con) who haven't boosted it. What you have is "scholars tend to be smart and urchins tend to be tough". Both selection and training bias.
It's still a kind of bigotry and essentialism (just moving from biological to class or the like, and as a Brit, I know how vile that can be, even if most Americans pretend classism isn't really a thing), as much as people might pretend otherwise for the sake of argument. An Urchin literally cannot be as smart as anyone with an INT background - this by itself is hilarious because it's like 15% of the backgrounds of fantasy novel protagonists - i.e. they grew up on the streets or as a servant or whatever, but were smarter than the actual scholars etc. We know Noble has +INT, and Wayfarer (which I think is "the real Urchin" lol) does not have +INT, for example (I believe). That's crazy. That goes against so many fantasy novels and settings. It even goes against most D&D ones!
