D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics

[prabe]

I mean, all the feature really says is that you have a contact, and a means to get in touch with them if you're far away. It doesn't say anything about you know someone in every town you ever visit.

And how often do you need to contact your guy in City A if the adventure is 1000 miles to the north? Once, maybe twice a campaign?

This. So much sound and fury, signifying nothing.

 

[mamba]

It's a LONG thread. But to answer, the PCs tend to expand their range and widen their areas as they go up in level (start local and branch out) not universal, but pretty common.

sure, but that also means whatever they gained since they started is not granted to them by the background feature, they ‘earned’ it in some way

Seems like a lot of hoops,

seems more realistic

I tend to prefer "it generally works and if it doesn't - something is REALLY wonky..," so the player actually knows the feature failing is not the norm.

I have no general preference, this is all very much dictated by circumstances

 

[mamba]

Fixing the game how?

How do you fix something when there are wide disagreements on what the problem is or if it's even a problem?

in this particular case they fixed it by removing these features from the backgrounds

 

[Aldarc]

People. Like them or not, the background traits worked under somewhat different logic than the rest of the game, so it is understandable that some people found them jarring. And WotC seemed to agree, given that they're gone in 5.5.

The horse is truly dead. WotC nuked it. I'm not sure there is much point in arguing about it anymore.

I'm not sure if the change has anything to do with WotC agreeing with people who hypothetically share our biases for or against background features.

I think that the primary reason that background features were removed for 2024 D&D has a lot more to do with what Jeremy Crawford said was something of a guiding principle for their rules update. Crawford explicitly said in one video that the design team wanted to reduce the amount of "Mother May I" abilities in the game so that players had reliable abilities and features that their characters could use.

I strongly suspect that Background features were removed because of this reason, as further evidenced by the GMs here who seem fairly quick to say "no" to players using their PC's background feature. Feats, in contrast, provide clearer mechanical advantages.

 

[mamba]

In my games, the players and I are trying to tell a fun story together, and I don't need a rule to prevent a good player from telling a bad story.

cool, may you always have good players then.

You can ignore any issue by pretending no one would ever exploit it, doesn’t mean no one will

 

[prabe]

I'm not sure if the change has anything to do with WotC agreeing with people who hypothetically share our biases for or against background features.

I think that the primary reason that background features were removed for 2024 D&D has a lot more to do with what Jeremy Crawford said was something of a guiding principle for their rules update. Crawford explicitly said in one video that the design team wanted to reduce the amount of "Mother May I" abilities in the game so that players had reliable abilities and features that their characters could use.

I strongly suspect that Background features were removed because of this reason, as further evidenced by the GMs here who seem fairly quick to say "no" to players using their PC's background feature. Feats, in contrast, provide clearer mechanical advantages.

As I said upthread a ways, I'm pretty sure the change is going to work better for a lot of tables, since everyone at the table will have the same expectation/s.

 

[Mort]

seems more realistic

That seems to be a big difference.

I don't need real world realism in my mid-high fantasy.

In fact, something being TOO grounded in "real world" realism would likely break my verisimilitude of the high fantasy setting!

 

[mamba]

Group consensus, of course.

if there were consensus, there would not be an issue to begin with, this is just ignoring the issue until it comes up

 

[Mort]

in this particular case they fixed it by removing these features from the backgrounds

As stated in my post - that is a choice, but it is only a "fix" to those that didn't like the features. To the ones that did it's messing with something that wasn't broken and making it worse.

 

[mamba]

I don't need real world realism in my mid-high fantasy

yep, that is the difference then, I need quite a bit of realism if you want me to take a story seriously