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This. So much sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I think it's pretty close, yeah. Seems to me the conflict is between DMs who hold their settings closely--as in, are really reluctant to let go of anything in them--and players who want the abilities they choose to work the way they understand them to--and who will have at least some tendency to...

Because it's "funny."

Yeah, I'm with you that there should be some common sense applied, here. I think if you want to be "I-know-a-guy Guy," you probably shouldn't be like fifteen. If you just want to be able to make non-hostile contact--more like "hello" than asking any favor/s--then I don't think being fifteen is...

You mean, if the feature is explicitly considered to be the result of time spent in the underworld making contacts, the player shouldn't take it if their character is too young to have done that? That's defensible, at least.

I would read the Criminal background feature not so much as a network as the ability to find a network (or whatever) and make non-hostile contact with it, more or less wherever they are. It doesn't seem out-of-whack to me.

I think that's consistent with the point I was making, did you mean it as something other than (mostly) agreement?

The player chose "Criminal" not "Urchin." Doesn't matter how old their character is. Someone who grew up doing criminal things might be able to navigate city spaces more swiftly (the Urchin feature, IIRC) or they might be able to find/make non-hostile contacts (a reasonable interpretation of the...

I think that if the DM is just going to nope-out background features--and it's clear there are a lot of DMs who do exactly that--then the change in both 5e2024 and ToV to feats/talents instead of more-narrative background features is probably going to work out better all around. DMs won't have...

Even leaving my tendencies to ask the players for setting things, I generally have a standing offer like this in games I run, and if someone comes with something on their own I'll make an effort to find a place for it.

I can't wait!

The stereotypical "Old Sparky" chair is bolted to the floor, because convulsions.

Anyone who steals dice gets the chair!

The last poll I saw, or at least the last one I remember, broke out homebrew settings (including from-scratch and patchworked from published bits) and homebrew adventures (possibly also by whether you were working from scratch or mixing and matching). It might also have called out homebrew...

Yeah, the problem with all those games people were running that I didn't want to be in was me.

As I said before, whether I'm running a "heavy-prep" game will depend on what and when and how you look. I've put some work into my setting, I've asked players for input, there's a lot of work that happens before the start of a campaign (and a somewhat smaller bolus whenever I frame in a...

The main reason I started running games this time around was because no one else I could find was running the sorts of games I wanted to be in.

I think on some level it's possible to determine if a movie, or a novel, or a song, or whatever succeeds at doing what it sets out to do, and to use that to determine if it's good--which can be an entirely different then than whether one likes it. Sometimes even that might be too murky to parse...

I don't disagree. I've put some work into the setting I'm running in over the past few years, and I gave the players for the third campaign a ~5500-word document about the city they were going to start in. That does seem like some heavy-ish prep. I then asked the players for people, places...