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For my part, it's just...I have seen so, so, so many instances of "but it's what my character would do!!!!" as a crap-awful excuse for crap-awful behavior from someone trying to weasel their way out of there being consequences for being a jerk to their fellow players. And It's worth noting, a...

Well, to give you a good example of a background I felt was missing from 5.0, and which hasn't been matched in 5.5e yet to the best of my knowledge, one that I picked up from ENWorld itself. "Academy Graduate"--the idea that the rich and powerful send their kids to good schools where they hobnob...

And I do not.

There will be thousands, yes. Is it useful to have thousands of them as options? Or is it useful to articulate relevant, interesting, evocative ones, and then carve out a clear space for "If none of these describe YOUR character, this is where you draft your own." It is not bad to have...

Really, really looked like we were gonna bite it, and then we finally took down the big bad and the enemy's power collapsed with her. (One of us actually did bite it, but we were able to use an in-combat revivify to fix that.) Of course, it helped an absolute crapload that we kept rolling 5 or...

For my part, this is why I have always spoken for key racial features. Dragonborn have dragon breath, faster healing, and a frenzied edge when the chips are down. Tieflings have infernal wrath (what 5e diminished to merely hellish rebuke), amped-up damage against weakened foes, and the other...

Don't own the book, so I can't say. If they've done that, then cool, that would be a (teeny tiny) improvement. Which just means WotC is offloading even more design work onto the GM. Wonderful. Just fantastic. Just the absolute best. I love it so much. Edit: As for your previous post, asking...

Forgotten Realms. I thought that was quite obvious. Given, y'know, a third or more of all the books really are about the FR and only incidentally about anywhere else. And the fact that the vast majority of adventure paths and such published by WotC are specifically set in the Forgotten Realms.

I don't. Instead, I work through things like the following, using "I" to mean "my character" for brevity: What am I feeling? (Rage? Pain? Joy? Fear? Hate? Love? Apathy? etc.) How do I make decisions? (Logical stepwise thought? "Honor before reason"? Self-interest calculation? etc.) What do I...

Okay. Folks have repeatedly said they should, or said things about how backgrounds somehow invoke culture. If they do not actually say anything about culture, then either those people are deeply mistaken, or they're presenting falsehoods, or they're in some way creating something that simply is...

So...when you said "I consider backgrounds to be the participation in various cultural institutions.", what did that mean? Because that doesn't look like participating in "cultural institutions" other than in a purely instrumental sense. Because...all people by definition have a culture. The...

You ask this as though 5e does not have a default setting...because it pretty clearly does.

I find them far, far, far too generic to serve any such capacity. "Scribe", "Merchant", "Artisan", "Criminal". What, in any way whatsoever, does this say about your culture? Every single one of the PHB backgrounds is purely generic, something essentially all civic cultures would support to some...

I fully agree. As said above: being 3PP, it may as well not even exist, as far as what is actually accessible to me as a player. It could be the most amazing piece of TTRPG content ever written, and I would never know. I'm not saying this flippantly. Even with a GM who is in favor of 3PP, which...

3PP is functionally useless to me as a player, so it doesn't really matter how amazeballs the product is, I'm 99.99999% surely never going to get to use it. And I still see that as a lame half-measure. Feats should not be competing with stats. Period. I just do not see that as being in any way...

And yet culture matters less, mechanically, than species--which hardly matters at all. Like culture literally has no impact on your character. No mechanics, no ribbons, no fluff. Nothing. If the intent actually is to make species mostly color and culture matter a ton, then 5.5e has objectively...

At least in my experience, that stance is.....highly unusual. Not the opposition to MC, though, rather the willingness to consider 3PP/homebrew content to replace it. The hostility to 3PP/homebrew content I've seen from the 5e GM community is pretty much the strongest I've ever seen. Of course...

Certainly. I would say that the ethos (good word!) of early-edition D&D tended toward: Logistics-focused play -- your items and equipment kind of are your "features" (in modern terms), use 'em wisely Characters are more like your game piece, they let you access play, direct character RP is...

Since you are asking for opinions, rather than objective analysis: I'm not someone who is particularly fond of 5e. I've made that fairly clear around here; just saying it now to lay my cards on the table. From my perspective? 5e's popularity has literally nothing to do with its structure or...

Whereas I see it as a GM getting tripped up by the ways that D&D characters can invalidate one another's abilities, and trying to keep in mind all of the potential ways that could happen is a pretty big ask.