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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.

Ruining an entire arc is unlikely. The example given was "awesome, my backstory really specifically matters for this scene! This is a great payoff for months/years of development!" -> "...oh. The spellcaster solved the problem in six seconds with a single spell." That's not ruining an entire...

Well, let's look through the list of 3rd level Wizard spells. clairvoyance -- who needs Perception or various means of trickery to listen to conversations when you can just make an invisible sensor that can hear (or see, but not both) anything near a chosen spot? fear (or possibly enemies...

Unfortunately, at least on this axis, you're running into fully intentional aspects of the game design, that we were told about extensively during the "D&D Next" playtest. They straight-up explicitly told us they were going to replace AC/hit scaling with greater HP/damage scaling instead...

Alright. Your position absolutely came across as "anyone who listens to people who really try to test the rules is wrong". That's a position I've been resisting for nigh on 15 years at this point, and I gotta say, I'm not particularly keen on it. It was a bare half-step from throwing around...

Okay...how about, y'know, the whole "we literally licensed out books to others" thing? Because that's a literal actual business thing they did. We have it on record. That's why we got the Acquisitions Inc. book. That's why we have the Humblewood book. That's why there's a whole book full of...

That was not mentioned at any point in the post I quoted, nor the post to which you were replying. Having system mastery ≠ being an "optimizer". Otherwise, the only way you could have someone design a system is to do it blind, because by definition if the designer knows how their system works...

And then flips a second time into painfully bad again when you read up on things like the PrCs and such. BoED is in a similar boat. So over-the-top "we have to make an Inherently Good version of EVERYTHING" that it starts out incredibly cringe-worthy, and then becomes funny, and then the humor...