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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9798527" data-attributes="member: 6790260">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 not there, or some other thing, but the culture part is not there.That last bit was exactly my point, so I'm not sure where you're going with this. I was specifically pointing out that these things are perfectly fungible. Every culture has scribes, so there is nothing cultural about being a scribe. Hence, the Scribe background does not and cannot communicate anything about culture--because it works identically well in every single culture that has any degree of writing ability, which every civic culture is going to have. (As long as we allow things like quipu to count as "writing", which we absolutely should.) The same logic applies to every other background.Respectfully, this doesn't really respond to my frustration. I'm aware that 3e (and prior!) editions had lots to say about such cultures. "You can thus adapt this into 5e yourself!" is not a response to the criticism, "5e, as published, failed to include culture in a meaningful way." If anything, it is an admission that that's precisely what happened, because we not only have to invent our own rules, we have to go back to previous editions to even get material enough to work with!</blockquote>

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