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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5098411" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think you're mischaracterizing backgrounds. Lets look at the mechanics of it. A PC gets to choose at least the following elements: Geography, Society, Birth, Occupation, and Racial (some books may have other elements and each campaign will likely also have Regional). That is either 5 or 6 elements of which they can choose one or more. Every one of these has at least one associated skill and possibly a language. The player thus has 5-6 skills to choose from for his character. If he doesn't find something appropriate he can simply make something up that works for him. That means no 'shopping' necessary. The skills just give little hints to say this or that might be cool and appropriate for his character concept. Once you've worked through that list you WILL have whatever you wanted. Its not going to work out that the player picks something FOR the skill. He picks something interesting, it gives him a skill he can use and probably the one he would most like to focus on for that matter. Personally I've found that it works out quite well. I've gotten FAR more detailed and interesting backgrounds from the players using this than I had in the past. Honestly most of the people I play with would do some level of background anyway, but the PHB2 system does kick them in the brain cells some and give them stuff to think about. I tell them to write a paragraph about their character and point them at PHB2 and they generally don't even write down the 'choices' they made, they just say what the character did before, etc and that they get +2 on whatever skill for whatever reason. I don't question this or try to get them to nail down that it is from "Geography" or "Region". I don't really care. It just works.</blockquote>

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