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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8740713" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Giving the sample backgrounds names makes it easier for the player who just wants to pick a sample background and go to decide which one they want. They just choose based on which name sounds closest to what they envision for their character. This just happened a week ago, I was helping a friend make a character for an upcoming Witchlight game we’re both going to play in. She just had me read off the names of the backgrounds in the PHB, said, “Entertainer sounds close enough,” and then had me tell her what stuff she got from it.You could put in some tables for rolling a random background. That might appeal to some more old-school players. I don’t think it would appeal to most new players these days. Going back to my example of the friend I just helped make a character, she insisted on making her own character; she thought using a pre-generated one would suck the fun out of it, because it wouldn’t feel like “hers,” and I have no doubt a random one wouldn’t have either. But, she didn’t really do what I would normally think of as “making a character.” She just picked things she thought sounded cool - fairy, sorcerer, entertainer - and had me tell her what to write down on the sheet. That’s how casual players are. Nah, that wouldn’t work for the same reason it doesn’t work to randomly generate a character. Casual players want to feel like they made a decision. They just don’t care about the mechanics. They want to pick race, class, and background because it feels like they’re deciding who the character is. They don’t want to choose proficiencies and the like because they barely understand what that even means, and don’t really care.</blockquote>

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