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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mamba" data-source="post: 9344044" data-attributes="member: 7034611">as I said, if you want it to not be implausible, it does affect worldbuilding...For you to know a messenger everywhere whenever you want to sent a message to your contact, there are basically two options<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">there is a universe spanning network of villains, and you 'know' all their contacts, so that you can go to them and send your message</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">you are incredibly lucky and one of the handful or so of messengers you know just so happens to be around whenever you need one</li> </ul>Neither is very believable, so let's go with the first option and a way to recognize them as the more believable oneNow it is not enough to just hand your message over, you expect something to be sent back too, and all of this should not take months, as by then it would be pointless. So next you need a way to get messages across different worlds in a fast and reliable fashion, which makes powerful magic commonplaceSo we now have a global villain network with 'uniforms' that members can recognize and access to a net of teleporter stations to send messages across the multiverse, and all of this because your criminal background supposedly is not limited to the region your character is from...this statement makes no sense to me, of course it only happens when the characters use it, but the whole 'infrastructure' has to exist everywhere, just so it is available whenever they decide to use itacross many worlds? this is your background feature, there is no way you know them across worldsFive is plenty for a local thieves guild, if you need more you are already bending the background beyond thatIf WotC meant 'recognize' and not actually know the people, they would have said so instead of hoping you twist it into 'recognize' because if you twist the meaning just enough, the two can be similar. This still does not get you over the hurdle of the use of 'local'. If they did not mean 'your home region' with it, but 'wherever you find yourself', then the whole thing would be clearer if they did not include it at all.So you have to use two very strenuous interpretations to then get to a hard to reasonably explain feature that works everywhere instead of going the with more logical and consistent reading of it being a feature that works in the region you are from... you are stretching all of this beyond recognition to defend having the ability to send messages anywhere...Then why does the smuggler specifically mean 'one region' when the two features are very similar? Why restrain one like this but not the other? The logical conclusion is they both are, and WotC learned a bit about how to make it clearer between the two..,At this point I feel like the biggest improvement in the 2024 books might be that these features are gone <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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