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<blockquote data-quote="sheadunne" data-source="post: 7652518" data-attributes="member: 27570"><p>I understand. In my game that isn't possible. Or rather, its possible through personality, profession and biology, but not background story. That's all I'm saying. You have the end result of your background story, just not the details. I'm not saying you won't be disappointed that its not available to you. But mechanically speaking having it leads to being unable to advance beyond the equivalent of a level one character. It's built into the game because I enjoy it and find my players like it, although it requires thinking differently about background and how it plays out in their characters lives. </p><p></p><p>As I said in a previous post it doesn't work well with D&D which almost completely ignores background and focuses a great deal on the detail of items like feats, class abilities and spells and uses level to balance them rather than the abilities themselves. Wish isn't balanced with toughness which isn't balanced with a barbarians rage. The character level attempts to balance those items. </p><p></p><p>Since D&D ignores background, or rather only really cares about it at first level rather than the characters entire career, it doesn't lend itself to a system that makes background a continuous source of discovery about the character. It implies that I learned fishing between level 10 and 11 when i took the skill, rather than something I learned fishing with my dad 15 years ago and it just hasn't presented itself in the game until now, because there was no need to fish. And it certainly wasn't something I thought about taking at level one because I had no idea I wanted my character to learned fishing and I know my character better now that I've played him for 10 levels.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="sheadunne, post: 7652518, member: 27570"] I understand. In my game that isn't possible. Or rather, its possible through personality, profession and biology, but not background story. That's all I'm saying. You have the end result of your background story, just not the details. I'm not saying you won't be disappointed that its not available to you. But mechanically speaking having it leads to being unable to advance beyond the equivalent of a level one character. It's built into the game because I enjoy it and find my players like it, although it requires thinking differently about background and how it plays out in their characters lives. As I said in a previous post it doesn't work well with D&D which almost completely ignores background and focuses a great deal on the detail of items like feats, class abilities and spells and uses level to balance them rather than the abilities themselves. Wish isn't balanced with toughness which isn't balanced with a barbarians rage. The character level attempts to balance those items. Since D&D ignores background, or rather only really cares about it at first level rather than the characters entire career, it doesn't lend itself to a system that makes background a continuous source of discovery about the character. It implies that I learned fishing between level 10 and 11 when i took the skill, rather than something I learned fishing with my dad 15 years ago and it just hasn't presented itself in the game until now, because there was no need to fish. And it certainly wasn't something I thought about taking at level one because I had no idea I wanted my character to learned fishing and I know my character better now that I've played him for 10 levels. [/QUOTE]
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