NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yaarel" data-source="post: 9286410" data-attributes="member: 58172">There is no such thing as a "culture" that has 100% of its members trained in a specific trait. The closest such trait would be a shared language, but even then this would not normally be 100% of the members. Literacy, immigration, dialects, jargons, and slang would further reduce the percentage of members who know the shared language.To assert a 100% membership trait, is either to misunderstand what a cultural institution is as if it is omnipotent, or to misunderstand what a culturally learned trait is as if it is a racist biologically essentialist trait.There is no 100% in a culture.Toward a better understanding of what the word "culture" means, and how it can work in terms of D&D rules:A "culture" is what a community LEARNS. Knowledge that proves useful transmits from an earlier generation to a next generation.A "culture" enforces, comprises, and transmits via various kinds of "institutions", such as ones relating to literacy rates, family obligations, economic transactions, and combat service.Example. A modern culture prioritizes institutions that promote literacy (languages, reading and writing), math and physical sciences (Nature), human sciences (History and Insight), and arts and literature (Performance, Persuasion and Intimidation). The education institutions include Elementary School and High School. The modern culture has a reasonably high literacy rate. But literacy is never 100%. Not every member of the culture is automatically literate. An institution lacks omnipotence. If a modern person is literate, it is statistically likely they attended an Elementary School and a High School. But who knows, perhaps they were homeschooled? Or they grew up elsewhere, or dropped out, and taught themselves how to read and write. Cultural experiences are fluid, and personal, despite statistical "trends".In a D&D context, a cultural institution can EXPLAIN how a character acquired a certain skill proficiency. If the High culture town has a wizardry school as a local institution that all town citizens are required to attend, then most of the Elves and others of this town are likely to have Arcana proficiency, maybe Nature too. But this same cultural institution CANNOT guarantee that every member of the town culture participates in this particular institution. There will be exceptions to the rule. Some citizens will be nonproficient in Arcana or Nature, or both.The 5e background represents what a character learns growing up. If a character happens to have skills, toolset and feat, that are "typical" or "prestigious" in the culture, then likely they learned them from a prominent institution within the culture.But if the character has a skill or feature that is unexpected for ones culture, then perhaps the character grew up with exposure to more than one culture. Thus one actually learned from the prominent institutions from more than one culture.Or the character is "rebellious" and disregards conformity to ones own culture, and taught oneself how to do the unexpected skill.Whether it represents an institution of ones culture, of ones several cultures, or is an antithesis to ones culture, the background is the best D&D mechanics for all of these cultural experiences growing up.</blockquote>

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