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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5998426" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think that if the game is going to include Backgrounds, then this has to be regarded as a feature, not a bug. A player how chooses to play an Artisan knows what s/he is getting into, and the burden now falls on him/her to find ways to make the PC's Artisanship matter in play.I don't agree, as I'll try to explain: there can be another way of establishing scope and limits of backgrounds.Agreed.But not completely agreed. There is another technique that can be used here, I think. Which relates to the empowerment issue.I don't agree. I'll try to explain why. It relates both to the setting of scope and limits, and to the empowerment issue.I'm very much a "player empowerment" person, but I don't object to this sort of skill system at all. I think it has the potential to work well for D&D - I use a (much softer) version of it in my 4e game, only treating Paragon Paths as the relevant backgrounds - +2 circumstance bonuses to checks which are directly in the field of your paragon path (applied more sympathetically to those PCs with bad stats or untrained skills).I think that one way to solve the scope/limit issue is to give the player an interest in both broad and narrow scope. The interest in broad scope obviously comes from increased PC efffectiveness. The way to introduce an interest in narrow scope is to give the GM permisssion to introduce complications into a situation based on the player's narration of their background.I will elaborate this by reference to these posts by the OPer:Long justifications from a player, in the course of play, can bog down and (as was noted upthread) cause player-GM conflict. And working out backgrounds in advance can also be boring and a bit academic.The alternative is that, when a player wants to call on his/her PC's background and the GM thinks it's not clearly a "yes" nor clearly a "no", the player goes on to explain how, in his/her PC's background, s/he learned to do this thing/recognise this thing/once courted a duchess/whatever it might be. And this extra PC background then both underpins the +3, but also provides the basis on which the GM can introduce complications for the player's PC. So the player has an incentive to be measured rather than profligate in spinning tall tales about his/her PC's background.This approach also reconciles a high degree of GM arbitration with a high degree of player empowerment: the player gets to frame his/her conception of his/her PC, but the GM gets to frame the complications the gameworld throws at that PC. And the more flamboyant the background, the greater the opportunity to introduce complications.This also helps balance the Artisan and the Bounty Hunter. The Artisan background suits a player who is happy making a modest range of skill or ability checks, and who doesn't want to be the main focus of the action. The Bounty Hunter (or Pirate, or Knight, or Noble) suits a player who wants to have his PC get more limelight, both as a protagonist and a victim of circumstance.</blockquote>

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