Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arilyn" data-source="post: 9417545" data-attributes="member: 6816042">It'll encourage players to just pick and move on. This, in turn, will start getting players to pick a background solely based on what will give them the best stat and feat for their build, and then the actual story elements of the backgrounds will be forgotten. Some GMs might only allow the  "official" backgrounds. Some players might never even realize custom backgrounds are a possibility. Why do I care? D&D is the gateway hobby. It's a creative hobby but this discourages that. But Arilyn, you've been playing OSR games. Not much to character creation there. True, but the creativity in modern OSR comes from decisions made from play and the openness of choices. These games require creative solutions to problems or there'll be a lot of dead characters. Also, there tends to be long lists of background in these games. Some are delightfully weird or flavourful. I don't love the drift in D&D to just being about choosing options from a WotC pre-approved list. There is becoming a certain sameness to 5e, which will turn off potential players who'll miss the richness of the hobby. And yes, D&D is vastly more popular than ever, but ever so slowly the gameplay set up in 5e is becoming more prescribed. The designers tell us the 2024 version has more choice and options, but I actually feel like, for me, it'll have a little less room to breathe. Looking outside 5e, there is an explosion of wondrous creativity. I want some of that in the 5e books. This is a long rant over something as simple as backgrounds in the 2024 PHB, but it's a symptom of other problems I see bubble up in the game. And we had custom backgrounds in the playtest and were told that the whole origin system had received high ratings. Then this. It bugs me on a philosophical and design level. I want the game to encourage players to think about where their characters come from, whether it's as simple as farmer leaving their whole life behind, as whimsical as stepping out of a child's dream or as dark as raised by a doomsday cult.</blockquote>

Verification