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Message: <blockquote data-quote="roguish" data-source="post: 9432107" data-attributes="member: 7046843">Two points.1) Story is great, I also optimise around a character concept. And if I want to play a Rogue who's more book-smart than dexterous, I will (and I have!). But having the ability to pick any stat I want doesn't prevent me from making RP choices my priority. I can still do that! So why limit myself to WotC's 16 backgrounds whose flavour and mechanics may or may not fit the what I have in mind? 2) Your Acolyte and Sage descriptions are stereotypical in a way I personally find very restrictive. Why presume that ALL acolytes everywhere do nothing all day long except read and pray and chant (INT/WIS/CHA)? For example, do you know how christian monasteries work? There's A LOT of manual labour involved, menial labour to get humble, agricultural labour to get food, someone needs to move around furniture, there's carpentry abound, you get real good at kneeling and getting up again, all sorts of things. Can't a temple be like that to some degree? What if I want to play someone like Friar Tuck, who's a poacher and who can beat you silly with his staff? Or Salvatore from The Name of the Rose, who surely has a penalty in all his mental stats? Or someone like a Shaolin monk (different monk!) who grew up in a temple, and there was quite a lot of physical exercise involved? Or someone like a Mevlevi mystic, a.k.a. whirling dervish, who joined a tekke in early youth and routinely danced to exhaustion? Or a million other things that don't conform to WotC's preconceptions and generalisations about their 16 Backgrounds, but can give life to amazing, diverse characters?With all that in mind, is it really SO unfathomable that an acolyte could train in a physical stat? And even if none of that is prescribed, don't people ever do things NOT prescribed? If I'm an acolyte in a cloistered cell, can't I choose to do pushups before bed?That's why I argued earlier that ideally, backgrounds as a concept should encompass everything in your upbringing and environment, and shouldn't be limited to this one job you had. And the only way to make that work is leave the mechanical benefits up to the player (with DM approval of course).But different strokes for different folks.</blockquote>

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