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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 9432363" data-attributes="member: 6779196">That’s why I said “thematically tied to your upbringing” instead of “mechanically tied to your background.” In the UA version where custom backgrounds were the default, all these boosts were functionally floating, so mechanically speaking they weren’t really tied to anything besides the character creation rules. But narratively they had to come from somewhere - how did you get so strong, or so charming? Where did you learn to speak Elvish? Where did you learn to play the pan flute? Where did you learn to cook? Those things all make sense to have come from your upbringing, so custom backgrounds as the default makes it clear where characters learned these abilities, while saying everyone’s background is ultimately unique.This has been gone over a million times, I’m sure you can find an old thread if you care to read the answers to these questions. I don’t want to get this thread locked, so I’m not going to get into it here.I agree that having fixed ability scores tied to background has classist implications, which is part of why I don’t like that they changed them to be fixed in the new PHB and shunted the background customization rules off to the DMG instead of having them be custom by default like they were in the UA. Custom backgrounds as the default is the thing I voted in favor of, but they changed it without consulting the broader playerbase about it, and I don’t like that.I do disagree that classism is worse than racism. They are intersecting prejudices, you can’t really pull one apart from the other, they have to be addressed together. But again, this isn’t the place for that discussion.We still have species with different capabilities, it’s just ability score adjustments that were the problem, because they are too tightly linked with what classes a character can take (and be any good at, anyway). Again, let’s not rehash this here and get another thread locked about it.</blockquote>

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