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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 4498249" data-attributes="member: 99">I'll answer it:  Because the variety of skills and their proficiency at them could vary considerably from character to character and the ability to write an extensive (which is not to say "good") character background shouldn't necessarily translate into a mechanical advantage in the game.One player may indicate that his character was the only son of a poor farmer who simply did menial tasks on the farm until the day that his family was slaughtered by Orcs and he took up the life of an adventurer to seek revenge.  Another player may indicate that her character lived in a major metropolitan center, worked a large variety of jobs as a youth and is a veritable Jaqueline of All Trades.For the first character, the applicability of his skills as indicated by his background will be rare.  For the second, she may have altered the entire flavor of the campaign to the point that "infrequently" is a completely inaccurate descriptor of how often her skillset is applicable.  This situation is bad enough if the players are doing it by accident.  If they are actively trying to game this non-system then you could have a real problem.Could this be addressed by simple adjudication by the GM?  Most certainly.  But then again, so could pretty much everything.  The point of having systems and sub-systems in the game is so that not everything has to come down to a judgement call by the GM.  He has enough to worry about already.In 3.x this was dealt with by the spending of finite resources (skill points and feats) to improve skills so that one PC didn't have an unfair advantage over another.  It's absolutely true that the simple farm-boy who became a Fighter after his family was killed is going to have a far narrower skillset than the Jack of All Trades type Rogue who grew up in the city simply due to the disparity in skill points.  But at least there is a theoretical trade off in other abilities to compensate for that.I'm planning to return to the model of spending a finite resource (allowing them to pick two, but only two, profession/crafting skills) to gain trade and hobby skills to add interest and flavor to my game.  But in my case I'm getting what I consider to be the best of both worlds.  The player determines the skills without being bound by a specific list.  And because I'm adding the trade and hobby skills onto the system rather than substituting them for other skills, the PC's don't sacrifice any effectiveness in other areas.For the record, I'm also open to the PC's developing additional skills over the course of the campaign.  If a player wishes to describe their PC becoming buddies with a local musician and asking them to teach his character how to play the lute, I'm fine with eventually (over the course of some period of time and game sessions) saying, "Go ahead and add Lute as one of your Trained skills."Anything that will help the players become more immersed and engaged with the game world and campaign is worth a bit of time and effort and this certainly falls into that category as far as I'm concerned.</blockquote>

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