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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6133597" data-attributes="member: 1465">No, backgrounds are doing a great job at differentiating PC and NPC characters within the same culture.Currently there closest thing to differentiating cultures is races and subraces. However they cover also biological/genetic differences.Some of the backgrounds could be adapted for different cultures, maybe a "sage" is a bit different in two cultures, but the current idea is that the "sage background" tries to capture what is common among all sages of all cultures, and leaves it up to the DM to eventually make slight modification. Take the current "knight background" and try to imagine it being used to represent a Samurai (I know that in the next packet both Knight and Samurai will be Fighter subclasses) instead of a medieval european knight, and see that in fact it still works pretty well!I think that the term "background" confused a lot of people. There were even people suggesting there should be an "oriental background", what is that supposed to mean? :/ How can you possibly lump all civilians of an oriental land into the same set of features? As I mentioned before, this might work only in selected cases such as barbarians, but only if you are using such background to represent a rather horde-like group of barbarians (e.g. all being hunter-gatherers, or pillagers), not so much if you are trying to depict a whole barbarian society.</blockquote>