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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CapnZapp" data-source="post: 7107272" data-attributes="member: 12731">At least you're stuck with the Background you chose. With the present system you can often pick a Background you like (or one close to it) and STILL ignore your class list.I can only vouch for the PHB Backgrounds. It's not as if my players bring some obscure book and demand it to be allowed. So I'd like to focus on the PHB options at least initially.And Sailor is the only Background with Perception. But this is one of the least desirable background - very few adventures take place at sea (or even in port cities, up rivers etc).This might have been a problem if one of the most generic least-restrictive backgrounds that everybody can identify with - like Folk Hero - gave out the two best skills in the game. But I don't see a (huge) problem, at least not now. Let's not forget that we're "only" talking skills here. This is nowhere near, say, the situation where you in 3E "had to" pick a god based on its domains (or portfolio or whatever it was called). There you could talk about "domain shopping", since domain abilities and domain selections really affected your power as a character.In my case, you either pick a "nature guy" if you absolutely need Perception proficiency, or you pick Bard or Rogue. Or you can play, say an Half-Elf*. Or, you can persuade your DM that Perception is a racial skill for Elves and pick an Int 12 Elf.*) not really on topic here but in my "Races Redux" half-elves gain two racial skills, so some DMs won't allow Perception here...See? Not such a huge restriction after all, eh? But it is at least still a restriction. Not allowing every human Fighter or dwarf Wizard to pick Perception is IMHO a much more interesting restriction all things considered.And even then a variant Human can start the game with Skilled feat. And then we are forgetting where we started - the dwarf can still be a Sailor, which doesn't need to be as ridicoulous as it sounds... perhaps the Wizard is a former galley slave of the duergar, which lives in a city on the shores of a vast underground lake...So let's not blow the "background shopping" out of proportion <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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