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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 6296860" data-attributes="member: 6677017">I skipped a few pages here, but I want to chime in with my support for "acolyte" rather than "priest."The main reason is that I like backgrounds as something that could point at, but not require, actually being established in your life/career.What about the young hero who sets off adventuring when he is an apprentice blacksmith (for instance)? Fantasy fiction is full of heroes who aren't already established professionals. It is, in fact the norm.When backgrounds imply you were already established in life prior to taking up adventuring, they urge a style that I really dislike. Adventurers are much more likely, at least as I see it, to be people who started off adventuring instead of finishing formal training to become an established member of society, rather than after. Rarely are adventures a group of merchants, innkeepers, sages, and others who decide at some point in their adult life to head out in search of fame and fortune. They are much more likely to be teenagers thrust unwittingly into a life of adventure.So I prefer if background can allow either interpretation. If you are a priest, then you once were an acolyte, since it is a normal path along the way. But if you are an acolyte you didn't necessarily become a priest. Maybe you got disillusioned and become a rogue. Or maybe your background was "street urchin" but you got religion and became a priest (perhaps a cleric).Backgrounds ought to say who you were before you became established, so that you can say that a character was or was not established in the direction the background would have pointed.</blockquote>

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