Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6296863" data-attributes="member: 2067">Is your view is that a character's background should give them a thing they can do on their downtime, and they can also do other things on their downtime if you want?Seems like kind of a pointless distinction, then. If downtime actions are always open to anyone who wants to do them (provided they have the time), what does it matter if it's tied to a background or not? It doesn't matter what your background is, anyone can perform weddings/funerals/birth rites, or manage a farm, or craft a clockwork wonder, or make a weapon, or brew a potion, or whatever...clearly, your background can point you in a direction, but its not like you need any prerequisite box on your character sheet filled out to go around doing weddings for people in the village, if that's what you want to do. Mechanically, all that might mean is that you don't make much coin doing it.I was thinking more that these are separate moving parts: you choose the "Acolyte" background if you're playing with backgrounds, and the "Priest" profession if you're playing with downtime mechanics, and you have both the basic skills of one raised in the church and you can dedicate your downtime to doing priestly things like weddings. That way, your current profession need not match your past skill set, but it can. If all downtime actions are NOT always open to anyone who wants to do them (meaning, it takes some prerequisite other than time to do a particular action -- only a Priest can perform religious rites during their downtime, only a Smith can make metal items during their downtime, etc.), then putting your downtime options in your background precludes the kind of story changes I was talking about (someone who had an  Acolyte background could only be a Priest as a profession, and could not be a blacksmith, which is linked to some other background, such as Laborer or Commoner). It seems like we're both agreed that this isn't a great result.Or is the idea that you can either do something related to your background during your downtime, or do nothing? Because then it seems obvious that this is the second option, essentially -- you have a "useuless" background if your story doesn't make use of the specific thing your background lets you do. If we're going with the first possibility, that all downtime actions are open to anyone, then there's no real point in housing downtime actions within the background because it doesn't really matter anyway -- anyone can do whatever. Makes more sense to house these options in a way that doesn't imply that only Priest-background characters can do weddings. Which then reaffirms that background are only historical elements, not ongoing character elements. They give base abilities, not current options. If we're going with some flavor of the second possibility, that certain downtime actions are only available to those with a specific "profession," then putting those professions in with backgrounds limits the potential to tell stories about questioning Acolytes and fallen Nobles and Commoners who rise above their station. If we wanted to give these characters useful options, we'd have to allow them to "swap professions" anyway, so why wed these things to backgrounds if they're not really part of the background mechanics? I dunno, this is a lot of words about spitballing stuff. But I don't see a lot of value in marrying a character's profession to their background -- these are distinct character elements in my mind, so it makes sense to choose BOTH.</blockquote>

Verification