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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6297053" data-attributes="member: 1465">It can mean both things. The designers at WotC have explicitly talked about D&D backgrounds both ways. But the proficiency rules (i.e. increasing bonus) they actually designed match more with background as "meanwhile" than with background as "before". The specific backgrounds we've seen in the playtest rules can be easily interpreted both ways. This is very good, because a lot of gamers assume that adventurers do adventures all the time, and they play campaigns which are endless streams of adventuring quests and event: for them it maybe makes more sense to have a "before". But others prefer characters who lead normal lives plus sparse adventures, and backgrounds as "meanwhile" make a lot of sense then.The downtime system is IMO meants to represent a more active management of the time between adventures, such as "you have this amount of time, what do you do?", and then use the system proactively i.e. make a decision "I want to obtain this benefit". Backgrounds are meant to... well.. "blend in the background" <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=":)" /> It's not something to worry about specifying exactly what you're doing. You can assume you're doing that all the time you're not doing something more specific (e.g. adventures).It also has to be kept in mind that originally background were introduced as a mechanic to deliver skills outside classes, because a lot of players were tired of the 3e way of virtually requiring to be a certain class in order to learn a skill. That's the real reason they were done in 5e, not because players wanted a mechanic to represent what you were doing before picking up an adventuring life or what you're doing as a job. The narrative interpretation came later, but it's very useful especially for players more interested in description than mechanics IMHO.Well, my opinion is that backgrounds are going to be more useful for me to represent a PC's role in society, because generally speaking I like campaigns where quests may overlap and weave together continuously but most of the effective time is spent living in the world, but I do not generally want to specify the details. When I want to do that, I'll use the downtime system for specific actions.So it's totally ok for me that someone has a background "Blacksmith" and that's how she makes a living and develops her skills continuously, and then sometimes she exploits a chunk of downtime to craft a masterwork weapon.Honestly, I am not interested in using a system to represent the past, especially if such system grants something that still increases all the time.</blockquote>

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