This is the lowest run of optimal play, but sure

Yep, that one I agree with, though I've tinkered with it and the current page is absolutely bursting at the seams, so without doing something interesting on the layout end there's no way to squeeze another sentence in there.

It should be in the PH for BGs, most assuredly.

The UA presentation was basically the correct way to do it if you're keeping them this brief, for my money.

Present how you build one, then give examples.

This is a pretty massive problem and forces you to choose between roleplaying/story choices and mechanically sound choices. Always a recipe for friction and barriers to fun.

Your starting increase to your ability scores comes from your Background, which gives you a choice of a specific three scores.

This means if you want to make an optimal choice for your class, you're limited in which BGs you can take. Ex: You can't play a Soldier BG Wizard and increase Int.

I mean, good, as long as your table does something about the ability scores to support that

Counting digital supplements and Eberron

I would have like a middle ground between 2014 and 2024 Backgrounds as my ideal, but that's what we're doing at Avantris, so, I'll just do my thing 😂

In the DMG

I'm sympathetic to most of the issues given the realities of page space. Starting abilities scores are a key fucking bone of the system though, and that deserved better treatment.

Presenting buckets of options alone is a bad direction and I'm glad they didn't do that, I just wish the background packages had a little more texture to them and didn't go straight back to the issue of locking your starting ability score increases to a single character building axis

It is in the vast majority of ways a big step forward. There are a couple misses, though, and ability scores locked to backgrounds is one of them

I'm fine with presenting defaults for things like that, essentially sample packages of the kinds of things you can do.

The problem is not making it explicit right up front that you can change those selections, and only presenting it as a tacked on option in the DMG.

🤔 guests is an interesting question

“So. You messed up and turned to the Dark Side.”

Genuinely delighted by this and everything surrounding it