True. Because there are so many rogues where some God simply says 'you are a rogue now.' Or some young merchant takes up crime and decides, for fun, that they will invent a new language, that coincidentally happens to be the same used by every rogues' guild everywhere, even those who are enemies of each other.
The mental gymnastics needed to have it make any sense whatsoever are pretty major.
But that’s the thing. This is not an issue with the Rogue class or with the Criminal background. The mental gymnastics are needed because of Thieves’ Cant being a globally used cypher that somehow nobody who knows it is ever convinced/coerced/seduced/magically charmed into revealing to an interested outsider. That’s the unbelievable part. That a character might know Thieves’ Cant without being a thief in good standing with crime bosses everywhere is a lot easier to explain.
The bottom line is that, mental gymnastics or no, the Criminal background doesn’t inherently overlap very much with the Rogue class and in fact complements it - making a rogue character who takes this background a better rogue (if that rogue is one with a larcenous bent).
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I had a player try to explain to me that based on his background as a Sage, and a High Elf, he had spent a hundred years in a library growing up, and now knew everything there was to know about every single Undead in any source book, and how nicely that jived with his choice as a Necromancer. I laughed and laughed, and told him "no".
Backgrounds help with a char's backstory (and I try to integrate char's backstories into the campaign), but there are limitations, severe limitations, on just how much impact backgrounds have beyond the published features.
It’s another game conceit. Just because a bookish centenarian elf could in theory have been researching a certain subject all his life, doesn’t mean you just get to say that he did to reap an in-game benefit that isn’t specifically in the rules. It’s the same with literally anything a character from a long-lived race could have been practicing since before his human contemporary’s great grandfather was out of diapers: we accept that - for whatever reason - that character’s still just a 1st level [insert class here] with a 1st level proficiency bonus and only 1st level class abilities and similarly generated stats as any other character, and so on. Because that’s fair, and doesn’t make long-lived races the best at just about everything.
But that’s the thing. This is not an issue with the Rogue class or with the Criminal background. The mental gymnastics are needed because of Thieves’ Cant being a globally used cypher that somehow nobody who knows it is ever convinced/coerced/seduced/magically charmed into revealing to an interested outsider. That’s the unbelievable part. That a character might know Thieves’ Cant without being a thief in good standing with crime bosses everywhere is a lot easier to explain.
The bottom line is that, mental gymnastics or no, the Criminal background doesn’t inherently overlap very much with the Rogue class and in fact complements it - making a rogue character who takes this background a better rogue (if that rogue is one with a larcenous bent).
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I had a player try to explain to me that based on his background as a Sage, and a High Elf, he had spent a hundred years in a library growing up, and now knew everything there was to know about every single Undead in any source book, and how nicely that jived with his choice as a Necromancer. I laughed and laughed, and told him "no".
Backgrounds help with a char's backstory (and I try to integrate char's backstories into the campaign), but there are limitations, severe limitations, on just how much impact backgrounds have beyond the published features.
It’s another game conceit. Just because a bookish centenarian elf could in theory have been researching a certain subject all his life, doesn’t mean you just get to say that he did to reap an in-game benefit that isn’t specifically in the rules. It’s the same with literally anything a character from a long-lived race could have been practicing since before his human contemporary’s great grandfather was out of diapers: we accept that - for whatever reason - that character’s still just a 1st level [insert class here] with a 1st level proficiency bonus and only 1st level class abilities and similarly generated stats as any other character, and so on. Because that’s fair, and doesn’t make long-lived races the best at just about everything.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].