Post-Tashas Skills

[RSP]

I still maintain that demonstrating that you can become proficient in any skill you want with any class you want at character creation addresses that argument. Class skills define your class archetype; background skills allow you to defy that archetype.

Let’s say you wanted a Folk Hero Background for your Wizard. You could not then, RAW, also choose that your Wizard studied Nature instead of History, Medicine, Religion or Arcana. So, no, it’s not possible, RAW to become proficient in any skill you want with any class you want - you would have to sacrifice either your background or class.

I did not mean to imply that you do not have the ability to make well-developed characters. If that's what you took away from my post, I apologize for the miscommunication.

Noted.

The point I was trying to convey is that both background and class go into the development of a character's identity. It doesn't really matter how your character got a skill; the fact that your character got that skill contributes to their identity. Even mechanically, once you have them the game makes no distinction between skills you got from your class, skills you got from your background, and skills you got from any other source.

Let's suppose WotC did remove class skill lists. A Wizard who got Nature as one of their "class" skills wouldn't defy the Wizard archetype any more than would a Wizard who got that same skill through their background under the current rules. In fact, I would argue that the Wizard who had to get it through their background did more to defy the archetype, since the Wizard with no limits on their class skills effectively has no skill archetype to defy.

It does matter how your character got their skills, if we’re developing backgrounds and not just mechanically creating PCs. If your PC started out making their own way in the streets as a scout for the local thieves guild (Criminal background), but ended up, after a fortuitous set of circumstances put them in position to apprentice, as a Wizard; they wouldn’t also have been able to study Nature.

Your response as I understand it is “well don’t have them be a Criminal background, make a custom background that gives them Nature instead. Well, then, I guess my PC now wasn’t a scout for the local thieves guild but instead was studying Nature. So I had to give up the Background, and story, I wanted because Wizards can’t study Nature.