Recent content by Hriston

Yolanda Sánchez Figueroa, mayor of Cotija, Mexico, was killed in an ambush Monday.

I wasn't including those species in the "major peoples of the Material Plane," by which I meant elves, dwarves, humans, and halflings, which I thought would be clear from context, my bad. It's unclear in my mind, for instance, how long goblins live. They could be nearly as immortal as elves or...

My advice to read Three Hearts and Three Lions wasn't meant as a refutation of the (+) thread's premise. (I see @Jolly Ruby was the first to mention the novel in this thread.) I think it's plausible or even likely the knight-errant of chivalric romance could have been influenced to some extent...

Compared to the other major peoples of the Material Plane, humans are... Short-lived. Their lifespans are slightly shorter than those of halflings, much shorter than those of dwarves, and like the blink of an eye when compared to the (near) immortality of elves, which is related to...

Read Three Hearts and Three Lions (1961) by Poul Anderson. It's a modern medieval fantasy take on the paladin and is THE source for the paladin class in D&D along with some other D&D-isms. It's also in Appendix N.

No one, not even the designers, is trying to override how you approach D&D.

You're speaking as though the 2014 background features are outside the "core" design of D&D, yet they're published in the PHB, one of the core rulebooks. They are part of how D&D is designed. People who don't play like you do aren't going against D&D's core.

Not "always", just when the feature's actually used does it work. If it's not a secret that the player's feature is offline, then why is the player trying to use it? Sounds dysfunctional. Why am I the only person who's ever been to Krynn from wherever it is I'm from?

I edited this for clarity since you seem to have taken a different meaning than I intended. Let's just say there's a pretty large difference between requesting clarification to increase understanding and posting a kneejerk reaction based on a lack thereof.

I agree the existence of such a sailor would be improbable. Luckily, the existence of Ship's Passage as a background feature does not imply the existence of such a sailor!

I'm not sure what part of what I said you're disagreeing with, but okay.

How is this different from the situation normally faced by adventurers without the relevant background feature? Because "Ravenloft" has been referenced in this thread as if its existence as an RPG setting is some kind of monolithic refutation of the validity of the 2014 background features...

Sure, but that isn't what was being discussed. A player dominating the table by constantly and repeatedly making action declarations that stipulate their PC knows this or that person in every place in which the party finds themselves, as has been conjectured in this thread, is not behaving...

No, sorry if I wasn't being clear, but that's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is nonsensical is the fiction that the PC knows someone in every possible place or, coincidentally, in every place they visit which you extrapolate from the, to my mind, sensible fiction that the PC knows...

I agree with all of this. One way it might be related to what I wrote is constraining the rule might be seen as a way of constraining the potential fiction.