Monstrous Menagerie II: Hordes & Heroes has a launch date! Mark your calendars for November 12th, 2024. 300+ more monsters for your D&D 2024, or Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition games, plus new horde rules and rules for heroic monsters who level up alongside you--whether they be allies, companions, or foes! Click here to follow on Kickstarter!
Backgrounds are for player characters. NPCs get whatever stats and abilities the DM thinks is appropriate, which for NPCs specifically labelled as "untrained" might be no proficiencies at all.
Untrained characters might get some proficiencies for verisimilitude's sake, but nothing useful on...
It's also a choice made by individuals to seek employment at a company that reliably screws over its workers every. single. damn. year. No excuses for Hasbro leadership, but they wouldn't be able to get away with this if workers didn't put up with it. There are plenty of good companies to work...
My impression is that the reason Larian isn't making BG4 is that they have more fun working on Divinity games. I don't think there's anything WotC could do to change that.
AKA: "martials can't do cool things because realism"
I'm pretty sure it's intentional in the rules that a fighter can grapple an ogre and drag it around. A grappled creature isn't a sack of potatos, it's a creature that's moving by itself, and a skilled wrestler can force it to move in the...
I dunno, the way it is worded it sound like the casting might have to happen on the same turn as the damage for the ability to trigger. There is a difference between "cast" and "have cast". It's hard to say if this is an intentional change or just poor writing.
I think it's going to depend a lot on your players' personalites if they accept simply being told the result of an encounter. Some may find this interesting and make them want to explore the surrounding story, others will see it as a gross violation of player agency.