Perhaps the backgrounds would be easier to use, if you got to choose two skills from a short list.
This is taking the thread off the topic of Backstories. That being said, I share your issue. As I request the same in the past, I'm just going to copy-paste :
Could we choose the skills given by backgrounds ?
Currently, each background gives a fixed pair of skills. However, it is often tremendously easy to imagine a sensible backstory for a character of a given background justifying perfectly certain skills which are not the ones given by default. One could consider associating to each background a list of skills, as is the case for classes, but that idea would immediately run into the same problem : a character's backstory that justifies perfectly certain skills which are not proposed. So my suggestion is rather to go straight to :
- pick a background,
- choose any 2 skills.
As a matter of fact, this customisation of backgrounds is suggested in the PHB.
Note : since Larian has started making the world react a bit to our Background (through the Background-dependent gain of Inspiration points), the above suggestion does not render the Background variable completely useless. However, it does allow players to roleplay their character as they want.
Coming back to the thread's topic a bit, I want to emphasise that Backstories and Background are very different things. Many Backstories can be associated with a given Background, and a given Backstory can work with multiple Backgrounds.
So I very much hope that Larian doesn't plan to use our chose Background to inform the Backstory of our Custom Character. Then again, it's largely because I hope that Larian will not impose us a Backstory, however sketched and vague.
