It just feels like you want to artificially limit characters out of a knee-jerk reaction, rather than spend a minute or two at most coming up with a decent reason to let their background shine. Which is not, IMO, a very cool thing for a GM to do. It turns the game into "mother may I" and makes the players second-guess their every decision since they'll never know what you arbitrarily decide isn't "logical."
I'm not sure what your point is. Are you saying the PCs' background features don't apply when they aren't from the setting?
It feels to me like you put too high a priority on the letter of the rules for something that is not a supernatural ability and little to none on in-world logic. My reasoning is never arbitrary, my players are happy with the way I run my games and they tell me so on a regular basis.
I don't know if you've ever played or run Ravenloft. He's saying that according to the module, they don't know anything about Barovia and no one knows them.
Assume your created persona? Yes, any time.
Players can care about their characters' backgrounds as much or as little as they like. The question is whether those backgrounds are there merely as lore to help the player roleplay the character and that may or may not ever become relevant in play at some point (my preference) or whether they have actual mechanical heft like species and class along with a built-in expectation that the DM will provide opportunities for this heft to make a difference (not my preference).
I'm putting a high priority on players enjoying their characters, and arbitrarily shutting down their actual abilities isn't fun, especially when it literally takes less than a minute to come up with an extremely logical reason why it would work just fine.It feels to me like you put too high a priority on the letter of the rules for something that is not a supernatural ability and little to none on in-world logic. My reasoning is never arbitrary, my players are happy with the way I run my games and they tell me so on a regular basis.
I may not be the DM for you but then again, I don't want rules lawyers in my game so there you go.
Depends on what those features are and whether they are tied to the setting. If you're a criminal with contacts in the underworld in various cities, that's setting-tied*. If you're a titled noble with a small castle, lands, and a reputation, that's setting-tied*. If you're an ex-soldier with contacts in the Roman Legions, that's not just setting-tied but nation-tied.
Which is why background features like this are problematic if you don't want to change the setting or bend plausibility to accommodate them. I'd rather not bother with them mechanically at all if that's the case.
There are a great many times when a player's background feature would be absolutely bonkers to apply. Not from the setting when the setting is one so difficult to scces/escape like ravenloft is quite possibly the most obvious example. Ravenloft keeps getting used as the example because it's such an obvious unquestionable example with so many aspects supporting the exclusion.
