Are Traits Weaksauce? (Social Favored Terrain)

[KidSnide]

We saw five background in the May playtest, and presumably we’ll see more soon. I think the skills work fine. I mean, backgrounds don’t add a lot to skills (other than some narrative coherence and faster character generation), but skills are known technology. Yes, WotC can improve on 3.x and 4e skills, but it will be fine-tuning, not a massive quantum leap in game design.

Traits are the “new” part of backgrounds. I like the traits we’ve seen so far. Trade, Researcher, Endurance, Temple Services and Knight’s Station are all reasonable benefits associated with their respective backgrounds. But they don’t do a lot. They tie a character to the world - a valuable part of a background - but they just don’t come up that often. Effectively, they operate like flavor text, not like a significant part of a character’s abilities. I don’t want to see them go away, but they just don’t do enough.

I want to see traits have a real impact in the interaction phase of the game. If a character’s background is appropriate to a situation, then that character should have a significant mechanical advantage in that situation. Sure, the Cha 18 Bard is more charismatic and persuasive than the Cha 13 Barbarian in general, but there should be strong mechanical support if the Barbarian (and not the Bard) wants to persuade a tribe of savages to change the target of their raids. If traits can’t provide mechanical support to the concept of “this is where my character is from, so it’s my turn to take the lead in interacting with the locals”, then they have failed in their task.

I think backgrounds should include some type of “favored social terrain” bonus (but maybe not with that term). In other words, commoners should have a significant advantage with “ordinary people”, knights and soldiers should have a significant advantage with guards and other military types, and sages and priests should have a significant advantage with knowledgeable scholarly types. This type of bonus shouldn’t dominate skills and ability scores, but it should be enough to allow a socially mediocre character to significantly contribute when their character is in a situation that matches his or her background. The mechanics should back up that character's familiarity with that part of the game world.

Thoughts?

-KS

 

[Tuft]

After 4E failing for us, my GM has been running his Feng Shuei-derived homebrew.

He uses a simple way of spreading the social play around in that *each and every skill* can be used as for a social check in the appropriate context. You can use your shoot skill when talking to military personnel or gun nerds, melee skill when talking to martial artists, maneuver skill when talking to acrobats, etc. The two social skills, charm and impress, can be used in all contexts, but with different interaction flavour.

For example, in a sci-fi setting, when we needed to gain entry to a particular building, one character noted that the planetary military had an office in the same building. He reasoned that there ought to be at least one member of that office's staff that was a member of the lokal gun club. So he went out to the shooting range to make friends, using his Shoot skill.

In my personal opinion, having each skill have an explicit and clearly defined social element works better than "doing push-ups to impress the duke", and this is after trying both approaches...

 

[Stormonu]

Skills are the red-headed stepchildren of D&D; the skill system has always been a tack-on to the game and doesn't flow as elegantly as those games that are skill-based instead of class-based.

Unfortunately, I haven't seen the 5E skill system in use; my playtest only revolved around the actual Caves and was only about 2 encounters long before the party got wiped. However, looking at the traits, I don't see anything impressive about them. Especially not in the playtest setting.

Until I can reconvene my playtest group to run something like U1-U3 (which has a good portion of town-based encounters), I don't think I'll see much use out of traits and whether they're of much use.

 

[GX.Sigma]

I don't like the traits as they were in the initial doc. They're too automatic. They should be more of a cue for the DM, rather than "you get free healing and rest, all the time."

 

[Raith5]

I don't like the traits as they were in the initial doc. They're too automatic. They should be more of a cue for the DM, rather than "you get free healing and rest, all the time."

I agree with this, even though I like overt attempts to bring the PC into the gaming world. It also seems logical that an acolyte and a high priest would have different access to temple services.

A good DM in any edition would take the cue that a priest of X would have some access to the temple services of that deity.

That said I agree with the OP and idea of “favored social terrain” bonus with like minded NPCs - maybe it should just grant advantage.

 

[Umbran]

They tie a character to the world - a valuable part of a background - but they just don’t come up that often.

How often they come up will depend upon what kind of game you play. If you're playing hack-n-slash dungeon crawling, where you don't interact much with the social background of the world, then no, they won't come up much. In a game with different focus (say, playing with more connection to political intrigue in an urban setting), they may come up all the time.

 

[Li Shenron]

Traits are the “new” part of backgrounds. I like the traits we’ve seen so far. Trade, Researcher, Endurance, Temple Services and Knight’s Station are all reasonable benefits associated with their respective backgrounds. But they don’t do a lot. They tie a character to the world - a valuable part of a background - but they just don’t come up that often. Effectively, they operate like flavor text, not like a significant part of a character’s abilities. I don’t want to see them go away, but they just don’t do enough.

I disagree. If you play in a whole campaign then those traits are definitely going to come up. The fact that they don't come up every session but only once in a while actually makes them more interesting for my tastes compared to something that's always used. But OTOH if the group plays just a series of endless adventures with no downtime or gap, then Traits can probably be ignored.

I would absolutely hate to see Traits become another "must be useful in combat" (although this is not what you mean) ability. If a group doesn't like downtime, travel management, social interaction (which is far more general than using the interaction pillar just to go forward or get benefits for each specific quest, which I think is more like what you mean) and other long-term "background" options for a campaign, then why should the "background" subset necessarily be changed for them? Nobody is going to change the combat abilities to provide non-combat benefits for a group that plays a campaign with no combat... Different rules subset serve different purposes, and that is good.

I want to see traits have a real impact in the interaction phase of the game. If a character’s background is appropriate to a situation, then that character should have a significant mechanical advantage in that situation. Sure, the Cha 18 Bard is more charismatic and persuasive than the Cha 13 Barbarian in general, but there should be strong mechanical support if the Barbarian (and not the Bard) wants to persuade a tribe of savages to change the target of their raids. If traits can’t provide mechanical support to the concept of “this is where my character is from, so it’s my turn to take the lead in interacting with the locals”, then they have failed in their task.

As I hinted already, I don't think the Background is conceived to support the interaction phase when this is meant only as specific situations that will be solved mechanically (i.e. rolling) to go further in the current adventure. Of course part of the background is skill bonuses, which are mechanical, but at the same time it is good that the Traits are exactly non-mechanical, because that makes them IMHO more interestingly open-ended. At least I'm the kind of DM that wants this type of things in the game.

So overall I personally think the task is different from what you have in mind.

Incidentally, backgrounds are not supposed to represent cultures, but daily activities in a PC's life when she's not adventuring. They describe the "normal" life and work of characters, not their culture.

Think of the PCs going to adventures as they were people drafted into the army and going on missions (although some PCs may do this all the time): while you're flying on the helicopter to your destination, your comrades ask you "what do you do, back there in Alabama?". They are asking you about your Background, and you may answer that you're a student, a scientist, a clerk or even a spoiled brat doing nothing and spending his family money. But you will never answer "I'm an Asian", "I'm a Russian" or "I'm a Jew". The Barbarian is a little bit on the edge but only if you think barbarians are all doing the same thing, otherwise it would be much much better not to have a barbarian background at all. Certainly not an "oriental" background... how could you even select three skills and one trait without bordering on racism?

I think backgrounds should include some type of “favored social terrain” bonus (but maybe not with that term). In other words, commoners should have a significant advantage with “ordinary people”, knights and soldiers should have a significant advantage with guards and other military types, and sages and priests should have a significant advantage with knowledgeable scholarly types.

Now that's definitely reasonable. It's a good idea BUT it has one risk: that of actually codifying a benefit that you should already have!

Let's go back to the barbarian persuading the savage tribe. Do we really need a Trait to tell us "you have +X bonus skill on social interactions with other savage people" when this could have been just a circumstance bonus that the DM grants if you ask her? A particularly stubborn and rules-lawyer DM would refuse the bonus, but IMHO a reasonable DM should immediately recognize that this is a circumstance that should be valid for everyone interacting with someone else with which they share strong cultural basis.

Turn this into a Trait, and what you get is that actually you now have to pick the Trait to have something you could have been entitled to anyway, and now you can't pick another less obvious Trait.

Of course you can make similar arguments about any Traits probably... but at least IMHO some Traits are much less obvious and may not necessarily apply to all characters with the same concepts (such as Knight's Station applied to a character with the Knight background but not necessarily to all characters who happen to be technically knights but decided to pick another Background).

 

[Yora]

How often they come up will depend upon what kind of game you play. If you're playing hack-n-slash dungeon crawling, where you don't interact much with the social background of the world, then no, they won't come up much. In a game with different focus (say, playing with more connection to political intrigue in an urban setting), they may come up all the time.

I actually don't care that much about skill bonuses, because that's something you can customize manually. It's the traits that really make backgrounds interesting.

Like Allegiance, Backgrounds have a great difference to your characters background story, in that you put them down on fields on your character sheet.
Idealy, it should not matter. But in practice, it does. Even with people who are all into complex roleplaying, when you play D&D 3rd Edition and encounter an obstacle with no obvious solution, most people will go over their character sheet to look if there is anything that might be useful.
And when you see "Background: Priest", you remember "wait a minute! Why don't we go to the temple and I ask them for assistance?" You could do that without backgrounds, but having it written on your character sheet as one of your characters special abilities that you can ask the temple for assistance does make a real difference.

 

[Serendipity]

I think they're just about right - I don't really want traits to have a larger mechanical footprint.
Of course, I say that about pretty much everything. Obviously, someone who wants a more mechanics oriented game (or not) may have different wants.

 

[MatthewJHanson]

I like the overall idea, but I have a couple concerns.

First is that most of them are very DM/adventure dependent on how useful they are. I played the knight through Caves of Chaos, and never really got a chance to use Knight's station.

Also they can be a little vague. I find researcher to be the most difficult in this sense. Does this allow you to find out any information? As a DM I'd put some limits on it, but I'm not sure quite what the intent is.