D&D (2024) 2024 Player's Handbook Reveal: Feats/Backgrounds/Species

[Belen]

PC One was born a half-orc. While he is stronger than the average wizard, he is not as smart. PC Two was born a high elf. Therefore, he knows more arcana than the half-orc.

For some, this second example is a representation of racist ideas that are sometimes reflected in modern society. Hence, it's more inflammatory.

It is a fantasy setting where species also had cultural background. Orcs were largely tribal while elves live a really long time, come from a fey background, and grow up with magic as part of their culture.

All they are really doing with the new backgrounds are reducing dynamic choice and shoving it all into background. It will make it easier to build a character because you have fewer choices to make.

Species is now just a bag of traits and goodies and background is forced to carry all the important choices in character creation. I liked the previous method that made species one of the pillars of character creation. I think they have really just made it far less important.

 

[CreamCloud0]

My suggestion decreases class influence on character creation.

In which of these does class have more influence?
1. You may pick any background with any class freely without mechanical repercussions.
2. To avoid mechanical repercussions, you must limit which background you pick to those that favor the ability scores your class needs.

It should be clear that the first one class has less influence. So I agree with your goal, and moving class-related mechanics (like ability score matching) to class so it doesn't influence your other choices is an important part of meeting that goal.

i thing you're confusing influence over the rest of the character versus their weight of mechanics, i'm discussing the latter, i feel like this is only possible in your example for the background to be freely picked without repercussions as a result of removing the ASIs from background and giving them to class is my point though, your class now controls that extra few percent of determining your build by the ASI it provides, i want backgrounds and species to be freely pickable but i dont want them to be that as a result of them purely existing as ribbon features, i want them to have meaningful impact on a character's build but preferrably not in a way that limits creativity for optimisation choices.

BTW, I really do agree with that goal - one of my pet peeves is how little design space is given to race in the 2014 PHB. They are kept so "eh" that there's no room for a race to be more powerful. Centaurs that are large in the MM are only medium-sized Pony People as a playable race, because they can't deal with a large creature. Think of all of the outcry about flying races, when if there was a still opportunity cost of losing out on all the goodies from a powerful race it wouldn't be as big a deal.

 

[Veltharis ap Rylix]

so seeing as background is such a longwinded extensive process including multiple factors and experiences it makes less sense that it would be locked into specific stat increases

And in general I agree. I would have been fine with keeping floating ASI.

But WotC seemingly views floating ASI as the implied equivalent of making ASI class-locked instead - which makes sense on some level, given that there are natural incentives to using them to boost whatever your character build is good at and any power gamer will do so by default.

The point of the bonus ASIs at character creation, apart from giving people who roll stats a small degree of control, is to help promote character build diversity. If everyone is just putting them where their class says they should, even if it's not strictly mandatory, then they're not serving that purpose.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

correct.

if I want to play an STR based ranger, IE, I cannot play a guide background or whatever as those ASI options are DEX, CON and WIS.
So as an STR based character, I start with 15 instead of 17 in STR, or I play as you say a former soldier that decided to be a guide after boot camp was over.

Well you can…but I hear you

 

[Belen]

Does it make the work more or less comprehensible?

It depends. I think less in most cases. You cannot say someone is diabetic anymore. You have to say person with diabetes. It often means adding a lot of extra text to get to the point. You also have to know when to break the rules. For instance, the deaf community prefer the deaf label as it is part of their culture and many get offended if you say "person with a hearing disability."

You need someone with specialized knowledge to navigate many of these issues.

 

[Epic Meepo]

It sounds like they hired sensitivity readers. I use them a lot in scientific publishing right now.

Just to be clear, in the post you quoted, I said I don't if it's true that sensitivity readers had anything to do with renaming the backgrounds. I was using an earlier post which made that hypothesis as a segue, because I wanted to talk about background names.

My main point was that I find the disassociated name of the wayfarer background nonsensical. (Also, that name choice can cause confusion, as noted by someone upthread who speaks English as a second language and doesn't understand why wayfarer is called wayfarer.)

The reason for the name change doesn't really matter for me. The fact that the new name of the background has nothing to do with living on the streets, learning how to use thieves' tools, and getting by on luck (three of the core concepts of background) is what I find irritating.

 

[Staffan]

I have no idea if that's true, but a similar narrative would explain why "urchins" are "wayfarers" now. That's another one that really annoys me, because "wayfarer" just means "someone who travels a lot, usually on foot." There is no connotation of growing up and the streets and learning to use thieves' tools, both of which we've been told are baked into the "wayfarer" background. That background isn't describing a wayfarer, it's describing an urchin.

Yeah, "Wayfarer" sounds a lot more like a traveler-type of person, like a Roma, a cowboy, or a traveling tinkerer.

 

[TwoSix]

Ah. See, I think both of those deserve robust mechanics.

They can have robust mechanics, but for modern D&D, they need to be non-synergistic with class abilities.

If class is strongly influencing race choice, or vice versa, we're moving out of modern D&D "neotrad" space and into OSR space.

 

[Belen]

correct.

if I want to play an STR based ranger, IE, I cannot play a guide background or whatever as those ASI options are DEX, CON and WIS.
So as an STR based character, I start with 15 instead of 17 in STR, or I play as you say a former soldier that decided to be a guide after boot camp was over.

This is going to be the reaction of a lot of players.

It will just be an immediate house rule if I use 5.5. They have added additional complexity that I am not sure I need at the table.

For backgrounds, I really dislike Origin Feats. Instead of fixing underpowered feats, they just made them Origin Feats because they did not feel like fixing them all to a baseline and they wanted to prevent players from getting overpowered feats until 4th level.

This means that EVERY background will need to be custom for my games.

Also, they HAD to be gamist when developing the backgrounds because they needed to provide for all the combo options which further kill the background as an element to add to RP.

In order to fix backgrounds, I need to remove ASI and make the feat a floating feat. I would have to stick with floating Origin Feats or just fix all the Origin feats to be inline with the other non-epic feats.

 

[Minigiant]

Said reasons (that we're not allowed to talk about no matter how relevant they are to the topic at hand) have nothing to do with mechanics and power gaming, from which the headaches you are concerned with spring according to your argument.

The power gaming is why the iffy parts mattered.

I agree about class. For me ASI with backgrounds is worse than with species, but as you say, iffy to talk about it.

If it were +2/+1 or +1/+1+1 to STR/DEX/CON for fighter or STR/CON/CHA for paladins, no one would care...

...except that it makes everything but class irrelevant due to how important class already is in 5e.