D&D (2024) Learning to Love the Background System

[pukunui]

In any game I DM I'm using paper character sheets as the default. Even with online games I lay all of the PCs' printed out character sheets in front of me so I can see all of them at once.

OK. I don't. To each their own.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

There is quite a bit of Oberoni Fallacy going on here again. You can ignore the fiction, or you can change the rules. Perhaps. But if you have to, then it probably wasn't a very good rule!

 

[tglassy]

Two points.

1) Story is great, I also optimise around a character concept. And if I want to play a Rogue who's more book-smart than dexterous, I will (and I have!). But having the ability to pick any stat I want doesn't prevent me from making RP choices my priority. I can still do that! So why limit myself to WotC's 16 backgrounds whose flavour and mechanics may or may not fit the what I have in mind?

2) Your Acolyte and Sage descriptions are stereotypical in a way I personally find very restrictive. Why presume that ALL acolytes everywhere do nothing all day long except read and pray and chant (INT/WIS/CHA)? For example, do you know how christian monasteries work? There's A LOT of manual labour involved, menial labour to get humble, agricultural labour to get food, someone needs to move around furniture, there's carpentry abound, you get real good at kneeling and getting up again, all sorts of things. Can't a temple be like that to some degree?

What if I want to play someone like Friar Tuck, who's a poacher and who can beat you silly with his staff? Or Salvatore from The Name of the Rose, who surely has a penalty in all his mental stats? Or someone like a Shaolin monk (different monk!) who grew up in a temple, and there was quite a lot of physical exercise involved? Or someone like a Mevlevi mystic, a.k.a. whirling dervish, who joined a tekke in early youth and routinely danced to exhaustion? Or a million other things that don't conform to WotC's preconceptions and generalisations about their 16 Backgrounds, but can give life to amazing, diverse characters?

With all that in mind, is it really SO unfathomable that an acolyte could train in a physical stat? And even if none of that is prescribed, don't people ever do things NOT prescribed? If I'm an acolyte in a cloistered cell, can't I choose to do pushups before bed?

That's why I argued earlier that ideally, backgrounds as a concept should encompass everything in your upbringing and environment, and shouldn't be limited to this one job you had. And the only way to make that work is leave the mechanical benefits up to the player (with DM approval of course).

But different strokes for different folks.

Then take the Artisan background, and say you were a monk in a monastery who worked as a carpenter. Or the Guide Background, and say you were a traveling minister. These backgrounds have plenty of leeway in design. Looking at Acolyte and thinking "Every single person who is devout is an acolyte" is as disengenuous as saying "Everyone who picks up a sword is a Fighter".

Even then, being Friar Tuck who can beat people with a staff is great. Just be a Fighter. A 15 in Strength means you are two standard deviations from the average in regards to strength. That still pretty strong! And you'll get to 20 eventually You get 5 ASI's, and each one will have at least one point. You can take 5 Feats and still get to a 20 by the end.

 

[Seramus]

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Yeah, I liked the idea of ASIs being tied to background in the playtest, because there custom backgrounds were presented as the default, so it was effectively ASIs, a 1st level Feat, two skills, one tool, and one language, all floating, and thematically tied to your upbringing, that you could flavor however you wanted.

I mean, I frankly don't get the point of pretending to tie these things to something, if we can just freely ignore that something and assign things however we want. Not that I like how they've done it here.

But having them all be fixed in the PHB and shunting the custom background rules to the DMG just repeats the same pitfalls as species ASIs (though again, without the implied biological essentialism, which is at least an improvement IMO). Really strange change to have made without soliciting player feedback, I definitely would have voted dissatisfied if they had presented it this way in the UAs.

The biological essentialism complaint never made any sense to me. They're different species, of course they have essential biological differences, that's what makes them different species in the first place! And those differences still exist, they're just represented by features rather than ASIs, but that's apparently fine?

And I think the new version if more offensive. It is classicists. Nobles are smart and charming, peasants are dumb brutes etc. That to me is way more questionable than orcs being stronger than halflings or elves being more agile than dwarves.

Prejudging humans based on their background is directly an actual issue that happens in our societies, and it is not nice. Fantasy species having different capabilities might be seen as analogous to some racist ideas, but it is still removed from that. And if we get rid of that altogether, we cannot actually have fantasy species to be anything besides cosmetic.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

There are a lot of religions (though as I say that, it's mainly Christianity) which are literally illegal in certain places in the world, and open worship can get your head cut off.

Mod Note:

First, while essentially factual, let’s not any go further down this particular road of discussion. We don’t need to get into finger pointing at how people use religions (and other -isms) as an excuse to be crappy to each other in the RW.

Second, when raising points like this on ENWorld, it’s preferred that you do not single out a particular faith as villain or victim. Historically, nobody’s faith is free of atrocities & general vileness.

 

[Charlaquin]

I mean, I frankly don't get the point of pretending to tie these things to something, if we can just freely ignore that something and assign things however we want. Not that I like how they've done it here.

That’s why I said “thematically tied to your upbringing” instead of “mechanically tied to your background.” In the UA version where custom backgrounds were the default, all these boosts were functionally floating, so mechanically speaking they weren’t really tied to anything besides the character creation rules. But narratively they had to come from somewhere - how did you get so strong, or so charming? Where did you learn to speak Elvish? Where did you learn to play the pan flute? Where did you learn to cook? Those things all make sense to have come from your upbringing, so custom backgrounds as the default makes it clear where characters learned these abilities, while saying everyone’s background is ultimately unique.

The biological essentialism complaint never made any sense to me. They're different species, of course they have essential biological differences, that's what makes them different species in the first place! And those differences still exist, they're just represented by features rather than ASIs, but that's apparently fine?

This has been gone over a million times, I’m sure you can find an old thread if you care to read the answers to these questions. I don’t want to get this thread locked, so I’m not going to get into it here.

And I think the new version if more offensive. It is classicists. Nobles are smart and charming, peasants are dumb brutes etc. That to me is way more questionable than orcs being stronger than halflings or elves being more agile than dwarves.

Prejudging humans based on their background is directly an actual issue that happens in our societies, and it is not nice.

I agree that having fixed ability scores tied to background has classist implications, which is part of why I don’t like that they changed them to be fixed in the new PHB and shunted the background customization rules off to the DMG instead of having them be custom by default like they were in the UA. Custom backgrounds as the default is the thing I voted in favor of, but they changed it without consulting the broader playerbase about it, and I don’t like that.

I do disagree that classism is worse than racism. They are intersecting prejudices, you can’t really pull one apart from the other, they have to be addressed together. But again, this isn’t the place for that discussion.

Fantasy species having different capabilities might be seen as analogous to some racist ideas, but it is still removed from that. And if we get rid of that altogether, we cannot actually have fantasy species to be anything besides cosmetic.

We still have species with different capabilities, it’s just ability score adjustments that were the problem, because they are too tightly linked with what classes a character can take (and be any good at, anyway). Again, let’s not rehash this here and get another thread locked about it.

 

[tglassy]

Mod Note:

First, while essentially factual, let’s not any go further down this particular road of discussion. We don’t need to get into finger pointing at how people use religions (and other -isms) as an excuse to be crappy to each other in the RW.

Second, when raising points like this on ENWorld, it’s preferred that you do not single out a particular faith as villain or victim. Historically, nobody’s faith is free of atrocities & general vileness.

I’m sorry. I was just pointing out that you can, indeed, have a devout religious character with the Criminal Background.

 

[MarkB]

That’s why I said “thematically tied to your upbringing” instead of “mechanically tied to your background.” In the UA version where custom backgrounds were the default, all these boosts were functionally floating, so mechanically speaking they weren’t really tied to anything besides the character creation rules. But narratively they had to come from somewhere - how did you get so strong, or so charming? Where did you learn to speak Elvish? Where did you learn to play the pan flute? Where did you learn to cook? Those things all make sense to have come from your upbringing, so custom backgrounds as the default makes it clear where characters learned these abilities, while saying everyone’s background is ultimately unique.

And so does taking a standard background that suits your character, but rewriting the fluff text - which you're already explicitly allowed to do.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I do disagree that classism is worse than racism. They are intersecting prejudices, you can’t really pull one apart from the other, they have to be addressed together. But again, this isn’t the place for that discussion.

I respond, as I want to be absolutely crystal clear about this: I obviously do not think that classism is worse thing than racism, merely that the racism implied by different imaginary species having different capabilities is an analogy, whilst classism of different humans beings having different capabilities due their background is not; it does not rely on an interpretation, it is what it is.

We still have species with different capabilities, it’s just ability score adjustments that were the problem, because they are too tightly linked with what classes a character can take (and be any good at, anyway). Again, let’s not rehash this here and get another thread locked about it.

So this whole problem with ASIs, were they tied to species or background, is that classes are too dependent on singe stat. So every wizard needs to have same Int, every rogue the same Dex etc. And that is just boring and bad design.

Apparently they have gone so with forcing these cookie cutter builds, that there are suggested standard array assignments for every class in the new PHB! That is just sad.

(Also, I'm sure that features of some species still favour some classes.)