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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doctor Proctor" data-source="post: 5099117" data-attributes="member: 78547">Backgrounds can be good or bad, but it largely depends on the player and what material they have access to.  Some of those Forgotten Realms backgrounds are WAY too powerful, such as the aforementioned Auspicious Birth/Bad Moon backgrounds.  And yes, I realize that the benefit they give is about the same as Toughness, but that's exactly the problem.  It's as good as Toughness, which is a feat, and Toughness will still stack with it! (Someone else did the math earlier, but basically, if CON is a dump stat then this background will increase your HP almost the same as Toughness)With the other backgrounds though, the benefits are more minor.  +2 to a skill is less than Skill Focus or Skill Training (+3 and +5 respectively).  Similarly, picking an additional skill to add to your class list is less powerful than Skill Training because it only adds it to your class list, and does not increase your overall number of skills.  And the final benefit, learning a new language, is only a third as strong as the Language feat.So in all the PHB2-style backgrounds, the mechanical benefit is minor...although I would probably say that +2 to a skill is the strongest.  How your players use these though is up to them.  If they just pore through looking for the best mechanical benefit, then you can call that "bad" if you want, but I would say to challenge them to come up with a reason for it.  For a Dragonborn Fighter in one campaign I picked the Geography: Mountains background due in large part to the +2 to Athletics it gave.  However, I then incorporated this into my character's background and said that his clan used to serve a White Dragon back in the days of Arkhosia.  After the fall this clan went back to living up in the cold mountains where their dragon lord came from.  So even though it started as a mechnical choice, I crafted it to fit my character (also, there are other backgrounds that could've given me a +2 to Athletics, but I specifically chose this one because the others didn't fit my character concept).In another campaign I'm playing a Dragonborn Sorcerer, and I took the exact opposite approach.  I saw the Dragon Bound Arcanist background in the PHB Races: Dragonborn book and just thought there was a lot of RP potential there.  It also happens to work well mechanically for my character, since I'm not putting points into INT, but would still like to have a high Arcana (the background gives a +2 to Arcana, plus I have Sorcerous Vision, which is why I want a high Arcana score...I might even get skill focus later).The point is, whatever criteria you use to choose your backgrouns, what you get out of them is up to you and your group.  Holding players accountable to come up with a reason for that background choice, as well as not assuming that just because they bump a main skill (like my Sorcerer and Arcana) it means they took it for purely mechanical reasons, are both important.</blockquote>

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