D&D 5E How have you modified PHB backgrounds in your game?

[Afrodyte]

I'm thinking about switching out a few proficiencies for certain backgrounds. What changes did you make to specific PHB backgrounds in your game? What prompted the change? What were the results?

 

[pukunui]

The backgrounds in the PHB are just meant to be examples. It says right in the book that you can swap stuff around. I'm happy to let my players do it if they wish (though most of them don't care enough to do so). I've probably done it a few times myself. Nothing to it really.

 

[Li Shenron]

I'm thinking about switching out a few proficiencies for certain backgrounds. What changes did you make to specific PHB backgrounds in your game? What prompted the change? What were the results?

For my 5e conversion of the Rokugan fantasy setting, I have changed the narrative of backgrounds from social roles/occupations into families. That's because in a Rokugan campaing normally all PCs are nobles anyway, so nearly all PHB backgrounds are not applicable. The resulting Family Backgrounds feel very different, and I had to remove the downtime feature (because also nearly all of the PHB ones didn't work) and replaced it with a choice of ancestor feature instead (of more practical use in the adventures).

 

[thethain]

Generally the background is meant to give additional flavor to your character beyond their class.

A fighter who has been a thief his whole life has a different flavor than one than has been a knight or man at arms.

Similarly a rogue who has been in the military as a scout is different than one who has been street hustling people.


A good example of something that could be changed, any character with the military background likely has athletics, but intimidation is really variable, watchmen might have perception, scouts might have survival, some characters might have gotten medicine or history training if they were officers.

 

[Oofta]

We use the backgrounds in the book as a starting point and make ones that make sense for the character and the story.

So I can't tell you what tweaks we've made because everyone does their own.

 

[Waterbizkit]

First reply is best reply? Seriously though, pukunui essentially hit the nail on the head, the PHB backgrounds are just examples to give players and DMs an idea of how to put them together. They're essentially a small bundle of extra proficiencies, a few trinkets and bit of a quasi-mechanical ribbon to give a characters backstory a little more weight in the game.

Now my players have been just using the ones found in the PHB and SCAG exactly as presented, but I've made it clear to them that of they want to tweak them or completely build a new one from the ground up that they're more than welcome to as long as they let me look it over, to familiarize myself with it if nothing else. As I said though, none of them have done that as of yet

For myself though I've modified some of them when creating NPCs using the normal character creation rules. As a simple example, on NPC had the Sailor background but was the ships cook, so the proficiency in navigation tools didn't make much sense to me, so that was dropped in favor of cooking tools. I also, odd as it might seem, completely dropped the proficiency in "water vehicles" and gave him an extra language instead to represent less time spent sailing the actual ship and more time spent with locals at exotic ports.

Either way, whether you're talking little tweaks or building new ones from scratch the backgrounds are pretty easy to mess with, which I think is great.

 

[Warmaster Horus]

I usually take the 'custom' background of 2 skills & 2 tool profs or languages of my choice and marry that to an actual background option.

 

[Afrodyte]

I usually take the 'custom' background of 2 skills & 2 tool profs or languages of my choice and marry that to an actual background option.

I really like this idea.

 

[Satyrn]

I really like this idea.

It is one of the ways backgrounds are intended to be used.

I was happy to use the Criminal background for my gnome battlemaster straight from the book, although I did swap out the gaming tools proficiency (or something) for speaking Dwarvish since I wanted to speak the language of the ruling race in the region the campaign started in.

 

[bedir than]

I even allow a cantrip to be selected. Cantrips are quite common in my homebrew, so it doesn't tweak the power too much.

I have some others where I would allow a weapon to be chosen, but have yet to complete that write-up