Urban Bounty Hunter from SCAG Courtesy of Extra Life

[MENTION=6748898]ad_hoc[/MENTION]: How do you keep finding these things? I've been looking and looking and refreshing and refreshing. Still nothing!

 

[pukunui]

*shrug* Art is subjective.

 

[Parmandur]

I like it a lot. And, AL depends on some elements of these, even for making your own, as you can only replicate a portion of a background that is official. This one introduced a new precedent in skill and tool choices. It's a pretty meaningful change.

The AL aspect is a good point: making these up is easy and balanced well, but AL legal is another thing.

 

[Benji]

Well, the mastermind class just made me want to buy the book. It has stuff that is great if you have a game with little combat. It'd be nice to see more of that.

 

[MarkB]

I would have totally taken this background for my Oath of Vengeance Paladin if it had been available last week.

 

[Parmandur]

Wow. Who wrote this?

Bounty Hunter is already in the PHB as a subset of Outlander; that's what this means here.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

People do understand that the flexibility isn't new, the rules say you can make any background you want by picking any two skills, a combination of any two languages or tool proficiencies, and picking any background feature and tweaking it slightly.

Heck if you don't use custom backgrounds than having two fixed rigid skill proficiencies is still flexible as if you gain a proficiency you already have from race or class you can again by the rules pick any skill proficiency you want. For example if you are a rogue who takes sleight of hand and stealth for class choices and then takes the urchin background you get to replace those two skill proficiencies with any two you want so for whatever reason you could take religion and arcana, and your second thieves tools proficiency becomes any other tool proficiency in the game.

I wonder how long it will take for people to actually pick up on this. It's been a year already, and little improvement in the message getting out to the wider fan base.

That being said, I explicitly tell my players every time, and some of them still pick a background straight out of the book, unmodified. So maybe it's just an issue of not wanting to mess with it (although swapping out a skill seems like something that you would want to do anyway to better fit a character concept, not something you'd have to be bothered to think about.)

I've also allowed my new players to swap a skill or two in the first few levels if they find out the skill wasn't exactly doing what they wanted it to do (Athletics/Acrobatics, Intimidation/Persuasion).

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

I like the background. Personally, I'd buy a book that was just hundreds of pages of backgrounds. I love the concept and flavor of them.

I'm not specifically glad that aren't any new feats, but I'm very pleased that they didn't feel the need to create feats just to fill a book.

 

[Mistwell]

Not that feats are remotely power-gamer-only. My players like feats because they like being able to customize their characters. Sure, they want to be able to do some cool stuff, mechanically, but they're not remotely power gamers/optimizers, and in fact often make substandard choices if it fits the character.

Let's not paint with too broad a brush.

Talk about painting with a broad brush - I didn't say feats equate with being a power gamer. I said him complaining that his players get BORED with ability boosts instead of feats, combined with his specific handle, is self-explanatory. It was about as narrow a focus as I could get - it was a reply truly for him and just him.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Fair enough.

 

[Pauper]

With this background feature, and the ability to re-flavor backgrounds by taking any feature in any published book, there's no longer any reason to take the Criminal Contact feature in the Criminal background -- you can take a criminal contact with this feature if you want, or take a different kind of contact if that works better for your proposed background.

I'm also, frankly, amazed at how much restraint the designers have shown about not adding tons of feats to the game, because doing so would eventually make a feat choice superior to a stat bump choice in every case, for those games where feats aren't banned. (And let's face it -- if anybody at your table played 3E or 4E, you're probably using feats.)

--
Pauper