Your Background Matters
Whether you write a paragraph or a 20-page opus, your character's background story tells the world how they became who they are today. Everyone has a story about their life before becoming an adventurer. While we may not find the need to write more than a brief description of your character's childhood or old profession, some love the creative exercise of going into detail about their lives and how their experiences shaped them. Of course, most of the characters were edge lords, but I won't judge…much.
The problem was that your background was just that, a story that you told. Your background brought nothing of consequence to your new life as an adventurer. The only thing that had any real consequence was a couple of skill proficiencies. Other than that, you received a language or two (don't get me started on languages) and some equipment you'd probably never use.
With a revamped focus on backgrounds, who you are and where you came from are now very important. I was lucky to score a copy of the new Player's Handbook at GenCon. I have yet to read through it in detail, but one of the parts that caught my eye was Chapter 4, Character Origins. A character's background and species (formerly known as race) are now combined to tell the story of your character's family origin and your life experience before you decided to swing a sword or cast a fireball.
Gone are racial ability bonuses. Instead, they are now part of the character's background. There are several reasons for this, but that's another discussion. Your origin still gives you particular traits; a halfling still has the Luck trait, specific origins still have Darkvision, and so on. There are even new traits for some classes! Now, it is your character's background that determines the following 5 things: Ability Score Bonuses, a Background feat, Skill & Tool Proficiencies, and Equipment.
Skill and tool proficiencies see little, if any, change. The same holds true for equipment. Ability Score increases differ slightly from the methods found in the old Player's Handbook (2014) and the revised method in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. First, increasing your ability scores is tied to your background instead of your origin. Second, your background has three Ability Scores tied to it. You can increase only these three scores. You can increase one by 2 and two by 1 or all three by 1 point.
Where we see a considerable impact is now you receive an Origin Feat. Yes, you read right. All characters now gain a feat at 1st level and are specific to your chosen background. These Origin feats cannot be swapped out for another during character creation, but you can take any Origin feat when you can take an additional feat and no feat category is specified. There's even a new feat, Crafter! We'll get into feats in an upcoming article, but needless to say, it's a new, exciting feature.
I'm pleasantly pleased about these changes. Sure, a lot remains the same, but as we've seen, there are some dramatic changes. Currently, there are only 16 backgrounds to choose from. I'm confident that quite a few homebrew backgrounds will be created. It will be up to the GM to decide what ability bonuses, feats, etc., your character will receive when you make a personalized background. Talk to your GM if you want to avoid choosing from the official 16, and have a great time describing who your character was and how it grants you the five parts of your character's new and improved Background part of character creation.
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Art Credit - WotC
