I think overall the new Unearthed Arcana is quite good. I don't like feats being more complex (having levels), but it's not the worst type of complexity in the world, and for the most part the races are great. I think telling the player to build their own background is great, and encourages creativity, but there is one thing lost in doing so that I think really, really shouldn't be.
The thing that made backgrounds (to me, at least) was the background features. They were a thing that only your background could do - a skill that couldn't be learned by adventuring. Urchins moving through cities like no one else, folk heroes being shielded from the consequences of their own actions by the general populace, sailors being able to get a ship anywhere, and especially hermits having access to a single secret or relic of cosmic importance was incredibly cool, and it made the background feel special. I think that not having access to these features is an oversight, and in my limited playtests (four one-shots and a first session of a prospective campaign) I was really surprised at just how often not having the background feature I expected came up.
I get WotC wanting to make everything more equal, but that doesn't and shouldn't equate to everything being the same. This Unearthed Arcana replaces some of the most interesting and diverse noncombat features in the history of the game with a choice among some of the most generic and uninteresting feats I've seen in a while (Savage Attacker, for example, literally just increases weapon damage). Maybe they're trying to incorporate the video game feel of 4e, but if they are, I don't get why they can't just make a 4e parallel to 5e so we can have our cake and eat it too and WotC can make even more book money. Overall, the new backgrounds feel like one step in the right direction (Tasha's player-driven modularity, putting stats in the background) and two steps back, and I just don't think they need to remove one of the game's best and coolest toolsets.
Background features were a way to leverage your character's personhood instead of just their class, to have out-of-combat utility otherwise almost exclusively reserved for spellcasters or partial spellcasters, and to make your character feel more unique at a level deeper than just their class customization. I think that removing that diversity from the game is a mistake, and a wasteful one. It would be trivially easy to just add a list of background features to the PHB: you pick one, and you have it, and maybe the PHB includes some guidelines on how to write your own alongside the DM. It is not any more complicated than having to add spellcasting to your character because you wanted them to have pointy ears, and it makes the game feel deeper.
While you can see this trend with inspiration becoming a reward for rolling well instead of just for roleplay, I think it is most obvious here: D&D has very little interest marrying roleplay and gameplay. Fundamentally, I think that doing so is a mistake, and hope that in the event they keep background features removed, that the community will adopt them as a tradition in the way that it adopted universalizing crit fails and crit successes.
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I think overall the new Unearthed Arcana is quite good. I don't like feats being more complex (having levels), but it's not the worst type of complexity in the world, and for the most part the races are great. I think telling the player to build their own background is great, and encourages creativity, but there is one thing lost in doing so that I think really, really shouldn't be.
The thing that made backgrounds (to me, at least) was the background features. They were a thing that only your background could do - a skill that couldn't be learned by adventuring. Urchins moving through cities like no one else, folk heroes being shielded from the consequences of their own actions by the general populace, sailors being able to get a ship anywhere, and especially hermits having access to a single secret or relic of cosmic importance was incredibly cool, and it made the background feel special. I think that not having access to these features is an oversight, and in my limited playtests (four one-shots and a first session of a prospective campaign) I was really surprised at just how often not having the background feature I expected came up.
I get WotC wanting to make everything more equal, but that doesn't and shouldn't equate to everything being the same. This Unearthed Arcana replaces some of the most interesting and diverse noncombat features in the history of the game with a choice among some of the most generic and uninteresting feats I've seen in a while (Savage Attacker, for example, literally just increases weapon damage). Maybe they're trying to incorporate the video game feel of 4e, but if they are, I don't get why they can't just make a 4e parallel to 5e so we can have our cake and eat it too and WotC can make even more book money. Overall, the new backgrounds feel like one step in the right direction (Tasha's player-driven modularity, putting stats in the background) and two steps back, and I just don't think they need to remove one of the game's best and coolest toolsets.
Background features were a way to leverage your character's personhood instead of just their class, to have out-of-combat utility otherwise almost exclusively reserved for spellcasters or partial spellcasters, and to make your character feel more unique at a level deeper than just their class customization. I think that removing that diversity from the game is a mistake, and a wasteful one. It would be trivially easy to just add a list of background features to the PHB: you pick one, and you have it, and maybe the PHB includes some guidelines on how to write your own alongside the DM. It is not any more complicated than having to add spellcasting to your character because you wanted them to have pointy ears, and it makes the game feel deeper.
While you can see this trend with inspiration becoming a reward for rolling well instead of just for roleplay, I think it is most obvious here: D&D has very little interest marrying roleplay and gameplay. Fundamentally, I think that doing so is a mistake, and hope that in the event they keep background features removed, that the community will adopt them as a tradition in the way that it adopted universalizing crit fails and crit successes.