It's not a background. It's a background feature that you can use to replace any other feature. You can be a pirate spirit medium or a noble spirit medium or a spy spirit medium. So, for the last one, you get the spy proficiencies and equipment, but for a feature you replace it with spirit medium.
Okay that makes a little more sense but digging in I cannot figure out how you replace the feature.
make a homebrew copy of the background you're swapping the feature out of.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Formerly Devan Avalon.
Trying to get your physical content on Beyond is like going to Microsoft and saying "I have a physical Playstation disk, give me a digital Xbox version!"
D&D Beyond typically takes time after a book's release to implement everything that book introduces. Often quite a lot of time, depending on how complex the book is. Tasha's Cauldron required them to spend over a year redoing their whole website from pretty much scratch to accommodate half of what it did and they still haven't gotten everything working properly in it. Eberron caused them similar gas. Anything that allows you to swap things around that normally aren't swappable, like background features, is going to take work for them to do because they have to figure out a way to add options where they didn't exist before.
In the interim, I expect they'll rig up a bandaid fix with the Custom Background feature. That's what I'd do if I had to implement the optional backgrounds features tomorrow - I'd create unselectable "Backgrounds" in the system that offer the background features, then instruct users to use the "Custom Background" feature and take all the traits of the background they're normally using except for the Background Feature, which can be one of the new ones. It's honestly easier for individual users to create a homebrew copy of their background and modify their class feature themselves, but the Custom Origin feature in Tasha's Cauldron proved that "Just homebrew it yourself, it's easy" is not a valid solution for a strong majority of players.
I don't blame them - DDB promises to implement the rules in the books you buy on this website in their builder, you shouldn't be required to do it yourself. Sometimes it's the only way for a while, and something like this swappable-background-feature bit is gonna be low priority, but I can understand not wanting to deal with DDB's nightmarish homebrew editor if you don't have to.
Please remember that software development is not an easy job, and fitting brand new mechanics for things which never existed before into an existing system can be a nightmare. While they get access to the new rules in advance of the general public, it will still take a while to develop the more complex or different functionality into their system.
Full disclosure, I'm a software developer myself. The number of times I get asked "Well, can't you just do this?", when the feature in question is so different to everything else the software contains... The answer is generally along the lines of, "Yep, that'll take X months of my time to develop, should I get started?"
One good analogy I heard once for this sort of thing is someone buying a two-door car, then taking it back to the dealership a week later and asking the dealership to install the other two doors and make it a four-door car. Observe the following example conversation:
Dealer: "What? No, why would you even ask that?" Carstumer: "I want four doors, that's why. Why won't you do this for me?" Dealer: "Because we can't, that's not how this model of car works." Carstumer: "I've seen tons of cars out there just like this one that have four doors! Just put the extra doors on mine!" Dealer: "Those are completely different kinds of cars, this one was never built for - " Carstumer: "Excuse me, I paid for this car, and now I want the rest of my doors. You sell cars that have four doors - take the doors off of one of those and put them on my car." Dealer: "Look...look at your car. Does your car look like it has room for two more doors?" Carstumer: "I don't care what it looks like, just change it so I can have my extra doors!" Dealer: "Look...fine. We can sell you a different car, one that comes with four doors, so - " Carstumer: "I don't want a different car, I want THIS car, with four doors! Quit being stubborn and defeatist and just get it done! You build cars, right? Just build this one better!"
So on and so forth. People assume that because software is all soft, i.e. just digital data, ones and zeroes, it can be altered freely and without stress or effort. it's like telling an author he can take all the letters in his book and rearrange them to make a different story. Yes, he can do that, but it's a hugely time-consuming process if you want the result to be anything other than a completely worthless, illegible, nonfunctional mess of random characters.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Please do not contact or message me.
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Im sorry but i seem to be challenged when trying to use this background in dnd beyond. What am i missing?
It's not a background. It's a background feature that you can use to replace any other feature. You can be a pirate spirit medium or a noble spirit medium or a spy spirit medium. So, for the last one, you get the spy proficiencies and equipment, but for a feature you replace it with spirit medium.
Okay that makes a little more sense but digging in I cannot figure out how you replace the feature.
make a homebrew copy of the background you're swapping the feature out of.
Formerly Devan Avalon.
Trying to get your physical content on Beyond is like going to Microsoft and saying "I have a physical Playstation disk, give me a digital Xbox version!"
hmmm ok. So a workaround. Seems odd you cannot do this using the dnd beyond rulesets since its included in the new sourcebook.
D&D Beyond typically takes time after a book's release to implement everything that book introduces. Often quite a lot of time, depending on how complex the book is. Tasha's Cauldron required them to spend over a year redoing their whole website from pretty much scratch to accommodate half of what it did and they still haven't gotten everything working properly in it. Eberron caused them similar gas. Anything that allows you to swap things around that normally aren't swappable, like background features, is going to take work for them to do because they have to figure out a way to add options where they didn't exist before.
In the interim, I expect they'll rig up a bandaid fix with the Custom Background feature. That's what I'd do if I had to implement the optional backgrounds features tomorrow - I'd create unselectable "Backgrounds" in the system that offer the background features, then instruct users to use the "Custom Background" feature and take all the traits of the background they're normally using except for the Background Feature, which can be one of the new ones. It's honestly easier for individual users to create a homebrew copy of their background and modify their class feature themselves, but the Custom Origin feature in Tasha's Cauldron proved that "Just homebrew it yourself, it's easy" is not a valid solution for a strong majority of players.
I don't blame them - DDB promises to implement the rules in the books you buy on this website in their builder, you shouldn't be required to do it yourself. Sometimes it's the only way for a while, and something like this swappable-background-feature bit is gonna be low priority, but I can understand not wanting to deal with DDB's nightmarish homebrew editor if you don't have to.
Please do not contact or message me.
Please remember that software development is not an easy job, and fitting brand new mechanics for things which never existed before into an existing system can be a nightmare. While they get access to the new rules in advance of the general public, it will still take a while to develop the more complex or different functionality into their system.
Full disclosure, I'm a software developer myself. The number of times I get asked "Well, can't you just do this?", when the feature in question is so different to everything else the software contains... The answer is generally along the lines of, "Yep, that'll take X months of my time to develop, should I get started?"
One good analogy I heard once for this sort of thing is someone buying a two-door car, then taking it back to the dealership a week later and asking the dealership to install the other two doors and make it a four-door car. Observe the following example conversation:
Dealer: "What? No, why would you even ask that?"
Carstumer: "I want four doors, that's why. Why won't you do this for me?"
Dealer: "Because we can't, that's not how this model of car works."
Carstumer: "I've seen tons of cars out there just like this one that have four doors! Just put the extra doors on mine!"
Dealer: "Those are completely different kinds of cars, this one was never built for - "
Carstumer: "Excuse me, I paid for this car, and now I want the rest of my doors. You sell cars that have four doors - take the doors off of one of those and put them on my car."
Dealer: "Look...look at your car. Does your car look like it has room for two more doors?"
Carstumer: "I don't care what it looks like, just change it so I can have my extra doors!"
Dealer: "Look...fine. We can sell you a different car, one that comes with four doors, so - "
Carstumer: "I don't want a different car, I want THIS car, with four doors! Quit being stubborn and defeatist and just get it done! You build cars, right? Just build this one better!"
So on and so forth. People assume that because software is all soft, i.e. just digital data, ones and zeroes, it can be altered freely and without stress or effort. it's like telling an author he can take all the letters in his book and rearrange them to make a different story. Yes, he can do that, but it's a hugely time-consuming process if you want the result to be anything other than a completely worthless, illegible, nonfunctional mess of random characters.
Please do not contact or message me.