The Backgrounds and Origin Feats in the 2024 Player's Handbook

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The 2024 Player's Handbook has changed the order you move through while crafting your characters. Think of it as stepping backward in time through your character’s history. You start with where your character is at the beginning of your game, your class, then look at the road that led them to this heroic point, your background, and finally, look at how you began your life with your species.

Today we’re going to look at how backgrounds have changed in the 2024 Player's Handbook to create a connected narrative between your origin and the beginning of your adventuring career. When it all comes together, the new core rules make it much easier to imagine your new, fully fleshed-out character.

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How Do the New Backgrounds Work?

Artist: Katerina LadonHuman with her cat familiar walk through the busy streets of a fantastical city.

Your character’s background is the collection of characteristics that they picked up during the formative years of their life. These are the experiences and occupations your character engaged in separate from their upbringing and species, and prior to their life as an adventurer.

Mechanically, your background contains five aspects: ability scores, skill proficiencies, a tool proficiency, starting equipment, and an Origin feat specific to your background. While gaining a feat as part of your background is new to the core rules in the 2024 Player's Handbook, we have seen feats offered at character creation previously as part of optional custom lineage rules in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything and in backgrounds featured in recent books like The Book of Many Things.

Parts of a Background

Let’s talk about what each of these different parts of your new background mean, and what you’ll do with them during the character creation process. We’ll use the Wayfarer background as an example, since it’s a brand new background introduced in the 2024 Player’s Handbook.

The Wayfarer shares some DNA with the Urchin background from the 2014 Player’s Handbook but represents a larger swath of characters who have fallen through the cracks of urban society. It could be the Artful Dodger, but it could also be Fagin. Edgin’s backstory in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves has shades of the Wayfarer once he leaves the Harpers, and Mol and her gang of tiefling kids in Baldur’s Gate 3 certainly fit the bill.

  • Ability Scores: Each background has a list of three ability scores to choose from. You can increase one by 2 and another by 1, or you can increase all three by 1. The Wayfarer offers you Dexterity, Wisdom, and Charisma.
  • Origin Feat: Each background has a specific Origin feat that best represents a talent your character developed while living this portion of their life. The Wayfarer background grants you the Lucky feat.
  • Skill Proficiencies: Your background grants you proficiency in two specified skills. For the Wayfarer, you gain proficiency in Insight and Stealth.
  • Tool Proficiency: You gain proficiency in a specific tool that would have been commonly used in your background. For the Wayfarer, this proficiency is with Thieves’ Tools.
  • Equipment: This is the equipment your character starts the game with, or you can choose to opt out of the starting equipment and start with 50 GP to spend on the equipment of your choice. The Wayfarer begins with two Daggers, a set of Thieves’ Tools, a Gaming Set of your choice, a Bedroll, two Pouches, a set of Traveler’s Clothes, and 16 GP.

The 16 Backgrounds in the 2024 Player’s Handbook

The Wayfarer is just one of the backgrounds you’ll find in the 2024 Player's Handbook. You’ll discover a few more new choices as well as several reworkings of some returning favorites. Let’s take a quick look at all 16 options available as part of the new core rules.

Background Descriptions

Background

Description

Acolyte

You were a devoted servant in a place of worship. You learned the rituals of your faith and how to channel divine power as part of your service.

Charlatan

You have learned to seek out a mark in taverns and pubs, and find the people most in search of less than honest goods, such as forgeries or sham magic items.

Artisan

You worked your way up from scrubbing floors to an apprenticeship creating your own crafts. You know how to schmooze a customer and have a keen eye for detail.

Criminal

Whether you were a member of a criminal crew or a solo thief who only looked out for yourself, you know the best ways to slice some purse strings or how to find alternative means to enter a locked shop.

Entertainer

You’ve spent your life on either a literal or proverbial stage, performing for willing audiences. You have learned how to channel your talent for creation into a crowd-pleasing art form.

Guard

You’ve put in your time standing watch over a city or location. You’ve had your head on a swivel, keeping a watchful eye on raiding enemies on one side of a wall or criminal elements on the other.

Farmer

You’ve tilled the soil or raised animals as livestock or to aid you in cultivating your fields. You’ve gained a healthy respect for nature, in both its bounty and its wrath.

Guide

Your life was mostly spent outdoors, exploring the natural wonders around you. In your travels, you learned the basics of how to channel the magic of the wild world around you.

Hermit

Whether alone in a hut or as part of a monastery, you’ve spent a considerable amount of time outside the trappings of society. You’ve grown comfortable pondering the wonders and mysteries of creation.

Noble

You grew up in the opulence and structure of wealth and societal privilege. You may have bristled against the restrictions and expectations of your role, but you learned a lot about courtly intrigue and the skills of leadership.

Merchant

As an apprentice to a trader or shopkeeper, you traveled either supplying artisans with the materials they needed or acquiring their goods to sell to your customers. You know how to make a deal and how to handle a long journey.

Sage

Your thirst for knowledge drew you to some of the greatest libraries and archives in the world. You’ve got a knack for research and perhaps a rudimentary knowledge of magic gleaned from a book or two.

Sailor

You called the open water your home, survived some of the sea’s harshest storms. You’ve swapped stories with the best of them, whether that’s on the barstool of a random port or the denizens of the world beneath the waves.

Scribe

The written word has been your domain, either copying tomes, crafting government documents, or producing your own texts. Your eye for detail and ability to catch errors and mistakes is finely honed.

Soldier

You can hardly remember a time when you didn’t wield a weapon. You’re well-versed in the ways of battle and war to protect the realm, and you have the muscle memory to prove it.

Wayfarer

An urchin or societal castoff, you learned to survive. Forging your own path on the streets and possibly turning to crime when needed, you’ve managed to keep your pride and hope that destiny has more for you yet.

Using Old Backgrounds at Character Creation

Previous D&D books contain a plethora of backgrounds that are beloved by players. If you don’t see your favorite background listed, don’t despair! The scribes have scrawled some handy tips for converting a background from an older book to work with your new character using the 2024 Player’s Handbook. When using an older background, simply select the ability scores you want to add your 3 total points to, so adjusting one score by 2 and another by 1, or three scores by 1.

This comes in place of your species' Ability Score Improvements. So, if you also choose an older species that has an Ability Score Improvement, ignore it.

If the background you select does not already provide a feat, you gain the Origin feat of your choice.

Origin Feats: Start Your Journey With a Boost

There are different types of feats in the 2024 Player's Handbook: Origin, General, Fighting Style, and Epic Boons. General feats become available at level 4, and may carry other prerequisites, such as certain ability scores. Fighting Style feats are bestowed by features in your class, and Epic Boons are available to be chosen by characters at level 19.

Origin feats are similar to the features each background got in the 2014 Player’s Handbook but with mechanics that give them more utility in your adventurer’s day-to-day life. They represent the talents your character’s background will likely have led them to develop, but don’t offer boosts to ability scores like some General feats do. These are designed to be abilities that brand-new adventurers might possess versus skills that more veteran heroes might have gained on the road.

Origin Feat Descriptions

Origin Feat

Benefit

Alert

Add your Proficiency Bonus when you roll Initiative. Can also swap your Initiative with a willing ally in the same combat.

Crafter

Gain proficiency with three different sets of Artisan’s Tools. Gain a 20 percent discount on nonmagical items. Can craft an item from a Fast Crafting table, which lasts until you finish another Long Rest.

Healer

When you Utilize a Healer’s Kit as an action, a creature can expend one of its Hit Point Dice to heal. Your Proficiency Bonus is added to the roll. When you roll to determine Hit Points when healing with this feature or a spell, you can reroll the dice if it rolls a 1. You must use the new roll.

Lucky

After finishing a Long Rest, you have a number of Luck Points equal to your Proficiency Bonus. You can expend one when you make a D20 Test to give yourself Advantage. You can also expend one to impose Disadvantage when a creature rolls a d20 to make an attack roll against you.

Magic Initiate

You gain two cantrips and one level 1 spell from the Cleric, Druid, or Wizard spell list, and can replace them with another spell of the same level from the same list when you gain a level. You choose Wisdom, Intelligence, or Charisma as your spellcasting modifier for these spells when you take this feat. You can cast these spells once per Long Rest without expending a spell slot, and can cast them again using spell slots.

This feat can be taken more than once, but you must choose a different spell list each time.

Musician

You gain proficiency with three musical instruments of your choice. At the end of a Short or Long Rest, you may play the instrument and grant Heroic Inspiration to a number of allies equal to your Proficiency Bonus.

Savage Attacker

Once per turn, when you hit a target with a weapon attack, you can roll the weapon damage dice twice and use either roll against the target.

Skilled

You gain proficiency in any combination of three skills or tools of your choice. You can take this feat more than once.

Tavern Brawler

When you hit with an Unarmed Strike and deal damage, you can deal 1d4 + your Strength modifier. If the damage dice for your Unarmed Strikes roll is a 1, you can reroll it and must use the new roll. You have proficiency with improvised weapons. Once per turn, when you hit a creature with an Unarmed Strike as part of the Attack action, in addition to dealing damage, you can push the target 5 feet away from you.

Tough

When you first gain this Origin feat, your Hit Point maximum increases by twice your character level. Thereafter, your Hit Point maximum increases by 2 each time you level up.

Gaining Origin Feats in Other Ways

You automatically gain one specific Origin feat as a part of your background, but you can add more to your repertoire in other ways. For example, if you play a Human character, one of your species’ features is to gain an extra Origin feat of your choice. You can also select an Origin feat if you choose when you reach a class level that allows you to pick a new feat.

Choosing a Background for Your Character

Artist: Luca BanconeAn candlelit artisan's workbench

So, how do you determine the “best” background for your character? Ultimately that comes down to how you want to build and play your character, but there are a few different approaches you can take that can be supported using the 2024 core rules.

First, for a purely mechanical approach, you can simply look at which abilities are the primary focus for your character class, and then select a background that gives you a boost for that score. The 2024 Player's Handbook has a helpful table for giving you an assortment of options for each ability score. The options can be pretty diverse as well. A Strength-based character with a Soldier or Guard background might seem obvious, but Farmer and Artisan are also in the mix for Strength.

Another possibility is to consider which background best ties into the flavor of your class and how your character got there. A Wizard, for example, is most likely to have come from a life of study as a Sage or Scribe. A Bard is likely to have worked as an Entertainer before learning to harness the Words of Creation, but having been a Charlatan or a Noble who shirked her responsibilities to run off and dance after a fateful summer isn’t too far out of left field either.

But while common wisdom might lead you to emphasize your most important stats, there can be a benefit to using your background to supplement skills you might not usually access with your class. Since a Sorcerer’s magic talent is more inherent to them, you might imagine your Sorcerer as a Wayfarer. Their inability to control their magic at a young age led them to a life on the streets where they picked up a few skills like lockpicking. Maybe you want your Cleric to have a honed Perception, so you imagine them having worked as a Guard until a chance encounter turned them into a devotee of Corellon.

Your First Furthest Steps From Home

The 2024 Player's Handbook is now available on the D&D Beyond marketplace, which means it's time to set out on new adventures with fresh or familiar characters!

Backgrounds have always played an important part in the story of how your character became who they are at the start of their adventuring career. With the changes to character creation in the 2024 Player's Handbook, this part of your origin has been boosted with some mechanical aspects that really emphasize that importance, allowing you to absorb it into your roleplaying. When you bring it all together with a class and species choice, your characters made with the 2024 core rulebooks will have fully triangulated into a fleshed-out hero ready to begin their journey!

We’re delighted to share with you the changes to fifth edition D&D that appear in the 2024 Player’s Handbook. Make sure to keep an eye out on D&D Beyond for more useful guides on using the wealth of new options, rules, and mechanics found in the 2024 Player's Handbook!

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A smug mage looks away as an explosion goes off behind them. Text reads, Adventurers wanted! Join the D&D Discord today!

Riley Silverman (@rileyjsilverman) is a contributing writer to D&D Beyond, Nerdist, and SYFY Wire. She DMs the Theros-set Dice Ex Machina for the Saving Throw Show, and has been a player on the Wizards of the Coast-sponsored The Broken Pact. Riley also played as Braga in the official tabletop adaptation of the Rat Queens comic for HyperRPG, and currently plays as The Doctor on the Doctor Who RPG podcast The Game of Rassilon. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

This article was updated on August 13, 2024, to issue corrections or expand coverage for the following features:

  • Savage Attacker: Clarified that you roll the weapon's damage twice and choose. You don't roll once, then reroll.
  • Tavern Brawler: Specified you have to deal damage with your Unarmed Strike.

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