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.
- How Do the New Backgrounds Work?
- The 16 Backgrounds in the 2024 Player’s Handbook
- Origin Feats: Start Your Journey With a Boost
- Choosing a Background for Your Character
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How Do the New Backgrounds Work?

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 |
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 |
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

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!

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.
all i see, with the origin feats as presented :
they worked hard to give the players something that is 90% useless and sell it as buffing in the new 2024 phb.
while also nerfing decent feats so you can't have them at 1st level anymore
You have this backstory in your mind of a sorcerer, wizard that was also trained in using armor in his backstory .... too bad, can't be done because lightly armored is not an level 1 feat anymore .....
so if you now create a character you first have to look ( after selecting your class ) what is the background that gives you the stats you need for your class, to not be a burden to your group and then you need to look what ( if any to choose from at all ) gives you skills that don't duplicate everything you selected for your class, and then look what feat is the least useless maybe .....
i wonder why they left in MI as an origin feat at all, 99% will take the background thats grants MI: wizard ( paladin, ranger, bard, cleric, druid probaly forgot some ) that don't have shield on their spell list just so they can get : shield, booming blade ( i know thats 2014 material most likely ) and another cantrip
even Sorcerers would benifit from taking it, since it gives them another spell known :)
The thing with Magic Initiate is that you can only A) Take it a total of 3 times since they made it cover the three "types" of magic (Arcane, Divine, and Primal. Which is a hold over from the UA where that was a thing so there's a fun fact for you) and therefore can't take from paladin, ranger, sorcerer, warlock, or bard (and by extension artificer under this ruling due to overwriting the old 2014 version except for Artificer Initiate which of course came out in Tasha's). And B) Much like what it was showcased in bard with Magical Discoveries, you can't take any exclusive class spells, so no Eldritch Blast, none of the unique sorcerer ones if they survived and weren't revealed, nor any of the ranger or paladin spells. Those are 100% off limits now.
They likely left it in because its still a very small amount of spells at the end of the day in addition to only being able to change them per level-up. It only really gets nutty because you when you pick the spell list you take from you can also change the spellcasting stat with it. So a wizard can roll up with MI: Cleric and get the boosted Cure Wounds spell that they can cast once for free before using their other spell slots.
Oh for sure. And that's even assuming DMs care to use silver in the first place and not just round it out to gold. The background features were mostly misses (there's a few I would consider fun on paper at least) and I would take even Skilled any day of the week if it meant not having solely 4 locked skills for some of the classes, barring species bonus ones.
The magic initiate feat appear to state that the cantrips can only be cast once or by using a spell slot.
Can you clarify if this is poorly worded on this article or exact phrase from the PHB? Does the magic initiate feat allow to use the cantrips without use of a spell slot?
since cantrips don't use up a spell slot it is clear for me at least :)
You would be minimum 4th or 8th level for this, and missing out on stat raises and real (i.e.; 4th+ level) feats. No thank you.
There's nothing wrong about optimization, it's a significant part of playing the game. I just don't see why RP would have to be sacrificed for the sake of optimization, they don't need to limit one another.
A Rogue mostly benefits from having less chance of bad rolls. A 5th level Rogue using a short sword, booming blade, and sneak attack would do 2.3 extra damage from it (https://anydice.com/program/37ca3).
It's nice but Alert is likely to be more useful.
I wish the backgrounds still gave languages as well as or instead of tools. Also, I hope there's a rule allowing you to change your background feat. For example, my harengon rogue is a street magician with the entertainer background. I don't really imagine her playing an instrument and I think that the lucky feat would be more appropriate to her than the musician feat.
I think they meant "get all the spells from the feat always prepared."
Background rework is great.
Origin feat are despite hitting broad, very restrictive, and pretty clone warsy. Which is kinda the opposite of a customisation.
I want an expertise origin feat. It will grant more customisation that +3 skill, when a lot of people already have +X skills.
I think we should have at least one social origin feat which does not revolve around skill check but some other stuff of advantage.
Social "talent" feat such as you can taunt, or you can unescalate. You can do this without speaking, or even without real talent but who cares.
I just find it misses. The healer talent did make it. I see no reason not to try for one.
Ah ye it was unclear before and still is.
u got equipement from ur background
u got equipement from ur class
u can renounce it (? which ? both ?)
How does it rules there.
In UA you could take cash for both. It's a fixed value instead of rolling like before. I assume it's going to work this way in the official version.
Sorry chaps, chapettes and chaples, Savage Attacker actually does not work with spells. Dunno if that was an error the mods edited out after the post went live, but I've seen a few comments talking about using it with Eldritch Blast or other spells, and no, sorry, we can't: casters got enough toys this ed anyway.
(I love the change to Alert: Not sure if it's more "Oi, Jimmeh, swup yur pless wi' mi!" or more "You first darling, no after you dear, no I insist, but darling no it's your turn...")
I feel like these new backgrounds lack so much flavour. ESPECIALLY the acolyte. Where is the mention of gods? The pillarstone of dnd??
"You have spent your life in the service of a temple to a specific god or pantheon of gods. You act as an intermediary between the realm of the holy and the mortal world, performing sacred rites and offering sacrifices in order to conduct worshipers into the presence of the divine. You are not necessarily a cleric—performing sacred rites is not the same thing as channeling divine power."
THIS has flavour!
Initially when the article went live Savage Attacker said the same thing you said but instead of weapon attacks like it is now it specified damage rolls. So completely different applications as a result of that. So people putting in spells that could be done with the feat is not wrong per-say. People were working with what information they had at the time.
Alert is a good change. Even without a +5 to initiative and scaling with proficiency bonus instead, being able to swap freely with another person has great applications.
It kinda does. Basically anything that slaps extra damage to weapon (smites spells, holy weapon, melee cantrips) gets a reroll / pick based off this text. Its going to be requirement for every Paladin looking to maximize their smite spell dmg to take it (along with weapons that allow them to cleave for a mass-smite, which will also combo with Savage Attacker here for optimal damage).
The only notable restriction on it is "once per turn," which is great, because at least Eldritch Knight Fighters can't double their benefit from this using action surge (though anyone with Sentinel can).
I feel like switching from races giving ability bonuses to backgrounds thematically works but mechanically is no different. Tasha's made it so you can put the bonuses wherever, but now if you want to play a barbarian with a background that does not give strength as an option, it is no different mechanically than playing a barbarian but playing an elf.
I wish the official rule was a compromise like this: your race/species, background, and class each give you 2 ability scores to choose from. Each choice gives you a +1 to the chosen ability score, but you can't put all 3 in the same ability to give +3.
It works thematically for new players who don’t want the complications of too many options and just wants to put together a character and play. As you said it isn’t good mechanically, but nor is it good for players who put serious thought into their characters background. The problem for those players is that the background they have designed will almost certainly not fit that well with any of the background options just by virtue of the fact that the possibilities players can come up with are close to infinite. Because of this the types of skills and abilities their character should be good at based on their background will almost certainly not perfectly match with any of the options given.
I feel bad for people who even care at this point. Stick with 5e with what you own and do not support Hasbro. Don't bother complaining in the comments because they literally do not give two turtle turds about any of you. This is simply a fact, lynch me if you want but you know I'm right.