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 Thievesâ 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 Thievesâ 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 Healerâs 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.
Oh. My. God. You people will complain about anything.
First of all, the old Backgrounds didn't even provide a starter Feat. That is literally a completely new feature granting something the old characters wouldn't have at all without either playing a Variant Human, which is a variation and only allowed if the DM said it was, or a Custom Lineage. It is literally an extra ability. And many of y'all are complaining that the choices are too few? I'm sorry, did you want a larger selection of your free desert? How about you don't look a gift horse in the mouth and just be glad you get a free lvl 1 Feat at all.
"Now you have to start character creation by looking at the Class instead of being more focused on role play". Have any of you actually played the game? You ALWAYS look at the Class first. My DM says "I'm going to be running a game. This is the premise." My next question: "What class is everyone playing?" It's only once we know we've got a good spread that we start looking at race and background to give it all some flavor.
And boo freaking hoo, you now tie your first ASI to your background. I'm sorry, .but it makes perfect sense. Having it tied to Race always frustrated me, because my Orc Wizard would always be less capable than the Elf Wizard, who would get his 20 faster and therefore be able to take Feats. Now, they're both Sages. THAT MAKES SENSE. Your Background will determine what abilities you increased while growing up, because that's how life works. "Oh, my Acolyte of Mystra won't know Arcana at lvl 1!" Omg. You grew up in the church, your magic is channeled by your god, you don't NEED to know Arcana. "My barbarian can't be an acolyte". Why? Because you'll wind up with a 15 Strength at lvl 1 instead of a 17? That's a 5% difference in strength checks. That's a single bonus point lower. And guess what, your Barbarian spent more time praying than doing pushups. They're slightly weaker than the Barbarian who stood guard all day every day keeping the tribe safe. But they can also cast Guidance, Sacred Flame and Bless. "Oh, my super niche character build is totally ruined because I can't get a 20 in my main stat by lvl 2 anymore I hate WotC why do they have to ruin everything!"
You people will literally complain about anything. You're getting a free extra Feat and there aren't enough choices. You can be any race with any class and still be optimized, and you're complaining that the LEAST USED FEATURE OF CHARACTER CREATION doesn't grant enough leeway for your niche builds to be 100% optimized. The Sage is going to be a better Wizard than the Guard. That. Just. Makes. Sense.
After hearing y'all complain, players at my table will be required to use the new php backgrounds as is. No custom backgrounds. No prior phb backgrounds. Use the options granted and work within them. They've been sufficiently broadened to encompass more archetypes, so that's what you'll be using. And I'll be doing the same with my own characters. Because that is what Role Play means. It means working within the constraints of the game and coming up with narrative reasons why something may not be as high as it could be. Limitations, awkward builds, and unoptimized abilities make for BETTER role play than optimization.
And Jeremy Crawford and WotC is telling everyone whose focus is on role-playing to eff off and find a new system, because choosing character traits and details in service of character will invariably make you significantly weaker right out of the gate than a player who builds their character purely around their build.
A FEAT at 1st level - so new, so radical...
Price Vultan:
Gordon's4e's alive (echoes: -live, -live, -live).Dr. Franken-edition: 4e's alive!
Most famous cinematic space-elf: The edition, out of danger? Don't grieve for 5e, Admiral, it is logical. The need for 4e outweighs the need for 5.5.
Another famous elf (with her own TV show): The edition is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was, is lost. For none now live that admit liking 4e!
Spelljammer Pilot: I feel the need, the need for 4e!
Dramatic Narrator: No one would have believed in the first decades of the twenty-first century that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of astral space. No one could have dreamed that across the gulf of space, editions immeasurable superior to 5e regarded this campaign with envious eyes. And slowly, and surely, 4e planned its return amongst us!
smiley-face lol.
D'OH! This one was SO obvious!
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to play 4e
Oh waw , almost no change to savage atacker from the sory state it was in before... and loss of BA graple does actualy hurt alot of the reasons one would pick tavern brawler but eh a shove aint so bad when you combine it with other stuff
I've been playing AL exclusively for the last 6 years and in 100+ sessions the background features have come up exactly twice.
So basicly the backgrounds are now made only for opimisation not for those who wanna tell a story? Cause if i was to say have a barbarian who grew up on the streets thats no longer allowed, because on the streets he can only learn how to sneak? Not how to fight or survive? Seems really restrictive
To be honest it allows players to actually build a background instead of useing a preset
I'm seeing a lot of people complain about things that make no sense to me, I want to point out two things:
-At the start of pretty much every book, they state that things explained in the book are a guide for players and DMs, but they are meant to be change by them to accomplish the game you want.
A lot of things are written in a streamlined way for efficiency sake, because most players and DMs don't read the book front to back, so they simplify stuff with solid options to speed decisions up.
-In this very post under "Using Old Backgrounds at Character Creation" it explains that you can take any distribution of ability scores and get any origin feat, of course, it's based on taking an old background, but I think you can very much see this as a custom background template...
This rules are meant to simplify stuff for players and DMs, if you want more customization just talk with your DM...
They build those sections for people that group together and make characters at the momment, so it needs to be streamlined because otherwise it would take ages for people not aware of the rules and mechanics.
My friends and I are 100% on the side of custom stuff, at no point I read this and say: -"OH NO I WONT BE ABLE TO DO IT ANYMORE!!". Stop complaining for the sake of complaining.
Hi, CaptainRelyk
Thank you for taking the time to comment, it's appreciated.
I agree with practically everything you've written. Elsewhere, I said I thought these are good examples of the default flavour of a generic campaign setting - tropes, as you say. A way to get everyone into the game fast and furious. And I'm hoping that all the UA stuff about creating unique backgrounds allows us to make all those cool variant backgrounds you exampled above at the table/VTT! Sword swallowing/juggling would be so cool - you are literally carrying the weapons that you'll use to assassinate the evil duke in plain sight for everyone to see!!! And whilst the crystal ball = smartphone video call things bugs me a little as too modern day, the illusionist storyteller, well, every tavern should have one.
As for the features you miss, put them back, you know you want to! House rules them just like you said. The Acolyte, Hermit, Scholar suggests you might have lived within a sheltered community of some kind (monastery, convent, temple, scholarly conclave, etc.), return back to them after that dungeon delve and they'll let you have your old room back providing you don't bring 500 people and demand 5-star meals. And what about the next time you turn up and they refuse to open the gates to you and threaten to throw their night-pot over you - trouble's a-brewing within!? Some other features might not be quite so easy to recreate, but imagination and problem solving are a D&D player's superpowers! Let's hope they (officially) explain how to create new feats as well.
A lot of comment in these PHB2024-build-up articles have mentioned the brand new art, and I sometimes think that the cool new artwork (which I believe they've said will act as backdrops on this site's character sheets if you buy PHB digital) has taken priority over the old (beloved) features. Streamlining clearly hasn't just come for those dwarves, gnomes and halflings - like the way it's looking like extended lore has been cut from the 2014 multiple page species in favour of MP:MotM's predominately 1 page/species style.
And, more than anything, what I wrote was me kind-of deliberately being silly. Reading some of the other comments had become a bit of a negative experience. Clearly, I have failed my Diplomancy (whimsical) roll.
Best wishes for all your future adventuring!
How am I supposed to build my nomadic strength Barbarian
The wording of the new Alert, at least according to this article, seems to imply that taking Alert + getting Reliable Talent would guarantee you at least a 10 when rolling initiative. (Which is a Dex check that now lets you add your proficiency bonus.)
Am I right? Or did Reliable Talent get "updated" as well?
My apologies, I meant no offence.
As an oldie who's say, played 99.5% of all their RPGs without tech (good old fashioned pencil and paper etc.), I don't always see the type of problems/issues that are blatantly obvious to the more tech-savvy players.
And, if you can, send positive thoughts to salesperson Jeremy, it's not like he can just go "This new version. What an absolute mess! I wouldn't bother if I were you!" even if he ever thought that! (that's me trying for a lol again)
@CaptainRelyk
But that is precisely the point of this release. The new PHB is the baseline; anything in it supersedes all prior publications.
If you wanted something from an earlier release that is not reprinted here, it's fine, just adjust according to any sidebar details.
If you wanted something from an earlier release that was reprinted here, your table needs to use 2014 rules, or DM discretion.
Yes, this means AL uses 2024+, Westmarch will probably use 2024+, and your RAW DM will probably ask you to go 2024+. This is a game health decision, not an attempt to quash your fun.
If you have something specific you built that you don't feel will work, perhaps post it here and we can assist with migration.
The new Crafter feat makes me feel like Minecraft in dnd is possible and Iâm so glad they made this new feat.
While it's a shame that so many of the best feats for 2014 Variant Humans to take at level 1 have been moved to level 4 (and even then, I'm sure that Sharpshooter and Great Weapon Master have been significantly nerfed) I think it's probably better for the game overall if the power variation is smoothed out, especially at lower levels. It makes it easier for "power-first gamers" and "story-first gamers" to play together.
Well said and if you look at the posting history of some of the posters here screeching about the Backgrounds, you will find that there is virtually nothing positive they have to say about the 2024 rules in any article or thread. Some are already committed to hating the new rules before even seeing them.
Giving +2 or +1 to ability scores of your choice, if that's what they went it, would've amounted to simply giving more point buy points to distribute. They chose to restrict options a bit more, and D&D always had these kind of dilemmas in earlier editions. If options don't matter, you might as well be playing a D&D version of Whose Line Is It Anyways? where everything's made up and the points don't matter.
That being said: limited to one Origin feat per background? Now, that's just evil.đ
The bastion rules have only been revealed in playtest and are in the DMG not the PHB. How certain are you that they haven't changed? They haven't provided anyone with advanced copies of the DMG yet that I'm aware of. For all we know the final result might be nothing like what we saw several months ago.
A person thrashing around in every article makes feedback from that person far less meaningful and valued from any perspective except to validate the opinions of other haters who are so change averse, that they have already made up their mind the moment the 2024 rules were announced.
You have not seen the actual rules yet. You have seen paraphrases, discussions, and interpretations of the rules. Only a few people have seen the actual rules currently. One of the moderators has even said that nothing on the site, currently, has given the information needed to draw any concrete conclusions on optimizations. We are only getting a preview. A preview, by definition, is a peek at something before it becomes available.