Backgrounds are an oft-ignored part of the current edition of D&D, a tacked-on nod to the design trends popular at the time of the game’s publication a decade ago. The recent branches of 5e often feature updates to this subsystem, whether it’s the first level feats of the Character Origins UA and other 2023 Wizards of the Coast releases or the changes made by both Kobold Press and EN Publishing in their respective 5e forks. What’s recently inspired me however is playing through BG3 and appreciating how the backgrounds interact with the inspiration system (There’s no spoilers here; I’m just focusing on the broad mechanics of the game rather than specific story moments). This article examines what each of these 5e variants does with backgrounds and tries to find the best ideas among them.

The Problem with Backgrounds

Backgrounds, as they exist in the 2014 PHB, provide a quite a few different functions

• Tie a character to the world in a concrete way

  • Race and class say what your character looks like and what supernatural abilities they may or may not have, but it doesn’t actually explain their lifestyle

  • Mechanically, this comes in the form of two skill proficiencies + a combination of two languages and/or tool proficiencies, as well as the “Background Feature”.

• Provide some basic equipment, such as clothing, that isn’t tied to core adventuring capabilities.

• Provide “intro to roleplaying and characterization” helpers (Traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws)

  • These also provides the mechanical hook for the Inspiration mechanic as a “reward for good roleplaying”

These are a lot of different functions, but that’s not inherently a bad thing - race and class perform dozens of design functions each. The measure of if a design component is good is if it accomplishes design goals. Unfortunately, Backgrounds largely fail at this.

• Backgrounds can provide concrete ties, especially with the cooperation of the DM, but the implementation of background features is lackluster. “I know a guy” type features require a type of DM buy-in, while some features such as the Outlander’s Wanderer feature seem to obviate the Exploration pillar of play as written.

• The equipment feeds into D&D’s hyper-specificity around what a character is carrying without having the kinds of exploration subsystems that mechanically support that hyper-specificity; more modern games leave “appropriate equipment” more open-ended and part of the conversation between the player and DM, trusting them to tell the story together.

• Traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws are ultimately not that helpful as roleplaying aids; conceptually they’re fine, but the actual implementation in the PHB and supplements is lackluster. The associated Inspiration mechanic also struggles from needing to be declared before a roll.

From these failings, the issue is less that Backgrounds aren’t necessary but that the existing ones fail to do their job. The trait/ideal/bond/flaw is a great example of this; four sentences to describe a character may provide more depth, but they’re a lot to track as a DM for a relatively small reward. Generalized “Good Roleplaying” is easier to manage from a DM POV but divests the Inspiration mechanic from backgrounds.

Existing Fixes

Each of the three major branches of D&D have attempted to address the issues with backgrounds. One common piece of these is adding additional mechanical power — ability score increases and/or feats. Ultimately, those changes don’t actually mean much because that power isn’t meaningfully tied to the story of the background; it’s just a way to provide additional capabilities to first level characters.

Wizards of the Coast

The new background section immediately starts by reversing the priority in layout: Custom backgrounds get first billing, followed by “Sample Backgrounds”, rather than listing backgrounds and providing tools to customize them. Second, backgrounds provide significantly more mechanical power — starting ability score increases have migrated from races, and backgrounds now give access to a selection of level 1 feats. Equipment has also been standardized in total gold value, but still follows the principles of high specificity.

The great sacrifice here is the roleplay ties; traits/ideals/bonds/flaws are completely gone from the revised core books, background features are no more, all replaced by quarter page pieces of art. There also appears to be no other tables, such as the Charlatan’s “Favorite Schemes”, that provides further suggestions of specificity to the background.

As for Inspiration, it’s been renamed to Heroic Advantage; as of Playtest 8, it’s now awarded if a character does something “particularly heroic or in character”. Fortunately, it is improved in effect — it can be used after a roll rather than before — but it’s effectively shoved the mechanic into a corner to be further ignored.

EN Publishing

The Level Up 5e Adventurer’s Guide split backgrounds into “Background” and “Destiny”. In addition to providing proficiencies and starting equipment, A5E backgrounds are the source of Ability Score Increases. What’s more, the features are reworked to interact with the beefed-up exploration pillar; instead of single-handedly solving all food concerns, Outlander’s sustenance benefits are tied to nearby friendly settlements. Some of the features provide outright skill boosts, such as Exile providing an expertise die (a 1d4) “on Persuasion checks against others who are away from their land of birth.”

In terms of roleplay opportunities, backgrounds replace the trait/ideal/bond/flaw set with a d10 table of Connections and Mementos. Furthermore, there’s an entry for “Adventures and Advancement” that suggest quests tied to a character’s background with a concrete mechanical reward that often enhances the background feature.

The inspiration mechanic has been significantly expanded upon with the selection of a Destiny. Destinies are fairly broad — Chaos, Dominion, Knowledge, Revenge — and come with a d6 table of motivations for roleplay purposes. Each destiny provides a concrete “Source of Inspiration”, in addition to the general condition of “good roleplaying”. Inspiration is still used before a roll, but can alternatively be spent on the destiny’s Inspiration Feature. Furthermore, each destiny provides a “Fulfillment Feature” to be acquired later in the campaign, each of which provide substantive mechanical benefits.

The main downside of the A5E presentation is quite simply, it’s a lot of extra bits and bobs that may not have sufficient payoff for the complexity introduced. This is the core dilemma of A5E — each of these changes seems individually defensible, but together they add a lot of features to track and increase the cognitive load of playing the game.

Kobold Press

The backgrounds of the Black Flag Roleplaying system (the free version of the upcoming Tales of the Valiant) provide proficiencies and equipment, like all of the other backgrounds. They also provide a starting talent, the ToV equivalent of feats. For roleplaying, they provide a d8 table of motivations tailored to the background. There’s no direct ability score increases here or anywhere - those bonuses are just directly part of determining ability scores.

Inspiration is replaced by the Luck mechanic. Luck points are generally lower value - they’re spent as +1 bonuses to a roll, with a full reroll taking 3 points. On the other hand, PCs have a regular supply of them — you can automatically gain up to 1 per turn by failing a check, in addition to earning them as a roleplay reward.

In all honesty, the Tales of the Valiant updates to backgrounds are very similar to the Wizards of the Coast 2024 PHB updates, with the caveat that the level 1 talents feel more disconnected from backgrounds than the level 1 feats do and otherwise raise some balance concerns. The more significant work is the shift from Inspiration to Luck. There’s only a little bit more roleplaying material here with the Adventuring Motivation table, which is more than the 2024 PHB but far less than the Level Up: Adventurer’s Guide.

Baldur’s Gate 3 (no spoilers)

The 2023 Game of the Year Baldur’s Gate 3 blended the designs of TTRPGs and CRPGs in a beautiful melody that has myself and many others totally enraptured. As part of the adaptation of D&D’s mechanics, in a sort of 3.25 that’s a parallel development to the core updates from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, the game slightly reworked backgrounds. Selecting a background does provide a pair of skills, but the game does not use tool and language proficiencies. Backgrounds only rarely provide new dialogue options for roleplay; race and class are far more impactful in opening new branches.

Where Baldur’s Gate 3 excels in its usage of backgrounds, however, is the inspiration system. The game is littered with concrete inspiration triggers for backgrounds — exploring new places triggers Outlander, helping people triggers Folk Hero, uncovering ancient lore triggers Scholar, etc. Inspiration is then a pool for the entire party to reroll failed ability checks; you can’t use it in combat for a failed saving throw, for example. In some sense it’s a built-in way to “save scum” on pivotal dialog moments.

What this clarified for me is that Inspiration is a critical mechanic to manage the inherent variability of the d20; inspiration isn’t a guarantee at success, but gives the players a key resource for fighting back against the whims of fate. Failing a key roll sucks, and inspiration can help smooth over the bad feelings from it — and if you roll two 1s in a row, well that’s a story!

Lessons Learned

There’s clearly a lot of design room to change how backgrounds work. One simple option is to just use the version that matches the dialect of D&D you’re playing; it avoids any kind of conversion work because you’re playing the game as the designers intended. But this does leave out the elegant implementation of BG3, and I think each of the fixes leaves things out. I think all three TTRPG fixes are correct to tie ability score increases to backgrounds, and I think starting feats/talents are fun, but neither is terribly important to the overall design despite having the largest mechanical impact.

Premise 1: Backgrounds should offer concrete roleplay hooks. As the primary tie between a PC and the broader world, they’re a great way to push back against the rest of the game’s design incentivizing murderhoboing. This kind of direction (which Group Patrons can also provide) gives broader context to the character’s lives beyond the starting adventure. Stories are richer when the characters influence the plot as much as the plot influences them.

Premise 2: There should be a way to correct for the inherent variability of the d20. Many modern TTRPGs have ways to expend resources to make up for bad rolls, but BG3 really puts it front and center due to the rigidity of being a CRPG. Other games may be able to use dice pools to create a bell curve, but D&D is married to the d20 for better or worse.

For the first premise, there’s two mutually compatible methods to encourage roleplay: Rewards for engaging, or mechanics to help you engage. The original Inspiration mechanic, its modified usage in BG3, and the Source of Inspiration from A5E destinies marry the first premise to the second. Unfortunately, each of these runs into some difficulties

• PHB2014: Too many characteristics to track, and the characteristics are generally poorly written for use with Inspiration

• BG3: Your game isn’t a CRPG with a crack team of writers, and the shared pool of inspiration works better when it’s a solo playthrough controlling four PCs.

• A5E: Backgrounds and Destinies are better written than the 2014 PHB, but they still have too much to track. Destinies especially feel off in the context of D&D compared to more narrative-driven games, requiring a little too much predetermination of a character’s arc.

Still, each of these three are better for trying compared to the 2024 PHB and the Black Flag Roleplaying system, which have entirely give up on tying backgrounds to their Heroic Advantage/Luck mechanics.

The Solution

My fix, which may get written up in a DMsGuild or DTRPG supplement at some point, is to build on the simple skeleton of the 2014 D&D revisions.

1. Add concrete Heroic Advantage triggers for each background. A wizard who was a soldier should be different from a wizard who was a scholar.

2. Provide a set of adventure hooks for each background

The second in particular is something that I wish was more prominent in published adventures, but the limited content of the SRD have prevented wider adoption in 3rd party adventures. Having multiple sources of adventure hooks can enrich an adventure by creating distinct points of entry. While not every D&D game is about the differences between the lower and upper classes, backgrounds anchor characters somewhere in that hierarchy; the blue-blooded noble is seen differently in the world than the urchin who grew up on the streets.

Coming up with the full list of background inspiration sources is the work of a published supplement, but some basic principles should apply; they shouldn’t be trivial, and they should push a character to do new things, but perfectly balanced opportunities aren’t strictly necessary. An entertainer shouldn’t get inspiration just for performing for a crowd, but performing for a new crowd. A Guide should gain inspiration for finding shelter in a new environment.

For more factional backgrounds, I would reward inspiration for “making an impression” with an NPC of matching background: Soldiers with soldiers, farmers with farmers, nobles with nobles. You “make an impression” if, at the end of a social encounter, you shift the NPCs attitude at least one step — not only does this leverage the mechanical language of the social pillar, but emphasizes that this is more than a passing encounter.

Conclusion

Backgrounds are a persistent part of character creation this edition, but it’s clear that it’s not a settled piece of the overall design of the game. Each dialect of D&D has its own take on how to fix them, and this article throws out its own version. Even if you keep to using backgrounds as written, this article gave you ideas of how to better use the mechanics that are present to you.