Expected read time: about 12 minutes

UPDATE: Find the link to the survey HERE

Today I’m continuing my analysis of the Unearthed Arcana article “Character Origins”. Last time, we delved into the Races section. This time, it’s Character Backgrounds and the 1st-level Feats that go with them.

Download the relevant Unearthed Arcana article HERE

Build Your Background

It’s interesting that in the 2014 Player’s Handbook the reader was directed to pick one of the presented backgrounds, and if none were suitable, to create a custom one. In this article it’s the other way around: build a background from scratch, or if you don’t feel like it, you can sort through and pick a premade one.

For me, this reinforces the “descriptive vs restrictive” design philosophy of 5e; the presented options are meant to inspire you, not regulate you. It’s the story that’s emphasized, and all mechanics are there to help you build the story that you want for your character.

Each background is made up of 6 elements:

Ability Score Bonuses. Remember, these are no longer part of your race. You get a floating +2 and +1 to apply as you want to two of your ability scores. Or, if you prefer, you can instead have three +1s to apply to your scores.
Skill Proficiencies. You get two, just the same as in the previous system for backgrounds. It’s nice that you can pick any two skills, instead of trying to find the combination you want from the existing backgrounds.
Tool Proficiency. In the past, not every background had access to tool proficiencies. Later on in the article, we’re informed that the prices of artisan’s tools are now each 15 gold pieces, rather than each one having a different cost. This helps with one of the professed goals of the article: standardize and balance the equipment given by each background.
Language. You learn a language of your choice. They provide tables of Standard and Rare Languages, and I am so happy to see the inclusion of Common Sign Language! I mean, in past editions drow had their own form of sign language, but it was meant primarily for covert operations, not to help communicate with those who are hard of hearing. This Common Sign Language is much more welcoming, inclusive, and fun. Strangely, “Chthonic” does not show up in the list of Rare Languages.
Feat. The ‘Feature’ of backgrounds has been removed, and now every 1st-level character gets to choose a 1st-level feat as part of their background. This is Big News! More on this later, but in general it’s regarded so far as really awesome news.
Equipment. As mentioned before, the previous backgrounds had access to different amounts of starting gold (looking at you, Noble!) so one of the design team’s goals this time around is to make all the background equipment kits worth exactly 50 gold pieces. This seems very reasonable, and I imagine it will prove popular in the feedback survey.

The idea is that you decide how these elements come together to form your character’s Background. Since all Backgrounds provide the same number of ability score bonuses, skill and tool proficiencies, a language, a 1st-level feat, and 50 GP of equipment/coin, there’s less incentive to optimize, meaning that you’re free to concentrate on story-building for your character. Every option can mean something in your story, and ideally none of them would be disregarded as inferior.

The Sample Backgrounds

Again, these are really just examples or pre-made packages that you can use for your background if you don’t feel like putting your own together. They demonstrate how all the pieces can come together to form a coherent narrative.

For example, the Acolyte gains Wisdom and Intelligence, is proficient in Insight and Religion, speaks Celestial, and learns some divine magic through its feat. It even gains proficiency in Calligrapher’s Supplies, suggesting that maybe the character might have been tasked with transcribing holy writ. Among other things, in its equipment it gets a prayer book, a robe, and a holy symbol.

(Interestingly, there’s nothing in the background granting the Acolyte the ability to use the holy symbol as a spellcasting focus… Still, there’s no reason a religious character can’t carry one around. It adds to the story!)

There are several pre-made Backgrounds available here that weren’t in the 2014 Player’s Handbook: Farmer, Gladiator (as its own option, rather than a variant Entertainer), Guard, Guide, Laborer, and Pilgrim. Conspicuously missing are Folk Hero, Guild Merchant (variant), Outlander, Spy (variant), and Pirate (variant). I suppose the variants are simply reflavored versions of their original counterparts and are easy enough to reproduce, but I think I’ll miss the Folk Hero. I’m sure the Outlander will be bemoaned for the loss of its Wanderer feature, but that one was problematic for several reasons anyway.

In all, I’m very much a fan of these changes to Backgrounds. If you like them too, or can think of ways they can be improved, be sure to fill out Wizards of the Coast’s survey when it’s released, and make your feedback known!

Feats

This is the meat that most people have been waiting for news about! Personally, I’ve always been dissatisfied with how feats were handled in the 2014 Player’s Handbook, so I’ve been anxiously looking forward to this, hoping that a new approach to feats would assuage my doubts. But once I heard that feats with level prerequisites would be introduced, I immediately felt relief and got even more excited.

The 8 or so years since the Player’s Handbook was released have made it generally understood to the fan base that not all of the feats were created equally. The feats meant to add utility to your character ended up mostly lackluster, while the combat-focused feats proved to be problematically over-powered. Some feats would see use in every game session, or sometimes in every round of combat, while others… never really came up at all in gameplay. Whatever story the original feats were meant to build, whatever their goal was, their implementation never allowed it to happen.

What’s more, the way feats were implemented in the game meant that you could only gain them at certain levels and only if you sacrificed some of your Ability Score Improvements. Feats were just an optional rule, but most gaming groups chose to use them. Allowing characters the chance to gain them, but only at a steep cost, compounded the conflict between optimization more character-centric choices. If over the course of your character’s adventuring career it can only ever get a small handful of feats, those feat selections are under enormous pressure to get the most bang for their buck.

These new feats, however, already look much better. For the most part they’re generally useful and are more readily helpful for storytelling. These are meant to be abilities that your character developed in the past that actively help with adventuring. That they’re meant to be picked at 1st level, essentially for free, is a great point in their favor.

Here’s a breakdown of each one.

Alert

It’s quite different from the Player’s Handbook feat of the same name. Rather than a flat +5 bonus to initiative, you instead get to add your Proficiency Bonus (so anywhere from a +2 to a +6 over the course of your adventuring career). You don’t get immunity to surprise or the extra defense against unseen enemies, but you do get an interesting little feature called “Initiative Swap”, which lets you swap initiative with one of your allies at the beginning of combat.

Right away with these feats we’re seeing passive abilities taken away, to be replaced with active ones that the player can choose to use. While I personally have nothing against passive abilities, I do agree that choice does a lot to enable roleplay at the table. Making decisions, deciding what your character would do, that’s roleplay, it puts the power in the player’s hands to build the narrative happening at the table.

Crafter

With this feat you gain proficiency with three different artisan’s tools, a 20% discount whenever you buy nonmagical items, and crafting time is reduced by 20%.

Aaaaand so much for active abilities! From what I’ve seen and heard so far, this is the one feat in the article that most people just kind of say “meh” about. It’s interesting, because we’ve considered mechanics similar to these in our own designs here at Unraveled Archives, but always ended up discarding them for mainly this reason:

Monetary wealth is extremely variable between D&D games. Each DM has their own idea of how much gold should be given out to the party and when, and every game world or adventure has its own parameters. One of the common complaints is that D&D 5e doesn’t have anything to spend large quantities of money on (hence the prevalence of 3rd-party publishers and DM’s Guild content that try to help with this). It’s just very difficult accurately judge how balanced a feature is that deals with money in a D&D 5e game.

Healer

So the previous Healer feat allowed you to use Healer’s Kits to get dying characters back on their feet. You could also heal a creature for a decent handful of hit points, but each creature could only benefit once per short or long rest. It gave healing ability to a character, but circumvented the feat’s narrative and mechanical promise.

See, any character interested in playing support and being a healer (such as a cleric, bard, druid, etc.) would perk up at the mention of a “Healer” feat. But that original feat never actually did anything to make healers better at healing. Instead, it gave some small healing ability to characters who didn’t normally have access to such an ability.

On the other hand, this new Healer feat gives anyone who takes it the Battle Medic feature, which does allow them to use a Healer’s Kit to heal people, but also the Healing Rerolls feature. This second ability let’s you reroll 1s whenever you use a spell or this feat to heal somebody. It’s actually useful for characters with healing magic now.

Fixing this problem of previous feats promising one thing and delivering something else is one of WotC’s specific design goals with this Unearthed Arcana article, and Jeremy Crawford actually mentions this feat and the reasoning behind its changes in a video interview with Todd Kenreck.

You can find that interview HERE.

Lucky

Ah, Lucky. Yes, this was a very popular feat in the original Player’s Handbook, and for good reason. It gave you three “luck points”, which could be spent to essentially give you “double-advantage” on a d20 roll. What’s more, by some interpretations it could even turn disadvantage into “double-advantage”, or inflict “double-disadvantage” on an attack roll against you that normally would have had advantage. It really played with the math in a way that some people thought was just a bit ridiculous.

This new Lucky feat has a few critical differences. Now, instead of an arbitrary number of Luck Points, you get your Proficiency Bonus’ worth. That’s 2-6 uses per day, depending on your level. This follows with the recent pattern of ability usages that WotC has been proffering. So the longer your character lives and continues adventuring and levels up, the luckier they get! I think that’s kind of fun.

The other big difference from the original feat is that this one actually abides by the game’s math system. You can spend a Luck Point to retroactively give yourself advantage on a d20 Test (the new official term for ability check, attack roll, or saving throw), or disadvantage on an attack roll against you. So, immediately after you make the roll, you can decide “Oh, actually I want to have advantage on that roll.” Ironically, this is how many game tables use the Inspiration rules. But more on that in the next blog post! (Also in the next blog post: how enemies being unable to score critical hits might change how people hoard abilities like these Luck Points.)

In any case, I like these changes much better. Whatever your thoughts, feel free to sound off in the comments below, or let WotC know in the survey when it comes out!

Magic Initiate

Now this one is pretty interesting. In all, I believe it’s considerably stronger than its previous counterpart in the Player’s Handbook. Before, you picked a spellcasting class and gained two cantrips and a 1st-level spell from the spell list of the chosen class. And you were limited to using the spellcasting ability of that chosen class as well. So if you were a Wizard trying to pick up a healing spell from the Cleric spell list, you had to use Wisdom to cast that spell, rather than your usual Intelligence. Also, you could only cast the 1st-level spell once. Without expending a spell slot, but just… once.

That’s all different now.

Now the feat references three spell lists: Arcane, Divine, and Primal. I’m certainly happy to see mechanical divisions between Arcane and Divine magic, and (being a fan of 4e) I was surprised and overjoyed to see Primal appear and stand on its own merits. Instead of choosing a class and its corresponding spell list, you choose one of these other three spell lists, gaining the usual two cantrips and one 1st-level spell.

The spells you can acquire from the lists are pretty much the same (with the notable exception of Eldritch Blast), so what’s the big difference? Well, first off, you get to choose your spellcasting ability for the spells you gain; it’s not tied to the specific spellcasting ability of an existing class. This is a huge change, but also a pretty fun one.

For example, it used to be very difficult to pick up the Shillelagh spell and tie it to the spellcasting ability that you wanted. Typically it’s based off of Wisdom, and if you wanted to use any other spellcasting ability for it there were some hoops you had to jump through. Now, you can just pick the Primal spell list, pick Shillelagh as one of your cantrips, and choose Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma as your spellcasting ability for it. Suddenly you have an easy way to make a melee-build that is based off of a spellcasting ability instead of Strength of Dexterity.

The other big change is that the 1st-level spell you pick - you always have it prepared. You can cast it with any spell slots you have. So it’s not just a once-per-day use of a spell, but it’s essentially added to your list of spells you know!

This is a two-edged sword.

On the one hand, I absolutely love that now a Wizard can pick up Cure Wounds and cast it using their own spell slots, so now you can have a sort of apothecary wizard who can play more of a support role in the party.

On the other hand, I just know that now we’re going to see Clerics, Druids, Paladins, Rangers, pretty much everyone with easier access to the Shield spell. I have a friend who commonly says, “Yeah, I never make a character who doesn’t know Shield.” And I like the guy, but I still shake my head over how restricted and closed-off his character concepts are. Well, maybe this feat will let him broaden his horizons a bit and still have his Shield.

Musician

Being a musician myself, I’m always happy to see options like this is in the game! This feat is entirely new, so it’s our first view of a feat that didn’t previously exist in the 2014 Player’s Handbook. And I like what I see!

You gain proficiency with three musical instruments. Cool! I tend to pick instruments most people have never heard of. But it’s the next part that has the real benefit: Inspiring Song! Basically after any short or long rest you can perform a song and give people Inspiration. Not Bardic Inspiration, the unfortunately-named Bard feature, but actual Inspiration.

Another of the design team’s goals is to redo their approach to the Inspiration mechanic. Basically, they want people to use it more often. So instead of just relying on the DM to remember to dish it out according to their preferred method (which could be anything from ‘always’ to ‘never’), they want to introduce more ways for characters to gain Inspiration. Remember the Human race in the last blog post? They gain Inspiration after every long rest. And now, through the Musician feat, we have another way of granting it. I’m a fan.

Savage Attacker

I’ve always appreciated the original iteration of this feat, in spite of the derision it received from people comparing it to powerhouse feats such as Great Weapon Master or Polearm Master. I had a player take this feat when I ran Out of the Abyss, and she put it to very good use. I’ve been impressed with it ever since.

It’s great to see it now as a 1st-level feat. Without being overshadowed by other feats, it stands out as the best option for anybody who just wants some extra damage. Basically it gives you ‘advantage’ on the damage rolls of your weapon. Once per turn, you can just reroll the damage and keep the higher result. Solid, doesn’t mess with the game’s math, and doesn’t take much extra time at the table.

I’m curious to see how it interacts with other features that reroll damage, such as the Great Weapon Fighting style. Might features like those be getting updates, so as to avoid reroll confusion? It’s very exciting that we’ll be getting more Unearthed Arcana articles like this in the future!

Skilled

Okay, so this feat is the same as it was previously. You gain proficiency with three skills. It doesn’t have any other little features added like most of the other feats here, but three extra skill proficiencies isn’t anything to sniff at! 5e has gotten to the point that between racial traits and class/subclass features, having ‘only’ four skill proficiencies seems like so few. Well, pick the right race and subclass now, and take this feat, and you could easily end up with nine or ten skill proficiencies!

Tavern Brawler

Now this one has me excited. Long did the original feat suffer either from people calling it weak and ignoring it, or taking it and being unsatisfied with it.

No more!

You start with the 1d4 damage for your unarmed strike, which was present in the previous version of the feat. But then you also basically get the Savage Attacker feat for all of your attacks with unarmed strikes. Oh, and once per turn when you hit a creature with an unarmed strike, you can also push it 5 feet away. Monks may actually look at this feat! Or characters of races that have bite, claws, or talons for their unarmed strikes.

This feat becomes even more impressive when you get into the new rules for grappling, but that’s going to have to wait until the next blog post! (Hint: grappling’s now based off of unarmed strikes)

Lastly, the feat lets you use furniture as a weapon! Depending on the size of said furniture, you can treat it as either a club or greatclub. That’s just fun.

Overall, I can see this feat being very popular in the survey.

Tough

One last feat makes an appearance here, and it’s an oldie but a goodie. Tough basically just gives you extra hit points equal to twice your level. So, 2 extra hit points at 1st level, up to 40 extra hit points by 20th level. If you can’t decide which feat to pick for your 1st-level character, you can’t go wrong with Tough.

Interestingly, this now lets a 1st-level Dwarf Barbarian with 16 Constitution start the game with a whopping 18 hit points. You know, just about triple what the party’s Wizard is starting at! Anyway, I’m a fan of this one.

Wrapping It Up

And that’s it for this post’s breakdown! Next week we’ll tackle the rest of the article, covering a bunch of new rules and terms, as well as the new source-based spell lists!

I’d love to hear your thoughts if I’ve missed the mark on anything or said something that resonated with you, so feel free to make a comment.

Don’t forget to take WotC’s survey when it comes out! As a wise woman once said, “If you didn’t go vote, you forfeit your right to complain about the president.” Sure this isn’t politics (whew!) but you have a chance to make your voice heard to the makers of the game. Let them know how you feel about these possible changes!