At the beginning of this month, I began a new campaign with my weekly table. We’re back to a homebrew setting and adventure after our run of Tyranny of Dragons; one I’ll be delighted to write a bit about in a future post. Today, however, I’ve got some thoughts about the ways character creation and customization changed in the 2024 Player’s Handbook I wanted to puzzle out.
Namely, there’s a new tension in the choices presented. One that’s easy to miss on first glance or even on a first build with this version of the rules. To understand it, though, you need to know what exactly has changed.
Back in 2014, when 5th edition first began, it retained a lot of traditional holdovers that have only become more unpopular in the last decade. Twelve years ago, when you were creating your D&D character, your chosen race had certain attribute bonuses assigned to it. You know, elves have a bonus to their dexterity, orcs have one to strength; things that have become so misaligned with the game’s current culture it’s shocking they were ever there to begin with.
This changed in 2020 with the release of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. In that supplement, we were given the option to reassign these bonuses however we’d like. This proved a popular change, one that my own tables never dispensed with for our all campaigns and one-shot adventures prior to 2024. That’s not to say that there weren’t plenty of grumpy old fats on the internet upset about the elimination of that … “texture.” The best of them, I think, were upset to lose the tension of a choice in character creation (and the worst of them we won’t waste any time on). As in, in the 2014 rules, if one made a half-orc wizard, you were specifically accepting a disadvantage to pursue your character fantasy.
And that is the tension that’s come back around in the 2024 PHB – not due to any preassigned heritage based bonuses, but with bonuses to our attributes provided by our selected backgrounds.
Now, December wasn’t my first brush with these adjustments. When the updated PHB dropped, I let my players rebuild their PCs at their discretion in between sessions. The DM of my monthly game with my Warcraft guildmates did the same, and my sporadically meeting table I host for my family has only been using the new PHB’s rules.
Thing is, in those situations, we didn’t really experience the tension. Not immediately, anyway. For both of my tables, I let my players just select whatever combination of feat and attribute bumps they wanted, effectively using the Custom Background rules that we now have from the new Dungeon Master’s Guide. My own character in my guild’s game is defined so entirely by his history as a soldier that I settled on it pretty early; it provided the attribute bumps I wanted, but, to be honest, I practically never use its origin feat and would’ve preferred something like the Guard background’s Alert. I settled with that trade-off, however.
All this is to say: I wasn’t ignorant of this tension. I’d merely delayed the need to interrogate my own thoughts on the matter until now. As we neared our Session Zero, one of my players was considering two character concepts. One was a monk who he imagined as having something like the old Folk Hero background. That one didn’t survive the transition between 2014 and 2024, though; the closest one to it would be the Farmer background in the PHB. My player’s issue was that he definitely wanted to boost his Dexterity and Wisdom for that monk, not his Strength.
That is where I think there’s a line here. A lot of the time when we’re building our D&D PCs, we’re making decisions. We’re deciding we want to play a certain class, a certain species, have a certain personality, etc. Then, we come upon the new backgrounds and the game is asking us instead to make a choice. That if we want a specific origin feat, we’d better be happy with one of the attribute sets assigned to the same background(s) it’s attached to (to say nothing of the given proficiencies). (Alternatively, hopefully we’re happy picking the human species for an additional origin feat.)
I don’t know if Backgrounds is the right place to ask people to make a choice over a decision, though. Maybe WOTC doesn’t either, since they codified a work-around themselves.
Any alternatives that come to mind seem like poor replacements, too. Like, if they’d instead made these 1st level bonuses provided from your class, that limits the many avenues in the game that let us play with an alternate primary stat, like the Dexterity focused paladin subclass from Heroes of Faerun, or playing a Rogue or Cleric PC that primarily attacks with a weapon through True Strike and thus doesn’t need a good Dexterity or Strength score.
These bonuses are meant to help prop up a character to perform their primary focus. They’re bad-luck protection when rolling stats, or it’s the bonuses that allow your primary attributes to truly excel over the other ones when using Point Buy or Standard Array. It’s just inelegant.
But, hey, who says it needs to be?
It’s healthy for the game to have both choices and decisions. Choices can help us flesh out characters we’ve already made several decisions about, and the decisions we make inform the choices that are meaningful to us. I see a lot of value in both ends of that spectrum. Perhaps in a future edition of the game, we’ll have some other way these attribute boosts are created, or the starting budget for point buy will change, or the standard array numbers will shift around, or maybe we’ll move away from 4d6k3 as the default for rolled stats. Who knows.
As always, thank you for reading. Good luck out there, heroes.
Ben Stovall Blog 