New Feats | Backgrounds | Species | 2024 Player's Handbook | D&D

so when you're making your character now you will first choose your class the most important choice you make for your character and then you will flesh out your character's origin and so we like to think of it as you might decide I want to be a fighter or I want to be a rogue or a cleric or a wizard and then you think well how did I get there what did I do before I was a member of that class and what do I know about my character's childhood and so it's when you start pondering those questions that you turn toward the character Origins chapter and you will essentially be going back in time in your character's backstory so again you start with your class then you'll Ponder well what was my character's background and background is all about not only what you did prior to becoming an adventurer but also where you did it you know where you was sailor were you a criminal were you an acolyte in a temple were you a sage and then you keep going back in time in your character's origin to your birth and that's when you then Ponder your character's species and your species choice and your background Choice together combine to give you a number of critical game capabilities that will really help flesh out your character background has far more weight for your character now than it did in the 2014 rules people in the UN Arcana process got to see a preview of this where in addition to giving you proficiencies as backgrounds previously did backgrounds also now all give you a feat at first level they also determine ability score bonuses for you when you make your character and these are ability score bonuses that really are rising up out of how your characters spent their time prior to embarking on the Wilds of Adventure and those two things in particular the ability score adjustments that backgrounds bring as well as the feet mean your background will have an effect on your character for your entire career and that was something that was not necess neily the case in 2014 backgrounds except for perhaps the proficiencies you got you would still enjoy those throughout your career but now there are more parts of your character that are forever affected by your character's background now to support the use of Feats at first level we have now divided Feats up into categories because we don't want uh if first level character to be plunged into the deep end of the feet pool we want you to be able to sample Feats uh and to have that sampling be curated so that the feet you get from your background is from a special selection of Feats that are appropriate for a starting character and so those Feats are now in a category called origin Feats appropriately enough because you get get them as a part of your character origin now even though they're in that category later on if you decide to go deeper into Feats you could potentially choose other origin Feats for your character as well but to start each person gets just one origin feet that's provided by their background in addition to the proficiencies your background is providing as well as the ability score adjustments now those ability score adjustments to me are really juicy because of the flexibility that we provide and this is a flexibility that goes beyond anything that we previewed in unart darana so what we now do in each background is we provide three ability options and then you as a player decide am I going to put plus two in one of those three and you choose which of the three or and then plus one in one of the other two or am I going to do plus one in all three so here's an example the ooly uh if you decided your character whatever class you're a part of spent their formative years serving in a temple in some capacity you could choose ooly and the ooly background tells you that the three abilities that you have the the option to adjust are intelligence wisdom and Charisma and you have total freedom in which of those You decide gets the plus two which one gets a plus one or if you maybe don't want to make that choice and just give plus one to all three right we did this because we want backgrounds to interlock with as many appropriate classes as possible previously when we previewed this approach to backgrounds of them providing ability score adjustments one of the downsides of the the play test version is it kind of hard locked the backgrounds to specific classes yeah and we did not want to proceed with that because in some ways that was recreating the exact problem that we were getting away from from 2014 species because in 2014 these ability score adjustments existed inside the playable species and one of the reasons we moved it out of there is we didn't like how that drove certain species to be combined with certain classes we wanted people to feel more free to mix and match and so here rather than just recreate the same restriction we now do have a little bit of restriction but you have tremendous amount of flexibility within it I mean because you have three of the games six abilities to play with no matter which background you choose and really it's just which three changes from background to background and we made sure that there was a broad range of character building options uh in the different backgrounds to support many different char character builds like if I jump ahead uh in the chapter to the guide for instance the guide's three abilities are dexterity Constitution and wisdom that combo means the guide is actually a happy background for a number of different classes uh particularly because everyone is happy to have Constitution um and really any background that has Constitution is one of the three will work with pretty much any class and this was something very much on our minds as we created these Trio of a these trios in each of the backgrounds to really make sure that the 16 backgrounds in this book provide a huge array of character building options and now if someone wants to go beyond the 16 background options in the player handbook the new dungeon Masters Guide provides guidance uh under the DM supervision on creating additional backgrounds but in the players handbook itself there are these 16 to choose from there are a few backgrounds that share the Feats that they offer because we we did not want to force people to choose a certain background because that was optimal for for certain Feats now there are a number of Feats that are you know only one background offers that feet but there are a few and alert is a great example of them where the feet is offered by more than one background right uh skilled is a similar one as well yes particularly because the skilled feet is so open-ended all of these combinations of options the Feats the ability score adjustments the proficiencies also the starting equipment that the backgrounds provide mean that each background is a package of very distinct options from the other backgrounds of course you can dig deeper into Feats if you decide to at higher levels uh when everyone reaches fourth level uh they get uh ability score increase just as they did in the 2014 Players handbook but ability score increase is now itself a feat and just like in 2014 you have the option of taking that feat or selecting a different one and because we now have given everyone a taste of Feats at first level we wanted to make sure that this book had more Feats available which is why there are 75 of them in this book so that uh if you do decide to go into the the fun customization world of Feats there's more there for you to play with and the Feats have all been uh enhanced in some cases completely redesigned and then there's the whole other half of your origin your species right and we've we've got a lot of new things in species we've we've got and we've got new additions so the orc has joined goliaths have joined and the asamar the asamar and uh those three brand new options and uh they they join of course classic options like uh human elf halfling gnome the tling the dragon born uh are are still with us as well and every one of these species has been Revisited has been enhanced uh a number of these enhancements people got to see in the unearth Arana process with like the dragon born uh having an enhanced uh breath weapon and then when they get to higher level even gaining the ability to sprout wings and fly and even humans and halflings have been Revisited and in in some of their traits redesigned the dragon born are super dragon born uh the goliaths are very Goliath because now they're tied to Giants not surprisingly if if you have the background a background being a cloud Giant in your heritage then you can kind of you know Misty step away teleport way because you're more of a trickster but it's all based off like Hill giant storm Stone all of it has different uh abilities that you can choose from and that is a part of the theme that we had with the species which was to really lean into the fantasy of each one this is why uh dwarves now have Tremor sense that they can use a certain number of times a day where we again wanting to lean harder into what what is the resonant fantasy of each of these peoples uh and part of that with dwarves with their connection to the Earth well let's give them this really remarkable ability a certain number of times per day to sense things through the Earth itself their dark vision has also gotten better uh dwarves and Orcs both have dark vision out to 120 ft uh in the new players handbook uh really driving home that certain peoples have spent uh at least their ancestors have spent more time Underground than some of the other peoples uh humans I mentioned have been uh redesigned with uh the origin Feats in the game in mind because now when you if you choose human you get to choose an additional origin feet for your character so you'll not only get the origin feet of your background but also uh one of your choice uh and uh humans now each day start off uh with heroic inspiration and right also people will see that uh because we want each species to really bring its own fantasy to life they're very asymmetrical in how we have designed them so some of them have uh Choice points in them where you know you mentioned the Goliath earlier where you might be picking a type of giant that you're associated with or you know dragon born have their different breath weapon options but then we have others like the halfling the dwarf the orc where there aren't Choice points like that because their fantasy didn't demand that in the design but it's also because we did not want every single one to have the same complexity level just as our classes and subclasses have different complexity levels the species have different complexity levels as well so we talk about a lot about meeting that fantasy that wish fulfillment mechanically that's done as well in action economy the Goliath being that is now tied closer to Giants you can get big it once you hit a certain level you can go one size larger but you can do this as a bonus action you're not taking a full action to have that happen for you you're just getting big and then possibly attacking and terrifying a group dragon born is the same thing and this was a change that we saw in a previous book but you can now use your breath weapon not only does it get more powerful over time but if you take the attack action one of those attacks can be the breath weapons AB so you're not sacrificing if you're a fighter a bunch of your attacks you know that could have been possibly more effective by using the breath weapon you're just laying it on to what you can already do and another example of us really deepening the fantasy and giving people more options is in the asamar where before you had to pick a single Celestial Revelation and that was true for your character forever you now get to change that choice every time you use it uh because we figured well an asamar who is descended from celestials sure might have some days where in the mood to shine with light but they might also have some days where they're they're more on the the the vengeful end of the celestial spectrum and uh choose one of the other Celestial Revelation options so significant changes to species we've got several more species to work with and a lot of lered on abilities that kind of hit that again that wish fulfillment of like this is what I want I want to be a big character a big goath I I can get big bonus action I'm huge now I'm just going to Pummel the character creation chapter in this book includes a sidebar that explains how to use backgrounds and species from older books uh because over the last decade there have been several different approaches to where you get the your ability score increase do you get a feat or not we have a rule in the character creation chapter on how to use backgrounds or species from other books that don't appear in this book uh so any any species or background that appears in this book that also appeared in an earlier book The version in the new players handbook is now the canonical version but if there's say a species or background in an older book that is not in the new players handbook and you would still like to use it you can and again the character creation chapter provides guidance on how you can do that the new player handbook is available for pre-order right now on D and D Beyond you can find that link in the video description and you can also find the new core rule books bundle for pre-order both physical and digital thank you so much for watching we have a ton of video content coming out about the new players handbook and all the new core Rule books the new monster manual the new dungeon Masters Guide so be sure to check out all of that content and thank you for watching

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Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 18 2024