There is a post over at the D&D Next development blog about backgrounds and themes. I can already hear the old school groans. Oh no, more sets of options that can be used for character optimization! More complexity! But stay with me, I actually think there are some really interesting ideas here. In the article, backgrounds are described as a bundle of skills and themes are presented as a collection of feats. Choosing a background explains where your character came from, and choosing a theme identifies how the character plays. So far, so much like ACKS templates, right? Or Second Edition kits? Well, sort of, but not only.
This background/theme split actually makes a lot of sense to me. I like it because it focuses on character concept rather than character function. This is a move away from the focus on “role” in Fourth Edition. In 4E, role is actually more important than class. Using backgrounds and themes, rather than selecting the skill athletics and a feat that gives a bonus to ranged combat, a player might select the soldier background and the sharpshooter theme. You don’t even really need to be familiar with the skill and feat descriptions (assuming they choose the background and theme names well). You just need to pick fighter, soldier, sharpshooter. Done. More examples from the article:
The first theme you choose is broadly descriptive and flexible. Think Leader, Sharpshooter, or Skirmisher. When you adopt your second theme at 6th level, you might choose another basic theme or you might choose something that grounds you a bit more in the game by selecting an advanced theme. Currently, advanced themes, in concept, resemble the prestige classes from 3rd Edition. They focus your character a bit further, building on the foundation established by another theme, to reflect deep specialization or some character-defining quality. Here are a few ideas off the top of my head. A Sharpshooter becomes an Arcane Archer. A Tempest becomes an Eldritch Knight. A Lurker becomes a Shadowdancer. A Mystic becomes a Necromancer or Enchanter or Abjurer.
A wizard specialist would actually be something you grow into, not something you start as. This makes sense to me intuitively and also follows the principle of character elaboration through play rather than optimized builds constructed before the game.
Background and theme lists also provide a way for the referee to tailor the player interface to a given campaign without requiring the players to read a large setting infodump document. (Such lists might be amenable to random tables, too, for really quick character generation.) One of the examples they give is a set of backgrounds and themes that might be appropriate for a Ravenloft game: Occultist + Avenger, Commoner + Werewolf, or Bereaved + Revenant. That’s only six words right there, and I bet you already have a pretty good idea about the style and content of that campaign (though I have no idea what “revenant” has to do with class play style).
I also like the idea of getting a new theme every five levels rather than multiclassing. It would fit well with E6-style level limits. If someone wanted to play, for example, an E5 game, then the second theme would essentially be an endgame prestige class. More complicated characters would be possible for those that wished to run campaigns with a higher level cap. Blending magical and mundane themes could lead to very interesting non-stereotypical characters (like a wizard who takes the sharpshooter theme) without the blandness of wizard-4, thief-2 (or whatever). This may also help prevent some of the multiclassing abuses like taking first level in several classes just to get the basic class features. From the article:
As I mentioned last time, I can imagine the fighter’s suggested background being soldier. That tells the story of the fighter throughout the editions. By replacing soldier with priest, I suddenly have a very different sort of fighter—even if the mechanical adjustments are shallow and focus on noncombat task resolution. Such a character might have been a temple guard, a crusader, or even Friar Tuck, armed with a quarterstaff.
And, for those groups that like just picking skills and feats directly, it should be immediately obvious how to do that (“DM 5: Come up with your own background by choosing up to four skills”). Or, one could use backgrounds and themes in a more abstract way, akin to the old secondary skill system.
Now, that’s not to say that this design might not devolve into endless options, but I think it has potential to work well with multiple play styles. As the article suggests, if you don’t want to play with skills, the way to do that is to run a game without backgrounds, and if you don’t want to play with feats, the way to do that is to run a game without themes. Elegant, and by reframing the issues it might also help get people to try playing other styles. I could imagine a tactical gamer willing to try a game without themes and an old school player willing to play a game with backgrounds, especially if all the other rules elements that they are familiar with stay the same. I think this is the most innovative and promising design preview I have seen regarding 5E yet, and one of the few that really starts to show how the system might support multiple play styles an a modular way.
Sounds like an interesting idea, but it means that the classes have to be balanced before the addition of backgrounds and themes. It sounds like the are going to try to go back to a simplified and more flexible version of 3e.
I have also read a comparison to the Pathfinder system of archetypes, with which I am not familiar. The important difference compared to 3E, I think, that makes this interesting to me, is that they may be designing the system from the ground up to work in layers (thus allowing groups to more easily discard the parts they don’t want to play with without too much risk of messing up other parts of the system).
Interesting for comparison:
http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/ultimateCombat/classArchetypes.html
Each base class in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game draws upon a central idea, a basic concept representing the commonly held understanding of what a character of a certain class should be, and is designed to be useful as a foundation to the widest possible array of characters. Beyond that basic concept, however, exists the potential for innumerable interpretations and refinements. A member of the bard class, for example, might be an incorrigible archaeologist, a dashing swashbuckler, or a dangerously graceful dervish dancer, each refined by a player’s choice of background details, class options, and specific rules such as feats to better simulate the character she imagines and make that character more effective at pursuing her specific goals.
…
The primary way in which archetypes modify their corresponding base classes is via the use of alternate class features. When a character selects a class, he must normally choose to use the standard class features found in the class’s original source—the exception is if he chooses to adopt an archetype. Each alternate class feature presented in an archetype replaces a specific class feature from its parent class. For example, the flowing monk archetype’s redirection class feature replaces the Stunning Fist feature of the standard monk class.
For the record- I didn’t hate the initial idea of kits. I hated the abuse of kits that came later on in the “Complete Whatever Handbook” series. The earlier ones were quite good I thought and added a lot to the initial role that your character had, both in the party and in society. The biggest problem came from their proliferation throughout the series, and their general increase in power levels, combined with the fact that most DMs never used the roleplaying based down-side that was supposed to balance a lot of them with their mechanical advantages. I assume that those DMs were inexperienced or just didn’t care to read through 600+ pages of “Complete Handbooks” to see what the disadvantages were supposed to be.
I don’t own any of the brown “complete” books anymore (I have the blue DM necromancers one, but that doesn’t really count). I have thought about picking up some of them again, maybe the ones for the core four classes, to see how they have held up over time.
I also like the concept of kits in theory, though they were probably too ill-defined to work well consistently (as they ranged from a collection of proficiencies with some descriptive text to full-blown class mods). I remember often taking the “patrician” (I think) wizard kit because it allowed you to start with lots of extra GP.
I’m with you on your analysis. This sounds cool.
I used to complain a lot back in 3e about Prestige Class bloat. Now I’m OK with it, although PF has done away with a lot of it through the Archetypes system. Personally, I like the idea of trying to reduce the need for skills through a theme system (though that’s not necessarily what they will do here). So that a ‘Lurker’ will have an example list of ‘Lurker’ stuff that they are good at, etc. I also like the potential of blending character types with a minimum of optimization/complexity involved. Fingers crossed.
It feels like they are adding a lot of flexibility to the new edition without shoving it down our throats. “Here is the core and some other stuff. Do with it what you want.”
I do a similar things with B/X, allowing characters to pick a subclass. For example, a fighter might be a barbarian, knight, or swashbuckler. Each subclass gets non-combat bonuses along the lines of what they pick.
I found that the advantage of picking themes this way is that players will tend to pick themes they find interesting. When picking mechanical-based items, such as feats, however, the players will tend to pick the feat simply by calculating the in-game benefits of that feat regardless of any sort of character concept they may have in their head. By moving away from simple cost-effective choices you make the characters more interesting and less cookie-cutter.
Yeah, I agree that picking themes, backgrounds, or whatever with a system like this works better. I think this has to do with the aggregation of mechanical benefits. You can’t just pick bonuses a la carte. In some sense, if forces you to think about concept first. The more flexible and discrete a system is, the easier build something purely based on mechanics. I guess that is also why I like class systems (or some similar aggregate classification).
The only concern I had was where line was drawn as to what skills/feats were available for a given background/theme.
If the line is drawn at the Background/Theme level, then class becomes almost unnecessary, but if it remains at the Class level then how exactly do Backgrounds/Themes provide?
To illustrate what I mean in more detail. Lets assume I choose a background of “Thief”. There is nothing stopping me from then choosing “Fighter” as my class for 1st level. So does this mean the skills available to me may include skills that previously a fighter had no access to? Does this mean that my choice of skills remains under the “Thief” background for good? Or does the class itself still contain some kind of restrictions that the background must fit within?
The same thing applies to feats. If the theme is the controller of the feats that can be selected, then what does class now provide? Does that mean we can how have a “Lurker” who is either Rogue or a Fighter? Does that mean the ability to specialize in weapons comes from a theme or from the class? Or is it a bit of both?
My own guess is that some (but not all) of the class features will end up being feats and belong to the default themes. I don’t think that selection of backgrounds or themes will limit what options your character can take in the future. I guess we will just have to wait and see though.