9,700
edits
Changes
m
Grammar check
{{Tocright|4}}
=Background Abilities=
The master weapon smithweaponsmith. The prestigious planar sage. The renowned concert pianist. The most amazing chef. These are things that we want in the world in which we adventure, and possible possibly even things that we wish for our characters to be or aspire to. In the SRD, these aspects of a character were handled by skills, but they are conspicuously absent in the revised skill writeups on the previous pages.
This absence is not an accident. In many cases, these abilities just serve to round out a character’s history or personality, and either can’t be used outside of downtime between adventures or only provide fluff to round out the story and deepen immersion. And even when they do open new paths or provide direction during an adventure, they are not the combat or fantastic utility options that are more closely associated with character class and level. Because of these factors, there's no compelling reason to make people pay for these background abilities with character class and level-based advancement resources.
Each individual background ability possessed by a character has a grade associated with it that indicates how well the character can perform at it. This grade determines whether or not you need to make a check to complete a particular task, what your bonus on the check is, and how much more or less you can expect to earn should you work in the field during your downtime. The grade is generally advanced through the investment of downtime and an attribute check, though exceptions for higher-leveled characters exist.
{{Underbar|Why Aren’t These Skills?|While there are many reasons to restrict the previous skill abilities to characters of at least a certain level, there are basically no reasons to restrict non-magical non-combat abilities in a similar way. There are in fact several reasons ''not'' to do so. These background abilities do not scale up in “fantastic” in the same way as other skills do without problems. Perform could be made to scale nicely, but steps all over the bard class in doing so. Knowledge is just a check to see if you read up on something during downtime previously and not functionally different from visiting a library in many respects. To scale it up would make it a divination-based “learn secrets” skill that is outside of our focus here. Craft might scale acceptably well if you could make magical items, but access to that system is currently controlled by feats and class features, and reworking it to not need those or make them redundant is outside of the scope of this work. Profession just doesn’t scale up at all, as there aren’t any fantastic uses of being a barkeep or sailor (no, weathering a magical storm doesn't count).
So direct conversion to scaling skills is unpalatable for one reason or another, but leaving them in the skill system as non-scaling (and thus low-level) abilities causes other problems. While you can just let people spend skill points on them in low-level games and not worry about the lack of scaling, it fails in higher-level games because the character winds up giving up high-end abilities in exchange for these very low-end ones. It is a poor trade in the long run, and not one that makes sense to write into the system in such a way unless you want to allow characters to intentionally hobble themselves.
{{Underbar|I can't be a Grade II Chef?
|These rules are designed to provide a hit -and -miss nature to background abilities. There are some things that some people just don't get, and as a result, they don't get to be great at them. And while it is random and somewhat unfair to simply deny people some background abilities in this way, it's not a particularly large problem because the game is not about these things. You being a poor cook even though you gave it your all doesn't get in the way of you being an adventurer, so the parts where this isn't as fair don't make a large impact in a game.
Still, if it's really important for your character to be a professional chef or a master planar sage, you can simply elect to invest a skill point into the background ability temporarily, assuming you have sufficient level. It's a bit of a power hit, but worth it for many people. This option is described next.}}
