This week we once again take a closer look at an area of the rules that saw significant growth during the playtest process, the Background step of character creation. This section has actually evolved a few times before reaching its current form. For a rules element that only ever gets deeply interacted with once for each character, it remains an important section. Getting the results of this step to feel continually relevant to a character, despite their backward-looking focus, is an interesting challenge.
The Background Step of character creation was always designed to serve two goals, one tangible and one more ephemeral in nature. The more ephemeral goal is perhaps the more important of the two. This goal is to naturally coax deep consideration for who a character is as a result of their past. New players, especially, can be prone to thinking about a character as a collection of statistics rather than a fully realized person. While neither bad nor wrong, this can nevertheless lead to an unfortunate sort of shallowness in the storytelling process.
The second and more tangible goal of the Background Step is to provide an opportunity to more deeply flesh out and customize your character. This goal is achieved through the actual set of game mechanics, the suite of options that you get to choose. This step provides several ways for even characters of the same ancestry and class to become very differentiated from each other. While this is done through mechanical means, the way these options are chosen and presented are carefully curated to reinforce the first goal of the step. That is to say that as you choose your mechanical options, it indirectly causes you to think about how your character's past influences its present, and also its future.
Likely the first part of the Background Step that players will interact with as they make their characters is ability boosts. As one of the four steps that provide ability boosts, it will almost certainly never be skipped over. The step provides two free boosts. This ensures that characters have the ability to boost more than just their primary focus, making it easier to broaden your character's capabilities. Even a class that tends to focus on just one ability has room to be good at other things as well. The number also fits into a general pattern, which helps make character creation feel more intuitive. One step gives you one boost, this one gives two, another gives three, and the last one gives four.
Another incredibly important aspect of the Background Step is skill expertise. All characters are immediately lifted to expert in one skill of their choice. Combined with the skill expertise gained from the Class Step, this ensures that all characters are guaranteed to be experts in at least two skills. This is extremely important for a number of reasons. It helps instill a feeling of competence, but also broadens out the available pool of skill perks later on. Because Realm of Runes leaves the numerical improvement of skills to the game's structure, the choice of skill perks becomes the primary method of skill improvement.
These first two aspects of the Background Step always existed in some form as a vehicle for the mechanical implications of character creation. The first major addition to these is Backstory Boons. Backstory Boons represent several extra benefits that a character has access to as a result of their past. These can range from a special item, an extra perk, an influential character known, or even a bonus esoteric proficiency boost. These benefits likely stick with your character forever, but they are presented in a way that helps enforce some thought into a character's past. If you have inherited an heirloom item, it implies important relationships that can be expanded upon, in or out of game. The character gains a nifty bonus, but the GM gains a plot hook that can be used to further enrich the story.
For the much of the playtest process, this was it. Ability boosts, skill expertise and a boon. More recently, however, came the addition of Backstory Traits. Like boons, these traits are designed to provide interesting twists to characters during their creation, while also providing additional hooks for GMs and even a springboard into interpersonal interactions between characters. Unlike other areas of the Background Step, Backstory Traits are not purely a benefit. Rather, they provide a more mixed effect, packaging a bonus with a drawback. These Backstory Traits are therefore optional. If you do not wish to reckon with a character hindrance, you can freely ignore these options. During the playtest, once these rules were added, almost every character has chosen to make use of a Backstory Trait.
While other aspects of the Background Step are chiefly focused with character capability, Backstory Traits are instead geared toward character personality or circumstance. A character can choose one Backstory Trait or none, and the effects have a lasting effect throughout gameplay. We saw one of these traits in last week's introduction of the Druid Exemplar, whose Destitute trait game him a bonus perk in exchange for a dramatic reduction in starting money. Let's take a look at a few more examples.
JINXED BACKSTORY TRAIT
You radiate a potent aura of ill luck. You must roll twice and take the worst result whenever you attempt a check against a creature, but other creatures must also do the same against you. This is a misfortune effect.
Special: The base counteract level of your curse is always equal to half your level, rounded up. If this curse is cured, all effects of this trait are lost.
This trait is very obviously a double-edged sword which provides bad luck for everyone around you. The effect on other creatures is almost always a benefit, but it can also be a part of the drawback as well. It most obviously applies to really bad things, like weapon attacks and spell rolls, but its broadness also makes it apply to more helpful things like Treat Wounds. How often the primary drawback comes into play is also largely up to the character that takes this trait. A spellcaster that mostly uses spells that allow a saving throw is going to be naturally less bothered than a Barbarian that mostly tries to hack the foe down with a big sword.
LONG-TERM DEAFNESS BACKSTORY TRAIT
You have lived much of your life without hearing. Whether you were born deaf or were permanently deafened later in life, you have become adapted to these circumstances. You are immune to effects with the Auditory Trait and gain the Read Lips Society Skill Perk as a bonus perk. You do not need to meet the prerequisites for this perk.
Special: Your immunity to auditory effects is lost if your deafness is alleviated. You do not lose the Read Lips perk if your deafness is permanently cured.
This trait, along with its counterpart Long-Term Blindness, is intended to provide a basic mechanical framework around these disabilities. It has always been important that Realm of Runes be inclusive to such characters. Rules such as sign language help to make the world accessible. You do not need this trait to be deaf, of course, but the bonus perk is there to provide one of the tools to overcome this challenge without the cost of fleshing out your character in other areas.
OVERLY ANALYTIC BACKSTORY TRAIT
An abundance of caution ensures you act with prudence, if not speed. You always roll twice and take the worse result when rolling initiative, but have a +2 un-typed bonus to Perception. This does not have the misfortune trait.
This trait, along with its opposite Overly Hasty, provide an interesting give and take. Perception is important for many obvious reasons like traps, but so is initiative. Who goes first in combat can have lasting implications throughout the encounter. Perhaps the most interesting quirk of these traits is the fact that Perception is the default for rolling initiative. So an overly analytic character is often taking the worst result with a larger modifier, while an overly hasty character is instead typically taking the best result with a smaller modifier.
SOCIALLY INVISIBLE BACKSTORY TRAIT
The eyes and attentions of others always seem to slide away from you, whether you like it or not. You have a +1 un-typed bonus to Deception, Legerdemain and Stealth checks against creatures, but take a -1 un-typed penalty to Diplomacy, Intimidation, Performance, Religion and Society checks against creatures.
Like many traits, whether this actually has a drawback for your character is largely dependent on how socially active you tend to be. Fortunately, however, the penalty only applies to checks against creatures, so you can still use Religion and Society to Recall Knowledge without issue. This trait will have big and lasting implications for how your character interacts with the world around it.
The Background Step has evolved to be more than just a stepping stone on the path of character creation. The addition of Backstory Traits further ensures that the choices you make for your character's past continue to have tangible and lasting implications for the present and the future. Next week we'll once again introduce another class exemplar, the monk.
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