Mike Mearls Games
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Happy New Year!
🕑 Added 2025-01-01 08:22:37 +0000 UTCHappy New Year everyone! To ring in the New Year, here's an early look at the mountain dwarf and the miner background.
Going all the way back to the 1990s, I have this little tradition of doing something creative when the New Year rolls in. When I was younger and had the energy, stamina, and freedom to hit a New Year's party, I observed it the next morning. These days, I create something before going to bed. For this year, I've written up this material to share.
Not sure what I'm calling race/species/ancestry/folk/whatever yet. I want something that can work across multiple genres and also account for stuff like androids, robots, and AIs, and so on. It's a minor quibble, but I'd like the terms the game uses to remain constant across genre.
I'll take some time much later today to look over the fighter questions and get those answered. Sleep calls!
A few notes:
As you can see, this material fills in the blank levels at 2nd, 4th, 6th, and 8th.
I'd like race and background to provide utility that applies in any situation, with classes a little more combat focused.
Notice the unique skill that the miner grants. I like the idea of special skills that give a character some extra utility, but that can only be gained via a background.
Area of knowledge is meant to be a prompt to DMs to give extra info about that topic to the player for free and allow them to make Intelligence rolls relating to that topic with proficiency, regardless of skill.
I'd also like race/species/ancestry/folk/whatever to feel impactful, with benefits that feel like they allow you to play a very different character.
Ability score mods are a separate step in character creation. They're not tied to anything other than player desire. I like the flexibility that offers. Tying them to race feels too restrictive, and I'd rather focus on special mechanics to make them interesting. Tying them to background makes no sense to me for a long list of reasons to me, starting with the basic idea that fantasy stories depict characters transcending their background. The hero leaves behind their past. They're not fundamentally defined by it for their entire career.
Comments
D. H. Boggs
For "race etc..." I use KINDRED - a term I picked up from Tunnels and Trolls and find ideal for the purpose. So one can talk about robot kind, as a kindred and still sound sensible in a way that race, species, ancestry, etc. does not.
Lojaan
This looks really good. A few thoughts: If I'm reading this correct the traits associated with species are biological (bio-magical? magi-logical?) yeah? The sort of thing that the character would still get if they were raised independent of their culture? In that case shouldn't Stone Lore should be placed in the Miner background? Or is this a magical ability that would manifest regardless (and if so could that be made explicit)? Would it be worth swapping Tough Bulwark and Tireless around? Tireless seems underpowered and highly situational for a level 6 benefit. Since backgrounds are going to be beefier (which I like), could we do away with "sub-species"? Couldn't we just have the species (Dwarf) and a list of backgrounds commonly associated with them (miner, artisan, etc...) and a list of rare backgrounds, as informed by your world? That would be an organic way to get your various subspecies.
