D&Deconstruction Part III: The Third Kind of Heat

Backgrounds are a game changer.  Literally.  They allow a much wider variation in character than nearly any other aspect of D&D5.  While they may seem to be merely an addition of flavor to characters, they actually add something incredibly significant to the creation of the adventuring parties.

So, in 3.X, there was really only one way to gain proficiency with a given skill, to have it 'in class'.  Some skills were specific to a single class, some available to a select few, some fairly broadly available, but nearly every skill had limited access of some sort.   The most egregious example of this was trapfinding.  Not only was disable device only available to rogues, but trapfinding dictated that even if other classes took levels of disable device, they couldn't use it on magical traps.  This led to the problem of every party essentially needing a rogue.  So even if nobody really wanted to play one, in order to have a party that could meet all available challenges, one person would be forced to play a rogue.  Pathfinder got around this a little bit with traits, but those were an optional, underpowered system that also suffered from excessive specificity(I want the extra bump in Knowledge(history), but I'm not a scholar of ruins).

Backgrounds make skills much more adaptable.  Backgrounds exist that include many different skills, allowing the selection of skill proficiencies that match the character not the character class.  Plus, they are not limited by character class.  A soldier background can be used to make a wizard, a bard or a monk, not just a fighter.  An entertainer background gives an intersting spin on a warlock or a cleric.  By selecting a background and a class, a player can choose what skills their character has.  This means that challenges are no longer just focused on what the character class is, but on who the character is.

In Mongoose's traveller, at the end of character creation, there's a point where players divvy up a set of relevant skills, making sure that they aren't deficient in the required tasks to run their chosen spaceship(You mean nobody knows how to navigate?!).  D&D allows that to be done as part of character creation in a more free-flowing way.  It's easy to tweak a background or skill choice in order to make sure the regular bases are covered without forcing players into undesired classes in order to fill a party need.

And ultimately, it's an orthogonal system.  A pair of axes along which a character can be built where neither depends on the other for their value.  A soldier wizard will be different from a hermit wizard will be different from a charlatan wizard, both mechanically and in terms of personality.  It takes away the "standard fighter" option and allows for much greater variation.  In short.  I love it.