DnD Backgrounds

What is a background in DnD 5e?

Unless your character was born yesterday (which is very unlikely if they aren’t a Warforged), they will have a backstory.

Backgrounds provide a way to express your character’s backstory through mechanical means, primarily through skill, language, and tool proficiencies, starting equipment, and roleplaying features.

When creating a character as described in the Player’s Handbook, a background is typically chosen after selecting the race, class, and ability scores of your character. Depending on the background you choose, you are provided a number of boilerplate suggested characteristics that can help shape your character’s personality by defining their Personality Traits, Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws.

What backgrounds are available in DnD 5e?

The table below contains a quick reference for all of the backgrounds available in official D&D 5e sources. Even though these backgrounds have been published by WOtC, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your DM will allow them in their campaign. Always confirm with your DM when choosing a background outside of the ones included in the Player’s Handbook.

Optimizing character builds using backgrounds

Mechanically speaking, backgrounds play much less of a role than a character’s race or class. This is for a number of reasons:

1. Backgrounds are chosen at the beginning of character creation and they don’t evolve as your character levels up.
2. Backgrounds only contain small bonuses to your character, usually in the form of a couple of skill, tool, and/or language proficiencies, starting equipment, and a small roleplaying feature.
3. Backgrounds don’t contain any combat-related features such as attack bonuses or spellcasting benefits.
4. As per the Player’s Handbook, backgrounds can be customized to include any combination of feature, language, skill, and tool proficiencies, which somewhat trivializes the choice. 

Customizing Your DnD Background

If the prepublished backgrounds don’t provide the right feel or proficiencies for your intended build, don’t worry! There are three often-overlooked rules that will allow you to customize your character’s background so that it fits exactly the way you want it to.

Duplicate Proficiencies

If you pick up the same proficiency from two (or more) sources, you are able to replace the duplicate with another proficiency of the same type. 

Customizing Your Origin

Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything introduced a way for players to customize their background in the event that the one they chose does not contain a feature they were looking for.

This table summarizes the ways that you can swap proficiencies out for other ones.

Customizing a Background

The Player’s Handbook contains the following suggestions for players looking to completely customize their background:

Step 1: Choose a Background – When creating a custom background, you must always start with a prepublished background as it indicates the default feature, proficiencies, traits, equipment, and starting gold of your custom background.

Step 2: Choose a feature – Choose whether to swap your background’s feature with another prepublished background’s feature, as seen above in the table under “What backgrounds are available in D&D 5e?”

Step 3: Choose any two skill proficiencies – There is no penalty for customizing a background to fit your character. All backgrounds come with two skill proficiencies and this option is no different while allowing for maximum customization.

Step 4: Choose a total of two tool proficiencies or languages – Again, no penalty here as all of the published backgrounds have two tool or language proficiencies.

Step 5: Choose your starting equipment – Your character’s starting equipment is based on your class and background. While you are able to forgo your class’s starting equipment and instead roll for your gold and spend it how you wish, there isn’t a system for this when determining the starting equipment from your background. This likely won’t be a massive problem because the maximum amount of gold any background starts with is 25gp, which will be made up for very quickly in a typical D&D campaign.

Conclusion

Even though backgrounds are often overshadowed by other character options such as race and class, they are still a crucial step in character creation. Backgrounds can provide important skill proficiencies which, depending on the skill, can massively influence your character’s playstyle. Tool and language proficiencies come up much less often than skill proficiencies in typical D&D play, but they can be quite important in certain exploration and roleplaying situations.

Backgrounds also heavily affect your character’s backstory, which can dictate the stories and plot points that your DM prepares for the campaign. 

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Mike Bernier

Mike Bernier is the lead content writer and founder of Arcane Eye. He is a Adamantine best-selling author of Strixhaven: A Syllabus of Sorcery on DMs Guild and is a contributing author at D&D Beyond. Follow Mike on Twitter.