Thac0 with Advantage 53. Backgrounds

Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends that have been playing D&D a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D is the five page backstory we wrote for our characters.

Characters in our fantasy stories have always had varied and interesting backgrounds. From Conan being born on the battlefield to Raistlin being weak and sickly his entire life. These moments in their lives helped push them into who they were as the characters we’ve enjoyed in fiction. RPG characters can be the same but it’s nice when the game helps us get there. Jared and Ang discuss the history of backgrounds in DnD and then their current implementation in D&D 2024 and other contemporary high fantasy games.

From the Bardic College

Kits were a concept from AD&D 2e that modified a character class by giving it some minor abilities and a few extra proficiencies. The first appearance of kits was in the Time of the Dragon boxed set, where they were used to portray the standard abilities that people from different cultures would have. These weren’t broad concepts, but more setting-specific, like Minotaur Legionnaire or Gnomish Companion of the Dead. In this version of kits, you had to “pay back” the extra proficiencies you got at 1st level, meaning that by the time you reached a specific level, you had the same number of proficiencies that anyone of that class would have.

Kits continued on into the PHBR series, with PHBR1 The Complete Fighter. Some kits, like the swashbuckler, opened up new abilities and playstyles, and others just penalized you for fun, like the barbarian. But by the time the Complete Book of Elves came around, kits were starting to just add things to make characters better than they were without kits, and some much more so than others.

TSR tried to get the Kit Horses back in the barn with Player’s Options: Skills and Powers, where kits were a minor add on at the end of character creation, that bundled some abilities slightly cheaper when taken as part of the kit than if purchased otherwise. Skills & Powers had to get that power creep under control before it introduced it’s own power creep.