While the 2024 Player’s Handbook isn’t due out until September 17, early copies will be available at Gen Con in August, so expect the rules to be out in the wild soon. Wizards of the Coast has been continuing to detail the book’s contents in the meantime, recently showing the 10 playable species it will include, and now explaining how the new backgrounds and origin feats will work.
“The 2024 Player’s Handbook has changed the order you move through while crafting your characters”, it explains. “Think of it as stepping backward in time through your character’s history. You start with where your character is at the beginning of your game, your class, then look at the road that led them to this heroic point, your background, and finally, look at how you began your life with your species.”
Previously, backgrounds were a nice way to add a bit of flavor to a character—maybe your paladin is a reformed criminal, or used to be a hermit—but their mechanical impact was slight and easily overlooked. Now, backgrounds will not only be a source of proficiencies and starting equipment, but also determine the bonuses to your ability scores. Each background gives a choice of three characteristics to improve, and you can choose one to boost by two points and another to boost by one.
Backgrounds also determine your origin feat, which is a free, basic version of the feats most characters don’t get until level four. Giving away a free feat at level one is a fairly common house rule to make characters more distinct, so it’s nice to see it baked into the core rules like this. Origin feats include Lucky, which gives you a number of luck points you can use to gain advantage or give an opponent disadvantage, or Magic Initiate, which lets you start out with a handful of basic spells.
Regular feats still exist, and two other varieties of beneficial ability have been folded into the feat category as well. Fighting Styles, which can be earned by some classes when they level up, and Epic Boons, earned at level 19, also count as feats now.
A lot of these rules have been carried over, with tweaks, from playtests. I used the playtest version of Origin Feats in a Spelljammer campaign I ran last year and they worked just fine, with the Lucky feat being a popular choice. I expect the usual amount of internet fussbudgeting over the finer points of course, and the revised ranger in particular has already begun copping a lot of flak.