New backgrounds: Farmer, Mercenary, Healer

[Sindeloke]

I like backgrounds, but there seem to be some major holes in the archetypes they cover, especially when I look at the various jobs and life experiences characters are likely to have in my homebrew setting. So I made some more.

I basically only worried about the mechanics; if my players need roleplaying aids I'll encourage them to just pick from across all the existing backgrounds, there's more than enough to start from there.

So!


You grew up living off the land. You raised sheep for wool, kept an orchard, helped your clan plant vast fields of barley or rounded up the cattle every night.

Skill proficiencies: Animal Handling, Nature
Tool proficiencies: One set of artisan's tools, vehicles (land)
Equipment: A set of common clothes, a staff, a sturdy worknife, a donkey or mule (or similar beast of burden), and a belt pouch containing 5 gp.

Feature: Planning Ahead
Your years spent living by the seasons have given you a knack for knowing what you'll run out of tomorrow, no matter what you have on hand today. At any time that you find yourself in need of a specific piece of mundane equipment that *could* be concealed in your gear, such as a length of rope or a spyglass in your backpack or a set of bowyer's tools in your wagon, you have that piece of equipment.
Regardless of the list price, nothing you find in your bags is of high enough quality to be sold for more than 20 gp.



Your livelihood has been saving the lives of others. You are the local wise man, the ship's sawbones, a nurse at the temple clinic or just the village doctor, ready to wander out from your home and heal the wider world.

Skill proficiencies: Medicine, Insight
Tool proficiencies: Herbalism kit
Languages: One additional language
Equipment: A set of common clothes, an herbalism kit, five candles, a set of needles and strong twine, a dog-eared book and a belt pouch containing 15 gp.

Feature: Healer's boon
You gain a measure of protection due to your deeds in any civilized location where you are known as a healer. This usually takes the form of modest room and board in exchange for your services, efforts to conceal your presence, or a willingness to talk before shooting by hostile forces. If you do anything to cause harm to your hosts, these benefits are lost.



You've sold your skill at combat to pay the rent, whether as part of an organized group or guild like the Iron Wolves, a bounty hunting agent of the state, or as a freelancer keeping bandits and dire hares off farmers' property.

Skill proficiencies: Investigation, Intimidation
Tool proficiencies: One type of gaming set
Languages: One additional language
Equipment: A set of common clothes, a warm cloak with a hood, a gaming set, a map of a nearby city, a bag of caltrops, a lantern, a sealed letter with the details of a job or assignment and a belt pouch containing 20 gp.

Feature: Ear to the Ground
Information seems to find you. Any time you spend at least three hours in a town, city or other major center of population, you automatically come across at least one job offer, significant rumor, or hint toward the pursuit of your current quest.


Edit: Took Healer out of Healer.

[Shadow]

Healer's Boon. Really?
A free feat in a background?
No way, dude. Think of something else.

[Sindeloke]

The Medicine skill is an absolutely meaningless waste of proficiency without the Healer feat. I'm not going to saddle someone with wasted resources in a broken skill without giving them a fix alongside it. You're not much of a village healer if a kid comes to you with a broken leg you have to say "ok well you're not dying, guess I've got nothing to do here," or if a housewife comes to you with a cough and you have to say "yep! Definitely the red fever. If only all my years of experience had provided me with the least bit of insight on how to put a wet cloth on your head to help you recover from it" (though since even the feat doesn't let you treat diseases, I suppose that bit still stands regardless).

That said, I suppose the better solution is just to fold the entire feat into Medicine proficiency to begin with, as a baseline function of the skill.

[Shadow]

The Medicine skill is an absolutely meaningless waste of proficiency without the Healer feat.

That's not true at all.
The medicine skill allows you to diagnose illnesses. It also allows you to stabilize a dying creature.

A healer's kit allows you to stabilize one creature without a medicine skill check.

The feat takes the stabilization from the skill check and adds 1 HP to it.
It also takes the use of a healer's kit and adds 1d6+4+level HP to it.

Medicine is the least of those three. But no background is supposed to ever offer a mechanical benefit. The benefits offered are for RP stuff.
NOT mechanical stuff.
And a FEAT is certainly a mechanical benefit. You've just created the greatest, most OP, and (if it's ever allowed in your games) the most sought after background. Hey, take this BG, it comes with a free FEAT and ALL of the things that you need to make that FEAT work well in play!
Terrible.

You. Should. Not. Have. A. Feat. In. A. Background. no matter how useless you happen to think a certain SKILL is without that feat.

[Grey Watcher]

I have to agree with Shadow here. The general theme with background features is that they're stuff you can use in downtime between adventures, like getting free lodging or easy access to plot hooks.

Honestly, even the Farmer benefit is kinda borderline, since it helps you within, not between adventures.

Admittedly, I have no idea what to suggest instead that isn't just a rip off of other background features though. Farmer might just be the ability to maintain a self-sufficient, poor, or modest upkeep when you have access to a garden or livestock, though that's a bit bland. Healer... I haven't got a clue, honestly.

[Sindeloke]

That's not true at all.
The medicine skill allows you to diagnose illnesses. It also allows you to stabilize a dying creature.

Diagnosing illnesses is pointless. If someone's got a runny nose, the paladin lays on hands and it's gone. No remove disease skill in the game requires knowing what the disease is first. Without the ability to subsequently treat it yourself, simply knowing what it is is an unnecessary and empty gesture. Also you can probably surmise that it's mummy rot if you just fought a mummy.

Stabilizing a dying creature is a DC 10 check, which is a massive 50% chance for any shumuck to pass it to begin with. At low levels, the +2 from medicine proficiency gives you a 5% boost over someone who put a 12 in Wisdom. At mid to high levels, your casters have enough spells that they can just drop a heal on someone. Or even a cantrip, if someone took the right one. And you are guaranteed to have a healing caster of some kind, because there's no other way to heal in combat.


But no background is supposed to ever offer a mechanical benefit. The benefits offered are for RP stuff.
NOT mechanical stuff.

Every background offers two skills. Skills are very much a mechanical benefit, unless you think getting free Perception for being a sailor is pure fluff. That's my primary concern with Medicine. It's competing with the possibility of getting Deception, Stealth, Perception, or Persuasion, all of which make an absolute mechanical impact on the game, and Athletics, Insight, the various Int skills, Handle Animal and Survival, which all could have a substantial impact on the game in a specific campaign. Someone who gives up those options to take Medicine should have the ability to also make an impact on the game.

But, again, that's a problem with the skill itself and it doesn't make sense to solve it for just one background (also it'd need to be nerfed down to like, 1/long rest or something anyway). So on that much at least I agree with you guys, I'll hack it out.


Honestly, even the Farmer benefit is kinda borderline, since it helps you within, not between adventures.

Admittedly, I have no idea what to suggest instead that isn't just a rip off of other background features though. Farmer might just be the ability to maintain a self-sufficient, poor, or modest upkeep when you have access to a garden or livestock, though that's a bit bland. Healer... I haven't got a clue, honestly.

I would pretty much allow any player to maintain a self-sufficient poor-to-modest upkeep doing what they used to do just as a matter of course, without the need to spell it out in a backgroud. Well, unless their backstory was that they ran off to adventure because they were terrible at their job, I guess.

Farmer I figured was about on par with the backgrounds that let you find a place to heal (acolyte) or to hide (folk hero); it saves you some resources during rests by letting you repair or replace stuff on the fly, but they're all resources you'd have gotten back by the end of your rest anyway (heal spells or skill checks to find a safehouse, or in farmer's case, a mending cantrip). What's the most helpful/disruptive scenario you can see for it? I think probably always having a rope is the strongest aspect, but that's really easy to do regardless, so I dunno.

Healer, without the feat, is basically Performer with a slight refluffing, so that shouldn't need anything added.

[Galen]

I like those, except I'm not sure about the fact the Farmer can sell the things he pulls out of his backpack for 20gp. I'd change it to say the items are of low quality and can be used for their intended value, barely (a rope is old and frayed, but just strong enough to climb), but have no resale value. Also, I'd limit it to 1/day or something like that.