Everyone gets a free feat and a more mechanically impactful background in D&D's 2024 Player's Handbook

GamesRPGDungeons & DragonsEveryone gets a free feat and a more mechanically impactful background in D&D’s 2024 Player’s HandbookWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)

A young magician walks down the street with her cat familiar

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 the10 playable species it will include, and now explaininghow 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.”

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.

A lot of these rules have been carried over, with tweaks, from playtests. I used the playtest version of Origin Feats in aSpelljammer campaignI 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 therevised ranger in particularhas already begun copping a lot of flak.

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