I thought I would do a quick follow up on the last post, to take one background and combine the tables and see what it looks like. Here is the original, a cowboy background
| Free Skill | D6/8 | Growth | Learning |
| Wrangle-0 | 1 | +1 Any Stat | Any Combat |
| 2 | +2 Physical | Craft | |
| Quick Skills | 3 | +2 Physical | Exert |
| Exert-0 | 4 | +2 Mental | Notice |
| Survive-0 | 5 | Exert | Perform |
| 6 | Any Skill | Survive | |
| 7 | Talk | ||
| 8 | Wrangle |
And here is the updated idea
| Free Skills | D12 | Increase | D12 | Increase |
| Survive-0 | 1 | Any Combat | 7 | Talk |
| Wrangle-0 | 2 | Craft | 8 | Wrangle |
| 3 | Exert | 9 | +1 Any Stat | |
| 4 | Notice | 10 | +2 Physical | |
| 5 | Perform | 11 | +2 Physical | |
| 6 | Survive | 12 | +2 Mental |
One annoying thing about backgrounds I haven’t mentioned yet is they are a pain in the ass to format on Google docs, at least when doing 2 column pages. I was hoping this would make it smaller, but it really doesn’t. Regardless of formatting, it still needs some adjustment on number of picks. I like giving another skill for free, as I like skills, but it’ll take more time to pick appropriate skills for each background without making some choices too much better than others.
We can still do a “pick or roll” format. You can pick 2 from the first 8 choices, or roll three times. With some quick math, we can see the odds of rolling a +2 stat boost goes from 50% to 25%. Likewise though, the odds of rolling a skill you want goes from 12.5% to 8.33%. I think that’s probably a good tradeoff. As a proof of concept I think this works pretty well. I’ll probably spend some time converting the rest of the backgrounds over. That doesn’t solve all my issues with backgrounds, but it at least limits intentional min-maxing.