I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
Good recommendations! I'll have to work them into the next conversion, and into revisions of the other ones.
In 2e proper, they were somewhere between a build and an enhancement - you could get proficiencies and some (usually small) mechanical boost in exchange for a penalty that was usually RP in nature and hypothetically cancelled out the benefits.
In practice, of course, most benefits outweighed most penalties, especially late in the splat cycle.
I find most of them translate fairly directly as 5e backgrounds, and most of those backgrounds already exist, and have some small RP and proficiency benefit (and flaw!) attached, so generally I'm looking at a kit, seeing its background parallel, and saying, "take this background/ability score spread/class if you want to be like this kit, and here's what your character will look like." When the benefits are bigger, or when I think there's room to improve on the 5e representation of a thing, I'll typically include a feat to represent that more powerful ability - certain humans can take that at 1st level, everyone else at 3rd. Games without feats won't get that extra little benefit, but they can still evoke much of the feel of an old kit through class and background choices. For instance, the unarmed combat ability of the Fighting-Monk from the Priest splat is pretty central to its vibe, but right now there's no way for a cleric to just get unarmed combat capability outside of a multiclass. So I made a feat that gives you a monk's unarmed AC and a bit of their martial arts ability.
DM Magic said:Also, it's been a dog's age since I've played 2nd Edition. What are kits again? In the 5th Edition context, they just seem like suggested builds with some helpful roleplaying bits and not actual rules bennies.
In 2e proper, they were somewhere between a build and an enhancement - you could get proficiencies and some (usually small) mechanical boost in exchange for a penalty that was usually RP in nature and hypothetically cancelled out the benefits.
In practice, of course, most benefits outweighed most penalties, especially late in the splat cycle.
I find most of them translate fairly directly as 5e backgrounds, and most of those backgrounds already exist, and have some small RP and proficiency benefit (and flaw!) attached, so generally I'm looking at a kit, seeing its background parallel, and saying, "take this background/ability score spread/class if you want to be like this kit, and here's what your character will look like." When the benefits are bigger, or when I think there's room to improve on the 5e representation of a thing, I'll typically include a feat to represent that more powerful ability - certain humans can take that at 1st level, everyone else at 3rd. Games without feats won't get that extra little benefit, but they can still evoke much of the feel of an old kit through class and background choices. For instance, the unarmed combat ability of the Fighting-Monk from the Priest splat is pretty central to its vibe, but right now there's no way for a cleric to just get unarmed combat capability outside of a multiclass. So I made a feat that gives you a monk's unarmed AC and a bit of their martial arts ability.
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