Thread by @rdonoghue

I am a HUGE proponent of tricks to start an RPG group in alignment. These range from complicated background generation system to "Tell me how the character to the left saved your life" kickoffs, so it's in that context that I'm a HUGE fan of using existing mechanic as support.

The underlying idea is FAR from new. Many an ancient game includes things that mechanically support drawing the group together. But it's an endlessly robust idea to play with.

D&D 2e came REALLY close to supporting this well with Kits - every class had access to a swashbuckler kit, and it was clear it could enable an all swashbuckler game.

In 3e, we leaned into the robust multiclassing, and our absolute best 3e campaign was one premised on "Everyone starts with one level of rogue" (which was great thematically AND mechanically)

4e didn't give a lot of tools in this regard, so that fell to out of game tricks, but 5e's inclusion of Backgrounds gave a new opportunity, and the current fast go to around here is "We all have the same background" and it works GREAT.

Note there are still a TON of other cool ways to draw a party together, including the patrons in Tasha's, and of course more traditional ties (Our ToA group is bound together as the children of the heroes who faced the Tomb the first time) but for me this is the fast & easy one.

One other thing I really like about it is that I *love* backgrounds, but I also feel that they are kind of a weak, pale reflection of what they might be. Mechanically, I really want them to carry more weight.

Unifying a group around a background doesn't quite do that, but it makes sure the background has more *heft* in the story. It provides a robust field for NPCs with implicit character connections, and for things that are important beyond the dungeon.

Again: Plenty of other ways to do this too, but a shared background is just *easy*. AND it's fun - patrons can suffer a bit from having GM fingerprints all over them, but if the group background is picked (and contextualized) by the group, it's *fun* to pick.

Like, explicitly it's sufficiently fun and easy that I'm not even bothering to talk about *how* to go about doing it, because I think that once you buy into the idea, the implementation is almost trivial.