Customizing Your Origin

D&D 2024 rule: Customizing Your Origin. Source: Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. rule type Optional At 1st level, you choose various aspects of your character, including ability scores, race, class, and background. Together these elements help paint a picture of your character's origin and give you the ability to create many different types of characters. Despite that versatility, a D&D race that has the Ability Score Increase trait includes little or no choice-a lack that can make it difficult to realize certain character concepts. The following subsections address that lack by adding choice to your character's race if it includes the Ability Score Increase trait, allowing you to customize your ability scores, languages, and certain proficiencies to fit the origin you have in mind for your character. Character race in the game represents your character's fantasy species, combined with certain cultural assumptions. The following options step outside those assumptions to pave the way for truly unique characters. Ability Score Increases The Ability Score Increase trait in a race reflects an archetypal bit of excellence in the adventurers of this kind in D&D's past. For example, if you're a dwarf, your Constitution increases by 2, because dwarf heroes in D&D are often exceptionally tough. This increase doesn't apply to every dwarf, just to dwarf adventurers, and it exists to reinforce an archetype. That reinforcement is appropriate if you want to lean into the archetype, but it's unhelpful if your character doesn't conform to the archetype. If you'd like your character to follow their own path, you may ignore your Ability Score Increase trait and assign ability score increases tailored to your character. Here's how to do it: take any ability score increase you gain in your race or subrace and apply it to an ability score of your choice. If you gain more than one increase, you can't apply those increases to the same ability score, and you can't increase a score above...