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This came up in another thread, but I wanted to break it out on its own.
I really like backgrounds. When I'm making a character, they're a great prompt to think about something from my character's past and either jumpstart a backstory, or if I already have one, add something extra to it. My wife actually made a similar comment when she was making her first character earlier this week when she said that the backstory on it "started writing itself during creation".
So that's awesome! For AP themed backgrounds, it also gives both me and my DM an easy way to tie characters in to the story. For homebrew campaigns, they're also an easy point to add things to customize the world in a way that doesn't have major impact on the rules.
What I don't like is that if you want to not be mechanically penalized, you get severely constrained on backgrounds by the boosts you need. If a class only truly cares about one ability score, you're fine. If it cares about two, then you need to match things up and you lose a lot of options.
I think that could be done better. What if classes gave two boosts (to two abilities it wants instead of one) and when picking a background you simply get one free boost? That does two things:
1. Any background can go with any class, greatly expanding the options to tell stories
2. Classes that could only ever start with 18 in one ability will now have an option to start at 18 in one of two abilities, opening up some extra choice.
Thoughts? There might be better ways to do this, but I came up with moving it around this way to try and be as low impact on existing character creation rules as possible.
(Sidenote: my wife was very happy with character creation overall. More so than I am. She also had a much easier time with her first character than I did. While I was helping her, I also think that as a more casual player than I am, she didn't try to overthink things or plan ahead too much and her style seems to suit the system very well.)
There are 4 free boosts in the character creation that could be used in the background variable. Someone used to work with his arms is expected to have greater strength than someone that spent alll his ealry years reading books. Of course, every branching decision (for a lack of a better word) will somehow limit another decisions and the playtest already has a ton of that.
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I haven't found backgrounds to be restrictive at all in my playtesting. I'd vote leave them as is.
PF2 in a lot of cases leaved decisions to the GM - in places where I don't like, like when determining DCs. In this case, I think it should be up top the GM, and that there should be a specific note about this.
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I'm personally not too enthusiastic about backgrounds. As they currently exist, I'd prefer they be eliminated entirely and replace them with a 1st level skill feat and two free ability score boosts. I don't feel lore adds much of value to the game, and locking into a narrow selection of skill feats while also needlessly hamstringing certain concepts is pretty harsh.
As it stands currently the ability score bonuses aren't too problematic for single-class martials. They tend to be SAD on either Str or Dex, and generally are okay with a variety of other ability scores. This means any background can be made to work. The problem comes with casters and multiclassing, both of which often lock you into extremely specific ability score combinations that you cannot deviate from if you want your build to function. If you want to play a Fighter/Paladin, for instance, you must have 18 Str and 16 Cha at 1st level, and there are only 8 backgrounds that can provide the specific ability score combos that allow you to meet those requirements. On the caster front consider bards; most builds require 16 Dex and 18 Cha at 1st level to function effectively, and leaves 7 unusable backgrounds.
The actual benefits of backgrounds right now are spurious. I feel that the flavor they add does not compensate for the restrictions they place on character building. I feel backgrounds either need to be loosened up to be more flexible, or dropped from the game since they are a net negative currently.
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I have a different problem with the ability boosts from backgrounds. My players cannot remember the four sources of ability boosts during 1st-level character creation. Ancestry boosts are fairly easy to remember for the Pathfinder 1st Edition players, since they are accustomed to them, but they often forget one of the others. I have to doublecheck their stats to make sure they included all nine ability score boosts.
I also had one player who would apply multiple ability boosts from the same layer, i.e., ancestry, background, or 1st-level, to a single ability score. The point in separating them into layers is to prevent that.
Leaving aside the ancestry boosts, a character gains 7 ability score boosts at first level in three separate sets. When we sort the possibilities for the ability scores into descending order, we have only seven ways to boost the six ability scores to a maximum of 16, and five of them can be created by the PF2 method:
16 16 12 10 10 10 forbidden
16 14 14 10 10 10 forbidden
16 14 12 12 10 10 allowed
16 12 12 12 12 10 allowed
14 14 14 12 10 10 allowed
14 14 12 12 12 10 allowed
14 12 12 12 12 12 allowed
Only the two most concentrated cases, where three stat are left at 10, cannot be constructed from the 4 1st-level boosts, 2 background boosts, and one class boost. Thus, instead of using the three layers of ability score boosts, we can use the following rules:
1) All ability scores start at 10 and receive 7 +2 ability score boosts.
2) No ability score can be boosted higher than 16.
3) At least 4 different ability scores must be boosted.
4) Ancestry boosts are applied afterwards.
I think characcter creation would be easier to remember if Pathfinder 2nd Edition simply gave the players 7 +2 ability score boosts, to maximum of 16 and leaving at most 2 stats at 10, and then applied the ancestry modifiers. The full ability scores would be created in step A, Ancestry, rather than waiting until step C, class and 1st-level boost. Thus, ability scores would have no built-in relation to background or class. Backgrounds could stand on their merits of Lore and free feat, not the merits of the ability score boost.