Traits

Character traits are abilities that are not tied to your character’s race or class. They can enhance your character’s skills, racial abilities, class abilities, or other statistics, enabling you to further customize them. At its core, a character trait is approximately equal in power to half a feat, so two character traits are roughly equivalent to a bonus feat. A character trait isn’t just another kind of power you can add on to your character—it’s a way to quantify (and encourage) building a character background that fits into the campaign world. Think of character traits as “story seeds” for your background; after you pick your two traits, you’ll have a point of inspiration from which to build your character’s personality and history. Alternatively, if you’ve already got a background in your head or written down for your character, you can view picking traits as a way to quantify that background, just as picking race and class and ability scores quantifies other strengths and weaknesses. Many traits grant a new type of bonus: a “trait” bonus. Trait bonuses do not stack—they’re intended to give player characters a slight edge, not a secret backdoor way to focus all of a character’s traits on one type of bonus and thus gain an unseemly advantage.

Gaining Traits

When you create your character for a campaign, you gain two traits. These two traits must come from different categories: you can have no more than one trait per category. You can gain additional traits with the Additional Traits feat.

Custom Traits

If you have a specific trait (or idea for a trait) in mind that is not currently listed here, talk to the DM for approval to use it, and it may well get added to the list! Custom traits may need some tweaking to maintain balance, or to fit within the game world, but all ideas are welcome.

Types of Traits

There are eight types of character traits to choose from:

Basic: Basic traits are broken down into four categories: Combat, Faith, Magic, and Social. Combat traits focus on martial and physical aspects of your character’s background. Faith traits focus on his religious and philosophical leanings. Magic traits focus on any magical events or training he may have had in his past. And Social traits focus on your character’s social class or upbringing.
Combat: Combat traits are associated with combat, battle, and physical prowess; they give characters minor bonuses in battle and represent conflicts and physical struggles in the character’s backstory.
Equipment: Many adventurers come to rely on certain gear to the extent that the equipment and the adventurer each become something more when the other is present. The symbiosis between adventurers and their gear is varied and complex. Below are several traits and feats that help characters make the most of their equipment or use their equipment to make the most of their skills.
Faith: Faith traits indicate that your character has an established faith in a specific deity; you need not be a member of a class that can wield divine magic to pick a religion trait, but you do have to have a patron deity and have some amount of religion in your background to justify this trait. Unlike the other categories of traits, religion traits can go away if you abandon your religion, as detailed below under Restrictions on Trait Selection.
Magic: Magic traits are associated with magic, and focus on spellcasting and manipulating magic. You need not be a spellcaster to take a Magic Trait (although several of these traits aren’t as useful to non-spellcasters). Magic Traits can represent a character’s early exposure to magical effects or childhood studies of magic.
Regional: Regional traits are keyed to specific regions, be they large (such as a nation or geographic region) or small (such as a city or a specific mountain). In order to select a regional trait, your PC must have spent at least a year living in that region. At 1st level, you can only select one regional trait (typically the one tied to your character’s place of birth or homeland), despite the number of regions you might wish to write into your character’s background.
Social: Social Traits are a sort of catch-all category; these traits reflect the social upbringing of your character, your background with high society or lack thereof, and your history with parents, siblings, friends, competitors, and enemies.
Racial: Racial traits are keyed to specific races or ethnicities, which your character must belong to in order to select the trait. If your race or ethnicity changes at some later point (perhaps as a result of polymorph magic or a reincarnation spell), the benefits gained by your race trait persist—only if your mind and memories change as well do you lose the benefits of a race trait.