The Player Background

[Zephirus]

Do you like backgrounds? Do you want to roleplay a cool background with lots of 4th wall breaking? Look no furhter.

The Player

You found an enchanted character sheet. When you filled it with your lvl1 character, it plane shifted you to Forgotten Realms, or Eberron, or whatever, and now you are that character.


Skill proficiencies: None. You are an offworlder with lots of theorical understanding of this world but no practice whatsoever.
Languages: Choose two real world languages, like english or french or spanish. You are proficient on those languages, but no one besides you speaks those languages in this world.
Equipment: Real World pack, A "Real World" trinket from the table below.


Real World Pack

A "Real World" pack contains an band t-shirt, confortable jeans trousers and a pair of tennises that grants you +1 bonus on stealth and athletics checks that involves walking or running.

Feature: Metagaming

You have read all gaming material and some online guides. You are familiar with the game rules, classes, races, monsters, spells and items.
If you study an item, see the effects of an spell, a monster or if you study an character for a few hours you make an intelligence roll adding your proficiency bonus. If you succeed you identify the item, the spell, the monster and get all its relevant features and stats. If you use this ability on a character, you get to see it's character sheet. This feature fails if the spell, monster, item or class is homebrewed.

Suggested Characteristics



d8
Personality trait


1
I use an strange jargon and talk about things like bonuses, skill checks and proficiencies all the time


2
I yearn to roll initiative early and often


3
I am always warry of traps


4
I give no importance to NPCs


5
I adopt the stereotypical behavior of my class and/or race


6
I often forget what I am doing and why


7
I am actually very intelligent. I just act dumb because I want to rest my brain.


8
I attempt to critically fail at an inconsequential task to pre-roll "ones" and avoid critical failures at important moments later.




Ideals


d4
Bound


1
Roleplayer: I want to escape my dreary reality of McJob, crushing student debt and basement dwelling and live a full albeit imaginary life(Good)


2
Real Man: I want to kill things and gain XP (Evil)


3
Loonie: I want to do crazy stuff and have things to laught about in the years to come (Chaotic)


4
Munchin: I want to be the most powerful being in the table within the rules of the game by the means of minmaxing(Lawful)



Bound


d4
Bound


1
I have a sucky life in the real world, I am not eager to go back.


2
I wish to fullfill my power fantasies


3
I am new to the game, and want to explore it and master it


4
I want to kill things and get their stuff for XP



Flaw



d6
Flaw


1
I do things more for coolness than for effectivity


2
I do things more for hilarity than for effectivity


3
I do things more for drama than for effectivity


4
I do things for effectivity, but I have a very misguided concept of effectivity


5
I am crippled by overspecialization


6
I have made a build unsuitable for this campaign



*I have run out of ideas for the trinkets, but I think that a discharged cellphone described as an black mirror with some buttons, or a can of Coca-Cola described as a red can made of an strange metal with eldritch runes etched all over it, or a bubble gum described as an tablet encased on a weird parchment that looks like an exotic candy. Later I will do this table.

[Unoriginal]

And now D&D 5e can also be your generic Isekai anime.

Just make sure all the other players are attractive girls with lots of power and skills, and with personalities and backgrounds much more interesting than the protag's... I mean the one with the Player Background's, yet are somehow unable to succeed anything without him as they're totally dependent on his help and will all fall in love with him.


Joke aside, it was nice of you to post your work here, so thanks.

[Aett_Thorn]

Would a choice of Skill proficiency in History, Religion, or Arcana be a good way to represent the player's meta-knowledge of the world?

[Zephirus]

Would a choice of Skill proficiency in History, Religion, or Arcana be a good way to represent the player's meta-knowledge of the world?

Those Skill choices mean that the player actually knows the history os the realm, understand the cultural significance of each particular religion and can even disable a magic trap.
Those are practical skills that this background should lack.
The meta knoweldge is represented by the feature, that is kind of a skill proficiency. It is like if you have proficiency in Metagaming skill checks. And that skill is so overpowered that it counts as two skills.

[Easy_Lee]

And now D&D 5e can also be your generic Isekai anime.

Even being moderately familiar with Anime, I had to look up Isekai to see just how appropriate that was. I guess I'm more familiar with the trends of yesteryear than those of modern Anime.

To the OP, AL actually allows custom backgrounds, which is to say that custom backgrounds are generally a thing that players can do. The rules are two skills, two languages/tools, and one feature from an existing background.

Trinkets are probably fine, and your custom feature seems to be within reason (maybe a little strong, but not too much given that it would cost an action). I think you should add some skills and tools to this so it becomes a reasonable choice. Given the theme, I say Arcana, History, Cartographer's Tools, Painter's Supplies, and a dice set would be appropriate. Any metagamer ought to know how magic and history work, and what grognard hasn't painted some minis and drawn some maps in his time?

As a bonus, all of this works well with the high Intelligence that your custom feature encourages. This background would be popular among wizards. Guess it ties into Isekai even more now, eh?