NAA D6: Stuff For The Next Edition

I just started working on NAA D6 V1.6, after getting a bit of experience with 1.5 through some games I’m running. I’m pleased to say that I really like how everything is moving so far. Characters generated through the new skill rules look much like I wanted them to – players are making key decisions about their characters creatively and easily by purchasing skills with broader or narrower focus to say something about their character and what their character does. The sheets do not have too many skills or at too high levels – there’s room to grow and develop and they have not become overwhelming. Of course further testing and at higher levels of points will be needed sometime, but I’m more concerned with making sure standard, 200 point characters are playable and interesting, first.

This latest NAA D6 will not be a huge change. Rather it will be a few minor changes to hopefully tighten things up more and continue to make the game reasonably easier and reasonably interesting.

In a previous comment thread on this site with Helmsman I had a conversation where I misunderstood what he referring to when he talked about cutting down rolls. I believed he was talking about the multi-attack rules, which currently have players rolling numerous “fake attacks” that only add bonus damage. That’s when I realized I didn’t really like the implementation of bonus attacks this way, because I so easily saw Helmsman criticizing it and I found I couldn’t really defend the implementation in any way I felt comfortable with. I set out then to come up with some new ways to redefine multiple attacks and their associated weapon properties (Swift and Auto) so that players aren’t rolling a mess of 3d6s for a few scraps of damage.

When I write NAA D6 stuff I think about what I want as a player. That is chief in all things I put into NAA D6. When I’m playing and I want to attack an enemy multiple times, or wield multiple weapons at once in an attack, what I want is to do more damage, or to attack more guys at once. So bonus damage and bonus targets beyond the first one, these are the two key mechanical things that I want to see associated with multiple attacks or wielding multiple weapons. Though I like the idea of rolling multiple times associated with this, I can achieve those two aims other ways, with less rolling associated. Make no mistake either, as usual, the multi-attack rules will be usable by any character with any weapon that conceivably do damage. This isn’t just for Swift and Auto weapons.

Another minor change is tweaks to the damage values. A friend of mine put it this way once and I’ve been thinking about it: “it’s kind of boring when you are rolling 1d6+5 damage and stuff because you’re already getting more than half your die – it barely matters.” I sort of agree and I don’t agree, but that’s not the point. I think I can rework NAA D6 damage and armor very neatly by just tweaking the values, so that weapons are in the 2d6-4d6 damage range with minimal inherent static damage bonuses. Of course, there’ll still be a lot of ways to get static damage bonuses anyway, but there are tactics attached to those, like flanking and charging, that have to be performed. So static bonuses won’t go away altogether, obviously – but instead of a dagger being expressed as 1d6+4 it’ll be expressed as 2d6, dealing anywhere from 2 to 12 damage at base, with an Armor Penetration value of 2. Armor values will be tweaked as well to compensate, of course. This is a low-end weapon – on the same spectrum you could have a rapier with 2d6+1 damage instead, and the properties of the weapon besides damage will differentiate them.

In addition, the library of advantages continues to expand as well, I’ve written about 20-ish new advantages, and lowered the cost of a bunch of advantages after seeing characters built, in the hopes that they’ll become more important.