NAA D6: Skills And Character Determination

Defining what characters do in NAA D6 is a combination of skills and advantages, but the skills are definitely the most important part. This is because a NAA D6 skill is very player-defined as to what it does and is the primary vehicle to developing a character’s abilities. I want to talk about each tier of skills and what I envision their being used for.

I want to try to clear some of it up here on the blog. There used to be an essay in the book about it, but I felt it was too stodgy. I think the blog is the best place to talk about such things. To begin, Skills in NAA D6 are split into three types with three different costs. There is a “Full Skill” which is the most expensive, then specialties of the full skill which are less expensive and finally SubSpecialties of the full skill which are the least expensive. These all have different purposes both mechanically and for character creation.

One thing I want to note is that NAA D6 is a game where you interpret a lot of things on your own. Some of these guidelines are going to vary by tastes, by the tones and needs of a campaign or setting, and by the general power level and theme of a game. This is just the way I see them and it could help you understand, but your own interpretation or your GM’s can also be valid. I don’t purport to have the answer for every circumstance.

The “Full Skill” is a skill which composes an ability to do everything under its umbrella. Say for example that you take one single skill point in the Full Skill “Science.” This represents knowing a bit about every field of science. You only have one point, so generally you won’t be doing anything incredible with it, but you can roll simple checks. This same logic applies to other skills. If you buy the full “Long Guns” skill then you are proficient with every weapon under that category. You can pick up any big gun and shoot it well. Full Skills are meant to be convenient, particularly in games of higher power. A superhero inventor can very expediently have access to all manner of sciences without having to buy multiple specialties. He’s just good at all “Science” in general, period. However, for lower power games, a few points in a full skill can also mean something – potential. That single point in Sciences is a limited understanding of every single field of Science that could someday with hard work (buying more full skill points) become scientific genius.

A specialty is a focus on a particular subset of the skills present in the full skill. A specialty of Science (in NAA D6, most other skill-based games divide these) can be Mathematics, or Physics, or Biology. You are concentrated upon that field and so you can buy the skill cheaper per point, but it pertains only to that field. It’s still broad enough to be pretty flexible, so it presents a good middle ground. A specialty in Long Guns might be “Shotguns” or “Carbines” or “Assault Rifles.” Things get a bit more complicated when you take a skill like Esoterica, but the rules for each skill provide some examples to guide yourself by. At the end of the day, just be sure the skill is narrower than a Full Skill but broader than a subspecialty. Which brings us to the next tier of skills.

Subspecialties are a focus on even narrower fields for even cheaper costs. However, different skills have different guidelines for subspecialization. For Science, a Sub-Specialty might be something like “Mammalian Biology.” That’s still very broad, but it’s not “Biology.” Or it could be “astrophysics.” That one is a bit wonky – after all, you have to know physics to know astrophysics, even if you’re more concerned and better at astrophysics than you are about kinetics studies of weapons and things like that. For such a skill, I would pair it with high ranks in the Academics skill to insure that the character does have a grounding that can explain the astrophysics subspecialty. Some skills have subspecialties that are much narrower than that though, particularly the combat skills. A Subspecialty of Long Guns would be like “M-16 Assault Rifle” or depending on the GM, maybe a specific brand of gun, like “Remington shotguns.”

Those are the basics, but there’s a few more ways you can use them for determining what your character does. Say for example that you want a character that has a magical Gaze that puts people under your control. There’s no special advantage that will just give you this specific thing. This is part of the skill system as well. What you do is go to skills that allow you control over other people. The explicitly magical skill for this is “Enchantment” in the Social column of the Fantasy skill list. You could say “Enchantment (Gaze Attack)” as a subspecialty and define what exactly goes on when you do that. The reason for it being a subspecialty is that it is narrow compared to the broad range of what Enchantment could do. It has limitations, like someone having to look at your eyes, like only being able to control other people rather than for non-intelligent beings, and perhaps it being overt control rather than implanted suggestions or something more subtle. For GM’s designing NPCs and adversaries this works the same way. If you feel uncomfortable about current limitations, a few more could be imposed through the use of GM-imposed risks, or having to spend effort or story points, and so on. These are things you hammer out together.