CC7D
Three: Starting Skills
Defaults
Every starting character has a casual familiarity with a lot of skills.
To be fair, the typical Player has a long list of abilities they have picked up without diligent work:
- physical tasks such as how to maneuver around a free-swinging door
- interpretive tasks such as identifying which die is the Wild Die and what number shows on the top face
- mental tasks such as accessing the Internet and logging into the relevant character on World Anvil
In the West End Games system, every character starts off with over forty GeneralG Skills. Each one defaults to its associated Attribute.
No playable character, during their pre-adventure lifetime, developed all forty General Skills in even proportion to their Attribute.
No playable character got to the start of an adventurous life while never once dedicating improvement time to a particular skill, either. Some of their skill accumulation may have been due to mandatory schooling. Everyone with sufficient self-direction to start an adventure will have chosen at least one skill to refine, somewhere in their lifetime thus far.
This is where the seven starting Skill Dice come in!
Power comes from knowing where to place
the lever
the lever
Of all that your character knows, specific abilities were worth some dedicated effort. A starting character of any species or background has 7d+0 to spend on improving the skills that, according to their concept, held value worth the work.
As with starting Attribute Dice in Step Three, a single die translates to three pips.
Unlike with Attribute dice allocation, most skills will not start at 0d+0A. Nor do most playable species define species-based minimums and maximums in skills.
Some restrictions apply!
Restriction One:
A total of 7d+0 must be allocated to skills during this step! None of these dice can go back into Attributes.
Restriction Two:
No more than 2d+0 can be spent on any one skill, no matter its category.
Restriction Three:
In the case of Skills, all three of those pips must be assigned to the same category of skill -- GeneralG, SpecializationS, or AdvancedA Skills.
The oddest rule will always be about The Force.
If the character is Force Sensitive, then during Step Three some starting Attribute Dice were allocated to Force skills as if they were Attributes.
No backing up to Step Three! That part is finished!
However. At the conclusion of Step Three, Force skills became … well … skills. They have no Attribute on which they are based. They can be improved out of the beginner Skill Dice pool.
Every pip's worth of Force Skill might come with a Force Power related that skill. Remember to check for prerequisites!
If the character had not already decided to be Force Sensitive and allocated some Attribute Pool dice to a Force Skill, then it is now too late to have Force Skills at the start of play.
Game Mechanic resources for Skills
The WorldAnvil for Shards has a few articles discussing skills. Mostly that content exists elsewhere, and in better form.
A single browser window view of all the skills (that are not House Rules unique to the Shards campaign)Ryan's Complete Star Wars Skills List
by Ryan Oliver
The best source of detailed skill descriptions, complete with citations to their original publication source, is forever the d6Holocron. Start from the related Attribute to browse; use the search box to jump to a specific skill.
- General Skills
In the absence of a note to the contrary, a skill in West End Games is probably a General Skill. It derives directly from an Attribute. It can be attempted by defaulting to that Attribute.
Every adventurer knows a little about astrocartography:
- The Core Worlds cluster toward the center of the Galaxy, have more people living in each star system and more law enforcement to keep the general peace.
- The Outer Rim is a long way from the Core Worlds, with its inhabited systems spread out farther by hyperspace travel.
- People who live in regions between those two are forever hearing about how much more enjoyable life is in either the (dazzlingly fashionable!) Core or the (bucolic! private!) Rimworlds.
- People who live in regions between those two are forever hearing about how miserable life is in either the (crowded! resource-poor!) Core or the (lonely! technologically backward!) Rimworlds.
- default skill in Planetary Systems
The math with beginner General Skills is easy!
Start with the die code of the Attribute.
Add at least a pip to mean "character spent a few weeks of their life working specifically to get better at this skill." Add an entire die if the character really devoted time to learning it, whether that was a semester course at a proper certification facility or an intensive off-season drilling themselves on the best techniques. The presence or absence of learned instructors in this backstory matter only in terms of the concept; no effect happens on the cost. One die out of the beginning Skill Dice pool will directly add +1d+0Xd+Y to the Skill.
- Specialization Skills
A Specialization is a narrowed, more intense and effective focus on one area of a skill. It always grows out of a developed skill; in fact, it starts its die code by adding a single beginning skill die to the parent skill's die code.
Lady Acantha Vordrii noticed during Step Two that her chosen Template lists not only Bargain, but a specialization of Bargain: Mediation. If she wants to start off as a well-respected negotiator, she needs to put the maximum allowed number of dice into Bargain. The Specialization: Mediation can only start at a single die higher than Bargain.
Oh, but wait!
During this character creation phase, and only at this time for the rest of the character's career, one die from the beginner Skill Dice pool converts into three Specializations!
All three of those converted Specialization dice must immediately go into separate Specializations. They might all come from the same root General Skill. They might all come from the General Skills of completely different Attributes. The rule is that there must be three Specialization Skills, each increased exactly 1d+0 from the skill rating of their respective parent General Skills, all for a cost of a single beginner Skill Dice pool die.
No character has to spend Specialization points to be proficient in their native tongue. The GM is unlikely to require a skill check for casual conversations in Galactic Basic, either -- although perhaps a translator droid might be a useful plot device in some storylines. Translator droids can malfunction, after all, or be unavailable in other ways!
"Inyak Ennada, future pirate" by WookieeGunner
Does this mean I can
- use 1 die of my beginner Skill pool to split into 3 pips on General Skills, thus improving them above my Attribute defaults
- use 1 die of my beginner Skill pool to split into 3 Specializations, each of which gets a final Skill of {(Attribute die code)+(one pip)+(1d+0)}
and then
- Inyak Ennada,
Semi-Retired Swoop Pirate
Semi-Retired Swoop Pirate
If you want the GM to start the game already peeved at you for min-maxing, sure. The original character concept would have to be inclined toward seeking one's own maximum benefits at the expense of everyone around them.
I love him to death, but that is very much an accurate appraisal of my cousin.
- Lady Acantha Vordrii
Meanwhile, if I assigned two beginner Skill dice on Bargain then I have it at 5d+2. With this Specialization split die, I now have Bargain: Mediation at 6d+2 at start of play. At which point it becomes its own skill for advancement.
Taking that first Specialization means I immediately choose two more Specializations. I want one of them to come off my Business skill, which I only gave two pips from a beginner die. It's now 4d+1 which lets me have Business: Free Spacers Guild at 5d+1. I put the other pip into Bureaucracy, making that 4d+0, which means I can take Bureaucracy: Bureau of Ships and Services at 5d+0.
I think that gives me a tidy starting point as a respected liaison!
- Lady Acantha Vordrii
"Acantha Vordrii, future adventurer" by WookieeGunner
That is reasonable. Lady Acantha has spent four of her beginner Skill Dice pool, leaving three to go. She would be wise to consider one or two action-oriented survival skills in case negotiations get rudely interrupted, or possibly the Sensors skill to check whether the negotiation chamber and its contents really are what they seem.
- Advanced Skills
The Advanced Skills are especially complicated, difficult, or intricate. They cannot be tried with no training -- and the training involved is intensive stuff. An Advanced Skill can only be learned by someone who has achieved a certain level of expertise in prerequisite skills. Even then, the Advanced Skill starts out at 1d+0.
It is possible for a character to start play with an Advanced Skill, but this is not recommended for the first experience with character creation in this system.
During the character creation process, Advanced Skills technically do not draw extra resources for advancement the way that they will during Character Growth after adventuring begins. A character whose concept leans on an Advanced Skill can allocate one of the beginner Skill Dice to have 1d+0 in that Advance Skill. They must have already allocated at least one pip into each of the prerequisite skills, in the process of bringing those prerequisites up to the necessary minimum for the Advanced Skill.
Defaulting to Attribute is not a sufficient understanding of the prerequisite skill to then study an Advanced Skill.
Advanced Skills can lead to further study of their own Specialization Skills, but not during the character creation process.
How many dice is "great"?
WEG Skill Level Comparison Chart
Numbers are great when it comes time to reach for the dice.
But when we look at a character sheet, just how skillful is this character meant to seem at that particular skill?
This information brought to WorldAnvil directly from d6Holocron, who in turn sourced it from the original tabletop roleplaying game by West End Games. Thanks for making this information so easy to reference, d6Holocron!
Skill Level in Dice | Comparative Benchmark | |
|---|---|---|
1D | Below Human average for an attribute. | |
2D | Human average for an attribute and many skills. | |
3D | Average level of training for a Human. | |
4D | Professional level of training for a Human. | |
5D | Above average expertise. | |
6D | Considered about the best in a city or geographic area. 1 in 100,000 people will have training to this skill level. | |
7D | Among the best on a continent. About 1 in 10,000,000 people will have training to this skill level. | |
8D | Among the best on a planet. About 1 in 100,000,000 people will have training to this skill level. | |
9D | One of the best for several systems in the immediate area. About 1 in a billion people have a skill at this level. | |
10D | One of the best in a sector. | |
12D | One of the best in a region. | |
14D or more | Among the best in the galaxy. |
With six Attributes sharing somewhere in the vicinity of 18d+0, then an additional 7d+0 available as Skill Dice, the most nonsensical test concept alien could conceivably wind up with a single Attribute at 13d+0. They could base a General Skill on that one attribute at the maximum increase for 14d+0, then deviate into a Specialization Skill at a final total of 16d+0.
It would not be a playable character!
A starting character with one or two skills that reach as high as 7D or 8D is ready for their first adventure with epic stakes. A starting character who instead has many skills in the 3D to 5D range is likely to be well-rounded enough for any adventuring career in the galaxy.
What Skills make for a fun character?
The Shards universe loves characters who do not fit the pattern of the protagonists in any of the various source materials. It is true, however, that some General Skills are likely to prove of use to most adventurers.
Everyone needs to know how to get out of immediate danger. Reaction Skills like brawling parry or dodge are valuable in an ambush.
Combat in the Star Wars game is fairly lethal. The key to survival is not to get hit.
Picking up fluency via Language Specialization is often useful; some species are not physiologically able to speak Basic, and others simply prefer to talk about the "foreigners" without the bother of discretion.
Sneak can become important in the most unexpected scenarios.
In a story setting that draws from so many wonderful "space cowboy" variations, a wise character will have some skill they can contribute when the team's vehicle is under attack. Not every character has to be a proficient combatant! But for those who do like to return aggression to sender, blaster or starship gunnery are very different skills for very different scales of conflict. Other highly useful skills in such an urgent scene could be starship shields and communications, or various sorts of Repair skills, or perhaps first aid.
Remember to allocate some Skill Dice into the use of any gear that the character concept requires! Powered armor requires Powersuit Operation. Cybernetic components need regular maintenance and all too often they will require some repair. Droids have to have programming updates. Freighters seem to always need system maintenance, especially if the most recent "pilot" was defaulting to their Mechanical Attribute.
G
For this conversation, let's define "General Skills" as meaning "every skill that does not wind up in another category". General Skills can be used without special training first, and probably do not lend themselves to infodumping.
S
For this conversation, Specializations are the kind of skills that can go careening down a deep intellectual rabbit hole.
A
For this conversation, Advanced Skills are unlikely to show up on a starting character. If they do, they are likely to be Technical-based Engineering skills or else Medicine.
Xd+Y
Save yourself and the GM a future headache. Learn from our past errors!
Always write the full value of the skill. Do not write its relative value to the current Attribute, because that relationship may change.
Functional:
3d+1
Future Problems:
+1d+1
We also recommend from our own experience: always write die codes and Character Points and Force Points in easily erased pencil. Do not, and we mean this sincerely, use crayon or permanent marker!
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