Specialties

Abilities / Secondary Abilities

Specialties

Cannon Rules

The current system as outlined in DA2 requires the character to spend experience equal to his or her current rating in a skill to gain a specialization in that skill. It allows a character to have a number of specializations in a skill equal to half his or her rating in that skill, rounded up (1 at 1, 2 at 3, and 3 at 5). Having a specialty allows the character to roll one extra die in situations appropriate to that specialty. Instead of a specialty, characters may buy skill focuses, which are even more narrow than specialties, and provide two extra dice. For instance, if Germanic Languages is a specialty of Linguistics, American English would be a skill focus. A character may apply only one skill focus or specialization to any given roll (thus the maximum number of extra dice on a roll is 2, not 3).

The problem is that the experience cost penalizes those characters who gain general mastery of a skill rather than specialize early. This seems arbitrary.

Previous versions of the rule granted automatic specializations for each dot of a skill above 3, for free. Specialties granted no extra dice, but allowed the character to re-roll any '10' results on die rolls, adding subsequent successes to the rolls. This rule was replaced by the "extra die" rule above.

The New Rule
Modify the experience cost to a standard: The first specialty in any given skill costs 1, the second costs 3, and the third costs 5. In the rare case that a character has 7 or 9 dice in a skill, the character may buy a fourth or fifth specialty for 7 and 9 experience, respectively. This is the minimum experience that a character would have to spend under the DA2 system.

Specialties

Number of Specialties in Skill	Cost of Next Specialty	Minimum Skill Rating
0	1 xp	1 dot
1	3 xp	3 dots
2	5 xp	5 dots
3	7 xp	7 dots
4	9 xp	9 dots