EAch of those people in the photograph above have their own histories, their own abilites, and the like. How do we deal with the different backgrounds and skills? We use backgrounds and what we call skill picks.
At this point, you need to know only that skill picks are used to improve
your skills within a certain Field of Expertise. There are a total
of 6 different categories of Fields for the purpose of this application.
| Name of Field | Description |
| Combat | Deals with close combat and other things that do not deal with firearms |
| Firearms | Covers everything from pistols to rocket launchers |
| Movement | Anything to deal with moving, including driving and piloting vehicles |
| Communications | Your ability to interact with other people |
| Technical | Everything from computers to first aid. |
| Special | There are only two skills in this category, Avoid and Perception. |
These 6 fields are joined by what we call a 'Free' category. The backgrounds that follow along with your basic elementary knowledge(below) do contain Free picks that you can spend in any of the six categories above. Most other skill picks must be spent within the category that you received it from a background.
Since people learn things when they're a kid, we give all our applications
a number of Free skill picks that depends on their Intelligence score.
See the chart below for the breakdown.
| Intelligence Score | Free Skill Picks |
| 1-5 | 4 |
| 6-9 | 5 |
| 10-14 | 6 |
| 15-16 | 7 |
| 17+ | 8 |
Now that you've completed step, it's time to go onto your choices of backgrounds.