First Steps

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Revision as of 22:37, 16 August 2008

Apologies in advance if this starts out too simplistically for you; it's probably worth skimming over anyway, but also contains material designed to aid players who have little or no experience with this kind of game.

The very first thing you should do in Lost Souls is introduce yourself over the Neophyte channel. To do this, type the following:

neophyte hi

Many new players never use this channel; however, it lets other players know that you are actually a real person and not a cabbage or something. There is also an organization within the game called the Wardens, whose sole purpose is to aid new players in gaining experience. They are rewarded for this task, and so it's mutually beneficial; they will in general be happy to give you free stuff and lead you around the game merely for the opportunity to guide you ('guide' being the command they would use to initiate this process).

1 Your First Character
2 Starting Out
3 Being Hurt and Healing
4 Progressing : Guilds and Affiliations
5 Skills and Specializations
6 Making New Characters
7 What's The Best Character?

Your First Character

Is a half-elf, a respectable race with the advantage of nightvision and a good learning rate (experience multiplier), who has skills we've determined to be useful to a very-first character, like the common tongue Anglic, and skills to ease your ability to navigate and maneuver.

Starting Out

Lost Souls is an extremely flexible hack and slash game. We have non hack and slash elements, and we don't always intend to remain a primarily hack and slash game, but that's what we are for now.

As such, the goals the game encourages are gaining experience and developing your skills. The goals we, the developers and experienced players of the game, encourage are exploration and interaction with other players and your environment.

Because we strive to be flexible and interesting, there is something of a learning curve; what you need to now immediately is:

Don't kill anyone in Losthaven.

There are consequences to your actions. In Losthaven, which is where your first character, a half-elf, will start, most of the guards and shopkeepers will summon help, and are probably tougher than you anyway. They will also put a persistent bounty on your character for making trouble. The sewers are OK.

The common tongue is Anglic.

If you cannot speak Anglic, a Warden can still communicate with you, and you can communicate over general channels. However, you will find it much harder to interact with NPCs and group with other players.

It is easy to get lost.

The Orienteering skill and your compass enable you to navigate the map with the command 'determine location.' Many areas in the game are not on maps yet, so you might get a message like "You cannot determine anything about your location." If you need assistance from there, ask for help over neophyte or the ooc channel.

You need to 'keep' things you want

If you logout, you will drop any items that you aren't keeping. They most likely will not still be there when you log back in.

Being Hurt and Healing

It's extremely likely you will not fare well in the first combat you get into. Even rats can be a challenge for a neophyte with no combat skills and no weapons; while all new characters start with weapons and the 'starter' half-elf comes with the skill to use his or hers, it's remarkably common for neophytes to spontaneously create a new character and lose or sell their weapons. So, here's how you recover.

You can pay a healer to restore hit points, but it's usually easier just to wait it out. Type 'rest' to enter a resting state that will speed up your recovery process significantly; as of the time of this writing, there is no sleeping in Lost Souls. You cannot rest if you are in a state of taking continuous damage, such as if you are poisoned; resting also slows down your reactions for a little while after leaving the state (so it's advisable to 'stop resting' and execute a few commands like 'look' until you get the message that you feel less groggy before doing anything important, like starting combat).

Getting a limb cut off is a bit trickier to handle. A few races have the ability to naturally regenerate their limbs, but it's usually a *very* slow process. Certain other players have the ability to restore lost limbs; asking via the neophyte or OOC channels will usually get you some assistance with a line like

ooc Hey, I'm a new player and I lost one of my limbs.  Is there anyone around who can restore it?

You can also travel to the Mortician in Sanctuary to restore a limb. Again, try asking over neophyte or ooc for directions and assistance with this process.

Progressing : Guilds and Affiliations

One of the easiest ways to improve your immediate power level is to join a Guild. Guilds provide access to trainers and (usually) an array of beneficial powers to interact with the world and turn your targets into smoking, dismembered heaps.

The best guilds are usually whichever ones are most up-to-date. As of this writing, this includes the ELF, the Ringwielders, the Azure Magi, and the Rangers. Of these, the Rangers are probably the most newbie-friendly. The other guilds (both those on this list and the others in the help file) are hardly unplayable, but may require a bit more help from others to get the hang of.

You can also join associations, which are smaller and more focused organizations, and some races or events give you access to faculties (innate powers). Your starting half-elf has access to the Elven racial faculty, which gives them a few magickal abilities to play with.

Skills and Specializations

The amount you can train any skill is limited by the degree of specialization you have in that skill. Do

show specialties

to show what specialties you currently have, and

show specialty access

to show what specialties you could access. This will likely give you a largely incomprehensible list a couple pages long; the most effective specialties to start with are dodge, your weapon skill, combat reflexes, steadiness and resilience. Some other important skills include stamina, recuperation, precision strike, and pain tolerance.

To increase your specialty level in a skill, you can type

set specialty degree in <skill> to <degree>

where <skill> is the name of the skill with no brackets, and <degree> is a number like 2 or 3. You may get the message that you cannot specialize in a skill because you are completely unfamiliar with it, or that you have no specialty access for that skill. The first case can be remedied by training in that skill, and the second will require joining an association, which we discussed above.

You may also get the message you do not have enough specialty points; your specialty points are determined by your attributes. You receive one specialty point for each ten full points of an attribute. Your specialty points are specific to the attribute you received them from; so if you want to raise the specialty level in stamina, a Constitution skill, you will need Constitution specialty points to do so.

To find a trainer, ask other players. Garet Jax, who lives in the Arena of Losthaven (which you can reach by traveling to the Losthaven Square, then moving four to the west, four to the north, and west until you see her) will train you in combat skills. Miss Amelia, who lives in her Schoolhouse (which you can reach by traveling to the Losthaven Square, then moving two to the east, two to the north, and again to the east) will teach you scholarly skills like linguistics, which will raise your fluency in all languages slightly.

Making New Characters

Play around with this system to get the hang of it. You will quite possibly delete your first few characters as you learn the game and its systems; some basic advice is to think about what specialties you will want, and plan your attributes accordingly. Knowing a little bit about what guild you might like to join is helpful here, but your first few characters will probably benefit from high Constitution and reasonable Dexterity, Intelligence and Perception.

What's The Best Character?

Many new players ask this question. It's easy to say that the best character is the one you have the most fun playing, but that's not the answer they're looking for. A slightly more on-target answer is that the best character is whichever one the best player makes -- there is no substitute for knowing the ins and outs of the game and having a sound grasp of planning. But if you just can't accept waiting, a strong starting character would probably be a dracon ranger with a drake familiar, at least sixty points in intelligence and perception, and maximum starting constitution. Despite the section heading, this is not going to be the strongest possible character you could have, but it gives you a tough, flying character who can breathe fire and has a powerful familiar to help them in combat.

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