Newbie Ramblings
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Introduction
This page lists some pieces of advice I have been given as a newbie. Thanks go, so far, in no particular order, to: Chaos, Arana, Erebus, Gniffuts, Dyne and Morality. It is my hope to eventually understand enough to write some useful newbie howto's from this information. This information is a work in progress, and any contributions are more than welcome.
After a hiatus of a few months due to school and business, I'm playing again. I will be continuing work on this page, so any knowledge peoples want to impart to me in game will end up here. Thanks!
On Death
You're going to die. That's something you have to learn how to deal with. It sucks. There are penalties. I've died lots and lots of times, but I still am a bit unsure on all the penalties. They seem to include temporary stat loss, temporary assimilativity (xp rate) and bad luck. By temporary I mean, can last for real life days. On the shiny side, you don't lose xp outright. (Telurel says "This has been changed, you can in fact lose xp as a death penalty now" - 10/20/2014) When you die, you need to find an altar. I like to use the Altar to Eris at the Temple of Discordia. When you find an altar, you need to
pray to <deity>
where <deity> is the name of the local divinity you're petitioning for life. Then you may need to eat and drink. Alot. A stupefying amount. Unless you're a guild or race that requires no sustenance.
You only get 30 lives on a character. You can buy more at the church in Losthaven. The church is located w, 2n from Losthaven Square. Read the altar for directions. They cost 15k a piece, which isn't very bad, really. Also, you have a slight possibility of receiving lives when you sacrifice to Eris.
Devonshire Clerics can cast a resurrection type spell which minimizes or eliminates the penalties associated with death. Most clerics can cast this spell, although it does require the cleric to expend a fairly valuable gem in the casting, so help may be more immediate if you happen to have such a gem handy on your corpse, rather than getting someone to track one down for you after the fact.
On Limb Loss
In combat, you're going to lose arms, legs, hands, feet. You need to know how to fix that. The easiest option for a complete newbie that I've found is going to the imp healer located in the city of Imptropolis (20, 28, 0 in Ebiria). She will regrow your limbs very cheaply. Another option is to pick up (if you're able) your limb and take it to Kurd in Sanctuary. Just drop the limb in his presence and he will reattach it for a fee. He will also attach stock limbs if you don't have you're original, though I understand there is some trouble you might get into. I'm hazy on the details of that. Another option is to find another player who is a cleric. They can cast a spell to regrow your limbs. Also there is a scroll of regeneration at Camille (-32, 11, 0 in Celydon) from Curan's Magic Shop on the west end of the main street. I'm sure there are other ways, but these are the ways I know of.
You can view the status of your limbs with the command
show limbs
On Learning New Skills
The first skills I would recommend learning for any new character are scholarship and practice. This way you get more from your training and learning sessions.
Specialties appear to limit the maximum to which you can train a skill. If you have no specialty points in a skill, you can generally train it to 40. Further skill increases require an investment of specialty points to increase the skill cap for you.
Most skills you can learn without a specialty in them, however some you cannot.
Some skills you can learn by doing, others you cannot. A fine example is weapon skills. They increase while you use them, assuming you have room to grow.
The table listed on "show specialty access <stat>" has a points column at the far right. The number listed is the total number of free points you have to allocate for that stat, it does not mean that you can put however many of points in each skill listed.
In the specialty access table, sus means suspended, asg means assigned, bon means bonus. For most skills, 0 specs = a max of 40 in the skill. If you have 2 specs in a skill, and the max for the skill is 120, and then you remove one spec from the skill, it will show one point suspended, until your skill rating becomes 80. At that point the specialty point you removed will become available for allocation again.
Some advice I was given was to pick a guild, then worry about specialties. Your specialties change with your guild. However if you know you're going to use a particular skill in a guild, it's perfectly fine to go ahead and allocate it.
An almost direct quote from Chaos on learning:
The main learning limits are: the max from your specialty degree, the trainer's max they can train, which you know only by reaching it really (unless someone starts documenting those on the wiki), your gold, the wait time between training sessions, and, sometimes, trainer-specific limits, like where Battleragers need Clangedin's favour to a high enough level.
On Practicing Skills
I was told that repetition is the best way to train skills. Therefore, if you want to get specific weapon skills up, just attack a bunch of low level things (rats) and set your combat mode to defensive.
You can train dodge in the same fashion. You need to
stop defending with <x> set combat mode to defensive
in order to do so. Remember to start defending again after you're done training! You can
show suspended defenses
to check on your suspended defense status.
Since there is no separate skill for parrying, you can stop attacking, stop defending with your shield, set combat mode to defensive, then attack a mob. Your weapon skill will train.
You can see what influences your deflection rating with the command
show deflection rating with <whatever>
You can see your dodge rating with
show dodge rating
On Guilds
Changing guilds is not especially easy. Your atman (player account) permits you to play a number of different characters (not online at the same time, that's against the rules). Use this ability to create characters and try out different guilds.
Joining a guild:
1. Find the guild.
2. info npc to find out what needs to be said in order to join.
3. Depends on results of 2. If you are accepted, great! If not, you need to pay attention to why not. In my case, I didn't have enough free specialties to take the guild specialties that were required. So, show specialty access each stat specified, figure out what can be reduced in order to have enough free specialty points per stat in order to join. Once this is figured, set specialty degree in whatever to whatever to free the points. You might have to wait for some skills to decay to actually free the spec points needed. Once you have the free spec points, attempt to join again.
Assuming you now meet the requirements, welcome to your new guild!
Handy Commands That Are Not Immediately Obvious
info <thing>
This command is super handy for the newbie. It tells you about things. You thing that a certain npc is a trainer? info <namehere> will tell you, and will tell you what you need to say or do in order to use their services. Want to find out about that crystal ball you just picked up? info ball will give you directions.
set nickname for <thing> to <name>
This is how you set names for things. Example, you see "a black skinned male drow". You introduce yourself and find out what this person's name is. You can then "set nickname for drow to WhateverThisCharactersNameIs", and anytime you see that person, you will see the name you set rather than their description.
show attack rating with <weapon>
This is neat. It will give you a breakdown of every skill/stat you possess that influences your attack rating with a particular weapon.
show attacks stop attacking with <whatever> show suspended attacks start attacking with <whatever> show defenses stop defending with <whatever> start defending with <whatever>
Show attacks lets you see what sort of attacks you're attempting to use. Stop attacking with <whatever> lets you tune what you attempt to attack with. Show suspended attacks is fairly self explanatory. Start attacking with <whatever> lets you resume using a particular kind of attack. The defenses commands work the same way.
set term to ansi simple
If you find that the colors are too busy, but you want some colors, give this a try. It will probably help out a lot.
You can keep items over logouts with the command:
keep <item>
Your keep capacity is limited by a number of factors including raw willpower and charisma, the ownership skill, lore skills related directly to the item you're trying to keep, leadership for followers, etc.
show keep capacity show keep usage
The number of objects you can keep is controlled by the skill ownership as well as various other skills related to the object itself. These commands let you view your current capacity as well as see what items you have kept are using what points.
If the spaces before channel chats drive you nuts, you can
switch depiction IC
to turn them off.
Instead of using the command 'brief' to turn off your room descriptions, then struggling to figure out how to turn them back on, do this instead:
set shared alias br to switch depiction detailed rooms
Use this alias instead, it will work just like the "Brief" command newbies from other muds may be used to.
If you do something dumb like type "go 71n" when you meant something like 11n, you can type
stop
to stop it and clear the command queue.
On a related note, you can speedwalk by typing
go <count><direction>
which is handy.
show traits
This lets you see your characters traits, such as Assimilativity, Luck, Speech Pattern, etc. Interesting informational command.
set strike location to weakness
My understanding of this command, which may be incorrect, is that it will set your strike location to whatever portion of your opponents body you find a weakness (via the find weakness skill) in, automagically.
eq
This shows you what you're wearing.
On Healing
treat me treat <someone>
This lets you perform first aid on yourself and others. The pre-gen character starts with some small skill in first aid. It will let you heal yourself a bit, which can be useful. I would recommend learning more of the skill, and checking out the related help files treat, first aid, chirurgery, anatomy, and plant lore.
Training in Meditation and/or Regeneration will speed up healing during downtime.
Resting in bars also helps, as does getting drunk. Check out help carousing.
Common Acronyms
Check out Terms_and_Acronyms, which I just noticed.
Good Places to Kill
Well, I'm at a bit of a loss on this one, boys and girls. I tend to start by training skills in the sewers, then killing some giant rats when my combat skills are ok-ish. Then I move to thugs in town as well as mobs in the Catelius Minor quest. After that, it's overland map mobs, that are easy, like pilgrims, squirrels, etc. Then I work my way up from easy overland mobs to harder ones, like orcs, bears, etc. Then ogres and such. From there I've been told to start trying towns. Check out Locations and Landmarks. Pick a town, and give it a go. Be very careful. Be ready to run at the first sign that you're going to be overwhelmed. If you have some kind of recall/teleport out ability, have it hotkeyed and be ready to hit it. This is the part where I tend to die alot. I've been successful in Tlaxcala and Darkhold, semi-successful in Mycenae, and failed miserably in Sanctuary. The kender in the Kender City are easy to kill one by one, but in a group tend to beat you down, and they have the habit of robbing you silly, so I'd recommend staying clear of there. If anyone has any further advice on this particular topic, I would welcome it and add it.
Quests
Another good way of finding things to kill and familiarizing yourself with the world is through the completion of quests. While quests are not mandatory, most of them have an experience reward for completion, and the accumulation of quest points has a small number of in-game benefits. In general, you will want to avoid any quest with a physical difficulty (represented by the number in the 'P' column to the right of the quest name) above 1 or 2 until you feel more confident in your combat abilities. Also pay attention to the quest's danger rating (represented by the 'D' column), and steer clear of quests with high danger ratings until you've cleared some of the less dangerous quests.
Complete At'lordrith's Riddle for lots of XP with no risk of death!
Random Advice
Hunger and thirst can cause hitpoint loss. If your hitpoints just reduced a bit, check to see if you're hungry or thirsty, as that might be the culprit. You can see this on your score, or with show hunger/thirst.
Don't hang out in Arborlon resting after slaughtering the protectors. This is the voice of experience speaking, you won't like it much. Unless you enjoy chain deaths while attempting to recover your remains, of course.
You can sell some things that you loot from fallen enemies at Baldwin's, located 1e, 1s of the Square in Losthaven. You don't sell swords and armor and such at smiths generally.
Magic items can be sold at Lucanius's shop in the Temple of Discordia. Discordia can be found by following the road east from Losthaven, then following the next road north. Also, you can acquire Lenses of Insight at Lucanius's, which can give you more information about items including but not limited to: material, magical nature, and invocation words. After which point they will be more valuable.
In order to use a lens of insight (one of the main ways of identifying items -- also works on people):
look at <item> through lens
Max worth Baldwin will buy an item for is 1K.
Max worth for Lucanius will buy an item for is 10K, but he only buys magic items.
Often mobs do not clear agro when you die. It's tied to your character's physical appearance. Agro will clear next time the mud reboots.
A great! source of income is cleaning up trash. You're going to run across piles of things randomly. Either some high level player left them, not caring, or some mobs got in a tussle amongst themselves. Take the goodies and sell them. Obviously don't steal from other players, that's rude, but if it's unattended with no one in the immediate area, chances are it's fair game.
Two handed weapons are good, if you're not ambidextrous. Many people use a weapon/shield combo as well (stop attacking with shield can be helpful). There's nothing wrong with either.
Check out help set caption if you're interested in changing your description in the 'who' listing. You need to be level six in order to use set caption.
You can use show changes search <text> to search changelog for words of interest.
Max level is 675. Yeah, that's a lot.
Don't confuse a [Kazarithax] with a Kazarilin. The [Kazarithax] is a good weapon, but it's not the one associated with the Kazarzeth association.
Kenpachi's Advice for Beginning Life in the Land of Lost Souls
Let me start by saying that this is the method I use, it seems to work for me. I am not even close to an expert.
First thing, when starting a character there are skills that you may think would be useless, until you start running the realm. Most notably among them are Literacy and Orienteering. Literacy allows you to read shop signs, so the payoff there is obvious. It takes about 25 to read everything accurately every time, I usually go with 30.
I also start with 30 orienteering. Orienteering is what allows you ‘determine location' and find out your coordinates in the world. This is important for finding your way around. I have found that for me, spending my points in these two skills makes beginning life much easier. From there I usually put my remaining skill points into dodge, the reason being, if I get attacked by something I cannot kill I can hopefully dodge it at the least. Another good idea may be to put those extra points into first aid, because even if you are mortally wounded, you can still treat your wound every time blood flows from your chest and save your own life.
I think it is also a good idea to choose the losthavener culture. You will start in the main city of the world, this makes it easier to find people, and you have the starting language of anglic, which is the common language. Do not forget to ‘set primary language to anglic'.
Now you are in the world, you can read and you can find yourself. Great. The next thing I usually do is join a guild. Now these guilds may have certain stat requirements, race requirements, some may require a gift or offering to join. Each guild will have its own set of skills and abilities that are generally unique to them, and of importance.
Once you join a guild I also think it is a good idea to check my stats against my main skills to make sure I didn't set one stat too low and another too high etc. So “show specialty points” will show your current specialty points, and ‘show specialties' will show you what your specialties are. For the most part these should all be you main guild skills. So comparing what you have available to what your skills are, you can tell if you goofed. 1 spec point = 10 points of the corresponding stat.
Now once I am in a guild and everything, I usually like to place 1 spec point into practice (willpower skill) and 1 into scholarship (intelligence skill). I train these first, once I get each one to about 50 I start training the rest of my skills. The reason for this is that these two skills can heavily impact how fast you learn other skills. Practice helps you get more out of your training in physical skills, and scholarship helps you get more out of sessions in book type skills.
At this point you are free to do whatever. I typically start by heading to the sewers, which is 3 south, and 1 down from losthaven square. I set my combat mode to defensive and pick a fight with a rat, then I stand there until they run out of endurance, and then I switch to studious and kill them. This keeps my defenses higher than my offenses which I like because it keeps me alive when I pick a fight I cannot win, and I feel that is a good way to start out at the very least.
A note on starting races, when you are looking at the playable races section letting loose oohs and ahs, there are a few things to take note of. One of them being assimilativity. This controls how fast you learn skills and how much experience you get from your kills. I try to stay as close to 0 as possible. That seems to provide a decent balance of high stats, and you aren't dumb as a brick.
My race of choice is sekh, they are a cat people. They have a high starting dexterity and bonus specialty access to killer instinct. This makes them ideal for combat guilds. They also have night vision which makes life easier, though they do not take a sensitivity penalty. They are also ambidextrous, which is great for dual wielding weapons. If you plan to use a big weapon, you might want to try a race that is not ambidextrous as you will not benefit from it anyway, and may be able to pick up another cool ability. The final reason is that sekh have a luck bonus. And everyone can use luck.
Elradra's two bits for newbs
I'm also a bit of a newb myself, but I havn't seen anything on followers in any of the guides yet. Nor have I seen anything on grouping. So since the game's down for a bit, I'm making some notes. (On the subject of downtimes, I've noticed that when it says "minutes" it usually seems to mean "hours." Yay unforseen difficulties!)
One of the first things I do when I start a new character (which is usually a drow or drow-related race like the nylocs,) is find the general vendor, and find some unwanted stuff with which to start my career with. Often it is polite to ask if anyone happened to drop this or that doo-dad here or there before you pick it up. Usually I just skip that part and take a few things from the sewers of Yathryn, since hardly any PCs tend to go down there, the monsters really aren't that much different from the LH sewers, and all the unworthy drow warriors leave lots of loot that's good for nothing but turning into gold (since it all deteriorates in the sunlight.)
One my coinpurse is full I head to the LH bank to start up a death-recovery fund. With regular deposits, this bank account can easily get me outfitted with some decent magical gear and maybe a few pets to help recover my body. Or get me started on a completely new life, depending on how I died and where.
At low levels it's easy to die, even in the LH sewers. Giant rats, cats, and skaven are all a bit too much for the new adventurer. Just the regular rats are good for killing at the first few levels. You'll notice the rats stop giving xp after the third or fourth one. That makes it very hard to level by grinding I've found. There's a quest in the Northlands that involves answering riddles that I always do instead. Each riddle gives over 200xp, there's somewhere around 10 of them, and finishing up the quest itself gives you 6,000xp or somewhere around there, and the best part is there's no killing involved. It shoots me up to Bill-killing levels much faster, or at least gets me to the point that I can take out giant rats and put points where I need them to get into a good guild. After the LH sewers stop giving xp, I hear Spiderwood is the next place to go. Bring a torch, or be a race that has a flame aura. They burn the webs off you before you get tangled.
Recovering after death is always a pain. The things that killed me obviously can do it again, so I always take reinforcements with. Pets to be exact, from the pet shop 2n, 1w of the LH[]. Spiders are my favorite. Not only do they fit with my drow theme, but they have the same abilities to entangle and poison enemies as wild giant spiders do. Whenever I need a confidence boost I buy four of the buggers and kill all the low-lives in town with my entourage. Great for Bill-killing at lower levels. The pet shop also sells rats, dogs, birds, frogs, and a few other things I've yet to bother to check. Just across the street from the pet store is an accessory shop, where you can get anything from collars and adorable outfits to stones of preservation or recalling for your pet.
Followers are much like pets, but a bit more...frusterating to me. My drow started with a Nyloc follower, who can carry more stuff than me at once. The report command is very useful when trying to get an idea of what your follower can do. Sadly, I can't figure out how to get him to change his specialty points properly, so his anglic isn't good enough to talk to trainers with. Should your follower be much the same, then they still make ok meatshields and great porters.
Groups are something that I've never had much experience with. That's probably because I don't know that many people in-game, and they all tend to outlevel me by at least 20 levels. But should you happen to have a friend playing with you, (or someone willing to help,) you can utilize groups! It's recomended you only group with people you trust, for good reason. The leader of the group is the only one with completely free will. The rest can be bossed about, much like followers. Should the leader issue a command, your character will automatically follow. This can include anything from wise battle tactics to reports on your skills to determine where to put you to potentially handing over all your posessions like you're being mugged. I've yet to test the last for confirmation. On the bright side, few people on this game are cruel enough to do that to you, and groups share xp evenly. Groups can then allow you to not only get a Hero of Lostsouls to help you kill the gotzgul hovering over your body, but also get the xp for it. I suggest having some fun with this function with the help of a friend first.
And that's probably all I should contribute to one lengthy post that's killed a couple hours already! I'm off to see if the game's back up. Hope to see you all there soon!
See followers, grouping, and adventuring companies for more/better-worded info on the social stuff.
--Elradra 05:48, 8 August 2011 (EDT)
