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, and Dyne. 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 and bad luck. 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 need to eat and drink. Alot. A stupefying amount.
You only get 30 lives on a character. You can buy more. I'm not sure exactly how. You can also receive lives by sacrificing to Eris.
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 (18, 0). 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 (-6, 2), though I'm not sure from whom, exactly. 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
limbs
or
show limbs
On Learning New Skills
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>
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.
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 alias br to switch depiction detailed rooms start sharing alias br
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
abort
to stop it and clear the command queue.
On a related note, you can speedwalk by typing
go <count><direction>
which is handy.
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.
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 Kaarilin. The Kazarithax is a good weapon, but it's not the one associated with the Kazarzeth association.
