How to Start on Siege Perilous

had learned from the time before the server wipe. Dexterity was important, and so I didn't distribute all my stat points on strength. I started with 40 strength, 15 dexterity and 10 intelligence. I would not be a mage. But what starting skills should I choose? Well, my goal was, to be able to self-supply with everything I needed to survive. That would be primarily armor and weapons. If I was able to make these by myself, I would not need to waste money for expensive wares, one could easily lose in a fight. So I would start with smithing, and gave it 50 points. Tinkering was important as well now, so I could produce shovels for mining, tongs for smithing, and tinker tools for my own needs. Besides all tools (also daggers and scissors) would break very fast by using, so being a tinker seemed to be a promising job. For producing shovels a skill slightly above 50 was needed, so giving it less points would make no sense. Despite I only gave it 49 points, saving 1 point for mining in order to get a shovel.

I was standing there in my hometown, thinking about what would be the first thing to do now. I figured out that I would need a good basis of gold, to be able to buy some shovels, and maybe even skill. I didn't want to start mining with zero, and rising the fighting skills with rabbits is very annoying. Ah right, I forgot about fighting skills. I would take care about them later, after being able to produce my own fighting equipment, and having decent strength and dexterity. So my first business would be making money.

The easiest way to do this without having any useful skill at all, was escorting NPCs. I went through the moongates to Jhelom, and searched the island for these. As it was to be expected, escorts to locations which could only be reached by boat or gate travel spell were around in masses - Serpent's Hold and Nujelm requests everywhere. Finally I found an escort to a dungeon, and I told him that "I will take thee". The dungeon to be reached easiest by foot was Covetous, and I arrived there after a short foot walk. The entrance was full of other NPCs, which proved that my idea couldn't have been so wrong. I repeated this several times while learning the hiding skill, always letting pass the obligatory 15-minute time span between the escorts, until I had about 1500 gold pieces. That's when I decided to start with mining. Besides some evil players were already hiding in front of Covetous, trying to kill and rob the escorting folks.

I returned to Minoc, buying 2 more shovels, and let me teach mining from an NPC for about 600 gold pieces. A skill of 28 should make a good start. The next hours I was mining like a madman, storing all the ore in my bank box. I wanted to start melting it with an as high mining skill as possible, to avoid too many failures. My mining skill rose quickly to above 40, and soon I was melting with 30% success. I continued until I had about 300 ingots in my bank box. Meanwhile I had ruined many shovels, but I was able to make new ones by myself, although I needed many attempts. With one shovel I could dig about 100 ingots, and from these I could make one or two new shovels. I had a perfectly balanced character now, but I shouldn't have wasted the 1 starting point for mining just to get a shovel in the beginning.

I continued like this, and every now and then I was smithing a piece of armor or a weapon. Strangely my stats hardly rose, and this was very annoying. I was mining for an hour, without any effect on my strength. How did the system work? I would figure out! To me it seemed, that stats would only rise in specific intervals, but I needed a proof for this theory.

My plans for the next hours were easy: First getting some more money, then training all my fighting skills on the dummies. My escorts were successful, and I had to run from murderers twice, but was able to escape. I was very quick in leading the NPC into the dungeon, getting the gold, and running back out into the woods. I now had more than 3000 gold pieces in my bank box.

I went to the Jhelom Warrior Guild, for they had the most remote training dummies I knew. I was training for an hour or so, but to my astonishment the skill didn't rise steadily. Starting with zero in a skill, it would only rise every 20th hit or so, which made the training very annoying. Why was that so? I stopped this useless training, and went out to find some cats and small animals. I fought cats and rats, noticing the same effect: No steady skill increase. My stats hadn't risen at all in the meantime. What was the system behind it?

Mining, smithing and tinkering , they all increased well, but I seemed stuck at the fighting skills and the stats. I even tried to fight harpies in Covetous (and almost died), but they didn't bring more skill gain than any dog in the streets. I had to figure out the system, otherwise continuing would make no sense. Neither stat nor skill gain seemed to be continuous. You could do what you wanted, they would only rise in a specific interval. And that interval I wanted to find out.

I made several tests with various animals, and finally came to the following conclusion. Stats would rise about every 100 minutes the soonest. You could do what you wanted, you wouldn't get more than one stat point within this interval. Similar with skill points. One skill would only rise once in two minutes. Now it was easy! It didn't make sense to waste valuable hitpoints on sparring with wolves or so. I just ran to an animal, hit it once (which brought me +0.1 points in each mace fighting, parrying and tactics), and then ran away from it. I now waited 2 minutes, before I hit it again. And the result? Each hit was a skill gain, and I didn't even need healing!!! Same goes for hiding and all other time consuming skills.

Now I seemed to be getting along quite well, and I was doing what I was best in: Achieving with minimum effort.

09/99

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