Guild Information
Below is a description of each guild, the guild difficulty, main skills, rearrange sugestions
and a few hints for newbies.
When you join the Disc it is almost essential that you join a guild. Guilds allow you to advance for cheap amounts of experience, allow you to use the guild facilities, and allow you to learn specilaised, guild commands. Remeber:
You can only join one guild, unless you restart your character completely.
Rearrangement
Each character is allowed to 'rearrange' once. This has a severe effect on the charcters skill bonuses. It will determine how much your bonus for each skill rises when you advance the skills levels (the bonus is how good you are at the skill). Fighting skills use the strength (str) and dexerity (dex) stats. Health uses the constitution (con) stat, faith uses the wisdom (wis) stat and magic uses the intelligence (int) stat. Covert uses dex mainly, and int. I will be using abbreviations when referring to statistical rearrangment.
When you enter the game, your stats are all stet to 13. When rearranging (you may not want to rearrange until later in the game, but if you intent to go out in danger areas by yourself, you may want the best productivity from your skills), you can increase or decrease each stat to suit your needs. You cannot increase a stat above 23 during rearrange.
Take into account that there are several stat-increasing items in the world;
For example, you may substitiute a point of con for a point of dex because you know that you will be able to increase it later anyway...
Begginners Advice
The first basic tip of playing a proper character in the Disc (one you intent to stick with for a long time) is
'Don't try to be good at everything'.
Unless you are using a powerful fighting character (with fighting bonuses exceeding 400), trying to learn a small bit of stealth so you can sneak past the Yetis, get good enough faith to hold a Silver Flail, and advancing your magic skills until you can use a wizard staff, will not work!
Concentrate on your guild's primary skills and your fighting skills and you'll be able to mess around later ^_^
In all guilds, perhaps with the exception of the Wizards (who can zap everything), you should try to advance a single fighting sub-skill to a 300 or more bonus (preferably more). Other then questing, killing things is the only way to gain large amount of experience, and you won't be discovering 200,000 xp of quests an hour for long...
Warriors Guild
The warriors guild is 'The Begginners Guild'. Upon joining this you will advance your fighting skills and equip yourself with a deadly array of weapons and armour. With all types of fighting under your disposal (don't forget to advance your dodging skills!), you can efficiently learn to use sharp, blunt and pierce weapons (and combinations), aswell as mastering fighting.special.weapons and tactics to gain your excellent 'specials'.
Advantages
The main advantages of the warriors guild is that it allows you to get into the action extremely quickly, gaining you large amounts of exp and allowing you to rapidly advance. A 2 day old PK warrior could defeat a 20 day old thief if he got in a few of his (soon-to-be-guild-unique) crushes or impales.
All the other guilds, except for the thieves guild, badly limit the fighting skills of their members. A warrior will be able to slaughter wolves with sharp and pierce weapons, then switch to blunt weapons against trolls with equal effectiveness.
Disadvantages
Initially, a warrior does not have the advantage of stealth, faith, magic or wit. He will charge directly into combact, unprotected and relying on his immediate skills alone to get him through alive. A young warrior cannot heal himself and cannot sneak or portal away to safety. If hes ambushed or trapped, he must rely solely on dodging and health skills to survive.
Also, some may find that after a few days the warriors guild can become quite boring. Fighting, crushing, getting healed, fighting...and then advancing will become tedious. Becoming PK is a definite answer to this - as said earlier, a young warrior can be surprisingly powerful - but a really good warrior is made when the player sticks to his primaries and later branches out to scry/heal/read from scrolls.
Rearrange
All fighting skills are based on str and dex, but it is useful for all guilds to channel some points into con.
PK warrior ALT, used only for fun and when you're bored:
Str 23, dex and con balanced. This charcter will be using specials (crush and impale) alot, and will want to do maximum damage in minimum time. A powerful, single hit weapon such as a sledgehammer is ideal for this character, giving heavy hits and massive crushes. Equip yourself with good armour - you have strength to carry it - and, as you'll be messing around as a PK, you'll be starting most fights with a crush, so dex isn't too important (but will increase fighting bonuses). Con is quite important here, and should be fairly high (10 - 13), healh being advanced to 1700 or more.
Non PK, or long term warrior:
High str and moderate dex and con are needed. It is vital to thing ahead with this charcter - will you want to branch into magic or faith skills later on? I would suggest that magic has the more potential. You would be able to scry and cast from scrolls, and perhaps even invoke staffs. Both int and wis have huge stat increasing items, but faith has bad limitations to non-priests.
Str 20, dex 15, con 12, int 10 may work (int being later increased temporarily by 6 points).
Priests Guild
An easy guild to start off in if you know lots of quests and can advance your first faith skills quite fast. Unfortunately, the terrible cost (and great need) of fighting skills is a major let down, but if you can reach a 200 bonus in them you'll get along fine.
This guild quickly gives you many religious rituals in your first day, each useful to an extent, some more then others. The priests guild lets you further specify into a single god (theres no turning back after you've chosen one, though). You'll have to find a map or explore Ankh-Morpork to find the temples.
Rituals range from creating defensive shields, summoning huge cloud of wirling debris, making an opponent fumble a weapon, raising the dead, portalling, interfering with someones vision, scrying, and merely healing yourself and others.
Advantages
You gain rituals very quickly in this guild, your faith bonuses soaring up extremely fast. You'll soon be able to heal yourself and create a weak protective barrier, so gaining xp from killing will not be so dangerous. Later on you will find mega powerful rituals, such as visions, major shield and aegis, which, when acompanied by decent fighting skills, will make you a worthy opponent.
This is also a great guild for helping others, and raising a bit of cash doing so. Raise dead players (or resserect, depending on your god), portal them to another city, cast shields on them while they fight and ward and imbue their items (aswell as your own).
The passage rituals, such as air passage, are very useful to know. They allow you to portal yourself and others (if you have the skills) anywhere on the Disc. Guild temples can be found dotted around the DIsc aswell, so if you're low on gp, you won't have to walk far to advance.
Having never whorshiped the other gods, I can only speak for the denzions of Gufnork in saying that the priests guild offers superb ritual protection and unique (if not few) offensive qualities. Every ritual you learn will prove useful, so explore every branch in the faith tree.
Similar to the wizards, the priests guild offers unique and powerful weapons that require advanced skills to use. They are, however, fearsome blunt weapons, and a wide range of rituals can be cast straight from them, with no gp costs!
Disadvantages
The two major set-backs of the priests guild are costs to advance fighting skills
and the terrible gp cost of rituals.
Have pity on post-cut* priests! If I remember correctly it cost me around 500,000 xp to advance the first 10 levels of fighting in the guild. In the warriors guild it would cost around 50,000.
...and then, at fighting level 15, priests must learn from outside the guild, from other players (which takes up more xp, but there is no money cost).
The wizards guild offers fighting skills in the same way, but the wizards have a multitude of massively offensive spells, some which can attack and destroy multiple targets in a single attack round. Many gods (priests can only whorship a single god, who may offer different rituals to another, if I didnt make it clear) offer no offensive rituals (Gufnork and Pishe, for instance), and so fighting must be invested into.
*There was a 'skills cut' a while back which reduced all bonuses by a percentage because they were rising too high. Before that time, people spent xp on anything they fancied because of its cheap cost, so many priests (and those of other guilds) became,
and still remain, excellent fighters *snarls at Spacecowboy*.
Rearrange
Idling/helper priest:
Wis 23, con 14, str 14 would be fine if all you want to do is sit around chatting and helping people by healing and portalling. This would keep your faith bonuses high, alongside moderate strength so you aren't always burdened, and good con. Reducing con for dex and/or str may be more beneficial, but it depends on what the aim of your character is.
Fighter priest:
I myself use a (post cut) fighter priest with 23 wisdom and 18 str. After comparing a few bonuses, I've decided that, although these are good stats for me, more dex would create a better balanced character (advancing any covert skills with 8 dex is barely worth the satisfaction of inflating your command list). I have not advanced my other.health much, but with 1000hp (con 8) I am easily...unnerved (giant spider poison recently reduced my maximum health to 350).
It wouldn't be wise to drop wisdom below 20, as it is by far your most needed, but high str is crucial to combat the terrible cost of advancing fighting.
Thieves Guild
With a protective social community and scrict regulations, the thieves guild upholds the stealing system inside Ankh-Morpork. It is managed by powerful enforcers, and offers various training facilties and stores.
Before a thief reaches guild level 50, he/she may choose to advance into one of many subclasses. Each of these offers different primary skills that can be mastered at level 300, such as valueing, casing and fighting, and the offered skills can be viewed in one of the guilds own books (issued upon joining).
The thieves guild must carefully monitor its members and the amount they steal, and from who, so a strict quota must be kept and not exceeded. The thieves licence will show details about the recent thefts, the quota information (how long until your quota ends, how much you have to steal, how much the guild gets) and allows you to see how much you can steal from player killers.
An important PK part of the guild is the 'heavies'. These are a group of hardened thief guards who will beat up and throw in the river anyone who oposes the guild rules directly (for example, if a non-thief steals in Ankh-Morpork, they may be heavied).
Thieves may not attack or steal from each other unless in mutual play.
Advantages
A quickly rising bonus in covert, and the choice of many classes, this is a good guild for a players second character.
The ability to specilise in either pierce or blunt and sharp fighting skills is one of the top qualities of the guild. Guild-only commands are few, but still powerful - filch allowing you to steal a worn item, or an item inside a container.
Thieves will be able to ambush and fight almost as good as the warriors (dodging may not be present in all classes), and in addition can advancing stealing, snatching, hiding and sneaking to level 300.
The guild building itself is reletively safe (its big, dark, and I'm not sure of the bonus needed to sneak into it), and much information is provided in handy booklets.
As a PK guild, being a thief is quite difficult difficult if you are young, and patience is needed, but if you combine skills and cunning, you can make yourself a fortune in a matter of days.
Disadvantages
There are few glitches in this guild, and everything seems to run smoothly. However, I have found that, after specialising as a mugger, all other skills except for fighting, hiding and stealing became quite useless.
Like the warriors guild, some may find that wandering around and stealing from every NPC you come across, and then shoplifting a few times before heading back to fence the goods in, becomes very boring. Perhaps it is then that we should turn to other skills, or adventure into other areas, but at a young age one would feel that the oppertunities lay as PK steals.
In many ways they would be right; a thief with 500 bonus in stealing could make cake out of most pre 20 day first time PKs, but a younger thief would find himself with more trouble then expected.
Young thieves can be easily seen as bigheaded after a steal, and they may not appreciate comments like 'You looked like you were going to steal from me'.
A note for young thieves thinking about going PK: Before you do, be able to defend yourself with both skills and friends, but if you act mean and arrogent, expect little sympathy from any guild.
Rearrange
Sneaky bugger, someone who wants to sit and idle until some unwarey PK drops past:
Dex 23, con 12, str 16 will let you steal and hide well, and fight enough to get away.
Fighter thief:
Dex 20, con 12, str 19. Stats like this will see you through both fighting and covert skills well, and give you a fair amount of health quite quickly. You'll be able to ambush well, but may consider increasing int slightly (many covert skills take a slight amount of int). This will also be useful for scrying, a major aspect of thief life.
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