Newbie

Well, here it is - my contribution to the life of newbies.

Firstly, for those of you who are totally lost - what is a newbie?

Basically, a newbie is someone new to the Discworld - once they've escaped the Newbie area (which aims to teach some basic rules and information about the Disc, and to tell new players something about each of the Guilds that they can choose to join), players start off extremely weak. Over time they learn skills, and become more powerful, at a rate which varies from one player to the next. To all intents and purposes, a newbie can be considered to be someone with less that two days of login time.

When a player first arrives in the main area of the game, things can seem a little daunting and overwhelming. You arrive in the bar of the Mended Drum pub, which lies at the end of Short Street in the great (?) city of Ankh-Morpork. If, as I did with my charactor Ded, you decide to become a warrior, the Warrior's guild lies very close to here, as does the Assassin's. The other guilds (Witches, Wizards, Priests and Thieves) are all further from the drum, but all have branches within Ankh.

The decision on which of the guilds to join depends a great deal on what kind of player you wish to be. I'd suggest that if you're not sure, you don't commit to a guild immediately, since this is an irreversible decision, but instead walk around and take a look at the whole of Discworld life. Meet and talk to people, and ask their opinions - most will be happy to help.

In order to improve your character, and advance within whichever guild you select, you need to gain experience (or xp) which can then be used to learn skills. Experience is earned very slowly even if you are idly doing nothing, but you gain far more experience from killing things, and to a lesser extent using and commands your guild teaches you, than you ever will by idling alone.

Since we're talking about fighting, I guess that there are a couple of important things I should mention here, which many true newbies don't immediately realise (I didn't).

Firstly, there is a command "consider" which will tell you whether your target is weaker or tougher than you. To use it, type "consider <x>", where <x> is the name of the target. Take heed of the response you get - if something is tougher than you it probably means you don't stand much chance of defeating it, and will probably die trying.

Secondly, another important command to know is "wimpy". This command allows you to alter at what fraction of your total hit points you'll run away. For example, if you type "wimpy 50", then you will always run away if you fall to 50% of your maximum hit points during a fight. This can prove really useful, especially if you attack something far stronger than you. The number of hit points you have starts at 500, and can be found by typing score. In order to gain more hit points, you need to use your experience to learn the skill other.health. You can learn this in your guild, up to level 25, and after this you must find someone else to teach you. I'd recommend learning a few levels of other.health, and a few levels of fighting before you advance any other skills, no matter which guild you are in, since fighting is the main way of getting experience on the Discworld, and these skills will prove very helpful.

Finally, one final thought on combat, which I didn't discover for a while after starting playing. If you type "monitor on", then while you are fighting your hit points and guild points (used for your guild commands) will be displayed between every round of the combat. This is really useful, and I'd advise all new players to turn their monitors on before they start playing.

Thats it for now - if you have any ideas on what more I should put here, mail me.

Otherwise, return to my Discworld page here.