SPENDING TDPS

WHAT TO TRAIN:

What you train really depends on your profession. It is less expensive to train these stats yourself, rather than let a guild leader train them for you. To see what you need to increase, type HELP STAT 3. This will show you the required minimum stats for each guild. I would recommend you do the following for your first circle: Review the minimum requirements for the guild you want and train your stats up just to the minimum. Then go join your guild. Next get yourself fully equipped with armor, weapons, etc. After that, type INFO to see your encumbrance. Train strength and stamina (mostly strength) till your encumbrance drops to light or none. At that point any remaining TDPs (Training Development Points) should be trained as to maximize your guild skills. TDPs can be found by typing INFO. What I mean by maximizing your guild skills... Traders would prefer charisma, wisdom, and intelligence to advance quickly and be paid well on contracts. Moon Mages would want intelligence, wisdom, and discipline. Clerics should also train intelligence, wisdom, and discipline. The more hunting oriented guilds like War Mages, Paladins, and Rangers might prefer agility (for ranged weapons), reflex, more strength & stamina. Thieves would prefer agility (for opening boxes), discipline, intelligence, wisdom.

Of course, it all depends on what you would enjoy doing and how you want to roleplay your character. I play a cleric as my main character, though unlike most clerics starting out, I went heavy on strength and stamina. I prefered to hunt rather than sitting around getting teaching in and working magic. I did not want to deal with a high encumbrance. As time went on, I advanced and earned more TDPs. Then, I raised my mental abilities and began to focus more in that area. Many clerics prefer to have higher mental stats to start with as to quickly circle. But they need armor, parry, and weapons and find it difficult in combat to avoid injury due to high encumbrance. Really, it's up to you, with regard to what path you choose.

MECHANICS OF STRENGTH-by Dritz.
Strength most drastically reduces burden at odd levels. For Elves going from a strength of 25 to 26 increased the carrying capacity by 50 coins. Going from a strength of 26 to 27 provided an additional carrying capacity of 150 coins. From 27 to 28 was an increase of 50 more coins. And increasing your strength from 28 to 29 will incease your carrying capacity by 100 coins. Assuming this pattern is correct, then there should be a +50 coin increase when increasing strength from 29 to 30, and a +150 coin increase from 30 to 31 in strength.

WHERE TO TRAIN:
Training locations are scattered throughout the Crossing area. All the training sites can be located using the DIR command while standing on the Crossing streets. For instance if you were to type DIR WISDOM while standing in front of the bank, it would give you "... northwest, west twice, north 3 times, and go through the Academy Asemath". This will get you into the building where Wisdom is taught. Most skills are taught in single roomed buildings except for intelligence and wisdom. These two will be your hardest to find. To see what directions are available simply type DIR.

LEARNING MECHANICS:
For those of you who missed this or do not have access to the Simutronics Message Boards, the following is a letter from Zoha (head cheese at Simu) on the mechanics of learning.

Category: Suggestions and Improvements
Topic: Talk to Simutronics Q&A
Author: Zoha (DRAGONREALMS)
Posted: Sep 29, 1998 16:41:32

<There is a little discussion going over in the barb guild about how mental stats effect learning and such. A while back you posted on how disc./wisdom/intel help learning. I had this post saved, but recently my old computer crashed, if you could re-post or just summon them up a bit?>

There are two aspects to this and you need to take each separately before deciding on the whole how well any particular race can gain experience.

The first is the pool of field experience you can build up in each skill. The second is how much you can absorb from that pool each pulse

The size of your pool is determined by the following in order of their importance: Your ranks in that skill, whether it's a primary, secondary or tertiary skill, discipline, and intelligence.

Early on, your ranks don't contribute much to the size of your pool, but it's importance grows, until it eventually is the most important aspect of determining your pool size. Primary/secondary and tertiary importance declines slowly over time, until it can eventually become less than intelligence and discipline, though that would probably take until you are nearly 100th, depending on how you spend your TDPs.

Discipline and Intelligence are intertwined and their affect on the pool size depends on each other. One affects the other though the which one is more important to the other depends on a number of factors...see below. Wisdom has nothing to do with how big your field exp pools grow.

The amount you can absorb is determined by the following in order of their importance: Amount of experience in the pool, and wisdom. Intelligence has nothing to do with how fast you absorb. Neither does discipline. A foggy mind will slow you down considerably and directly removes the benefit wisdom grants to absorption.

Deciding whether to increase intelligence, discipline or wisdom depends on your race and what you are trying to achieve. If you are trying to achieve a larger pool for a skill, then you will want to increase intelligence or discipline. You will want to grow them both but deciding which one to grow faster than the other depends solely on which one costs you less in TDPs. Intelligence affects pool size quicker but discipline has the potential of affecting it more though it takes twice as long to achieve greater results by comparison.

If you want to absorb more experience there are two major strategies you should take. First, wisdom is obviously one important way. The other is to have lots of experience to transfer so by concentrating on achieving a larger pool of experience and filling it up is the way to go in that direction. If you find that your mind is constantly under a penalty then wisdom will help offset that penalty but you will achieve better results from having a fuller pool until your mind gets close to frozen. So, for this strategy to work as best it can you need to have a pool that's larger than you can keep full. This will offset having a lower wisdom stat to a certain extent.

And no, I don't plan on involving myself in the debate as to why barbarians are the only class to have so many negatives to TDP stat gain so if you plan to use this to launch me into a debate I'm not interested. Discussing this issue and how to overcome it is best left to those Barbarians who must deal with it.

Zoha

SPENDING TDPS

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