Thursday 3 January 2002

Pic of the day: The warming up is over. Time to step forward. (Screenshot from Dark Age of Camelot.)

Fantasy careers

I have played Dark Age of Camelot since the middle of December, minus the Christmas holiday. I have tried two realms and several classes. I have to say that I am particularly fond of the Cabalist, Paladin and Cleric classes in Albion. They are all different, but all of them have traits that I reall enjoyed. Until today I have not really been able to decide on a class, much less a character. But now I have decided. I think ...

I want to be an armorsmith.

***

The "trade skill" aspect of the game intrigued me since before I even installed the program. But the manual was rather vague on the topic, and it did not become more obvious as time went by. Eventually I managed to get one of my characters accepted into the Tailor guild, but I still had no idea how to actually do things, and I had no one to ask.

Enter google.com, the search engine that lists the most relevant hits first.

Dark Age of Camelot trade skills, hit [google search]. A few seconds later you are at daoctradeskills.com, a web site devoted to ... Dark Age of Camelot trade skills. It has a tutorial so simple that I didn’t even print it out, just jotted down the names of my local suppliers. Then I tried some tailor consignments for my cabalist girl, and lo & behold: It worked! She even seems to turn a marginal profit on it.

Time to create a new character. One that is more "me" than the girls, much as I loved playing them. The result is Itland the Paladin. Actually you need some fighting career too, because you can only create armor and weapons you are able to wear yourself, or at least that is what the manual says. A paladin can wear all kinds of armor (eventually - most of them are not available at low levels) and any weapon except ranged weapons like bow and crossbow.

***

You don't actually start as a paladin. Paladin is one of the specializations. You have to be a Briton of the fighter class, and then at level 5 visit the great church in Camelot and enroll as a paladin.

I could not start making armor at once either. You need tools, and they cost a few silver pieces. So I had to go out and kill various small monsters, such as spirit dogs and puny skeletons. Most monsters in DAoC have some loot in addition to the XP. But you only get a few coppers from each. So it took me like 3 levels to afford the tools and raw materials.

You need quite a bit of stuff to create armor. A sewing kit and heavy thread to make cloth or leather armor, or padding in metal armor. The cloth or leather itself. Metal for plate or chain mesh or studding. (Both cloth, leather and metals come in various qualities, so you may end up carrying a small warehouse.) A hammer. And a forge. The forge is not portable, so you have to hang around one of the forges in the city (and in most towns) while you work metal stuff. If you only make cloth or leather, you can do it anywhere. But I guess it would be a bit distracting in some situations.

After gathering my tools and raw materials, I started to take commisions. The guild leader (a computer controlled character) gives me tasks to create objects for people in the city. The tasks are meted out such that they challenge my skills a little, but will succeed after a few tries. Each success leads to an increase in skill. Any one of the sub-skills can rise too, but not to a higher level than the main skill, in my case Armorcrafting. This practicing is quite fun. Each product usually consists of several parts: For instance to make studded leather gloves, you first make the gloves from sheets of leather, and the studs (sic) from metal bars

The non-fun part is trekking through the city, asking all guards I meet, trying to find the NPC that has ordered the stuff. I guess it is useful to get to know your city, but I found it stressing. After a while I went out in the countryside to kill small creepy things again. Here I met a monk, and a bit later we met a friend of his, and levelled for a while. As I said, you can only make the stuff you can use, and you have to grow in order to use new materials. And all loot goes toward the raw materials fund. ^_^

But I have to say that creating stuff was more interesting than killing. I hope that says something about me as a person ...