Some stuff I did to get started

[Gicod]

Starting out here can be somewhat of a culture shock, especially if you havent played in a long time or are new to the T2A era. Money can be slow to come by, especially if you are used to the give-away nature of the modern OSI shards where you can make your first million before you have your first GM skill. Safety is also a big concern, again if you are used to modern UO. Finding a good safe place to work skills and make coin can be a daunting task if you are a little rusty on the T2A ruleset.

Personally, I have always been fond of working new characters in Delucia. Its a fairly short romp through the jungle south from the Trinsic moongate to the Del passage to Lost Lands, easily runnable even on a newly created character.

Delucia is a great place to work all types of templates for a new player. Its a large guarded area, so its for the most part safe (I say for the most part, as here you are rarely ever TRULY safe) and has everything a new player needs to get started. Mining (all ore types except valorite), lumberjacking, sheep to shear, plenty of leather-bearing critters, animals to tame/provo, a spot to fish from shore for early fishing gains, etc can all be had inside the guardzone. There is a stable to buy and keep mounts and pack animals to use in relative safety. Most NPC establishments beneficial to new players are there as well. Tailor shop to make/buy your cloth, blacksmith shop to smelt ore/make items, an easy-to-find healer shop (you'll need it eventually), provisioner, bank, etc. The mage huts next to the bank have 2 mage/2 alchemist NPC's to buy regs, if you "seed" the vendors by buying all their regs each time they spawn, you can be buying regs in quantity from them in a short time. Just outside the guardzone are plenty of orc spawns to work your combat skills/magery on while earning the coin to get you on your feet. Loot everything off them and sell to the NPC's as well as the gold and in no time you'll have enough banked up for your first house and its more entertaining than macroing and a good way to brush up on your beastie bashing techniques if you are a little rusty on PvM mechanics.

Magery is pretty much a part of most every template to some degree. Magery is very resource intensive which can be a stumbling block for new players to get stocked up on regs to macro it up to GM. I would suggest starting most templates with 50 magery. At 50 magery you want to cast lightning to gain skill until you can cast E-bolt. You can macro in town easily, but if you are strapped for cash, lightning kills orcs plenty good and dead orcs = reg money. Besides, you can lightning yourself at the bank to gain and just waste the regs, or you can go kill something with it and make some money and be more entertained, I prefer the latter. I would suggest you let an overnight eval macro run to boost your damage up before doing any serious hunting however. I started my mage off by macroing eval to GM on an NPC in the bank, giving him 100 of each reg and off to Del I went to lightning some orcs. I never had to give him regs or cash again. Orc killing made him self sufficient right off the bat and you will make enough to cover your reg needs and bank a nice profit. Be sure to 'live off the land'. Almost every piece of trash loot on a critter has an NPC that will buy it, and players often discard plenty of junk at the bank that can be picked up and sold.

One bit of advice for dexxer characters when killing orcs is to be sure and "joust" them as much as possible as they are macers and tend to pound the shit out of your gear quite quickly. Get hit as little as you can.

Most people will advocate starting with 50 magery/50 resist (as resist is integral to most templates as well). Personally, I think using 50 of your starting "free points" on resist is a huge waste, especially if you start with magery. At 50 magery you can cast fire field and greater heal quite well, run back and forth in a fire field and you can have 55 resist in about half an hour. Use your other 50 points on a different resource intensive skill or one thats just a pain to raise to that point instead. Just be sure to find a secluded enough area to do this or some jackass is likely to jump in the fire and flag you gray.

Sure there are plenty of more efficient ways to do thing, and other places/techniques to make coin, gain skill, etc. Alot of players seem to have a great disdain for actually PLAYING the game until they have macroed up to 7x GM. Personally I prefer to macro the more mundane/annoying skills (eval/med/anatomy/etc) and gain the rest through normal play once I feel that a skill has raised to a serviceable level. Macroing everything is efficient, yes, but not very stimulating. Typically I will macro something overnight or when Im at work, but during my playtime hours, I do just that, I play.

I am sure you will also hear plenty of "dude make a bard, you gotta have a bard". Yes, bards are cash machines and you can make one unattended in a few days. But...one detail is overlooked there...not everyone WANTS to start with a bard.

This isnt meant to be all-encompassing and I dont claim to be some sort of authority. Just sharing what I did/do to get started. Perhaps like-minded players might glean a couple beneficial tidbits from this.