So I caved and bought Arcanum and I'm looking for some experts to recommend me a build for my first time through. Something fun, but not ridiculously hard.

well when i tried to play i found it personaly easier as a melee type of char and diplomacy is great as well some battles are diffecult but there are diffrent ways to surive an encounter.
But to be honest i never came far so i cant tell if melee are great if you progress in the game.

If you want really difficult (especially on your first play through) make a technologist character. A gunslinger is a good mix of fun and difficult (especially finding the right guns and such), so is a melee tech character. Or diplomat tech.

Ha, I just read my post. I meant to put a not in front of ridiculously hard. :D

i heard that there were builds that worls well and some dont.

First time i played as mage: summoner/necromancer (black and white 1 lvl for heal)+ 3 companions and i practicly didnt have to do anything in battle. Take lvl 1 harm from black magic at the begging 'cause you will get extra healer quickly.

nice :) uhm i have to start playing spellcasters in games like these strangely i always play melee characters to give up in the end because at the end monsters ect are tough for a melee

If your are going for a mage, I would recommend perhaps contributing some of your points to up your melee skill just a tad. This is because magic uses fatigue, and if you use more magic than you have fatigue, you will fall unconscious. Which means you're pretty much dead. This is usually only a major problem in the beginning of the game though, and once you get you're fatigue up, you can pretty much forget melee.

thanks for the advise m8 and thanks for sharing about the summoning part sounds fun

haha. Well then totally disregare my advice and don't play a tech character in your first game.

As someone else said, if you want to play a mage get the spell Harm and you will destroy everything. Melee characters are also petty easy (especially if you have a good party too).

As SheBear said, melee characters in Arcanum are actually pretty easy. I played one for my first character, and had no trouble at all, especially later in the game.

Having said that, a pure melee character in Arcanum can actually be rather boring. Nothing's really a challenge in the last third of the game. If you want a melee character, I would recommend trying either some magical skills or some tech skills in addition to fighting. One thing that could be fun would be a technological fighter, and you could learn smithing so you can craft better weapons and armor with your tech skills. This will be a little harder than a pure melee fighter because you won't be able to use the powerful magical weapons (or rather, you won't get their magical effects) but the powerful technological weapons are pretty good too I think. Or you could do a magical fighter, for whom the powerful magical weapons would work even better. You could learn some summoning spells to help out in combat, or buff spells to increase your stats.

I have also heard that playing a pure mage is very easy. I haven't tried it yet. There's also tons of different magic schools so you could probably play five different mage characters with different spells and still have a good time with each of them.

Pure tech characters are considered hardest, but if you are drawn to tech, one of the easiest to play might be a grenadier. Use a boomerang and thrown grenades as your primary weapons and you should do pretty well.

its fun that a game diffecult is is descided wich type of char you play :)