I have made several characters and usually end up frustrated by having to carry/sort/figure out what I need to keep or throw away. There is so much crap to pick up, and it isn't clear what I will need. Tried a dwarf tech gunslinger but bullets are rare, tried a human but wasn't sure if I wanted magic or tech, etc, etc.

So I am looking for a viable character who is less dependent on scrounging for items but is still fun and has a good chance of success. It's my first time through the game and I would like to experience it without being so confused and frustrated.

I guess a dwarf gunslinger who doesn't make his own weapons but uses found weapons would be something I would like, if that is reasonable. If I save points from not taking gun smithing I hope to get melee up to a decent level too was my thought. Loosen em up from a distance with the gun, then melee the crap out of em.

Also, how to tell which items are tech related and which are magic related?

If you don't want to scrounge for items, consider making a magic-focused character. Magic is actually quite powerful. A few spells like Harm are extremely effective. You may still need to hoard fatigue restorers, but you won't need to scrounge for tech parts the way tech characters do. For a mage, the most important stat is WIllpower. Intelligence is useful too if you want to be able to maintain several durational spells at once. For an easy time, pick the Harm spell and use it a lot, then branch it to whatever else sounds interesting.

A pure melee fighter is also very easy, but so simple that you'll probably want to also use either magic or tech. WIth tech you could smith weapons and armor, or build mechanical allies. With magic you could add ranged damage or buff yourself. Melee characters need Dexterity plus Melee and Dodge skills.

Tech characters can be cool but unfortunately gunslingers are some of the toughest, due to the scarcity of bullets (as you discovered) and the fact that many guns are surprisingly low damage. An easier tech character is a grenadier. Pick Explosives discipline and Throwing skill, build molotov cocktails, throw at enemies. Bonus: grenades don't hurt you or your allies, so you can use them point-blank to push enemies away from you. Use a boomerang as a backup weapon. You will have to scrounge for items though; search garbage bins for ingredients for molotovs. This is definitley feasible, but as you found out, bullets are scarce. You can make your own if you take one point in the Explosives discipline, but even then you may find yourself just using melee. It's much more effective. If you hover over a tech item in your inventory, the description in the box at the bottom of the screen should have a gear-and-shield icon, plus the phrase "aptitude adj to chance of critical failure +XX%" where XX is a number. If your tech aptitude is too low (or you are too magically inclined) then tech items have an increased chance of critical failure, listed there. Different items have different aptitude thresholds for removing the extra critical failure chance.

Magical items will instead have a phrase saying "Magick power available: XX%". What this means is that an enchantment on a magical item will get stronger the higher your magical aptitude (or, weaker the lower your aptitude). So let's say a magical weapon adds 10 fire damage, but your magical aptitude is low, so the "magick power available" is only 50%. You will only get 5 fire damage. I'm pretty sure that the stats listed for the item are already adjusted by this amount. So if you have a magical weapon and it says it has 5 fire damage and 50% magick power available, then that weapon actually maxes out at 10 fire damage, provided you can get your magical aptitude high enough. Different items have different thresholds for getting to 100% power available.

If an item has neither of these descriptions, then it's just a neutral item, and will not be affected by your magical or tech aptitude.

I hope that helps! I'm sure other will chime in and offer more advice for character builds, it seems to be one of the favorite pastimes on these forums!

Wow! Thanks for the tips!

No problem! Making characters is one of the best things about Arcanum, so these kinds of posts let us do so vicariously when we don't have time to play ourselves.

On the subject of tech or magic item identification if I was unclear - I mean all the random crap you pick up. How do you know if it for tech stuff or magic stuff?

Almost all of it is tech.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any scrounging items for magick. If you make a magick character, you can largely ignore all the dumpster diving. All you'll need are potions, mostly for fatigue restoration. You'll be sucking those down a lot. It's a good thing they're delicious.

A popular kind of first build is some variation on a wizard/diplomat. Just make sure you have one solid way to deal damage. Harm is one possibility. My first character was a mage specializing in the Force school, and that worked out just fine.

Thanks. I am kind of favoring tech as I've played a magic character in a bazillion other rpgs in my life, so this is something new. Where can a guy store all this crap for tech building?

There are a few places one can find for storing items, although they may technically be spoilers -- let me know if you want those. Mostly, however, I would try to carry crafting parts with me and try not to pick up too much stuff. Don't bother grabbing things that aren't in any of your known recipes yet. Look through the schematics in your chosen tech disciplines, as they will list ingredients you'll need, and then prioritize those and don't bother with other stuff. If you realize you're missing an ingredient later, they're usually easy to find from junk dealers in towns.

Also, many ingredients are cheap and easy to find, which means you can end up carrying way more than you need. Pare down on the stuff you find often, and only grab it when you need it.

Keep in mind that many tech recipes will be "one time" things, like a new gun, a new sword, or a new top hat. No need to hoard ingredients for something you will only make once (or maybe a few times if you want to equip your followers also). The stuff you'll build often, like grenades and bullets, usually has cheap ingredients that you can easily find, so you don't need to carry tons of them with you at all times.

In summary:

1) Don't grab stuff unless you know you need it for a recipe. Most of it is probably for other tech disciplines that you don't know.
2) Don't hoard tons of each ingredient, you can often find ingredients when you need to craft, without lugging them everywhere with you.

One further point: if you do go tech, consider crafting in excess of what you need, in order to sell them off and turn a profit. This is especially true if you plan on playing as a gunslinger, since you can roll the profits into components with which to buy and make more bullets.

Investing in Haggle may help here. Earning expertise (which is something you do have to purchase, above and beyond investing the necessary skill points) offers the huge perk of being able to sell anything to anyone, rather than searching out that one person in the entire town or city who actually wants to buy your scrounged piece of junk, weird plant, or cobbled-together scientific doodad.

And while high magical or tech aptitude has obvious benefits, each also has some important disadvantages. High MA means never operating most tech items, especially guns, unless you want them to blow up in your face. Similarly, you risk being banned from using any trains, so as to avoid having those blow up as well. Whereas high TA means that even beneficial spells, such as healing, can bounce off of you without having any effect. You also at some point will no longer be able to enter magic shops to sell of that expensive armor you found in that dungeon somewhere... making Haggle an even more important/effective skill to have.

A last thought: rather than either magic or tech, consider at some point investing in thieving and skullduggery instead. (Perhaps on a future playthrough, to shake things up and keep it fresh.) Learning lockpicking will take you over to the tech side, but not by so much that learning a few magic spells can easily counterbalance that, if you so choose,

Two Handed Sword - good points to consider - thanks everyone