with 16 beauty and 8 charisma, 4 in strength and intelligence, and some other stats i don't remember.

how far can i go in this game (main arcanum "module") before i get horribly killed? i'm thinking of making her a ridiculously good-looking gunslinger in combat.

With followers, you can probably go pretty far. Guns can be hard early on because the low-level guns are pretty weak. With low intelligence you won't be able to craft much either, including (potentially) making your own bullets, which might make it harder. You might consider a different combat skill, like bows, or even just melee which is actually a very effective combat skill. Melee will depend on your Dexterity stat whereas guns and bows will depend on your perception stat. Dexterity is always good though as it makes you faster (more action points) in combat.

Your Charisma isn't that high, so you wont' be able to get many followers at the same time. So that also might make things harder.

BUT: Arcanum is the perfect game to try out crazy characters like this! The game isn't actually that hard, so builds that aren't optimized for combat can still do fine, and the game really reacts well to different character builds and choices. I encourage you to give it a go. Since you don't have many other criteria for your character, it means you can branch out in different ways if you choose to. You can think about pumping up your Willpower stat and taking some magic spells (including the one that makes you more beautiful!), and that would make you really effective in combat too as there are a few great and cheap spells for fighting. For tech you won't be able to craft things without Intelligence but you can still focus on tech skills and use tech items if those itnerest you (just use items that you find or buy, or have followers craft some for you). Or you can just be a fighter or bow-elf or something.

I have also heard that the dialogue for very stupid characters is hilarious. I haven't tried it myself though.

Oh one quick note: Keep an eye out for your character getting scarred in battle (often a result of a critical failure, or getting critically hit by an enemy). This can be fixed by doctors in towns, but until you get it fixed you'll take a hit to your Beauty stat. It's easy to miss when this happens so check your log if you notice your Beauty stat is down for some reason.

4 Strength is a little too low for guns except for the weakest ones. They tend to require something in the range of 5-8, depending on whether held with one or both hands. (Trying to wield a weapon with a Minimum Strength Requirement over your Strength score gives accuracy penalties.)

[MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD]

As Waltorious pointed out, low-level firearms are generally inefficient, and with you low Charisma you won't get many followers to help you in the early game (also, 4 Intelligence means you're retarded, so some people won't join you because of that). There's a half-ogre you can recruit in the first town, but you'll need one more point of Charisma for that; and you can use a little metagaming to get yourself a ridiculously overpowered melee-type companion, if you survive to the first large city.

The best firearms in the game have to be crafted or stolen. Crafting is not much of an option for you unless you plan to get addicted to the essence of intellect, so you'd better look up some info on where to get some decent guns. Again, the first one I can recall requires surviving to the first large city.

Low-intelligence conversations are epic; keep Virgil around and ask him stuff whenever you get any progress plot-wise if you want some fun.

As well, with only 4 Strength forget most weapons and armor. Daggers would be okay, as would the katana if you wielded it two-handed, which means no shield or lantern in the off hand. Definitely no bows or boomerangs for you.

Magic is also right out; if you're dumb enough to talk like a bimbo, you're too dumb to cast spells.

Encumbrance would also be an issue, so most heavy armors are out. And barbarian clothing or Dread Armour (the closest thing this game has to a chainmail bikini) would actually lower most NPC initial reactions, negating part of the effect of your Beauty. Magic robes would be all right, but they lose much of their effectiveness if you're not all that magical yourself.

On the plus side, however, if you get your Beauty up to a full 20 your reaction modifier will be +100%, meaning you will bedazzle everyone you meet (except wild animals and monsters, of course). At least until you open your mouth.


So what did you name this wonderment of feminine pulchritude? Buffy Summers? Cher Horowitz? Elle Woods? You didn't mention in your OP. Minor correction: only guns require PE; the Bow skill operates off of DX, same as Melee and Throwing. All that a higher PE would do is allow you to scroll just a little further offscreen, to detect or set up a possible ambush. Which is IMO always a waste of available points; if you're not a gunslinger, PE is a dump stat..

Well, if we are going for clarification, then Dexterity-based ranged combat styles - bows and throwing - do benefit from high Perception, as it negates accuracy penalties at longer distance (which is why bow-wielding NPCs max out both Dexterity and Perception). The problem is, master training negates these penalties for good, and since there's little sense in maxing out a skill and not taking the mastery quest afterwards, raising Perception on a bow/boomerang-using PC indeed ends up being a waste of points. But combat does start to feel different if you spend most of the game with low PE and then achieve mastery in your skill.

That's a fair point. My own playing style is to use my throwing weapon as a melee weapon that can also hit things at range, so I've never noticed that big a difference before and after achieving mastery. Thanks for the clarification.

ah wtf. GOG. deleted my unfinished message and close the reply window , when i click on another tab. anyways . thanks. created a new character with throwing and persuade. boomerangs can work with 4 STR, so do bows but i don't wanna spend more money on ammo early game. the ogre wouldn't join even with 9 charisma. i guess there's an intel or strength check too? love the bommerang. it can kill enemies on edge of screen without them even noticing sometimes.

also tried a 20 beauty elf for laffs, not really useful, everyone loves her but doesn't improve dialogs. I named her Ida Hoshi No Vidya if you get the stupid joke.

Not so! Willpower is what you need for spells. Intelligence just lets you maintain more spells at once. So low-intelligence character would be bad at summonings, or buffs, or other spells that need to be maintained. But Willpower is all you need to throw fireballs and whatnot.

Unless I'm very confused? Now I'm afraid I'm confused. Can someone confirm? I am certain that Intelligence is what unlocks higher tech disciplines, and I was pretty sure it was Willpower that unlocked higher spells. I think you need a point in the persuasion skill to get him to join. But I'm not sure. You also need enough Charisma to have 2 followers at a time; otherwise you'll have to dismiss Virgil if you want the half-ogre to join.

So did you give up on your bimbo character idea, or did you just change it up a bit?

By the way, another fun thing to do with the throwing skill is throw grenades. Strangely, the explosions don't hit you or your allies, so you can even throw them at your feet to damage and push back nearby enemies. You will need to invest in the explosives tech discipline to make them, however, and of course intelligence is needed for that. But there are still plenty of boomerangs and other thrown weapons you can simply find or buy.

You need at least 5 IN to be able to learn spells, regardless of WP (it won't let you spend a point on a spell if you have less). This also applies to the ability to cast spells from scrolls, which can make a certain late-game event quite frustrating if you weren't prepared for it.

EDIT: Okay, I created an idiot female elf, took Virgil, went straight to Shrouded Hills without doing anything else (yay for no random encounters), put one of my five initial CP into Charisma to bring it to 9, and Sogg said -- sure, let's go. No Persuasion points, nothing. ???

my "original" bimbo just had haggling and persuasion for skills ...i think. realised i'll need at least 1 combat skill to not get killed by wolves if the dice rolls screw me over. i'll probably keep her as a bimbo but raise the strength eventually as i hate having a low weight-limit and HP.

and as for magic, i think i need at least 5 intel to learn any basic spells at all.

Yes apparently this is true. I did not know that. However, I don't think there's any more Intelligence after that, unless you want to be able to maintain lots of spells at once. But an Intelligence of 5 might push you out of the "idiot" zome for dialogue which is disappointing when intentionally trying to play an idiot character.

Actual idiots can't learn spells, yes, but if you're only interested in the dumb conversations, there's always the infinitely awesome Idiot Savant background. Dumb dialogue + high magick/tech = best experience ever (or, at least, certainly more interesting than playing a genuinely retarded fighter).

okay... keeping a bimbo alive is lot more frustrating than i thought. so far she's been killed by the bridge bandits, killed by a pig and killed by rats. i really have to avoid combat with this character.

so i went and created a new half-ogre . i call him "Mister Shine", a sickly intellectual half-ogre, and techno-bruiser. more bruiser than technologist. i only intend to use the level 2 techs.

progressed a lot faster with him but not by much. game is lagging in more populated areas even when i use the standard 800x600 resolution.i'm guessing it's some direct x bug. townfolk are lot harder to talk to compared to the bimbo-experience because ogre racism. could have been worse if i didn't make my ogre "sickly" so he would have 10 intel. killing the bank robbers for NOT-doc holiday at least made them neutral, so i won't accidentally threaten to kill them when choosing dialog options.

Have you tried adding -doublebuffer -no3d commands to the shortcut? One or both often helps with the lag.
*sigh* You haven't played a half-orc yet, that's racism. Anyway, normally, low reaction almost always can be countered through dialogue if you have high Charisma (10-12 usually); Intelligence has little effect on it apart from the cases where NPCs specifically dislike you for being retarded if you have it below 5, and Beauty only improves the initial reaction but that makes it redundant to Charisma. However, if you have your reaction modifier lowered by something other than your ugliness, then this can get problematic (so don't wear barbarian-style armor while in town).

i put a dreaded armor on virgil. that should not matter, right? also virgil seems to learn lockpicking by himself, but every chest i tried to get him to pick ends up getting jammed.

and i think i figured out how to get out of town with my fragile beauty. since my ogre is good enough steal keys from shoppers and the banker, my pretty elf should be able to do the same and keep selling their own stuff back to them till i get 1000 gold to bribe the bridge bandit. alternatively i guess i could also go back to the crashsite to find the dynamite, then blow up one of the shopkeepers in his/her sleep. each one of them should have more than enough gold to pay the toll.

btw is there any way for my player character to directly break a chest or machinery?
(EDIT: nevermind. found the answer in the reference card PDF ; ALT-Mouseclick. it's not in the main manual for some reason.)