Fuck Yeah DragonQuest! Part 2

I've decided my dude's name will be Burgos. I don't know what a burgos is, but I like the sound of it.

The next step in the process should probably be selection of your College of Magic and all the spells and whatnot, since that's the next chapter, but I'm going to save that for last. So, we're jumping over that into equipment, followed by skills.

I'll get my weapons and armor first, which are found on pages 24 and 25. As you recall from last time (heh heh) I have a paltry 45 silver pennies (the common currency in DQ) to spend. Since he's an adept (DQ's word for someone who uses magic,) he's not gonna spend much. Cold iron really jacks with magic in DragonQuest, so if I wanted to use a sword, for example, I would probably want to use weapons made of bronze or bone (which will lessen their effectiveness.)

However, since Burgos's Strength is so low, that bars him from using most weapons. No surprises here. I kinda planned on that. Adding all the various factors, I decide on a hand axe and rock (yes, just a regular dumb ol' rock) as my weapons, and decide no armor at all will do, partly because it really annoys GMs. Now, to the equipment list on page 144.

Here's what I bought-

Hand Axe- 15sp
"Clothing"- 22sp
Leather Shoulder Pouch- 2sp
Quart Wine Skin- 2sp
Sleeping Sack- 3sp

TOTAL- 44sp

I'm going to dispense with the household items and sundries for this outing, so that leaves me with 46sp to spend on future expenses. Hopefully his skills and his magic will help get him through times of no dope. An itemized list will appear on the character sheet*, just in case you wondered what constituted "clothing." Rocks, in case you were wondering, are free.

As you may recall from part 1, I have 200xp to spend on skills and magic. Since I picked my weapons, it's now time to spend some experience points on them and for that we go way in the back to page 145 and table [87.8] the Experience Point Cost Chart.

Since Hand Axe weighs it at a hefty 100xp for Rank 0 (all skills start at rank 0) it looks like I'll be skipping that in favor of Magic, and maybe rank in a skill, depending on cost. I can probably swing Rock at Rank 0, however, since it's just 25xp. So, just to make it official:

Rock: Rank 0. This means I have a 30% chance to hit a target for D-1 damage.

Looks like I'm s.o.l. on skills, too, as the cheapest one is 200xp at Rank 0. This is true for all starting characters, so it's nothing to worry about. Now that that's out of the way we can finally move on to magic. I chose the College of Earth Magic for its abundance of outdoorsy spells. These are what I can afford with my remaining experience points-

Spell of Converse with Animals with a 45-50 percent chance of success- 50xp
Spell of Converse with Plants with a 25% chance- 50xp
Spell of Herbal Lore also with a 25% chance- 75xp

Add 25 points for the Rock and that comes to exactly 200 experience points.

As a starting character, he's kind of a pussy, but that's to be expected. A 1st level D&D MU probably has 2 or 3 hp, a dagger, and one spell he can use per day, probably Magic Missile or Sleep. Alone in the woods for a night, he wouldn't stand a chance.

At least Burgos can ask a deer for a good escape route or try to talk a wolverine out of eating his fingertips. Not too shabby. And these aren't just one-shot spells, either. He can cast as long as he has Fatigue points left. I'll explain that when I go into detail about the DQ magic system another time.

Oh, yeah- he also has a 1-in-3 chance of hitting some punk with a rock.

And that, my friends, is how a DragonQuest character is made. Not at all complicated or difficult, especially when compared to, well, a ton of other games, including some versions of D&D.

*Turns out the Excel sheet was giving me a little trouble in Open Office, so I'll have to leave it out this time.