water baron - "allows entrance to settlements

[dbennett88]

for purposes of trade"


what's this about?

[CHOO CHOO]

Nothing yet. Future content.

[RazzleStorm]

Also gives you access to Grit Gate without doing Argyle's quest

[davidb11]

Technically, being friends with the Elder of Joppa is enough to get into Grit Gate to trade.

[Fenix-Venix]

What's sad is that evenif you tell just about quest from Agryve and they won't let you to come in you can immediately talk to them again and they let you in.

[Aquillion]

Originally posted by Fenix-Venix:

What's sad is that evenif you tell just about quest from Agryve and they won't let you to come in you can immediately talk to them again and they let you in.

That was changed a while ago, I think? You now have the option to ask for access during the conversation where they send you to Golgotha.

But yes, IIRC, just talking to the Elder of Joppa is enough to get in to the first trader.

[Regeta]

Of course. One of the only awesome components of this game's chargen is "Future Content".

So tired of games that are exclusively about Combat Combat & Combat. What a disappointment...

All I wanted was to play a Water Trader in a post apocalyptic wasteland. Not yet another combat freak, but with a slight boost to Trade Cost / Worthless Charisma.

[CHOO CHOO]

Yar. The setting and many of the mechanics are pretty neat, but the game's focus is, after all, a pretty tight roguelike.

Can't say whether that's necessary; but that is the way it is. It's still an excellent game.

[Ulrik]

I'm playing a water merchant "esperish" right now. I ended up here because I rolled a random character a few times, but I'm happy to have a challenge to play right now.

They do start out with Snake oiler and high Ego, so that makes the trading game easy, so it's not without pros.

[Aquillion]

Originally posted by Regeta:

Of course. One of the only awesome components of this game's chargen is "Future Content".

So tired of games that are exclusively about Combat Combat & Combat. What a disappointment...

All I wanted was to play a Water Trader in a post apocalyptic wasteland. Not yet another combat freak, but with a slight boost to Trade Cost / Worthless Charisma.

For what it's worth, Charisma (Ego in this game) is actually overwhelmingly powerful. In addition to having a huge impact on prices, it has probably the single best skill tree, allowing you to recruit (and heavily buff) allies while scaring off enemies.

It's even more ridiculous for Espers, since it raises the level of all your mental mutations, but even for people with no mental mutations, starting with 18 Ego is a very reasonable choice. I'm not sure I'd go above that for a non-Esper (you need stat points elsewhere to survive), but I wouldn't call it a terrible choice for a True Kin to shoot for the 23 Ego they need to Proselytize allies.

(For everyone except Espers, willpower is the worthless stat here. Mental attacks are fairly rare, the willpower skills are defensive or situational or just relatively low-impact, and your HP regen speed is affected by your much more important toughness as well.)

As far as the more general playstyle you're looking for... at the moment, it is mostly not possible to make a profit as a merchant (a Tinker with very high Ego can profit by buying scrap and making it into stuff, but the profits are marginal and don't require moving around if you're willing to wait for merchants to restock.) You can in theory earn XP without engaging in combat by delivering books to the Six-Day Stilt, but it would be tricky and probably unsatisfying to play a character based solely around that - Qud is a combat-heavy game in an unforgiving wasteland.

That said, thematically, the game isn't entirely about combat - you can focus on exploring ancient ruins and looking for lost treasures. Those places will be crawling with stuff that will try to kill you on sight, though.

If you want a less combat-focused roguelike, I would suggest waiting for Ultima Ratio Regum to get proper gameplay releases, which sounds like it might be your kind of thing. I believe the first real gameplay release is coming fairly soon.