Chapter 4 – Character Select

Please enter your in-game name.

Daniel.

Please choose your appearance.

The game made a pretty good construction of his actual face and body. Daniel decided to take it, having no reason to spoil his rather decent features, if he could say so himself. He could always come back to this option later, anyway.

Please choose your race.

Human was the only option available right now, and Daniel took it.

Please choose your class.

Now this was where things got interesting. The tooltip from earlier floated below the class selection screen, and Daniel reviewed it quickly. Special classes and races were unlocked in real time as players explored the world, and certain events could even unlock a race for the entire playerbase, while other events like class advancements were probably unique to one player.

Thus, it didn’t matter too much what he picked right now, since the better and more fancy classes were discovered while adventuring. The current options were more or less variations of normal fantasy fare anyway, with warrior, rogue, mage, priest, and cleric being the most prominent picks. But there was a whole list of other classes that were equally standard that caught Daniel’s eye.

Blacksmith, sculptor, enchanter… half of them weren’t even combat classes. But one of the classes in particular was particularly interesting to Daniel.

Merchant.

The more he stared at the word, the more it rang true to him as a person. It was a class that could forge its own destiny, that could be enterprising and seize opportunities as they arose, and could create its own gameplay style and even combat style with enough creativity.

Daniel liked the option a lot, and considered it for a bit longer. After a bit more deliberation, he decided to go through with the class.

You have selected the Merchant class. Is this correct?

Confirm.

Class confirmed.

The next part of the process was his least favorite part, stat distribution. Some players had a lot of strong feelings about how to best distribute stats, but Daniel knew better than to blindly make judgments when he knew so little about the stats in this particular game.

For example, suppose he rolled with a thief class.

He could already hear dozens of min-maxers on the forums telling him to put all his points into dexterity so that he could just “dodge everything”. They would get frustrated and angry if he put any points in defense with already low base defense.

And they would be right… in another game, one that they knew by heart. But this game? What the hell did they know about this game? Did they play it before? Of course not– this was launch day and nobody played this game before besides the beta testers. Nobody said that thieves were capable of dodging everything by maxing out dexterity in this game. That was a dangerous assumption to make, based on what– experience in another, completely different game they played in the past?

It could be true, and it could be not true… but based purely on the realistic physics system that Daniel tested out during the loading screen, he had a hunch that maxing out dexterity without defensive stats was a surefire way to get killed like a dog.

Actually, any combination of stats wouldn’t matter if the player’s avatar piloting abilities were just bad. They’d get killed like a dog either way.

This wasn’t dungeons and dragons here, with dice rolls deciding attack hits or misses. This was a realistic VRMMO. A sword hit registered if the sword connected with flesh, not because some computer threw a virtual dice in the air.

And with that, Daniel distributed his stats evenly across the board, even to mana. Yes. Even to mana.

A merchant distributing stat points to mana… the min-maxers howled with rage on the forums. How utterly disgraceful of him to do so. How sacrilegious. How vile and uncouth. But seriously… how did he know that he wasn’t going to need it in the future? Did he have some kind of scrying orb that could forecast the future?

Daniel raised a virtual middle finger towards those stupid blind min-maxers he dealt with so often in past games, and took a look at the Merchant class’s stat growths.

Strength – D-rank growth

Dexterity – E-rank growth

Constitution – D-rank growth

Intelligence – E-rank growth

Mana – F-rank growth

Luck – D-rank growth

It was a standard, basic, bread and butter class by all measures, and Daniel knew that he would need to advance to a more advanced class or switch classes completely in the future, but for now it would serve its purpose.