[Japo]

Again my words were open to misunderstanding. :P Thanks Borodin for clarifying.

Pex, there are two kinds of reputation: local in every town, and global (or fame). Later when you're famous, you get the best quests everywhere where your local reputation is 0.

The procedure has been pointed out already: do some street vigilante work until you can hold your own and have minimum armor. Then start hunting raubritters, whom you can despoil of plate armor. Invest the money in studying to raise your skills. Later when you can make healing potions you can stash them and take on the longer quests (satanic covens and the main quest, or mines).

It's true that the lack of levels means that you won't get superhuman attributes, and precisely because of that you must choose your skill set wisely. It's true that in this game you can't play any character you want and survive. Precisely because you can raise your skills from 0 to 99 quite fast, but you can't raise your attributes (although there's one forest creature that can give you a fruit to raise your strength a little, if you're lucky to find him), my strategy is making all my four characters strong thugs who can wear plate armor. Skills such as alchemy don't need to be very high at the start, you don't have money for ingredients anyway, you raise it later by studying. At the start you may want it to be only high enough for town alchemists to talk to you and accept exchanging formulas, I think that minimum was (besides knowing one formula of course) 20--speak common is more important to raise your probability of the alchemist's accepting the exchange.

To each his own, it's true. People who like mainstream RPGs don't like this one, and think it's too hard (it's only so at the start). Myself, I dislike RPGs based on classes and levels, and I like skill-based ones. On pen-and-paper my favorite was RuneQuest, and D&D was my least favorite. Among CRPGs my favorites are The Elder Scrolls saga, even though it has (skill-based) levels and classes (I usually build a custom one), and you get insanely powerful and proficient at everything too fast. Darklands is simply my cup of tea, an exact match for my taste, also because of the historical setting.

It's true that the random generator of places, quests, etc. gets very repetitive, but that's because of hardware memory restrictions, you won't find a game from that age whose quests or missions aren't drawn from templates in the same way: not only the RPGs but flight simulators, anything. Even Daggerfall four years later is equally repetitive.