Cline smiled with his eyes, nodded and sent Dakkon an invite.
|You have been invited to a group by: Cline
|Do you accept?
|Yes No
Dakkon accepted the invitation and, able to see the compact pane of party information, exchanged pleasantries. “It’s a pleasure to meet you all—Melee, Roth, Mina,” he nodded to each of them in turn.
“Wow, you really are level five,” Mina said with some surprise, “90 hit points. I can almost heal that much with one spell. Melee and Roth both have over 400.”
“With only 90 hit points…” Roth looked considerate, “I suppose you haven’t distributed any of your free stat points yet. Everyone is likely to need stamina sooner or later. It can help keep you from getting booted out of the game again for 11 more hours, and each point will give you an extra HP per level.”
“I’ll admit I’m jealous,” chimed in Melee, “if I could kill a calcaba with a single swing I wouldn’t have to invest so many points into strength.”
“Oh, so you’d set aside your great sword for a dagger, would you?” asked Cline slyly.
“Well…” Melee reconsidered.
“What I think they’re trying to say, Dakkon,” the youngest member, Mina, interjected, “is that you probably won’t need to focus on dumping your stat points into strength for a while. I would be grateful, as the healer, if two or three hits didn’t flat out kill you. This area is nearly four times your level, so I’m not sure I can heal you in time.”
“Cline said you were new to games?” Dakkon asked, adding the right amount of inflection at the end of his sentence to make it a question. She seemed knowledgeable.
“What can I say, I’m a prodigy,” Mina said then thrust her chin forward and grinned.
Until Mina’s point was made, Dakkon was planning to keep his free stat points unallocated until he found out exactly what it was he wanted to do in the game. Barely having had enough play time to make any real decisions, he already suspected that he would be putting most of his points into agility. The idea of moving more swiftly and dodging attacks rapidly without breaking a sweat was very attractive to him. But, should an attack ever catch him, it would be important that he survived it.
“Right,” Dakkon had made up his mind. At some point or another he’d put at least 15 points into his stamina, he was certain. He might as well do it now, while it would likely have a more profound effect on his performance than the other stats. He opened his character window and distributed 15 of his free stat points into stamina. His HP increased from 90 to 150 and would grow by 25 more points every level, instead of his previous 10.
“I still don’t have enough HP to survive another attack from a grand panther,” Dakkon said with a hint of discomfort in his voice.
“None of us would,” Roth said flatly. “Those things are supposed to be around level 35. One would probably tear us apart before we had a proper chance to scream and shit ourselves.” Mina cocked her head at Roth, reproachfully—for his choice of words, Dakkon surmised.
The notion didn’t comfort Dakkon. He would have to keep his eyes toward the skies when the group found itself near trees.
“And what classes are you guys?” Dakkon asked with a sudden surge of curiosity. Perhaps if one suited him, he could find their trainer and switch.
“Melee and Roth are both warriors, although she prefers her massive swords while Roth doesn’t have any particular sentimentality,” Cline said while gesturing towards Roth who held up a cudgel and nodded. “Mina is a Druid. At lower levels like these, she’s more or less the same as any other type of healer class. As for me…” Cline trailed off.
“He’s a ranger!” Melee offered gleefully. “Without a bow, naturally.”
Cline shrugged. “I managed to pass my class trials well enough with the equipment at the ranger’s guild, but it turns out bows are rather expensive.”
“So, I take it you all came this way because of the 300-gold bounty for driving off the goatmen?” Dakkon inferred.
“Your information is a little outdated,” said Roth. “The bounty has doubled to 600 gold now. Goatmen started hitting the town harder yesterday. But—” he searched for the right words.
“The goats are a bit too strong for us. We were at the inn together when a group of six goatmen attacked,” Mina said. “Around 15 players were killed, some were as high as level 27. Realizing we were outclassed, the lot of us decided we’d be better off leveling up together.”
The group did not look particularly proud that they had shied away from the quest, but their reasoning was solid enough. “So, there’s been no progress on the quest, then?” Dakkon asked.
“Not to my knowledge,” Roth said as he held out his left-hand palm upwards. “Book!” he said. A large tome materialized in his hands and he looked down at it.
“That was… so cool!” Dakkon said as he held out his hand, imitating Roth. “Book!” he exclaimed. When nothing happened, he tried again.
“Ah, you need to set up a voice macro to do this,” Roth said as a matter of fact. “This one just opens up my quest journal.”
“Oh. I’ve never opened mine up, come to think of it.” Dakkon had learned a valuable trick that he would undoubtedly find a good and appropriately extravagant use for. For now, he would settle for binding his quest journal to the invocation ‘Book’ as Roth had. He did so, and summoned his quest journal.
|————
|Active Quests — ( Completed Quests )
|————
|Get the Goatmen:
|Goatmen have been attacking Greenburne.
|The village inn’s proprietor has informed you that the goatmen must be
|killed or driven off. After this has been accomplished, you should seek
|out the village’s leader, Barrcus, to claim your reward.
|Promised rewards:
| - 300 gold
|!Update - Talking to other players with this quest has provided new
| information!
|!Reward increased to 600 gold!
Dakkon’s first look at his quest journal taught him that he could receive quest updates simply by communicating with other players. “I wonder if that means players can give quests?” Dakkon wondered. It was something he would have to consider. He noticed the button leading to the completed quests tab, but recounting his triumph in rat hunting could wait for a later day. A much later day.
“So now that we’re up one more, killing calcabas should be easy-peasy,” Cline said sagely.
As part of a group now, Dakkon found it impossible to follow a conversation while practicing his Thermoregulate skill, so he decided to abandon it temporarily. He was happy to do so, though, because he was gaining experience much faster than he had hoped for. At first, the group would track down a single calcaba, then keep it occupied as Dakkon moved forward and struck it once. After a few of those encounters ended without incident, they moved on to groups of two then three calcabas with equal success. The warriors, Melee and Roth, never fell below 75 percent health, and Dakkon was hit only once over the course of 40 minutes. Feeling bolder still, they began to send off Cline and Roth to pull additional calcabas to the group as Melee, Mina, and Dakkon finished them off. In a grand total of an hour and thirty minutes of hunting with very little down time, the group had entirely run out of easily reachable calcabas to hunt.