Character optimization is a bit of a controversial subject. Without going too far down that rabbit hole, I’ll say that I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with a desire to have an effective character, especially if that character falls into a type, build, set of abilities, or mold that you’re particularly interested in.

What I do want to talk about here is optimization in TORG Eternity. As one of the designers of the game, I can tell you that I created a bunch of characters for it, and often, I tried to build characters that pushed the envelope in different ways. What I’m going to do here now, today, is talk to you about what I’ve learned.

There are six pillars of character creation in TORG Eternity:

1. Race

2. Attributes

3. Skills

4. Cosm

5. Perks

6. Gear

Race

Your character’s race often determines the maximums of your Attributes. There is sometimes a special ability or two as well, but I believe that the most important feature is determining how high you can set your starting Attributes. Here’s a few examples:

• Humans are limited to a maximum of 13 in Attributes.
• Elves can have a very high Dexterity and Mind Attribute (15).
• Edeinos can have a very high Spirit Attribute (15).
• Dwarves can have a very high Strength Attribute (14).

Races are also limited by cosm. For example, if you want to play an Edeinos (a kind of spiritual lizard-man), you have to come from the Living Land cosm.

Humans generally get a great deal of value in their race, since they can be from any cosm, and thus have the largest variety of gear and perks available to them.

Attributes

In TORG Eternity, very few things are more valuable to a character than their Attributes. Your Attributes determine your base skill in almost all cases (there are a few skills that MUST have skill points in order to work, such as reality). Attributes also determine your defensive stats and figure heavily into how effective your offense is. Strength-based characters also gain damage from their Attribute.

Starting characters only get 40 points for Attributes, with a minimum of 5 in each. Raising Attributes is very expensive with XP as well, so your initial spread of Attributes is incredibly important.

First piece of advice for optimization: determine which Attributes you don’t need, and then build up the others as high as you can.

Charisma: This can be a dump stat if you are not a “face,” or if you are not planning to use a lot of interaction attacks (like Intimidation). Many “physical” characters (those that rely on Strength or Dexterity above all) do not prioritize Charisma.

Dexterity: Vital for characters who want to hit things with weapons consistently. Fast/agile/sneaky/accurate characters also prioritize Dexterity. Not especially necessary for spellcasters or tanks.

Mind: Somewhat important if you are a scholarly character, an investigator, or if you are a spellcaster/psionic. One item of note is that the most commonly rolled skill (find) is based on Mind. Many physical characters can dump this Attribute.

Spirit: Vital for certain spellcasters (faith) and those who want to intimidate folk. Otherwise, this is a good candidate for dumping.

Strength: Important if you want to be a tank or a melee-based character. Otherwise, this is a good candidate for dumping.

Skills

You get to spend 16 skill points, but you have a maximum of 3 you can add to any one skill. At least one is required to be spent in reality.

My advice here is simple: find the skills you’re going to use the most, and max them out at 3. This includes reality, as reality is the skill you’re going to use when it counts the most (to avoid disconnection, soaking damage, and so forth). This means you should identify the four skills you really want, plus reality, and then a fifth skill you can afford to have only 1 in.

Cosm

Your cosm determines what perks and gear are available to you to choose from. Most often, you already have a concept for which cosm your character comes from at this point. If you don’t, you should think hard about what kind of gear and perks you want to get, and select the cosm that gives you the most access to those choices. Again, some races are limited in which cosms they can come from.

Perks

Perks are an important part of your character’s abilities. However, I would say that perks are far more important if you are a spellcaster/psionic or if you have super abilities from the Nile Empire cosm. These are the two most important groups of perks to consider… if you are a different type of character than those listed above, perks are more for flavor and expanding on what you can already do.

If you are a spellcaster or psionic, you then get to choose your spells, and this is where your character is going to get their primary means of offense and defense.

Gear

If you are not a spellcaster/psionic, then gear is really important, because it determines how much damage you can do and how much damage you can avoid, coming from your weapons and your armor, respectively.

Example: Moonwalker

Let’s make a character to illustrate the points I’ve made above. Moonwalker is an Edeinos from the Living Land cosm. My concept is that of a priest who uses his faith to cast spells and an animal companion to give him some additional utility.

Race: Edeinos.

Attributes: We’re going to take advantage of the Edeinos’ very high Spirit limit, and give him the maximum Spirit he can take: 15. We’re going to go with a decent Strength and Dexterity, and dump Mind and Charisma.

Our final spread of Attributes looks like this:

Charisma: 8

Dexterity: 7

Mind: 5

Spirit: 15

Strength: 5

A Spirit of 15 is amazing. We can already see that Moonwalker excels in any Spirit-based skills, such as Intimidation, Faith, and Willpower.

When we pick Skills, we’ll place 3 points in all of those skills, plus 3 in reality, and add 1 into Melee Combat.

Our final skill selection looks like this:

Faith: 3 (total of 18)

Intimidation: 3 (total of 18)

Melee Combat: 1 (total of 8)

Reality: 3 (total of 18)

Willpower: 3 (total of 18)

Moonwalker is really good at casting miracles, being intimidating, resisting fear, and decent at fighting with a melee weapon. That’s a very nice spread of abilities! We could, if we wanted, take the points in Willpower and spend them elsewhere, or possibly downgrade Dexterity and Strength a bit to get a slightly higher Mind (we could then buy 3 in the find skill!), but that’s up to the individual player.

For perks, we’ll select Miracles (giving us 3 spells to cast), and Animal Companion to gain a Sabre-tooth cat. The cat gives us an additional way to fight in melee during a combat, but I think the best use would be for the cat to block any potential attackers from getting to Moonwalker while he’s casting spells from the back of the party. Also, the cat lets us fight people in melee on a stronger level than Moonwalker is capable of personally.
(Thanks to @Quarrelblue on twitter for pointing out some mistakes I’d made in the numbers)

More Coming Soon

There are so many aspects to TORG Eternity character creation that I couldn’t hope to cover them all in one article. I’ll re-visit this topic in the future to talk about spells, miracles, pulp powers, psionic abilities, and present some additional builds from other cosms as examples of how you can optimize a character for this awesome RPG.