Wasteland and That Old-School Skill Set Symphony
-
Category: News ArchiveHits: 3374
As an example, when building my Wasteland party of four Rangers again, all I knew to start is I wanted a Brainiac, a Thief, a Jack of All Trades/Gunslinger as party leader, and a Melee Specialist because I like bashing the **** out of things with clubs, axes, and chainsaws. With those basics in mind, I went ahead and went through the Wasteland stat and skill set and built personalities formed by the random roll (although biased toward accepting characters with a high IQ, since IQ is a big (win) in Wasteland and this should remind me to do a blog on how prevalence of usefulness of skills and abilities can ruin role-playing and a lack of balance can do the same) and also based on the skills that were provided to me and what points I put into them.
Now one of the great things about Wasteland is that there are 27 skills to start. You can even learn brand-new ones over the course of the game, and the first time I discovered that, I was floored and ended up jacking up my IQ as high it could go to see what new skills became available (the higher tier skills are IQ-dependent).
...
So after the skill allocation phase, it's clear this character is physically challenged, has esoteric old world knowledge, and is gifted with electronics and machines and codes, so after remembering that Wasteland has a high technology bent, it occurred to me I had the freedom to imagine him as an android if I wanted to. And this could account for his limited mobility, esoteric pre-bomb knowledge, and his crappy CHR and DEX. Having fun and digging about the pre-knowledge of Wasteland and memories of my crappy knowledge of coding in Basic way back in the days of the TSR-80, I thought it'd be cool if I built an android that incorporated some elements of the 80s and came up with a makeshift bio:
G.I.G.0: Stands for (Garbage In, Garbage Out,) and his name reinforces that there's something flawed in this character's intrinsic android programming, since the last character is a (zero) not the letter (O.) I saw him as a damaged android the Rangers deem only worthwhile for reconnaissance in hazardous areas, notably because it seems like he's been damaged already ((past warranty) is what G.I.G.0 occasionally says, although no one's quite sure what he means when he says this - they assume it's a location in the game, and who knows, they may be right).
While G.I.G.0 will respond to his name when addressed, he will remind each new speaker once that (G.I.G.0.) is not his original designation, which has left some inhabitants of the Wasteland to wonder what kind of nation this (Desig) may be and if all the residents are like G.I.G.0.
