Choking down my disappointment, I make a conscious decision not to berate myself or let myself worry too much about having chosen a class that it seems I am extremely poorly positioned to take advantage of. Not because I shouldn't be worried, but because that die has already been cast. I'm an Artificer now; the question is no longer whether or not becoming an Artificer at level 1 was the best decision, but rather how best to make the most of that decision and overcome the weaknesses that are inherent to it. Now that I've gotten a chance to read the associated qualities and become familiar with the base status and abilities that it made available to me, it is time to select my talent. Talents are every bit as big of a deal as the class itself in that I am not aware of any way to change them once they are selected. This is another permanent decision that I have to make with extremely limited information. I’ll try and pick something that will help make up the difference between myself and a proper mage. I take a deep breath, relax my mind for a minute or two, and then return to the status menu and pull up the talents. It’s not what I expected. First off, even though I’d been warned that it would be a massive list, I underestimated just how many options there would be. There are thousands of these things, and they aren't organized at all. I focus randomly on one of the talents at the top of the list to try and see what information it provides.

Charming -

You are exceptionally charming and are slightly more successful than normal people at convincing people to sleep with you. As long as you understand the language, you are significantly better at understanding a person's speech when alcohol causes their speech to slur.

….

There are just… So, so many potential implications that this carries, and just so very many ways that this talent is concerning…

Closing the information window I select the one below Charming.

Aggressive -

When you are rushing towards an opponent you can see, your movement doubles until you reach them, though you move no faster once you have successfully closed to reach them. This functions for up to 1 noncontiguous minute per day.

I take a deep breath once more as I close the information window and return to talent selection. I pick a few more to study at random, and they are similarly specific or weird and generally not something suitable for me. And damn, but so many of these are just so poorly worded or vague I would have no idea how useful it could be even if it was somewhat useful. Ok, enough playing around, I query for filters, there should be, yes, there are… Many of these, too. General, Skill, Combat, Class, Magic, Bloodline, and dozens more besides. That's ok, this is manageable so I read them all just to be sure. Out of these I'm almost certainly going to pick from either general or class, I would've been wanting to look at combat as well if I were a melee class, or magic if I was a full spellcaster, but those are of limited use to people who cannot cast spells. I cannot cast spells nor can I fight well with this class. Well… I check Magic anyhow, and sure enough although there are some talents to choose from, they are all extremely weak or so vague as to be able to mean anything. That's normal for people who chose physical classes, the magic options I have just mean the system does not recognize me as a real caster, because none of the famous ones that casters use are on the list of options for me.

Again, I was warned. This is just a matter of underestimating the scale of the problem. Under General I see all the common choices of course, including abilities that are present under multiple filters, like being good at dodging, being better at hurting people when I do hit, but it’s the class specific talents that I wasn’t expecting. Wearing more rings? Mastery of Wands? Expeditious Architect? Efficient Architect? Elemental Infusion? These actually sound pretty interesting, what is all that?

In my humble opinion there’s good reason for me to be slow and confused here, the quantity alone is absolutely overwhelming since I have no choice but to stay in the talent selection menu until I have picked a talent. For most classes there are precious few class specific options. Spell casters can pick up some magic boosting talents, allowing them to cast faster or whatever, but for the most part all spellcasters have those options and they should have been visible under magic. As I struggle to think of exceptions, I remember that priests get a couple options for better destroying undead, and fighters can take their weapon skills a little bit further than other classes though frankly from what I understand they must be higher level for the choices available to matter much, and rogues get some nifty assassination abilities, and so on. I guess getting class specific talent options is actually the norm and I just didn't spend much time thinking about what I would find under class specific options. I guess I was just hoping the Architect would at least be special in that regard, that there'd be a ton more options or something. Sadly the more I think about it the more class specific talents I remember that the other classes are supposed to have, so this is just a bias I'd unconsciously developed ahead of time is that it would be a very small number since most classes will only pick from a handful of them. That doesn't mean their list isn't significant, just that most picks are not considered good enough to select. Which means that the only thing special here is that I’ve never heard of any of these; a point which would have been mostly true even if I’d gotten a common class, because frankly even though the class specific section is small, the list of talents is still noteworthy.

One thing to clear up, most talents are complete garbage. They are specialized or niche to the point of being useless. I've heard that before, but seeing is believing. Although I have no way to confirm this, probably ever, I feel as though half of the reason for the extremely high number of talents is because who or whatever designed or controls this system wanted to make everyone feel like they had a lot of options. The other half I am left to presume is probably because whoever is in charge here actually *wants* to create a disparity in effectiveness between people for a reason I cannot fathom. It is certainly possible that I'm completely missing some higher plan, but seriously, in a world this brutal, who would actually choose "Juggling" for their permanent talent selection? Regardless of intentions, the end result is that every class has a few talents that are considered must have picks if you want to develop in this or that way, but unless you are looking for a particular development path their benefits are marginal so it is fair to say even most of the "good ones" are only situationally good. You don't get a talent every level, and their individual improvements may not seem amazing at a glance, but talents end up being a big deal over time.

Since the majority of talents are considered to be garbage and only a relatively small number of developmental approaches are broadly considered valid, only a few people will try out uncharted developmental paths, instead relying on their mentors and teachers for guidance on what works well versus what doesn't, usually having been informed ahead of time about common choices. Even with that, though, and even after ignoring the garbage picks, there are still a lot of talents to choose from. Which is good and all, but… Trying to sort through the chaff to find the ones worth having and then making a good decision isn’t easy, especially when you don't have any guidance on effective developmental directions so you have to sort through them and read them one after another. These things aren't even alphabetized. By the time I find one promising looking option, there’s a good chance you’ll have forgotten one of the earlier good options. What makes it worse is that you can’t even drop out of the talent selection menu to do things like write down the ones that caught your interest and weigh them against each other later. There’s really no practical way to choose "the perfect build”, in large part due to that mass of options, but this difficulty is compounded greatly due to the details of "what these things actually are" being so poorly described. Doubly so since many more talents continue to unlock over time, but you don’t get any new notifications, and you don’t even get to see why a particular talent which didn’t used to be there is now there.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

So what determines when new talents become available? Some things are known, for instance class level plays a role in what talents are available, but not everything is class level. Even some talents which are widely accessible and appear to be based on class level are often discovered not to be that simple. For instance, the most famous example I'm aware of is the "Frequent Critical" talent, which was initially believed to be based on class level but was eventually determined to be linked to your attack rating instead. The problem is that most of the actual requirements for talents aren’t understood. In fact, very little about talents is well understood, despite it being something that many people and even kingdoms have invested ample manpower and funding into investigating. We'll continue to use "Frequent Critical" as the example. The concept of increasing your critical hit rate is nothing new to me; from my time on earth I would even say it was extremely common: It exists in video games of numerous genres from action to shooters to rpgs and so much more, and in other media such as television you see it implemented via the fast and lithe assassin types, and so on. Increased critical hit rates is practically a staple in modern entertainment. But. How exactly does one test that to determine how much more frequent the criticals are? In some games, "crit fishing" is amazing. In others, it's a giant trap. So it's kind of important that you know how effective it is, right?

Well no problem, just test the talents out, right? Well, yes, but. That presents a number of concerns. For instance establishing a solid control and establishing a large sample size. When you go to start testing this, how do you do it? Do you measure how often they succeed in stabbing someone in the eye? Well what if there’s a difference in the skill level of the person doing the stabbing? What if there's a difference in their attributes? Do those differences also adjust the critical hit rate? If so, is it by a static value on a per attribute point basis, or does it operate on a sliding scale? Just how many volunteers or even volun-tolds (like prisoners) are you able to assemble that you can stab in the eye with sufficient frequency to generate valid sample sizes? Does a great axe stab someone in the eye as well and frequently as a dagger? Probably not, right? Or maybe it does, but would you actually notice? I mean, if you split someone's skull with your axe, is that a critical? Or is that just the normal level of overkill? So, does testing by stabbing someone in the eye even make sense as a method to test a talent when different weapons are clearly going to have differences in how the talent manifests and may impact the degree of the talents effectiveness? Frequent Criticals is supposedly a common talent among mid and high levels, and yet those are just a few of the challenges associated with pinning down the actual benefit that one of the most commonly selected talents that people choose as soon as it becomes available provides. It makes a difference, and everyone who gets it says it does. But no one is truly confident in saying how much more often they succeed in getting a critical strike compared to their normal, and frankly it’s not always clear what a critical strike even looks like, or how much more damage it does. Sometimes it is obvious, but more often it isn't. Usually, it’s hard to tell whether it was a critical strike or just a good hit. So yes, vague descriptions or uncertainly implemented numbers are among the major examples of why the talent selections are more opaque than one would expect despite being something everyone gets to go through at one point or another.

Right, so, back to the class specific talents. That's a lot, but it's a manageable number of talents to parse through. Oh. I could seal elementals inside of magical items to create special effects. That’s cool. I’ve heard of summoning elementals, some of the shamans can perform magic like that, but trapping them inside of a magic item to do something aside from a direct summoning? What would that allow? And that extra rings thing? Conceptually I understand this: Magical auras of magical items can actually conflict with each other, and too many rings will cause them to stop working reliably if you try put a second one on the same hand. Sometimes one will work, sometimes the other, often neither, rarely both. Meaning, despite the trope of magicians like "The Mandarin" who have a ring on every finger, in this world you’re much better off just leaving it at one ring per hand. Unless you have Extra Rings, apparently, which allows you to wear a second ring on each hand. So if you keep selecting that, could you become The Mandarin? I can’t do anything with these options right now, magical rings are less common than magical weapons, but it does go to show that this class isn’t as bad as I first thought. Which, to be fair, was a pretty easy target to beat. Rings are powerful magical items, and even the weak ones are rare. Master of Wands? Ok, this makes it so that your wands are more effective by simultaneously improving the effective level of the wands spell, while also reducing the defenses of the target. So I guess instead of relying on skill and ability to fight, I’m supposed to just use my items to fight, and these talents are designed to make that more practical. Sadly, as it stands the class as a whole is still garbage. Magical items are simply too expensive even if you’re crafting them yourself, and things like wands can only be used a set number of times before you have to spend a bunch of money to get the right ingredients to recharge them, and even if you level up enough that you get more options than just scrolls and wands, and even if the ability to craft more is provided by class rather than needing to expend more talents on it. That's an idea actually, I could use a talent to pick… Nope. Although magical item creation is selectable via talent, not a single one of the magical item creation talents are currently available to me for this pick, so I guess I'm stuck with scrolls and so on. Not that I could afford to create something better, either. C’est la vie, I might as well finish checking the class specific talents. There might be a ton of talents, but there aren’t an overwhelming number of class specific talents for me to look at even objectively and without comparing to the total list, there are probably only a hundred or so class specific options, almost all of which are ridiculous. Under what circumstances would I truly want to start embedding a wand into my chest to be able to fire it? Most of them are, clearly, still trash and I won’t bother to mention them, but then? Oh. Expeditious Architect: reduces the base crafting time to create a magic item by 25%. Can be taken multiple times.

Efficient Architect -

Reduces the quality or quantity of rare materials required to craft magical items, allowing a 25% reduction in base gold cost.

That’s. Wow. These tell me the degree of impact. And it is a big impact. And it can be taken multiple times. I have no way to make this work. I don’t. But I see the theoretical path forward now. Being able to craft the same things as everyone else at the same levels as everyone else in the same time as everyone else and at the same cost as everyone else is a bad deal. Nothing about that would be worth losing so much of the direct power that a class will usually provide you. Being able to wear a couple more rings doesn’t come anywhere near to making up the difference in sheer power that a class will typically unlock. But those last 2 talents make it so that the Architect actually can shine in one area. The assembly line. They can craft magical items, cheaper and faster than anyone else. As for the path forward? Sell some of them to fund the ones that I want to keep. It’ll be slow, making anything with these technology levels is painfully time consuming. It’ll be hard. And frankly for as long as I can only create consumable items, interest in buying anything I make will be minimal. But this class has the possibility of being viable after all. For an NPC, at least, this would be incredible.

How in the world am I supposed to make this work when I have no way to make money in the first place, though? Even hunting is too much for me right now, I can survive a little longer than before, but health increase aside ultimately my ability to fight has not improved in any noteworthy capacity after having picked this class up. Throwing pebbles at mythical monsters is not a valid fighting style. But if I can win enough fights to make a couple levels of progress and collect enough money to start making magical items, the cause may not be lost after all. Without further hesitation, I select Efficient Architect. I need to save money more than I need to save time. I suspect I am going to regret this decision many times in the coming months, possibly years. I suspect that I will wish I’d chosen something that would work better with changing my class into something else. But this is a talent selection. Different classes get talents at different rates, but even at level 20 the number of talent selections will have been fewer than the number of levels. I know that this is a long-term decision. If I am able to stay the course, I might truly be able to make a difference. Not because I am personally strong, though of course I hope that I will become powerful, no, because I might be able to become a one-man industrial revolution. And an industrial revolution in this world is a bigger impact than even the strongest of fireball tossing mages could possibly hope to accomplish. I don’t know exactly how I’ll be able to change the world yet, but revolutions and change go hand in hand, and if I AM the revolution, then I’ll surely be well positioned to take advantage of the changes that are occurring around me and mold them to my liking.

Option selected, I decide that it’s time to visit my imbuements and see some details on the only potentially combat effective abilities I possess.