I play stone soup every now and than but some odd reason this game makes me feel overwhelemed.. Especially when it comes to choosing skills and items. Skills? There are soo many! Which to choose! But more important, items..how can you tell what is better for you?
Well, learning a new game system can be overwhelming at first. Here are some things that may help you: [ http://j-factor.com/dredmorpedia/ ] This website is invaluable to a lot of Dredmor players. It lists every item, recipe, spell, skill in the game, and you can even turn on some mods for this website, so you can see items, recipes, spells, and skills from mods! I mainly use this for planning out builds. [ http://dredmod.com/wiki/Statistics ] List of player stats and what they affect. [ http://dredmod.com/wiki/Damage ] List of damage types. Hope that helps. I find that Dredmor's mechanics are quite deep and a lot of fun to dig into, so I hope they didn't scare you away.
Check Mr. Strange's strategy guide, the share your builds thread and the Community Skills Guide, all great places to help you choose solid skills and synergies. They should all be stickied in the General forum. Or, just hit random and run for your life. It won't last that long, but you'll have a good time and slowly build up useful info about the game.
+1 for community skills guide. Hopefully once it's done there can be a community strategy guide that's a compilation of builds and whatnot, but the skills guide is a great intro to put skills in perspective. It took me a long time to understand how some skills work and that they are not at all intuitive to a newbie. Golemancy being most useful for building and digging through walls, for instance. Understanding items comes much easier once you get an idea of a build you want. Tanky warrior types will want items with high block chance and armor absorption . Rogues generally go for dodge and crit . Counterattack can be used for either. Casters and gishes go for spellpower . If you post the type of character you'd like to play, or even an archetype from some other setting, I'll try and come up with a build that plays similarly, if that helps.