Introduction Thread (Optional)

they all float down here

I believe this is battery acid!

How to find work as an assassin? Be patient. Don't just out yourself as an assassin to the first available listener, be savvy. Grind your stealth skills in a REASONABLE manner and quantity. Don't just walk up in a place and be like, yo, where the lockpicks and taints at?... you shouldn't be attempting to find work at all until you've sorta-ish worked up your combat and stealth skills. Only tell someone you REALLY trust about your abilitys, make sure not to get caught using them because a lot of people will metagame you and that's always annoying. Play yourself off as a sub-par fighter. Make friends, make allies, find out who's in the know about what and prove you can keep your damn mouth shut.

Once you've done all that, start considering, carefully, who you want to work for, and be honest with yourself about shortfalls and difficulties. FINDING possible sources of work is only the beginning, you, more importantly, need to know who you actually want to work for and can trust not to simply hose your 10-20-30 days painstakingly played assassin on some bumfuck dumbass job, either an unintintional mistake on their part, or perhaps intentional, just to make aide fuzzynuts sweat a little. You don't want someone who's going to give you suicide missions. Then you want to be very careful when deciding whether a job is within your abilities, there's more to it than sneak/hide/backstab/throw/poison/climb etc. and you will probably find yourself having to stalk people a lot and find their weak-points, make note of them, and not jump the gun.

Your best bet is to find a mentor that knows what they're doing... but the most important part is to RP your PC like someone who knows the risks and is extremely averse to something that might possibly out them or get them killed. Take it slow and play the character, not the guild, and keep IC IC, don't go around backstabbing everything impatiently trying to get your skills up, because no one likes that twinky player that ruins a good plot involving non-combatant characters just because "Had to twink backstab, yo?" (and in fact these are the characters that will have the MONEY to you know, actually HIRE you, which are in finite supply, therefor stifling future RP opportunities). Some will say wanting someone's boots or skin of water is a perfectly acceptable reason, I would contend that there are easy ways to get those things without you know, stabbing, with fewer risks involved. Just use your brain, be on the lookout for opportunities, OBSERVE a LOT more than DO, learn from tragic stories and the mistakes of others. Play the character, not the skillsheet, you may never use the classic assassin combat skills, AT ALL, and still find work and purpose.

For your subguild, some might contend thug gives you a redundant skill that you'll branch anyway, namely sap, but it's not a bad skill to have, you can get this, also, from bounty hunter (which has bitching direction sense, and pretty damned nice ride), and it give you an alternative to backstabbing with poisoned knives with intent to kill, which is kind of good in some situations, otherwise you have to master backstab just about to get it. There are other subguilds that are good too, outlaw, because who wants to have to max a weapon skill to get a crafting skill (knife making, which, if you want to stay low profile you'll want to be able to make yourself a set of practice knives for poisoning and tossing, without being like, I want to buy all these, and not only potentially outing yourself early, but also spending way more than you have to in the process to get them), plus you get outdoor sneak/hide as WELL, along with some pretty solid direction sense. No bullshit you can sometimes make your way through a blinding Red Storm sandstorm with no missteps with this subguild, and early-branched climb makes you more versatile. Plus, got to love making those spider-fang stabbing spears.

I would reccomend against hunter unless you want to suck with bows, make crappy arrows, skin like a half-giant, and have bad direction sense. Again, outdoor sneak and hide, but outlaw is much better.

Strictly craft subguilds are meh unless you go whole hog with the extended subs want to pose as a House Crafter or aidey type who suddenly turns into mister hyde when their full-time employers get pissed... or at least have a cover for your activities. Never forget the classice red storm tailor.

As far as combat subguilds, protector reigns supreme, but costs CGP. This subguild gets master parry and shield-use at cap, both of which make you beastly in melee and able to pass as a fighter/mercenary type until the need arises to get nasty. This subguild also pairs with ranger well. As far as gladiator, don't bother, you only get disarm high enough to hurt yourself, where it becomes a HUGE liability (reversed disarm fumbles are HILLARIOUS ways to die), in fact, none of the combat skills look to get high enough to actually use without hilarity ensuing. If you want to be comic relief, by all means, go gladiator. Nevermind bash and kick are useless against mounted opponents, unless you're a HG at which point you can just bash their mount.

I think the less obvious, though very good choice are the healing subguilds, physician and apothacary. These give you brew, which you'd ordinarily have to branch from poison, a very deadly skill which pretty much outs you when you try to buy fifty red tablets off of someone, so having brew to make your own tablets is boss. also, bandagemaking can be highly lucrative, and bandaging is not only handy in a pinch (provided you don't cap out at retard levels, at which point you're better off dropping your knife and using bandaging to assassinate your opponent when they're weak, trust me! I'm a doctor!), but provides a character RP element to where, yeah, I know the basics of anatomy? How you think I got so good? The foraging boost is nice if you wand to make a living as a grebber for a bit.

There's really no optimal way to slice it. Come up with a fun concept and RP.

Oh, and aggressor or berserker can be kind of cool too, depending on whether you want to have slashing, or chopping weapons respectively. The kick/bash/disarm here gets to levels where it actually becomes something an assassin might find use for, somewhere... but considering backstab has a delay of 12 odd seconds on it, if your target is still alive by the time you can do any of these things, they're only really useful for pretending to be a warrior, which everyone will know you're not when you can't parry or use a shield for crap... even with warriors I rarely invest all that much in kick or bash until I've had enough time to use them on silly unarmed training days or when fighting a warrior of equal skill level when parry is already at master and defense is up there. Otherwise you'll look like that slimy dick that's trying to kill all the non-warior newb characters in the training circle. Disarm is really only easily trainable when you can hold off five people at once while not fighting back and flick their weapons away until you get a few fails (hint, the will HATE you for this, but, make it a game, laugh and and taunt them, flaunting your combat superiority).

This all falls apart when you consider it will take you 20-30 days played ALONE to branch pariry as assassin/ranger, in short, you will, rarely have the opportunity to practice these skills in a sparring environment until you are already waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay far down the road... considering it will cost you CGP or special app, I'd rather just go for a different extended sub, and skill bumps. If you have enough karma to plop down an aggressor app wit a spec app for skillbumps, why not play something scary-sick like an aspect of corruption mage with a couple bumps in dual wield and one in piercing weapons?.. so no, aggressor is fun if it's an aspect of your character to RP out, but not all that great, imo.

Hi. I'm here to learn how the game works. I haven't been around long enough to h8 b8 staff. This will probably be my only post.

I think both of you guys gave me some good advice. I think my biggest hurdle will be training my skills Icly. Finding employers will be tough too because it won't make sense to flat out tell people you're an assassin. Maybe the best route would be like you said and go for a crafting subguild so I can at least offer some service to possible employers.

It's kind of tough to decide though, I like the sound of the offensive sub guilds you mentioned though especially the bounty hunter one.

I don't really want to post too much about my character because of the rules of Arm but does anyone think they can give me some advice in PMs. I have a few questions I want to ask about how to train my skills and also about the Rinth(yeah I decided to go all out and pick a tough starting location)