Good engineer(technologist) background, custom or vanilla.

As the title says. Looking for a good engineering background. I'd like to be talk my way out of situations, before drawing a gun to deal with the problem.
So far I've been using the raised by monks background. Money's not really a problem and the boost to perception is useful.
If any of you use a custom background that you feel is balanced I'd love to hear it. Never tried making a mod for this game, but I think I could figure out something like that.

 

I'm not all that familiar yet with this forum. I'm sure it's bad taste to respond to your own post so I apologize. I'm just surprised to see 52 views on this and not a single thought posted.

 

Honestly that is something you will have to figure out for yourself. I have only done 1 tech character so far, Dwarf with charged ring, healing salve, and full smithy, master melee/dodge. Running educator background, followers are expert melee/dodge. Party is 4 dwarves and a dog.

Only really usefull backgrounds are Only child for a mage, and Ran away with circus for melee ogre. IMHO that is.

Good luck testing.

 

You can always make your own background. Use the 'search' function to figure out how to do that.

Also: don't raise your INT too much. Use Potions of Intellect instead. They'll raise your INT with 10 and give you enough time to study a schematic and make it. And that's all you really need, isn't it?

 

Isn't intelligence also useful for dialogue options. I thought to get the most out of a conversation you need a mix of persuasion and intelligence.

 

Correct, but Intelligence need only be 10 or 12 (can't exactly remember) or so to get all the good options.

 

Potions are cheap and plentifull. If you have to talk to someone for quest purposes use one. Not a big deal if you waste one or two. Don't take two by mistake because the second one will cancel the effect.

The highest I go is 9 INT. Unless you plan on carrying spells then you have no choice but to put points into it.

 

I guess Potion of Intellect isn't very good if you want to talk to someone for more than 30 seconds, or however long they last. Works if you know exactly which dialogue options to pick, but I think it'd be a hassle to keep enough potions around for every conversation, and personally I don't know where all the 'good' Intelligence dialogue options are.

For background I would probably pick something that gives more points in attributes that I want, at the cost of reducing attributes that I can do without. For someone who's supposed to be good at talking and who isn't an awesome melee fighter, it's hard to beat Charlatan's Protégé, with its +6 CH, because the -4 ST and -2 CN are easy to live with, as are the penalties to Combat skills. Though I suppose that a lot of guns, particularly rifles, get minor penalties if the wielder is too weak. But Strength of Earth is a cheap way to boost Strength back to 8 or 12. Or you could just suck it up with 20 ranks in Firearms.

Miracle Operation also seems like a good background, as well as Sickly. Anything that dumps CN while boosting other attributes should be better than a measly +1 PE. Unless you intend to also use spells, in which case you'll probably want to have decent CN. Or use lots and lots of fatigue restorers. Which would probably work out great. Besides, if you get all degrees in Therapeutics you can raise all your attributes by 4, and DX, ST and PE by 6 points for 4 hours (30 minutes real time, apparently). So those low attributes can easily be raised to a decent value for a long enough time to do just about anything.

 

Don't forget altars

 

By the way for custom stuff backgrounds which include a few handy for tech ones see: http://www.terra-arcanum.com/phpBB/view ... hp?t=14914

Gillsing - They last long enough for a talk even when reading the conversation well. I used them at first before getting my Int where I want it.
And yeah, Girl Genius is a great online comic.