I Would Have Built My Character Differently if I Knew I Would be Transported to Another World (Patreon)

Castor always loved playing online RPGs. He always hated reading the Terms and Conditions.

Now he's been transported to another world by a System that insists he was given proper warning of what he was in for.

To get back home, he'll need to reach the top of the Tower. Nobody else has come close, but there's a first time for everything.

Besides, Castor was given a lot more flexibility than the locals when it came to setting up his character for the Tower challenge. It's too bad that he used all of those choices to build an unbalanced character that was meant to either crush the game or flame out and let him restart with a new design.

Now he's only got one life, one shot at the prize. Better make it count.

—-

Castor stood frozen in place. Ahead of him, a woman in plate mail armor was facing off with a green skinned monster. The scene was illuminated by torches, of all things. The flickering flames cast barely enough light to reveal the stone walls that surrounded them.

Not half a day ago, he'd been sitting in his dorm room putting the finishing touches on the character design for an online RPG.

"How did it come do this?" Castor muttered to himself.

It was a rhetorical question. He knew what had happened. Or rather, he knew who to blame. The System.

Not the system that people so often complained about, the capitalist conformity that took young men full of passion and ground them down into compliant wage slaves. Castor had been perfectly happy with that system. After all, he'd been within spitting distance of receiving his computer science degree and becoming a productive member of the workforce.

No, his problem was with the System. Capital letter very much included. The mysterious program pretty much ran this world. Not with the subtlety of the invisible hand of the profit motive, no, but with quests and classes and spells and all sorts of things that Castor had never expected to see in real life.

Not content with this, the System had reached out to his own world and drawn him into its grasp. In part, it was his own fault. With the difficult classes he needed for graduation well behind him, he'd spent an inordinate amount of time indulging in his hobby of online gaming. His friends knew about his habits, which was why he hadn't thought there was anything amiss when a link to a brand new RPG had shown up in his inbox.

He'd had no way of knowing that he'd be living with his choices for real, this time.

[Player Castor Palmen was provided with all relevant information related to the Tower Challenge]

Well, he'd had no way to know without reading through the entire list of terms and conditions that he was required to acknowledge before starting the game. As a result, the character he'd built for himself wasn't exactly traditional hero material.

Castor wasn't a munchkin. He wasn't in the habit of whining at the GM until he was allowed to adopt some tendentious interpretation of the rules for the benefit of his character. No, Castor was an optimizer. Whenever he was presented with a new game, he tried to figure out the most efficient way to beat it. That meant that he stayed away from warrior builds, at least on his first run.

If there was one thing that would be tested to death, it was the hack and slash functionality that most players would jump to when they started playing. In order to find options that might let him overpower the challenge, Castor had needed to dig a little further into the nooks and crannies of the available options.

As a result, he'd set himself up as a debuffer. A shaman, to be precise. A spellcasting class that had a very limited mana pool but that was able to select a small number of "hexes" that could be cast without using any mana. These hexes couldn't kill enemy monsters, nor even deal them damage. Instead, a successful hex would hamper the monster in some way. Slow them down, trip them up.

Debuffs were notoriously difficult to balance in a game-like setting. Too weak, and nobody would bother to play with them. Too strong, and a dedicated debuff build could cripple foes at a machine gun pace.

Castor had followed his gut. He'd figured the developers were most likely to make debuffs a little too strong, at least on the initial release. They often underestimated what a single minded player could accomplish, once he really dug into the available options. Especially in an ambitious project like the Tower Challenge, which had made available a whole swath of perks that could be purchased by accepting a corresponding drawback.

Of course, the drawbacks were more pressing now that Castor had to live through them personally. For example, while his companion looked the part of a formidable medieval warrior, Castor was dressed in a ruffled shirt, dramatic cloak and floppy hat. His outfit was topped off by a purely decorative eyepatch. All thanks to the Snappy Dresser drawback, a restriction on his outfits that had hardly seemed like a drawback at all when he thought it would only apply to a virtual avatar.

That was not to mention the Hunted drawback. He'd taken it three times over, seeing it as a source of free perk points and future XP as he killed the assassins that tried to take him out. His plan didn't seem nearly as clever now that people would be trying to kill him without the safety of a computer screen between them.

Even his companion was the result of his character build. He'd signed up for the Lackey drawback, accepting that he would be under the direction of his master for the first few floors. At the time, he'd thought it wouldn't amount to more than a few mandatory quests before he got to the meat of the game. As it happened, though, it was that drawback that had made him eligible as a target for Victoria's "Summon Servant" scroll, a spell that her father had purchased from the System at great expense.

If only he hadn't been intent on squeezing out every possible perk point, Castor might still be back in his dorm room, enjoying the comforts of modern civilization. He shook his head. There was no point dwelling on the past. Besides, the way the System worked, it would have gotten its claws into him sooner or later.

At least working for Victoria wasn't all bad. It wasn't like he'd been saddled with some clueless newbie.

She had been aiming to climb the Tower for a long time. One of the System's rules was that nobody could be obstructed once they decided to start their climb. Despite that, her father hadn't been happy with the idea of his daughter heading into danger. Castor wasn't privy to all of the details, but the bottom line was that the man had paid for top of the line gear and training before reluctantly giving her his blessing.

Castor would have preferred that he hadn't been included in her gear loadout, of course. The System might insist that he should have known what he was signing up for, but it was still a little hard to stomach the fact that he was supernaturally compelled to follow all "reasonable" orders.

Not that there was much for him to do right now. Victoria's father had implored her to choose the Iron Wall class, rendering her all but indestructible. And while as a result the System wasn't giving much of a boost to her attacking power, he'd already gotten a first hand look at the result of her extensive workouts when she carved through a wooden training post with her longsword.

The only thing Castor had to worry about was whether any of the goblin might splatter on his clothing. And whether the drawback he'd taken meant that the System would compel him to drop everything and clean it off.

The two combatants stood just out of weapon's range of each other, sizing up the situation. The goblin showed more intelligence than Castor had expected from a System generated monster, in its refusal to charge towards an armored opponent that towered over it. Victoria, despite her huge advantage, was also showing caution in what was no doubt her first real fight.

Finally, she moved. Stabbing forward with her longsword, the strike hit nothing but air. The goblin slipped to the side, and an instant later a clang rang out as its club bounced harmlessly off of her armor.

Castor grimaced, placing his hand on the hilt of the dagger that was his only weapon. Fortunately, the goblin didn't take the opportunity to charge past her and hit the squishy magic user. To be fair, Castor hadn't done anything yet to provoke it.

Victoria swung her sword horizontally in a move that would have cut the goblin in half if it hadn't rolled underneath it. It sprang to its feet and lashed out with a two strike combination, accomplishing little more than making noise before it was forced to scurry back.

Castor watched with rowing unease as the same pattern played out again and again. Victoria's sword hit nothing but air, while the goblin could land its attacks at will. The only saving grace was that for all of the creature's agility, it wasn't particularly strong. It's attacks could do little but annoy Victoria, though it did seem that it was getting under her skin. Her attacks grew more ragged as she grew more desperate.

It seemed her training hadn't extended to landing hits on a live target. Castor considered his options. Jumping in with his dagger was likely to see him cut to pieces by Victoria. Waiting things out didn't look to be an option. Sooner or later the goblin would turn its eyes to him. The longer it took, the more tired and frazzled Victoria would be. Even if the goblin wasn't a particularly fierce monster, Castor didn't want to fight it on anything like even terms.

Magic it was, then. He wouldn't get access to the really good hexes until level three. He'd considered it a reasonable tradeoff when building his character. After all, he already had all of the bonuses that made it almost impossible for the Tower's monsters to avoid having his hexes take effect.

The first level hex might not be as potent as what he'd be dishing out in the future, but it was enough to get things started. Castor sent the mental command to the system and then moved his hands according to its prompts. In response, a stream of energy flowed from his heart up through his arms and out his fingers.

The hex took the form of a dark cloud as it zipped through the air. At least, that was how it looked to Castor. Neither the goblin nor Victoria reacted as it flew true and struck home, sinking into the goblin's chest. A moment later a dark cloud formed over the goblin's head, indicating that the hex had taken hold.

His first level hex was supposed to hamper the target's actions and make it unlucky. Castor knew how that would play out in a computer game, as the debuff modified the numbers behind the scenes. He was curious how it would play out in real life. He didn't have long to wait.

As Victoria moved in for her next attack, the dark cloud hovering over the goblin's head pulsed with an ominous light. The goblin moved to dodge, only to lose its footing and stumble backwards. Instead of avoiding Victoria's blow, it practically thrust its throat into the path of her blade. The goblin's flesh didn't fare any better than the training posts had. Its head landed some distance away with a meaty thwack.

[You have defeated Goblin Runt. Your share of the reward is 5XP]

Victoria paused in the act of sheathing her sword. Her head was cocked to the side, in the posture Castor had come to understand meant that she was reading through a dialogue box.

"You did something?"

Of course, she would have noticed that he took a share of the experience points. The System didn't keep particularly close track of each person's contribution to battle, but it was impossible to get XP if you didn't help out in the fight at all.

"I hit it with a hex," Castor said. "Made it unlucky."

"Good work," Victoria said. She pulled off her helmet, releasing her blonde hair to pool around her shoulders. She then tucked the helmet under her arm and patted herself on the chest with a clank of steel against steel. "Of course, its real bad luck was running into me."

Castor just smiled and nodded. No need to argue with somebody dressed in armor and holding a sword.

Victoria stood there for a moment, basking in the thrill of victory and adjusting herself from the heat of battle. After a moment she squared her shoulders and led the way out of the room.

"All right," she said, "time to get registered."

By killing the introductory monster, they'd proven that they had the bare minimum of ability required to enter the Tower proper. Climbing the Tower wasn't something to be done in a day. Each floor was massive. All told, the thing was larger on the inside than some countries.

Naturally, for such a long term project, the first thing they had to do was take care of their living situation. That and figure out how they were going to tackle the first floor.

Castor sighed. He wouldn't be tangling with any monsters for a while. Instead he'd have to deal with yet another aspect of climbing the Tower that was glossed over in video games: paperwork.