LOTRO – One more wafer-thin Alt?

Slowly but surely I’m giving in to my Altoholism over in LOTRO.

For those of you who are single-character players, the lure probably doesn’t make much sense. You make one character, maybe a mule or crafting alt who will never get much attention, and just go about your mono-char business. The other altoholics out there, however, will know what I mean.

First, I had to make an alt to play with the spousal unit, so we wouldn’t have to force-level him to Ysharros’ level or so she wouldn’t have to hang around waiting.

Then we discovered that since we had half the crafting classes covered, we might as well make another alt each and cover them all. (There will be crafting guild issues down the line since you can only join one guild and most chars have more than one crafting ability, but we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.)

Slippery slope, I tell ya. Slippery slope.

So for now there’s Heloyse the Hunter who sits behind her Guardian buddy and sticks bad guys with arrows. That’s rather fun and it only belatedly occurred to us that we’re a rather stereotypical Legolas/Gimli pairing. Oh well – still fun!

But there’s also Yvriel the Warden, who is paired up with hubby’s new Rune-Keeper. He doesn’t often play casty types so we’re taking it slowly, but it’s also been quite entertaining so far. I thought I was going to make a Champion, because they look like slicing and dicing fun machines, but somehow I ended up selecting a Warden during char creation so I guess my subconscious decided for me. Besides, they’re a lot of fun too. Gotta love that Ambush move.

But wait! At some point I made a Lore-Master, Aethinviel, who ended up being the non-picked wallflower and doesn’t have a duo partner yet. I’m not sure how that happened except that I really wanted a hunter. I’m a hunter fan. So poor Aeth is in her mid teens and getting used to doing stuff by herself. Sneak up Weathertop for some herbs, at level 11? No problem! Thanks to my stupidly elephantine memory for irrelevant details from years ago, I remembered exactly a) how to get up to the top while avoiding most of the mobs and b) what the herbs looked like, though the whole shiny-clicky-me! effect makes that rather easy anyway.

So now I have not one, not two, but FOUR characters and I’m feeling a little tipsy. And distinctly less flush. Playing more than one char limits how much you actually gets done and siphons funds and resources away that you would otherwise be selling. That said, we both have spanky new houses in Falathlorn, so that’s taken care of, and the main thing left to do now is to get the Kinship house out of years-long hock. 6600 silver in one go is a lot to throw down!

Thanks to all those who have waved at me in tells – I still find it a little weird, though somehow also very flattering, and some have even sent me food packages! I guess I’m a hobbit at heart: food is always welcome!