Never played a Wizardry game before, but I love my RPGs with turn-based combat, so this will be my thread to come back to as I play the game (assuming I can't find an answer elsewhere in the forum).

Ok, so this is the Wizardry Gold edition. And it's got these cute little drop-down menus in the upper left corner so I can go straight to useful things like the manual and hint book...except that those bring me to a Microsoft page on the WWW giving me an error message.

I read some character creation tips over at GameFaqs, but in actually trying to roll up my characters....am I missing something? It seems sloppy that I start by naming a character, then pick race, then gender then if I'm lucky I get to choose the class I want? And there's no way to go back and start over if I don't get that class? Instead I have to go through all of creation before saying "No, I don't want this character."

I'm frustrated already, so if someone could tell me "You're just missing something, THIS is how you do it," it'd make my day.

First off you should play the DOS version, not the inferior (even though made later) Gold version.
Diplomacy doesn't work in the Gold version, and it's also aesthetically inferior IMO.

As for character generation, you may want to play Wiz 6 first, which has a less annoying character generation, and export characters into Wiz 7.
Ot you can use the Cosmic Forge editor to speed things up.

Took me a minute after reading your reply, but I hadn't noticed the DOS version also comes with Wiz 7. I see it now, listed under the "goodies" section.

I only chose to start with Wiz 7 because the graphics looked nicer and I (foolishly perhaps) assumed it would be more polished than Wiz 6. So if you're saying Wiz 6 has an easier character generator, then I'll go ahead & start with that.

Thanks!

The reason for the long character generation is probably the random number of attribute points. You are not supposed to easily get to the higher values, so some classes are hard to get. You can rename the character later so you can speed it up with a one letter name. +/- work for stat adjustments. You do not really need to wait for very high values though: changing classes is overpowered anyway. If you want a Lord for instance you can start a Priest or a Fighter or any character really. See to it you get a few levels to meet the attribute requirements for the Lord (or whatever you want) and change the class - done. Mind the attribute gains per level are also random so saving before levelling up helps. Then again it is a fun challenge to not change classes. Also it is less bothersome, although your characters won't be quite as strong. It is possible to play through with a single character, so six characters w/o class changes certainly work as well. That said it is not an easy game - harder settings require a thorough understanding of the game.