Jobs and roles for new players?
If a thread for this already exists please link it!

That said, having a job isn't going to necessarily create meaningful opportunities for you. I've seen skill-less guttersnipes finesse there way into chyen and well-situated chummers squander there worth.

If you want something high-demand - it is probably best to go with bare-bones transactional experiences. A Medic or Cab Driver are two great examples of these but there are a ton of jobs constantly being requested. Some of them don't even require a particular skill set. After listening to SIC for a little bit, you will get a better feel for supply and demand in the job market.

As a new player, I recommend focusing on meaningful interaction by exploiting what might be otherwise transactional in these roles and jobs. That is where the magic happens.

However there are several characters in-game whose job it is to help new players learn about the game and give them guidance, so that's probably the best place to start.

The best thing you can offer as a new player is not skills, but engagement and roleplay. Your interactions with other players are going to be much more relevant to them than whatever you spent UE on.

Aside from some skill pitfalls, I would recommend chosing an archetype that interests you personally, rather than one that might be strictly more powerful or flexible. It's really common for characters to be fairly diversified in their skills, so you're not locked into doing or being good at just one thing.

Only three of them would be accessible to new characters (and are not necessarily open at the moment), and most of them don't exist at all.

You're only going to find accurate and up-to-date job information IC.

Raise your hand if you've tried to pull a new player into a plot, or give them some work that would act as a launchpad for RP, and they responded with some variety of… "Uh. Yeah. Maybe if I have time after I run my crates."

All of that said, what I am now finding challenging is fitting my initial character concept to the setting, and finding my character isn't super desirable or employable, etc. It's just a bummer and I would have very much loved to have seen the content in Surviving Whitmore available before I made my character or the like so that I could have planned better. It's not a big deal, I'll just know better when I make my next character!

The last time some of those NLM jobs were advertised was seven years ago, I suspect some of them are defunct.

What I really like about those other systems is the do a great job of generating RP. Even when I'm alone, if forces me to take a socially available, vulnerable position where RP is all but guaranteed to find me.

My suggestion would be to extend this trickle-based-must-be-vulnerable-and-socially-available system to other jobs. Starting with bartending and bouncing. It would be a simple adaptation to make it available to other professions, and I think it might make those other professions more attractive.

And by not become your job I mean exactly that, it's part of you, yes, but is sitting behind the bar all your character is? Go hang at the gym, go explore different parts of town, bother people at the park, or other bars. The moment you put this in, any moment someone in those entry bars is not just sitting at that one IC room, they are being penalized.

There are more ways to fill your weekl limit than crates too. And hell, honestly, the most money you will ever make is by meeting other people, and reaching out to them and leaving your mark. Small simple player job usually pays more than mixer job does for entire week, and ones with a bit risk pay multiples of it.

Chy is in the people, not being tied to a room. You can still do that if you want, but lets not penalize those who do not.

Short term jobs, job term deals, one offs, services, runs of all sorts. Some will hire you to spy on someone, some will hire you to beat someone up, others to bring them items from red, or to do some deeper, weirder and more creative setups where both sides benefits.

Some of players who do that have access to NPC cash to fund some of those ventures too, and it's expected of them to use it to create work for others. And it pays WAY better than crates.

(Edited by Slither at 6:31 am on 10/7/2025)

I've found that the best, reliable way to earn money is through these automated income sources and most of my characters who earned a modicum of wealth relied heavily on these instead of PCs willing to part with their own chyen. Perhaps I am not the caliber player that the game expects. Or perhaps my experience is similar to many other newbies/midbies. All that is to say that I am all for ways of tying automated income to passive ways like tending a bar, as I play this game to RP but the chyen obstacle oftentimes makes it quite difficult to run the plots that I wish to run.