When you resurrect a character, you get that character as they are, with all their stats and skills exactly as you see them whe you inspect them in the mirror. If you reincarnate them their skills (Fighter, Ninja, Wizard, Priest) are completely wiped but their stats remain the same (and you can also rename the character). While it might seem like a bad thing to clear their skills, this is DM which as far as these games go is relative Easy Mode. Whenever a character gets a skill increaase, some stats relating to that skill will increase as well (eg for gaining Fighter levels I think you get some stamina and hp and stuff). It doesn't take long to regain the lost levels and you'll get some stat increases that you therefore wouldn't otherwise have got
. This is good in DM as the dungoen is pitched for newbie-level characters. If you tried this in CSB you'd get totally wrecked (not that that's unusual for high-level characters either, mind you
).
As for specifics on which characters to choose...well, they can all become good at everything if you train them up. At the start you're likely to run into some problems but if you give people enough practice at stuff they can overcome them. For example, Tiggy has bugger all hp/stamina and characters such as Stamm have no mana. But you can give the low-hp people practice with melée weapons to increase their Fighter levels and up their health. Meanwhile there are items that give the wielder a small amount of mana so you can give these to the no-mana people to cast spells until they get an actual Wizard/Priest level and develop some mana of their own.
As it's your first playthrough I recommend taking a full party of four, but note that you don't
have to take this many - you could try a solo run if you wanted
. Don't worry about taking your time, at least in the early levels, as there's plenty of food and water so you don't need to worry about running out of that unless you take a
really long time (and even then, there are some regenerating food supplies if you know where to look
).
Hmm, what else...well, I can think of a few general tips...
When recruiting your heroes at the start, bear in mind that until you actually rez/reincarnate someone, you have no food or water bars to worry about so you can take as long as you like wandering around and checking everyone out before you actually recruit someone. There are 24 heroes in total to choose from.
Spells only use mana when you initially click the runes - the actual
casting of the spell doesn't use any more, so you can prepare spells in advance (eg get offensive spells ready when you know you're going into a room full of monsters) and hurl them all off at once when you need to
.
Shields never seem to really do any good, so I never bother with them and instead my characters always keep an empty potion flask in their off-hands so I can have them create their own potions.
Similarly, I'm not sure what good some armour does - much of it doesn't seem to offer much more protection than any other, so don't feel as though you have to equip everyone in the most impressive-sounding armour you can find (as that kind of stuff tends to be quiet heavy
).
Speaking of stuff being heavy, if you're moving around and notice that you seem to be moving slowly, go into people's inventories and check their weight (shown at the bottom of the screen). If it's in the yellow, you're approaching that person's weight limit and are slowed. If it's in the red, you've gone over and are
even more slow. If the number is yellow/red but you're not carrying much (or haven't added anything to that person's inventory since before they became encumbered), check to make sure they don't have any injured body parts (they will have a red square around them and if you unequip that slot you'll see the body part is bandaged). If they do, just give 'em a health potion and this will fix it
.
I think I'll leave you with that for now. Hope that's enough to get you started but let us know if you have any more questions - it's always good to meet new people getting into DM even after all this time
.