I'm currently on the sixth level of my latest Dungeons of Dredmor run. I got tired of random skillsets. This time, I wanted to play as a rogue. An honest-to-goodness rogue with traps and crossbows and stuff. So my skills are Daggers, Crossbows, Burglary, Archaeology, Tinkering, Big Game Hunter, and Piracy.

The first time I used Tinkering, I ended up with a million zillion crossbow bolts and I could plink away at all the enemies from a distance and it was pretty awesome. For this run, I wanted to do that. So I took Tinkering, to make crossbows and bolts, and Crossbows, to make my shots stronger and recover more ammo. Burglary helps a lot with this plan as well--it has a teleport, which lets me jump away from enemies to get in crossbow hits, and it has Lockup, which chains an enemy in place so they can't fight back when I attack from a distance.

I tried Daggers when the expansion first came out, and I thought it was a cool skill. It's got stances that give huge boosts to counterattacks or critical chance. I was hoping I could use those. Unfortunately, that plan hasn't been working out, since there just aren't any daggers! I can't find any good ones. So that's been an underwhelming skill so far.

I took Big Game Hunter cuz...I dunno. Butchery, pretty much. Free meat. I put a point into that early on and it was pretty helpful in the early levels--some bonus xp from collecting trophies, and some bonus food from butchering animals. By this point I've got a better handle on things and I don't need the food or the teeny xp boosts, but I've been turning the extra meat into Lutefisk For The Lutefisk God and using some of it to apply a tasty meat glaze to my armor for bonus HP.

I don't remember why I picked Piracy. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I went for most of the game not getting any use out of it at all. Then I found a crafting recipe for the Mace of Windu, which uses amethyst gems. Okay, that's a combo. Piracy gives you free gems whenever you kill enemies; normally, gems like amethysts are rare, but pirates can plunder them all over the place. So suddenly I had a neverending supply of Maces of Windu. Which, by the way, are all artifacts. So now I can use Archaeology to send them to the museum for about 4000 xp. (THAT'S A LOT.)

Anyway, so far so good.