Commoner

Commoners are characters that have not joined a guild. All characters in DragonRealms begin their adventuring careers as commoners. It is largely assumed that commoners intend to join a guild, typically very soon after they are created.

Commoners train all skillsets as if they were secondary. For this reason, some players will train their new characters for a while in the tertiary skillsets of the guilds that they plan to join. For example, a player who intends to start a Moon Mage character might train his/her armor skills as a commoner, knowing that the game mechanics make learning those skills more difficult once the character actually joins the guild. Unlike guilded characters, Commoners do not gain skillset perks associated with skill-secondaries (e.g., Commoners do not get to FORAGE CAREFUL and are limited to small-sized arm-worn shields).

A rash of trained commoners sprung up around 2002 and 2003, after it was announced that the Necromancer's Guild was nearing release. Players were guaranteed that commoners who joined the Necromancer's Guild would be able to keep their skills, and so many players trained commoners in the hopes that they would have a head start among the eventual crush of new Necromancer characters. The retaining of skills on joining the guild was not guaranteed, as it was thought that the same principles that cause the Thieves Guild to wipe new members' skills would apply to the Necromancer's Guild as well. These commoners were sometimes called "necrocommoners".

The GM's originally responsible for developing the Necromancer guild are no longer on active Simu staff, so since that time it has become more or less accepted among players that the release of the Necromancer's Guild is on hold indefinitely. However, it continues to appear on the goals list that the Gamemasters release yearly. Many necrocommoners have joined other guilds or been shelved completely.

Although commoners clearly lack the powers of guilded characters and are not mechanically balanced to be their equals, a rare few players have commoner characters that remain so for the sake of roleplay. Most if not all of these commoners are "alt" characters of players whose primary character has joined a guild.