Wasteland 1 and that Old-School Skill Set Symphony

Chris Avellone writes on his Obsidian blog about replaying the original Wasteland and enjoying how deep character creation can enhance roleplaying:

So skills contributing to role-playing: As an example, when building my Wasteland party of four Rangers again, all I knew to start is I wanted a Brainiac, a Thief, a Jack of All Trades/Gunslinger as party leader, and a Melee Specialist because I like bashing the **** out of things with clubs, axes, and chainsaws. With those basics in mind, I went ahead and went through the Wasteland stat and skill set and built personalities formed by the random roll (although biased toward accepting characters with a high IQ, since IQ is a big “win” in Wasteland – and this should remind me to do a blog on how prevalence of usefulness of skills and abilities can ruin role-playing and a lack of balance can do the same) and also based on the skills that were provided to me and what points I put into them.

Now one of the great things about Wasteland is that there are 27 skills to start. You can even learn brand-new ones over the course of the game, and the first time I discovered that, I was floored and ended up jacking up my IQ as high it could go to see what new skills became available (the higher tier skills are IQ-dependent).