Yes I know my last two posts were about Dragon Age: Origins, so you should be used to it by now 😛  Anyways, after playing my Mage and my Rogue for quite a bit yesterday on my Veteran’s Day holiday, I decided to roll up another Rogue since I had missed a few things from the early game that you can’t get to once you’ve embarked upon the “main” storyline. And now knowing a few things about the game, I came up with a list of things I wished I would have known before starting.  Kind of like this bloggers post, but mine may have spoilers…

My Rules for starting out in Dragon Age: Origins

1. Be a Rogue – and train up lock picking, this way you can open up all kinds of locked places and get much more loot than any other class, and some of it is quite nice!
2. Pick up ALL loot – not to keep but to sell.  Early on you’ll want a bunch of stuff to sell so you can buy your first two (YES TWO!) backpacks for WAY cheaper than they are later on in the game.
3. DO NOT sell anything marked “gift” – You’ll want these later on to give to your NPC party members to boost your influence with them.
4. Holding down the TAB key highlights everything that you can interact with.  This is especially useful for finding the odd book, letter, or what-have-you that you need to complete either a quest or a codex entry.
5. Train up poison – you can make some nifty grenades with this talent, and grenades basically gives you an AoE spell equivalent. Plus you can deal extra damage by putting poison on your blades, which is nothing to scoff at either.  
6. You may mitigate influence loss if you do your “dirty deeds” prior to acquiring certain party members. For Example [Spoiler Alert]  In Lothering, shoo off the priestess from the over charging merchant before taking in Leliana. You’ll still take a small influence hit from Alistair, but you can give him a gift and he’ll be happy again, plus it’s pretty easy to get brownie points with him anyways.
7. In “temporary” instances, you may be able to travel to your camp and back without losing the instance (I haven’t proven this with all instances, however, so use this tip with extreme prejudice – Additionally, I think characters that are in camp will still know what you’ve done somehow, so you cannot mitigate influence dings by leaving NPC’s in camp while you go on murderous rampages – again I haven’t tested this extensively, but it seems this is true)
8. If you have enchantment “boxes” on your gear, be sure to use them! 
9. Sell off junk that you’re never going to use, your inventory can become full very quickly if you’re holding onto old junk.  Craft up items as well in order to use up some of those inventory hogging reagents.  Basically I sell anything that can’t be used by my current party members or other “regular” party members.  If in doubt sell it, esp. if it doesn’t have any special stats or enchantment slots.  You’ll almost always find better stuff down the road anyway.
10. Pause is your BEST friend – yes it can be a pain sometimes, but it can easily save you from party wipes by allowing you to “focus” all party members on one target, or to get an ailing party member to drink a health potion, or whatever – it will save your butt, believe me!
11. Learn how to set up an effective tactics queue for each of your party members – again this can save your party some serious grief.  My number one queue positions are to auto-drink potions when health or mana get low, just in case that incoming heal spell is a little late, or to ensure that the healer has the mana needed to cast a healing spell…

I think that about covers it.  I highly suggest you look up the “spoilers” concerning how to get the two backpacks from Ostagar.

I think that about sums it up – I don’t think I put any big spoilers in there. Anyways, the weekend is fast approaching, I hope the rest of your week goes fast and fun, Enjoy!