So you want to play a warrior?

Backstory Basics

It is not particularly difficult to come up with a good background for a warrior. Warriors are fairly straight forward by nature, but they don't have to be simple or boring. If you look at fantasy genre in books, television, and movies, it is very common for the party leader/series protagonist to be the party warrior.
A disproportionate share of the most popular and memorable villains in media are warriors as well.
Scarterra is a rough place, so it's pretty common for peasants and princes alike to have reason to acquire weapons and learn the skills to use said weapons.
Typically, the best warrior training is more commonly available to the upper classes, but even lowborn street urchins can become badass warriors if they survive growing up on the mean streets long enough.

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As a player character warrior, your character probably has some form of advanced training and has seen his share of action in the field.
A highborn lad with knightly training is going to have a different outlook from a fur clad barbarian warlord from the frozen north and both are going to have different personalities from a streetwise sword wielding street urchin or an escaped gladiator slave, but at the end of the day, all these characters boil down to their Dexterity + Melee dice pool but it is still useful to understand your warrior's background for roleplaying purposes.

Power Optimization Of Your Points Buys

In melee or when fighting with a bow, your weapon's base damage is boosted by your character's strength and the accuracy of that particular attack.
This means, in purely mathematical terms, as an Attribute, Dexterity is superior to Strength. A high Dexterity means you hit more and consistently do more damage. A high Strength just means you consistently do more damage. A high accuracy attack means more damage, but an attack roll that scored the bare minimum to hit is better than nothing. If your character misses with an attack entirely, a high strength doesn't matter because you don't do any damage whereas a hit with low strength might get lucky and do some damage.
A high strength has benefits outside of combat. You can climb and swim faster and lift and break things easier. Also, you can swap your Strength for your social attributes when performing crude Intimidation. Some players just like the idea of playing characters who are brick houses. That is a good enough reason to take a high Strength score.
The best warriors have high Dexterity scores and high Strength stores, but from a min-max perspective, Strength ●●● is all you really need to be a great warrior. Some of the best weapons and armors require a minimum Strength ●●● to use without a penalty but very few weapons require Strength ●●●● and no armor requires this.
A high Stamina score is useful to warriors but not required. Stamina is used to resist bashing damage and to accelerate natural healing. This is useful to a warrior, but most damage a warrior faces in Scarterra D10 is lethal, not bashing. Most warriors rely on magical healing over natural healing too. In both cases, it makes no difference whether your Stamina is ● or ●●●●● when your character is getting in straight up fights with other warriors if you rely on a magical healer or a piles of potions to maintain your health.
A high Stamina score helps characters pass Fatigue checks. Any battle that lasts more than five or six rounds is likely to force a Fatigue check on all characters involved and really long battles are likely to force multiple Fatigue checks. This makes Stamina useful to a warrior, but a fair few battles are resolved very quickly and don't require even one Fatigue check. Few battles require more than one such roll.

Comissioned male Mediteranean Satyr by Zeta Gardner

A high Stamina score makes your character more resistant to poisons, energy drains, and magical spells that target the body. This is useful, but even in the high fantasy setting of Scarterra, a lot of battles don't involve these exotic forms of attack, but those that do tend to be very deadly and high consequence affairs.
Every one wanting to play a warrior should look over the Advanced Training section of the Merits article. Almost every warrior should buy "shield proficiency", especially if they are not a spell caster. Shields were ubiquitous in pre-gunpowder warfare among every culture and region on Earth for a good reason...they worked.
The other advanced training Merits are useful, but they are more for flavor, but flavor is where the fun is.

Avoid one-dimensional characters

A spell casting character or a lore master character can get hundreds of experience points and still only develop a fraction of the traits open to them.
It is not hard to get a ten dice combat pool, or even an eleven dice combat pool. You can do this in Session Zero with during Character Creation if the game master allows you to start with two traits at five dots. Even if you start with only four dots in your Dexterity and Melee pools, you can max out your combat pool with a mere 24 experience points.
Then what? You have nowhere left to grow as a character, at least in terms of dots and traits.
Also, ScarterraD10 is not the same as D&D. In D&D you tend to have four level appropriate encounters and then have a long rest. Rinse and repeat. D&D10 has fewer combats but the combats it does have tend to all be life-or-death. In short, ScarterraD10 combats tend to be the climax or capstone of a story arc, not the foundation of the story arc.
If your character is only good at hitting things and making them fall down, than you as a player will probably be bored for long stretches of time between combats. Your character should have other skills and abilities.

Kormatin Portrait2 by Eron12 on Hero

Maybe your character is a warrior poet or a ass-kicking scholar. Maybe your warrior dabbles in a bit of magic. Maybe your warrior is a great detective who hunts down hidden bad guys and then uses her warrior prowess to beat them up. Maybe your warrior is a great leader of men. Maybe your warrior is musically talented. It is common in Scarterra for people who grow up in or near the wilds to both have lots of combat prowess and wilderness lore. A high Athletics rating is good if you want to surf a shield down a set of stairs or swing from a chandelier as opposed to just saying "I attack with my axe" for the fortieth time.
The bottom line is your warrior should have at least one secondary skillset outside of combat. It makes the character more interesting and unique and it gives your player a chance to get a piece of the roleplaying action during noncombat encounters.

A good example of this principle in action is The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Porthos, Aramis, and Athos were all skilled swordsmen and loyal patriots dedicated to king and country, but it was their backgrounds and interests outside of the battlefield that made them distinct and memorable characters. Arguably when a fight begins, the three are more interchangeable, "all for one and one for all", but they were very distinct characters when the action stopped. The novel would have been boring if they were all the same character copy and pasted three times.

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