Increased stats:
When you are on a shard that allows you to bring up your stats, drink a lot of beer until your stats are 1-1-1, or at least all under 3. Then fight something such as a dummy or a headless and your stats will go up. Keep doing this until you cannot buy anymore beer.

Creating a character:
A good safe character is easy to create. The following character is good for money, fighting, and buying items. Since you only can have so much skills and stats, try the following:

Skills:
Blacksmith
Mining
Swords/Fencing/Macing (no archery)
Tactics
Parry
Healing
Anatomy
100 STR
100 DEX
25 INT

Start at Minoc, which good for ores and Vesper is a good place of trade, and for when you become GM Smith. Start in Trammel. A pack horse is a good investment. You should have a Fisher who can get you a lot of food, which is important for skill gains. With all the money, buy some more shovels/pick axes and start a mage.

Gaining skill:
You gain more skill on a different server with less users of that skill. For example, if you are in Minoc's blacksmith and you are trying to gain smithing skill while everyone else is also doing so, you will barey get any. For faster skill gain, go in a dungeon.

Raise tinkering and mining:
Get a boat and two shovels and a tinkering kit. Go to the very northern part of the world where water meets mountain and start mining. You have shovels to get ore and a player run house nearby usually has a forge so you can smelt them and tinker more shovels.

Recommended profession:
The profession with the most pros and fewest cons is the Mule. A good skill table would be:

Smithing
Carpentry - Stone crafting
Mining - Granite and sand
Lumberjacking
Tinkering
Alchemy - Glass blowing
Tailoring