Special Disadvantages

A reminder about light and darkness as regards Special Disadvantages. “Darkness”, as the game interprets the term, means “out of the sun”. So, if you’re indoors, you’re in darkness. Obviously, if you’re outside at night you’re in darkness, too. “Light” means “outside during the day”. For game purposes, you would do well to ignore any light-powered advantages since you will make advancement more difficult and have few chances to benefit from it.

Inability to Regenerate Spell Points

Everyone regenerates their magica reserves when they sleep. If you take this disadvantage you will not be able to. This is a good disadvantage to take if you have chosen Spell Absorption as an advantage or if you have no intention of being a spell-caster.

Damage

A very restrictive disadvantage. If you are outside during the day or enter a holy place (depending on which version you take), you take damage. If you take the “Takes Damage from Sunlight” disadvantage and use the “Cautious” travel mode, you will always arrive at your destination when the sun is down. This can be good since you’ll never have to worry about taking damage while looking for an inn. This can be bad since the people you need to talk to for directions (except innkeepers and merchants) are only out during the daylight hours. Exercise caution in desert areas. Fighters Guilds in these areas tend to count as Holy Places.

Phobia

You’re scared to death of whatever you choose and have decreased chances to hit, less damage inflicted and a harder time defending yourself against the type you choose. Take this one with extreme caution.

Light-Powered Magery

You have problems casting indoors or after dark. If you take decreased ability, then you’ll have fewer spell points under those conditions and your spells will have a greater chance of failure. Otherwise you’ll be unable to cast at all in those conditions. A good choice if you’re planning on being a non-spell caster.

Darkness-Powered Magery

You have problems casting in sunlight. If you choose to be unable to cast in sunlight, you will lose all your magica reserves when you step outside during the day. Decreased ability means you will lose part of your reserves and have a greater chance of spell failure. This is a good choice for a non-spell-casting character.

Taking Increased Magery 3.0x and Reduced Ability in both Darkness and Light will result in your having more spell points than the default (you’ll get about 2x Intelligence, not 1.5x as you’d expect), but will seriously drop the difficulty dagger.

Forbidden Weaponry

You can’t use weapons of the type you select. You can own them, carry them in your inventory and sell them, but you can’t equip them.

Low Tolerance

You will be particularly susceptible to the agent you choose. This will usually mean you’ll take maximum damage.

Critical Weakness

Coming into contact with the agent you choose could kill you as you will take serious damage from it. Racial benefits take precedence over class penalties, so High Elves should choose a critical weakness to paralysis if they are going to use class disadvantages. There is a loophole in the program that can be exploited to your benefit. All harmful effects are checked against your magic resistance before they are checked against other things. For example, if you are bitten by a Spider (which has a chance of paralyzing you), the check is made against your magic resistance before it is checked against your resistance to paralysis or poison. If you have taken "Immunity to Magic" as a class advantage, you can give yourself a critical weakness to Poison, Paralysis and Disease with a fair amount of safety. The catch is that if you fail your magic immunity check, you will usually take full effect because of the critical weakness. The combination will bury your difficulty dagger in the red, though.

Forbidden Armor

Choose your poison: Leather, Chain or Plate. You can’t wear it. You can own it and sell it, but you can’t equip it. Taking the disadvantage of being unable to wear Leather or Chain can be a severe handicap very early in the game, but will be unnoticeable once you hit 2nd or 3rd level. By the same token, being unable to use Plate is not much of a disadvantage early in the game, but can be a major obstacle at later stages.

Forbidden Shield

You can’t equip shields of the particular type. Bucklers provide +1 to your armor class on the shield side; Round Shields give +2, Kite Shields +3 and Tower Shields +4. As a recommendation, if you have to take this, skip the Buckler since it only provides +1 and skip the Tower for weight considerations. A bit more on this under forbidden materials.

Forbidden Materials

You cannot equip any weapon, shield or armor made from the selected material. You can almost always afford to lose Orcish since there’s so little of it running around in the game you’ll never even notice its loss. Depriving yourself of Iron, Silver or Steel might hamper you early on, but will be almost unnoticeable once you’re past 5th level.

Ranked from lowest to highest for weapons: Iron, Steel, Silver, Elvish, Dwarven, Mithril, Adamantium, Ebony, Orcish, Daedric. The higher on the list, the more damage the material inflicts and the more it weighs (Orcish being the exception -- it's the heaviest material in the game).

For armor purposes Iron is +3, Steel +4, Elvish +5, Dwarven +6, Mithril/Adamantium +7, Ebony +8, Orcish +9, Daedric +10. You will almost never find any armor (besides helmets and shields) made of silver, but if you do, it's +4.

For Enchantment purposes (making magic items): Iron, Steel, Elvish/Mithril, Dwarven, Silver/Adamantium, Ebony, Orcish, Daedric. Silver and Adamantium weapons have the same capacity for holding an enchantment. Elvish and Mithril have the same capacity. Silver armor (pauldrons, gauntlets, etc.) apparently has a higher enchantment potential than Daedric, but it is equivalent to steel for protection.

As a general rule you’ll gain more benefit from losing the better materials than you will for restricting yourself from Iron. Iron is a safe choice, but you won’t gain much benefit from it.

The difference is sometimes hard to see (especially with Silver/Elvish and Adamantium/Ebony), but shields are also made from these materials. So you can allow yourself to have a Round Shield, but if you restrict yourself from Iron you can’t use an Iron Round Shield.

You can distinguish the materials through the color of the item. Iron tends to be dull dark gray, Steel tends to be shiny gray, Silver and Elvish are both silvery and difficult to distinguish, especially with shields. Dwarven is gold, Mithril is dark blue or blue-black, Adamantium and Ebony are both black, but Ebony tends to have obvious gray highlights. Orcish is greenish-black, and Daedric is red. If you have access to an item maker you can tell the difference between some of these materials by the number of enchantment points the item has. An Ebony Kite Shield has more enchantment points than an Adamantium Kite Shield, but there is no difference in the protection they provide. A Kite Shield is +3 regardless of whether it’s Iron or Daedric.

Be careful in selecting any forbidden materials, weapons or armor. Some creatures require special materials to be able to hit them. If you lock yourself out more than one or two of the high-end materials, you may have to resort to hand-to-hand combat in order to hit your target (not necessarily a bad thing if you’re using the Monk as a template). Also, you may very well prevent yourself from using the armor and weapons you start with.

A couple of final words on Advantages and Disadvantages. You cannot cancel them out. For example, you cannot saddle yourself with a critical weakness to poison and take immunity to poison. Also, you should not duplicate any racial advantages. For example, don’t take immunity to paralysis if you’re a High Elf. It won’t do anything except make it more difficult to develop your skills. And remember, you’re limited to 7 of each, so choose wisely.

SKILL PLACEMENT

Assuming that you have a little luck at the beginning of the game as far as picking up treasure, your character could easily be high-level within a few weeks of stepping out of Privateer's Hold and not have to fight anything. On the other hand, your character could spend years of game time gaining just a few levels. Skill placement is the key. The cold hard facts of life in Tamriel dictate that you will live or die by which skills you place in which slots.

For ease of skill development, nothing beats the schools of magic. You can sit in a nice, comfortable tavern room and sling spells for a few weeks, resting to replenish your magica, and become an instant machine of death. A High Elf with Critical Weakness to Paralysis, restrictions from a couple of materials and 3x Magica is ideal for this. The 3x Magica and Critical Weakness essentially cancel each other out by leaving the difficulty dagger at about 1.0x (normal skill advancement). The material restrictions will drop the dagger to about 0.5x (more or less). Make some cheapie practice spells in a spell-maker and you're set. Spend a few days doing the easy quests for the Mages Guild to get access to the item maker and everything else will take care of itself.

If you'd like to make life really hard for yourself, create a Linguist character. Stick those language skills in your Primary and Major slots and leave all of your weapon skills in Miscellaneous. Got any idea how few Daedra are running around when you are 2nd level? The nifty thing about this type of character is that you don't qualify to join any guilds, so getting training in those Miscellaneous skills is out of the question until you increase some of them by 15 or 20 points or pay the exorbitant fees of the temple trainers. If you'd like to make it even harder, give your character some really nifty, but useless advantages and no disadvantages. Try it when you're feeling suicidal.

Critical Strike is a must-have skill. It allows you to do more damage with your weapons. Though it will develop on its own, starting it off in the 20's or 30's gives you an edge at the beginning of the game.

Most of the "canned" warrior-type classes include several weapons in the Primary and Major slots. I've found this to be more of a hindrance than help. Yes, it allows you to immediately use any nifty weapon that you come across. But on the other hand, you have to continually swap weapons in order to develop these skills. Pick your favorite weapons type and put it in as a Primary or Major skill and your second and/or third favorites as Minors.

Putting one school of magic as either a Primary or Major skill will allow you to immediately join the Mages Guild and get access to the spell-maker. Even if you do not have Increased Magery as an advantage, it's a good idea. Mysticism (for the "Recall" spell - you'll need to practice a lot with a cheap "open" spell to get the casting cost down to reasonable levels, though), Thaumaturgy (for "Levitate), Alteration (for "Water Breathing") or Restoration (for healing-type spells) are all good choices.

Some skills should not be included unless you have a specific purpose in mind: Medical (which will develop on its own), Mercantile (which you can develop by selling off your goodies), Running/Jumping (which you can develop on your own) and languages (can be trained at the Mages and Fighters Guilds if you need them) are wasted in skill slots except for role-playing purposes.

You might consider taking Archery as a minor skill. Humans will certainly be trying to make a pincushion out of you at every opportunity. It's nice to be able to return the favor, but not critical.

Swimming and Climbing are recommended as Minor skills, at best. You will need them, but won't be using them often enough to justify their inclusion in a Primary or Major slot.

Unfortunately there are just too few opportunities to make effective use of the Pickpocket skill in a role-playing sense. It might be worth it if you stood a chance of grabbing something worthwhile. But at a maximum of 5 gold per attempt, it's just not worth the effort. Yeah, you can wander around town and pick the pockets of the townies. But if you're that hard up for cash, go pillage a graveyard. The best use of the Pickpocket skill is to get you into the Thieves Guild.

Developing your Lockpicking skill might be an early priority, even if you don't include it as a skill pick. At higher levels you encounter locked doors with greater frequency. Unless you're willing to wear out your knuckles, break weapons or burn off your magica, you'll have to pick the lock. There is some evidence, however, that increasing your Lockpicking skill also increases the chances that you'll encounter a locked door. You pays your money, you takes your chances.

Streetwise and Etiquette are "nice-to-have-but-hardly-essential" skills. They'll help you a little in your dealings with townies or nobles by modifying the reaction roll.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 559