DEALING WITH THE DAGGER

In the middle of the first character generation screen is a scale with a dagger for the pointer. This scale shows the relative difficulty of improving your skills in order to gain levels, hence the name "Difficulty Dagger".

Each time you attempt to use a skill, whether it be picking a lock, swinging a sword, selling an item or whatever, a check is made against the appropriate skill to see whether you are successful or not. The game keeps track of how many times it checks each skill. When the required numbers of checks are made, you have a decent chance of seeing an increase in that skill.

But just like real life, the less you know about something, the easier it is to learn something new. The number of checks required to increase a skill goes up in skill increments of 15%. When your skills are below 15%, it only takes a few uses of a skill to increase the skill level (I've seen skill increases off of 2 skill uses, but the dagger was at 0.3x and the skill was less than 10% at the time). From 15% to 30%, it takes about 10 to 15 checks against a skill before you'll see an increase in it. From 30% to 45% it takes 30 checks. It takes more uses when you reach 45%, even more after 60%, a bunch after 75% and a ton after 90%. You modify the number of checks required to increase a skill by raising or lowering the difficulty dagger. When the dagger is at 0.3x, it takes about 1/3 as many checks to see a skill increase. When the dagger is at 3.0x it takes about 3 times as many checks.

For example, let's suppose you're unloading your goodies with a local merchant. If your dagger is set in the middle and your Mercantile skill is at about 30%, you will have to make about 20 sales to see an increase in the skill. If your dagger is set at .03x, you might only have to make six sales, but if it's at 3.0x you might have to make 60 sales before your Mercantile skill will increase. And remember, the higher your skill level, the more times it will have to be checked before it will increase. So the name of the game is to get that dagger as low as possible.

With everything left at the default values, the dagger is at 1.0x. If you added health points to your character, then the dagger rose (a little or a lot, depending on how many you added). This means it will be more difficult for your character to gain levels. In other words, you’ll have to use your skills more times before you’ll see an increase in the skill level. If you want to gain levels quickly, then you need to move the dagger down toward the other end of the scale. In order to do this, you must saddle your character with disadvantages or penalties to offset any benefits you may have taken. You may have no more than 7 advantages and 7 disadvantages.

One item that will raise or lower the dagger, but you can't see the result is choosing reflexes on the next-to-last character generation screen. "Reflexes" is how quickly the critters react. If you choose "Very High", the critters will move and attack faster, giving you less time in which to react. Since this makes the game more difficult, your difficulty dagger is lowered, albeit only slightly. On the other hand, taking slower game reactions will give you more time to react and think about what's happening, but it will also raise the dagger. Most gamers are very comfortable with "Very High" reflexes. Newer players will probably want to play the game for a bit at slower speed in order to get used to the interface. Once you choose the game's reaction time, you may not change it. Or at least if you can I haven't come across the method yet (and don't think I haven't tried - as memories of being pounced on by five Ancient Liches come to mind).

SKILL DEVELOPMENT

What follows is some helpful hints on developing your skills. Keep in mind that you can train in each of these skills for 100gp/level at a guild that requires them (except Knights Guilds). For example, a 3rd level character will pay 300 GP for each training session while a 15th level character will pay 1500 GP for a training session. Most temples offer training to non-members, but their fees are exorbitant.

Remember: you must let more than 6 hours elapse before you will see a skill increase when you rest/loiter.

Schools of Magic

Let’s dispose of all six schools of magic right off the bat since developing them is pretty much the same for all of them. Join the Mages Guild. At Apprentice rank (rank 0) you get access to the spell maker. What you need to make are five cheap spells; one from each school except Destruction (if you took any school of magic as a Primary, Major or Minor you usually get “Shock” as a starting spell). The other five schools and my recommendation for a practice spell are:

Alteration: Water Breathing

Illusion: Light

Mysticism: Open

Thaumaturgy: Levitate or Water Walking

Restoration: Heal Fatigue

For Water Breathing, Light and Levitate/Water Walking you can only fiddle with the duration of the spell.

Lowering the duration reduces the cost to buy the spell and the casting cost, too. There is no major benefit to be gained from lowering the duration to less than 1 round per 2 or 3 levels (1 round per 20 levels costs the same in money and spell points) unless you all you need is a spell effect with a really short duration. Find the cheapest combination you can get and buy it. Name the spell something easy to distinguish from your regular spells. Train A, Train I, Train M, Train T and Train R work for me, but all you want to do is make the spell easy to find in your spell book.

For Open you can fiddle with the chance of success. The lower your chance to succeed, the cheaper the spell. 1% + 1% per 2 levels seems the cheapest way to go. For Destruction, buy the regular “Shock” or some other Destruction spell. You’re not going to actually be casting it. As long as you have the spell points to be able to cast it one time you’ll be OK.

Once you have the spells in your spell book, start casting them. For your Destruction spell you will cast it, but when you see the message to “press button to fire the spell”, hit the “E” key instead. This aborts the spell and returns your spell points to normal, but you still get credited with having cast it. “Q” will recast the spell; “E” will abort it. So a few Q-E keystrokes will credit you with having cast the spell a few times. After doing the Destruction spell, cast the others. The first time you cast the spell you’ll have to double-click it from the spell book, but “Q” will fire the spell off again (at the original casting cost, so check your spell book and double-click when the casting cost goes down).

When you run out of spell points, rest until you have them back and repeat the process. It’s boring, boring, boring, but it gets the job done. 15 or 20 minutes at the keyboard can raise your skill levels 30 to 40 points. You’ll find that the more skill you have in a school, the cheaper the spell is to cast. Sorry, but you can’t get lower than 5 points except for a couple of spells that come with the Vampirism or Lycanthropy diseases.

Some players have reported being able to set the range on practice spells (Alteration being a notable exception) and thus been able to use the "cast-abort" system to increase their skills. I have not been able to get this to work on my system, but it might work on yours. When you create the spell, set the range to "single target at range" or "area at range" (whichever works for you). When casting it, hit "E" when you see the "push button to cast spell" message.

Some players have also reported being able to combine effects into a single spell and, thus, raise two or three skills at the same time. I have not been successful at this, either, but you're welcome to try.

Archery

You have to shoot the bow. But it doesn’t work to shoot the bow at the wall. You have to shoot the bow at something that can shoot back or hit back. If you come across a critter in a cage while dungeon crawling, don’t waste the opportunity - make a pincushion out of it. What’s even better is a critter that requires special metal to damage it. Suppose you find a lycanthrope in a cage. You have to have a silver weapon or better to damage him. But you can still shoot at him with an iron or steel bow and get archery experience. You don’t necessarily have to hit/damage your target - you just have to shoot. Each arrow counts for skill level purposes. So in the lycanthrope example, stick 20 to 30 arrows in him and then finish him off with a weapon that can actually hurt him. Be sure to retrieve your arrows. If he’s fairly close to the entrance of the dungeon, you might want to step outside, rest, let the dungeon reset and then go after him again.

Axe, Blunt Weapon, Long Blade, Short Blade, Hand-to-Hand

Sorry, outside of a trainer, the only way you get experience is to fight something that can fight back. Shadow boxing won’t do you any good. For Hand-to-Hand, the graveyards are good training grounds. Find one with rats and bats in it and then go beat ‘em up. Leave the mausoleum and then go back. If you’re worried about taking a lot of damage because your skill level is low, use a second weapon instead of a shield. Swipe at the critter a couple of times with your weak weapon, then hit the “S” key to switch weapons and nail it with your best weapon.

Backstabbing

This skill is difficult to develop because you need to be able to sneak up behind your victim to get the element of surprise. A high Stealth skill is almost a requirement before you can begin serious work on backstabbing. An Invisibility spell will help, but it’s an expensive way to go. You can also backstab with a bow if you can see your target before you’re right on top of it. Be careful in sneaking up behind with a melee weapon. If you get too close you’ll bump into your victim and lose the chance at the backstab.

Climbing

You develop your climbing skill by climbing and it doesn’t matter what you’re climbing. Climb up on thrones, climb hedges, climb one-story houses, climb the walls of your room at the inn. If you fall you won’t take damage and you get experience for doing it. Each time you see the words “Climbing Mode” at the top of your screen you’ve made the attempt and it’s the number of attempts that develops the skill. This was fixed with one of the later patches (212/213, I believe). If you’re running an earlier version, climbing will not get you climbing experience and you’ll have to go to a trainer or upgrade your software. There will be times (especially with hedges) when you'll fall INTO the thing you're climbing. If you're running at least the v.212 patch you can hit <alt>+f11 to pull yourself out.

Dodging

It will develop on its own, but it develops fastest when you have multiple opponents swinging at you because there are multiple chances for your opponent to hit you so the game makes multiple checks of the skill. Normally (with SPD of 60-69) you’ll get in two or three swings for every one your opponent gets. Backing away and letting the critter engage you again can help, but this is one tough skill to work on without a trainer. At medium skill levels and wearing decent armor, go find yourself a rat or a bat and let him chomp at you for a while.

Etiquette/Streetwise

Develop this by talking to people. Use “Polite” to develop Etiquette and “Blunt” to develop Streetwise. You’ll get a lot of snide comments from the people you talk to, but it’s the only way that doesn’t involve a trainer. Thieves and Assassins who are members of their respective guilds can practice this with the Spymaster (select “Talk” rather than “Spymaster”).

Jumping

Jump. Don’t waste your money on a trainer for this skill. Just jump in place a few times every now and then or jump while you’re walking or running.

Languages (Orcish, Giantish, Daedric, Imp, Harpy, etc.)

Outside of a trainer, you develop this skill when you run into these critters. Clicking on the critter while your weapon is sheathed makes a check against the skill. A successful check means you are able to convince the creature to leave you alone. At low skill levels simply being around them will give you a skill increase (probably all of the curse words they use while you’re beating on them).

Lockpicking

Pick locks. You only get one attempt at a lock. A second attempt doesn’t do any good and will bring the guards down on you if you are in a town. Be careful with that mouse button. The best practice opportunity comes when you enter a walled town. There are doors every few steps on the inside of the city walls. Just walk around the town making one click on every door you come to. Every once in a while you’ll get lucky, but be careful to only try once at each door to avoid the wrath of the guards. You can do this multiple times if you leave town and come back again.

Medical

This develops automatically. Each time you rest you treat your injuries. Taking shorter rest periods will exercise the skill more often. If your difficulty dagger is down around .03x, you'll probably find that your medical skill develops very quickly (every 5 or so rest periods). In this instance, you might want to consider placing it in with your Miscellaneous skills to avoid gaining unexpected levels and leaving room for the development of the skills you really want.

Mercantile

Buy and sell stuff (preferably sell). When you unload your goodies don’t do it in one huge batch. Buy and sell one item at a time. This also works with innkeepers: rent your room one day at a time. This doesn’t mean go back to the innkeeper every 24 hours. After you rent the room for a day, purchase additional days one at a time (note: this does not work if you are getting the room for free (Knights Guild members and on Heart's Day). Identifying magical items at the Mages Guild also checks the mercantile skill. If you have a lot of items to identify, do it one at a time. If you're feeling really sneaky, have him identify nothing. It costs 0 gp and checks your Mercantile skill. Curing diseases at temples and purchasing spells/magic items at the Mages Guild also makes a check against your mercantile skill.

On this same topic, you’ll pay top dollar and get low dollar at stores where the description says “you can’t detect the slightest defect”. On the other hand, you’ll spend less and get more money for your stuff in the stores that have rusty equipment and mice running around. One last tid-bit: when you’re unloading a whole lot of stuff at a store, save the best pieces for last. After you’ve sold enough of the cheaper items, loiter for more than 6 hours and let your Mercantile skill increase. The next time you sell, you’ll get more money for the better items since their sale will be based on the higher Mercantile skill.

Pickpocketing

The best victims are rats and bats, but you can pick the pocket of any critter. When you’re facing them, pick their pockets. So what if they get in a few free swings at you? They don’t do much damage and you can get in 20 to 40 attempts in the time they take to get in a couple of swings. In the dungeons and cemeteries (inside the mausoleum - in the cemetery itself, the guards will get you) you can pickpocket with impunity. In town a failed attempt will bring the guards down on you.

Running

Run. You can run while Levitating and Swimming if you want to develop two skills at once. Given a clear path, a 3% skill rating and mediocre Speed, you’re still faster than almost everything in the game.

Stealth

Each time you come within detection distance of a critter, the game checks to see whether you are detected. Because of this, the skill will pretty much develop all by itself and pretty quickly if you do a lot of dungeon crawling. According to the documentation, holding down the <ALT> key while you’re moving puts you into sneak mode (you move at 40% of your base speed), but this does not work if you are going around in full-screen mode. If you are in regular mode (with the toolbar at the bottom of the screen), it does slow you down a little.

Swimming

Swim. There are lots of puddles you can fall into without having to worry about drowning. Unfortunately, these puddles don’t do anything for your swimming skill. You develop the skill when you’re underwater. If you should happen to fall into a puddle while being chased by the guards or some other critter bent on rearranging your face, use the "J" key to jump rather than let your low swimming skill allow you to get caught. Interestingly enough, critters don’t seem to be slowed at all when they pass through water.

Trainers

A trainer is equivalent to about 20 uses of a skill. At the higher difficulty levels (meaning your difficulty dagger is above the mid-point of the scale), it will take 2 or 3 sessions with a trainer to get one increase in a skill. Also, trainers can only go up to 51% skill level. Once you hit 51% in a skill you’re on your own.

Except at the Fighters Guild (where you can sleep), you’ll probably want to leave the premises to rest and get your fatigue back up (unless you have Stamina potions or spells or you have a spell to Heal Fatigue - which is a cheap Restoration spell, by the way). But you can do multiple training sessions by loitering. Training takes 3 hours, but you have to let 9 or more hours elapse before you can train again. Train, loiter for 9 hours (3 3-hour sessions), and train again. If you’re at the Fighters Guild, you can train, sleep for 9 hours, and then go back downstairs and train again. You’ll usually see the skill increase after the first stint at loitering, but you can’t train again until a total of 12 hours has passed (including the 3 hours spent with the trainer).

A good practice is to seek out a trainer before you have to travel anywhere. Do the 3 hours of training and then travel. The skill increase will show up when you reach your destination.

If you’re in a location where you don’t have to worry about being attacked, you can let your fatigue drop off the scale. You’ll collapse in exhaustion for an hour, but you can keep right on training as long as you have at least one point of health and fatigue to your name. That hour's nap that you get when you're exhausted will also slightly replenish your magica, so you can engage in a little spell practice as well.

SKILL ENHANCEMENT

You can temporarily increase your skills and attributes through magic. Spells, potions and items can increase your attributes and items can increase your skills. So even if you’ve reached your max level or just need a little extra "oomph", you can increase the remaining attributes and skills through the judicious use of magic.

A word of caution: if you equip an attribute-enhancing item and keep it equipped too long, the attribute will not return to normal when you unequip the item. Instead, it will drop anywhere up to half of its normal value. In order to repair this damage you will need to get healed at a temple or heal the damaged attribute yourself. In order to do it yourself you will need a spell to repair the attribute and each attribute requires a separate spell effect. In other words, you’ll need 8 spells if you want to be able to heal each attribute. It’s good Restoration practice, though.

Magic items can also enhance your skills. Typically, an item adds 15 points to the skill. When it breaks or you unequip it, the skill returns to normal. Multiple enchantments of a single skill will not work in a single item. If you want to enhance a skill more than 15 points, you will need to enchant multiple items. Since higher skill levels mean more difficulty in developing that skill, it’s best not to keep the item equipped while you are resting since this is when the game checks to see if your skills increase. With skill enhancing magic items it is possible to exceed 100% of a skill level. For magic skills, reaching 105% in the skill reduces the casting cost of all spells in that school to 5 points. This does not apply to spells that draw from more than one school of magic.

Interestingly enough, the guilds don’t seem to care where you got your skill. As long as the skill meets their minimum expectations, they’ll award you new rank based on your enhanced skill. So, you want to be an Archmage, but your highest magic skill is only 80? Equip an item which enhances the skill and they’ll award you the new rank (assuming you have the required rep). And they won’t take it away if you unequip the item. On the flip side, trainers gauge your ability based on the enhanced skill, too. So if you want to train, unequip any skill-enhancing items or the trainer may very well tell you that he can't help you. As an aside, the game had originally provided for the possibility of your being demoted by your guild(s). This feature was not implemented in the released version of the game because it caused too many problems. Beware, though, it may resurface in TES3.

Diseases such as Vampirism and Lycanthropy also enhance certain skills and these skills can go above 100%. The game determines your level based on the UNENHANCED skill level. So a Warrior going looking for a Werewolf in order to gain a few levels by contracting Lycanthropy will only get you a hairy Warrior. You will not get a hairy high-level Warrior. More about that in another section.

BUG ALERT: In one recent game I managed to contract Lycanthropy. The next time that I rested, I gained two levels. The game is supposed to determine your level based on your unenhanced skills, but (at least on my system) there appears to be an intermittent bug that counts your Lycanthrope skill level as your real skill level. If this happens to you, you have two choices: reload a game before you contracted the disease or live with it.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 591