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[Judas Maccabeus]

The game

Those of you who aren't already familiar with Daggerfall probably are with Morrowind or Oblivion.  Before all of that, there was Arena and Daggerfall.  Arena is kind of fun, but somewhat different from the later games; Daggerfall is where the series began to shine.

Daggerfall is a first-person RPG set in one corner of the Elder Scrolls' continent of Tamriel.  Unlike later games, it doesn't scale things down - dungeons are huge, twisting labyrinths (which is good for those who like exploring, but bad for those who get lost easily), cities are actual cities and not glorified villages, and the total land area of the game is, even in the game itself, approximately the size of England (not Great Britain, as often claimed).  As with the later games in the series, there are plenty of options for customisation, both when creating a character and while playing.  The music and art design are very atmospheric and dark, (I'll be having to censor some odd bits here and there, another place Bethesda didn't hold back).  The story is a sweeping tale of war, noble politics, and revenge.

It also has more bugs than a termite mound, but you can't have everything.

The problem was, Daggerfall was so ambitious that not only was Bethesda not able to fit everything they wanted in, a lot of what did make it in was either incomplete, or didn't work right.  Until an early patch, the game couldn't even be finished because important people couldn't be talked to.  It's still somewhat unstable, but it works now, and thanks to the miracles of science DOSBox, it runs fairly well on even a modern computer.


The backstory

The game begins in the year 405 of the Third Era of Tamriel.  Sixteen years earlier, the imprisonment of the Emperor by a usurper threw the Empire of Tamriel into a decade of chaos, and set various kingdoms within it against each other.  Two of these, Daggerfall and Sentinel, went to war over the island of Betony between them even after the chaos ended, in 402.  A year later, the battle of Cryngaine Field saw a victory for Daggerfall, but at a grave cost:  its king, Lysandus, was ambushed by orcs before the battle and killed.  His son Gothryd led the armies to victory and killed King Camaron of Sentinel, ending the war, and he married Camaron's daughter Aubk-i.

Two years later, the spirit of Lysandus and his spectral army are said to roam the streets of Daggerfall City at night.  The sprit's unrest has caught the ear of the Emperor, Uriel Septim VII, who summons one of his most trusted champions to investigate the matter.  That champion is the player, obviously.


First choice:

Because Daggerfall is so buggy, there are plenty of ways to bend the rules within the game.  There are, broadly, four ways we can approach this:

Hardcore:  Only play the game as intended.  Reloading when things are obviously unwinnable is allowed, obviously, but exploiting even minor bugs is out.  This is liable to get very annoying very quickly, but it's obviously doable.

Moderate:  Things like saving before getting a quest and reloading if it's one of the ones that will cause trouble no matter what (there are some that give no reward and lower one's reputation no matter what you do), weak "practice" spells that use up small amounts of magicka, other things that are within the intended game mechanics, but still kind of off.  I'd recommend this as the minimum simply to prevent frustration and keep things moving.

Gamey:  Waiting in stores after they close to grab a few things with impunity once in a while.  Picking advantages and disadvantages in character creation that give great things at little cost.  Taking large loans in unimportant countries and never paying them back.  Making practice spells that allow for quick magic training without paying or using up magicka.  There's others, too.  They aren't all that bad, and the game is still a challenge; this is a good way to keep things moving quickly as regards the plot and the like, but involves taking advantage of some bugs.

Cheaty:  Getting exceptional attribute scores right off the bat.  Making millions at level one taking horses/carts and selling them.  Cycling to quest locations in dungeons.  Becoming practically immortal.  Jumping into the Void and killing monsters where they can't reach you.  You get the idea.  It's pretty much cheating, though it's fun seeing just what strange things can be done if nothing else.  I'd rather not go this far myself, of course.


Character creation!



Most Elder Scrolls games let the player pick name, race, class, etc. for their character. Offer not available on Stros M'Kai.  See Redguard for details.  Daggerfall's is perhaps the most complex and flexible one.  It's also the one most easily broken like a twig, but how much we do that is up to you all.

I'll be splitting this up into two parts:  Race, Gender, and Class is the first one; since class affects most of the second part (Background, Skills, Name, Appearance, and Reflexes), that will have to wait until we settle on the class.

Spoiler: Races (click to show/hide)

We'll be selecting from this map.  Clicking on a province brings up a scroll telling us what race resides there and giving us a description, letting us pick that or go back to the map to pick another.  The Imperial Province is not an option, though.  Here are the descriptions:

High Rock:  Bretons
Bretons hail from the province of High Rock.  You are part of a tall, fair-skinned people, highly intelligent and willful.  Magic seems to infuse the very being of the Breton people.  As a race, they are more resistant to the effects of hostile magic than any other group, and thus are excellent in all arcane arts.

Skyrim:  Nords
Nords hail from the province of Skyrim.  You are part of a tall and fair-skinned people, strong, willful, and hardy.  Owing to the climate of Skyrim, Nords are resistant to the coldest of temperatures, and take little damage even from ice-based magical attacks.  Nords are historically well-suited to all the arts of the warrior.

Morrowind:  Dark Elves
Dark Elves hail from the province of Morrowind.  You are part of a tall, dark-skinned people, known to be extremely strong, intelligent, and quick.  They are extremely versatile in all manners of skills and well-known as warriors and mages.

Hammerfell:  Redguards
Redguards hail from the province of Hammerfell.  You are part of a dark-skinned people, extremely hardy and quick.  Legend has it that the Redguard are innately more proficient with weaponry than any other race.  In general, Redguards make excellent warriors.

Sumurset Isle:  High Elves
High Elves hail from the province of Sumurset.  You are part of a tall, golden-skinned people, extremely intelligent, agile, and willful.  The magical nature of Sumurset Isle has made the High Elves natural spellcasters who are immune to paralysing poisons and spells.

Valenwood:  Wood Elves
Wood Elves hail from the province of Valenwood.  You are part of a tall, fair-skinned people known to be extremely agile and quick.  Wood elves have a natural affinity for the bow and arrow, and all members of their race have some ability with that weapon.  There are well-known Wood Elves in most every class, but the arts of thievery are their particular forte.
[Hippie elves who love bows and trees, and have a history of cannibalism.  You know the type.]

Elsweyr:  Khajiit
Khajiit hail from the province of Elsweyr.  You are part of a tawny-skinned people, extremely hardy, intelligent, and agile.  Many Khajiit have taken to painting their faces to more resemble their legendary feline cousins, the predatory cats that hunt the great desert.  Khajiit are on the whole excellent climbers, and adept in all the arts of the thief.

Black Marsh:  Argonians
Argonians hail from the province of Black Marsh.  You are part of a highly-evolved race of reptiles, known for their intelligence, agility, and speed.  Because of their reptilian nature, Argonians do not tire easily when swimming.  While many Argonians have successfully mastered the arts of thievery and spellcasting, there are some regarded well as warriors.

Spoiler: Gender (click to show/hide)

Two options, obviously.  This is supposed to affect starting attributes, but since those don't quite work as advertised, it affects nothing but appearance and types of clothing available.

WALL OF TEXT ALERT BELOW

Spoiler: Class (click to show/hide)

I'll be going with custom, since that's more fun, and tends to end up with a better character anyway.  Feel free to be as general or as specific as you like with ideas.  You can skip all the info below if you already know it, of course, or just want to throw out an idea without working out the details.  It's a bit of a long read.




Class name:  Obvious.

Attributes:  Those eight along the left side.  If we choose to increase one by a certain amount, we have to reduce others to end up equal.  Unless we go with the "cheaty" way of doing things, then we can have whatever we want.  They provide various bonuses, and also affect skills related to them.

Strength:  Affects damage and weight capacity
Intelligence:  Affects maximum amount of Magicka, which is used to cast spells
Willpower:  Affects resistance to magic
Agility:  Affects chance to hit and avoid being hit
Endurance:  Affects hit points, resistance to disease and poisons, healing rate, and fatigue
Personality:  Affects how much the NPCs like us
Luck:  Affects everything, in a minor way.


Skills:  Primary start around 25-30%, major around 20-25%, minor 10-20%, ones we don't pick in the single digits.  Levelling is skill based; the game looks at all primary, the highest two major at the time, and the highest minor at the time when it's calculating how close to a level a character is.  The choices are (this categorisation is my own, the game doesn't do so officially):

Weapons: Archery, Axe, Blunt Weapon, Hand-to-Hand, Long Blade, Short Blade
Physical: Climbing, Critical Strike, Dodging, Jumping, Running, Swimming
Thieving:  Backstabbing, Lockpicking, Pickpocket, Stealth
Magic: Alteration, Destruction, Illusion, Mysticism, Restoration, Thaumaturgy
Languages:  Centaurian, Daedric, Dragonish, Giantish, Impish, Nymph, Orcish, Spriggan
Other:  Etiquette, Medical, Mercantile, Streetwise

The languages are almost useless; I don't think there are even centaurs or dragons in the game.  Orcish, Impish, or Daedric might be useful, but even then not much.


Skill Advancement:  Affects how quickly we train up those skills.  We don't change this directly; all those buttons to its right (except "Help", of course) are what do it.  Lower is better, of course.  We have to end up in the area between the "red zones" at x0.3 and x3.0.


Max Hit Points Per Level:  Levelling up gives between this number and half of it in hit points.  Increasing makes advancement go up; decreasing makes it go down.

Advantages


Parentheses are sub-options.  Advantages (and disadvantages) are limited to seven.

Acute Hearing:  Not useful for much of anything.  Hearing things in dungeons is helpful, but they can be heard well anyway.
Adrenaline Rush:  Makes a character tougher when they're at very low health.  Often you'll go from too much health for this straight to dead, though it's useful when that doesn't happen.
Athleticism:  Reduces fatigue loss from running, swimming, jumping, and so on.  Fairly useful if you have the room for it.
Bonus to hit (Animals, Daedra, Humanoid, Undead):  Does just that, and also increases damage.
Expertise in (Axe, Blunt Weapon, Hand-to-Hand, Long Blade, Missile Weapon, Short Blade):  Increases chance to hit and damage.
Immunity (Disease, Fire, Frost, Magic, Paralysis, Poison, Shock)
Increased Magery:  The base is .5 intelligence in spell points; this can set it to 1, 1.5, 1.75, 2, or 3.
Rapid Healing (General, Darkness, In Light):  Makes healing go faster while resting.
Regenerate Health (General, Darkness, In Light, Immersed In Water):  Allows character to regain health without resting.  "Darkness" is a very, very useful one to pick here if you have the space for it.
Resistance (Disease, Fire, Frost, Magic, Paralysis, Poison, Shock)
Spell Absorption (General, Darkness, In Light):  Allows spells cast at the character to be redirected into the magicka pool.


Disadvantages


Disadvantages (and advantages) are limited to seven.

Critical Weakness (Disease, Fire, Frost, Magic, Paralysis, Poison, Shock):  Very large chance that these take effect.
Damage (Holy Places, Sunlight)
Darkness-Powered Magery (Lower ability, unable to use in daylight):  A decent one to pick, since almost all fighting is underground.  You don't automatically get all those magicka points back when you go into the darkness, though.
Forbidden Armor Type (Chain, Leather, Plate)
Forbidden Material (Iron, Steel, Silver, Elven, Dwarven, Mithril, Ebony, Orcish, Elven, Daedric):  From (approximately) worst to best.
Forbidden Shield Type (Buckler, Kite Shield, Round Shield, Tower Shield):  Shields are fairly optional, especially at high levels, though of course that means this doesn't speed skill advancement much either.
Forbidden Weaponry (Axe, Blunt Weapon, Hand-to-Hand, Long Blade, Short Blade):  Not a bad idea to pick some from here, since specialising in a weapon or two is the best plan.  No Short Blade, though, since we'll probably need that early on.
Inability to Regen Spell Points:  A bit of a dangerous one to pick, and I'd rather avoid this, though with "Spell Absorption" it can definitely work.
Light-Powered Magery (Lower ability, unable to use in darkness):  Bad idea, since most times magic is used is indoors.
Low Tolerance (Disease, Fire, Frost, Magic, Paralysis, Poison, Shock):  Higher chance these take effect.
Phobia (Animals, Daedra, Humanoid, Undead):  Lowers chance to hit and damage.


Generally, if they look like they would conflict, you can't use them together.  Note that there are a few ways to mess with things, though; one can, for example, take both options under "Darkness-powered magery" and both count to speeding skill advancement, or select "Critical Weakness to Paralysis" as a High Elf and still be immune.


Reputation


This really doesn't affect much, but tweaking it a bit can be fun for, say, roleplaying purposes.  Balancing works like attributes do.  Increasing reputation with merchants and nobles can have useful effects, though.

[Glacies]

Play a human thief/wizard. Be greeedy and selfish and mean, but not evil. Don't use exploits all that much, cept', y'know, stealing money from far-off places. That's fine.

[Judas Maccabeus]

Well, there aren't any straight-up "humans".  They're split up into the Bretons (magic-adept, slightly elvish), Nords (Scandinavians, basically, cold resistant and strong), and Redguards (token black guys, great with weapons of all kinds).

Thief/wizard isn't all that bad of a combination, actually.  It'll make things a bit slow, mind, but it's certainly doable.

[Aqizzar]

Who's awesome?  You're awesome!

One of the non-cheating routes I found enjoyable was a essentially magic averse character. Use both of the magery-use limitations to make a complete inability to use magic, and use all that allowance to take every immunity.  So you have nothing to fear from magic, and are free to be a super badass warrior-thief.  Not for everyone though.  Hell, it's virtually impossible not to be a combination of everything after a while, so thief/mage or warrior/mage is good too.  As for gameyness, I urge Moderate.  The game isn't nearly so fun when you know it doesn't stand a chance against you.

Almost forgot; take either Dark Elf or Argonian.  So they'll both retroactively have that much more to bitch about in the next installment.  Both Male and Female will carry their respective pitfalls in grabbing postable screenshots.

By the way, re: languages - They actually are centaurs, and Dragonish is used with these wacky things called Fairy Dragons.  Still ab-so-lutely fucking useless as skills.

[Free Beer]

This has the potential to be really fun.

I propose a modified "Gamey" playstyle. Go ahead and take advantage of bugs, but with the added condition of selecting a bunch of skills that will never raise for the primary, major, and minor skills. This will have the drawback of keeping the character's level low. All that free equipment and money will be useless when the best things you can buy are Elven. This will allow for a challenging but convenient game.

I am not sure if it's impossible to avoid falling into the Void. I'd say use it for navigation but stay away from anything else.

On screenshots: Isn't there an install option to patch up the nudity? Might want to turn that on.

As for character creation, I seem to remember a lot of bugs involving spell absorption, so stay away from that.

I'd recommend jacking up the Peasant reputation as high as it will go, since most town quests are really hard to do without people to give you directions. To compensate, nuke either Scholars or Underworld, since both of those tend to be focused on NPCs in guilds and we can just join the corresponding guild and do a couple of quests to compensate.

May I suggest the following class?

Skills:
Primary - Axe, Blunt Weapon, Long Blade
Major - Pickpocket, Etiquette, Streetwise
Minor - All of the Magic Skills

Advantages - Expertise in Archery and/or Short Blade, Athleticism, Regeneration General, as many immunities that can fit
Disadvantages - Forbidden weapons Axe, Long Blade, and Blunt Weapon, Inability to Regen Spell Points, Darkness/Light Powered Magery with Inability to use (both, if possible), Phobia Daedra, Forbidden Material Daedric.

Maximum hp per level, with a focus on Endurance, Agility, and Speed in that order. Low Intelligence and Luck.

I'm thinking some sort of dedicated archer or thief character, obviously. I forget if Dark Brotherhood characters get access to the potion maker? If they do then the character will be able to survive without magic just fine. Joining the Temple that has an item maker will round out the character nicely.

[Glacies]

Okay, play as a redguard thief/wizard treasure hunter with greeeeedy tendencies.

[zchris13]

I like the Argonians.

[Dragooble]

be the most dwarven redguard you can be. i'd say to be gamey.

[Judas Maccabeus]

Free Beer:  The thing is, the main quest requires that the character be a certain level for certain quests, and I'd rather not have to slog through even more than usual for Daggerfall just to get to the plot.  That, and I'm not so good as to make too much of a challenge doable.

The general consensus seems to be a thief-style character, with most of you also calling for magic ability as well.  That sounds perfectly good to me.  [EDIT:  Miscounted]Redguard and Argonian appear to be tied, I'll give that a bit of time to work out, and since the racial attribute bonuses and penalties don't quite work right there's no reason to worry about those (the other bonuses do work correctly, though).  Since we seem to be hovering between "moderate" and "gamey", well, it's always an option to take a spot between those.

I'll start working the class details out right away, then.  Though people can still throw out more ideas if they like, until I've gotten it set in stone. 

[Judas Maccabeus]

Here is what we have so far:

Spoiler: Race, Gender, and Class results (click to show/hide)

I decided to throw in a tiebreaking vote for Argonian...


...And also decided on female, for not particular reason.  Not that you can tell so easily with an Argonian, anyway.







Our class.  Hopefully one of you can come up with a better name.  I was also thinking about something like "shadow mage", but that sounds a bit silly still.  There's a similar stock class called the Nightblade, if we want to use that name instead.

And the rest to decide upon.  Yes, character creation in Daggerfall is a bit complex.

Spoiler: Background (click to show/hide)

Of course we'll be picking.  If nothing else, I'll be picking.  The background questions are determined by what type of class you pick, which is why we had to do that first.








The only question I care about is the fourth one; I want that ebony dagger.  The "You are friendlier than most" question affects skills with that creature's language and is therefore basically useless.

Spoiler: Name and appearance (click to show/hide)

Yep, we need a name.



And a face.  Here are your choices:

Spoiler: Attributes, skills and reflexes (click to show/hide)

The bit with attributes is randomised each time we go in; rather than show you dice rolls that will change I'll just ask which attributes you want to focus on.



The exact skill numbers will also change depending on how we answer the background questions.  It always gives six points to distribute, though, so go ahead and pick.



That screen explains reflexes better than I can.  I'd rather not go above average, so I'll probably just go ahead and declare "average" on this one, so the game doesn't go too fast for me and levelling doesn't go too slow.

[Killas[SiN]]

Ah got's a name for the class, also, it doesn't break the lore.

Enter... the... Shadowscale!

It's the name of the Argonian assassins, trained in Black Marsh from the day of their birth until their inception into the Dark Brotherhood... Serving for the glory of the Night Mother, lest they tempt the wrath of Sithis upon themselves...

But hey, it's a cool name.

[Aqizzar]

Oookay, let's see if I can remember these...

Hate priests, it doesn't matter anyway.
Dodging, because you didn't tag it.
Short-blade; behold the power of cheese.
taek teh amulet hur hur hur
Quicksilver.  I dunno, why not?
Er, Dragons?  You are a lizard after all.
Book; worth more than the pearl (or gold), and the cuirass will just be iron.
Acrobatics, because I like to bunnyhop everywhere.
Fun?  Or riches or knowledge, whatever.
None, not that you'll need the rep help with the Mage's Guild.
Book again.  Bookworm lizard woman!
And by extension, be anti-social.

Seconding Shadowscale for class name.  Take the third head because, although creepy, it's not as immediately offensive as the others.  Dump all points into Alteration, Lockpicking, and Critical Strike.

No idea what to do for a name.



_{"Lifts-Her-Tail"  You know you want to.}

[Glacies]

Eech. You're playing a lizardman?

[major_sephiroth]

STAB. Short weapons and ebony dagger!

Also, Argonians rule.

[Dragooble]

definitely get the ebony dagger.