UESP Forums

I've played Daggerfall on and off ever since it first came out, but going back to it with the Anthology version has made me think about what I want from it more. Here are a few of my thoughts, they might be of use to someone else.

1) What level is best? This affects the choice of skills to be primary, major, etc.
I find that about L10 is the most satisfying: you have enough hit points to stay alive most of the time, yet tough enemies are still hard to beat; if you put most of the magic skills into minor and miscellaneous, you can max them out so spells cost very few magicka points, last a decent duration, do a decent amount of damage/etc, yet aren't so powerful that you can cast your very best spells on entering a dungeon and ignore enemies as they die around you; your stats stay relatively low, so your character isn't totally over-powered and can't kill everything too easily even when critical skills reach 100.

2) How to choose your level: put most of the skills you want to have high into minor and miscellaneous; put skills you won't want to use into primary and major. However, make sure you have at least one skill pertinent to guilds you want to join (Fighter's and Mage's Guilds for me) early in either of primary or major so they start high enough for you to join those guilds. And I normally put short blade into primary so I can survive Privateer's Hold.
You can then train or use those primary and major skills so you become the 'correct' level for your style of play - see the pages on how the game uses skill increases to increase your level. Meanwhile, you can improve the skills you want to actually depend on as much as you wish.

3) Custom Class creation: getting the 'dagger' as low as possible makes the game much more fun because you don't need to keep using a skill to get better at it - eg as few as 3 'uses' can trigger an increase when the skill is very low.
Casting and re-casting wimpy spells is much less tedious if you can increase every magic skill with one set of magicka points - if you solely use the 'destruction trigger' method, then you end up casting the spells even more often than if you allow each one to use up magicka because you need to actually rest for it to count! (Incidentally, slow fall was the only 'cheap' alteration effect that worked with the Anthology version - water walking and water breathing failed to trigger any increase, whether as part of a spell combo or by themselves, for me).

3b) Getting the 'Dagger' low: there are several methods, some of which are blatant 'cheats' - but the only effect on the game is how many times you need to practice a skill for it to trigger an increase. And is it really more 'fun' to have to practice a skill 300 times rather than 30 or 3 times? So, use these methods or not: be a High Elf and pick 'critical vulnerability to paralysis'; pick 'unable to use Steel' more than once (Steel is worth a lot to the dagger, but isn't much better than iron in the game and you will rapidly move past it into better materials anyway; and the game doesn't stop you picking it more often. Choose something else if you prefer). Make sure you pick '3x magicka' if you want to cast spells (I do, it's one of the best parts of the game). Choose anything else you want, but get the dagger low. Since I won't be reaching high level anyway, feel free to adjust your stats to whatever you want using 'U' to reset the 'point difference' counter. 60-70 is a good level - if you want really high stats, then you'll slaughter your way through the game without any challenge, and you'll be adding about 50 more points (across them all) by reaching Level 10.

4) Easier play: Join the Mage's Guild, do quests to guard the guild (you can safely refuse any dungeon-exploring ones without penalty); loot the corpses; join and train weapon skills at the Fighter's Guild, then cast your practice spells in the top floor bunk room and rest up. Repeat until your skills and character level are where you want them to be and you achieve high rank within the Mage's Guild so you can access the Teleport service. Cast your 'anchor' for teleport in front of the teleport guy, and each time you return to him, re-anchor. This way you have instantaneous travel to anywhere you want.

5) Location to train in: don't stay in Daggerfall, Sentinel or Wayrest in case you accidentally (or otherwise) become a criminal. I choose Alcaire because it is unimportant and small - so whenever you need to travel anywhere for quests, everything is nearby. I also chose Whitetale as the town to 'live' in - it's small too but has both a Mage's Guild and a Fighter's Guild near one another although you will need to visit a bigger city to find a bank to put your money in since it weighs so much. I don't worry about getting a good price on selling items since you very rapidly end up with more money than you need anyway.

6) Main Quest: apart from meeting Lady Brisienna, only start doing the main quest when you are ready. Then it's fun - you will meet vampires and liches and they will still be hard to survive against, yet your character will have a full repertoire of skills and spells to deal with problems.

Anyway, I hope that wasn't too long and boring.

I enjoyed your post but you forgot to mention crypt raiding which I stress as the best not exploitive way to amass 300k in under 50 hours of gameplay, even when doing main/side quests.

Also, I personally found a specific tomb in Glenpoint named the Ashsley cemetary which spawns FOUR treasure piles!

The only way to get 300k for a house/good ship without doing this (and staying sane) is to rob stores but then you get a thieves guild invitation letter which is possibly timed and if you join the Thieves guild and then contract vampirism (on purpose or accident) you lose access to the guild for good unlike the Fighters/Mages guild which is a risky endeavor.

Still, contracting it is unlikely unless during a direct run-through.

Your anchor tip would be pretty helpful in a lot of cases for instance but would make your wagon sort of pointless for gathering treasure because you wouldn't need to unload valuables after clearing each sector by anchoring/recalling right inside of a dungeon.

For gathering gold at crypts though, or solely turning in quests that would be great though of course.

A lot of things depend on a persons playstyle I guess, I'm more of a grinder so I probably see things differently.

Also, another way around the house issue is to join a Knight order for a free one at the highest rank that I just remembered, doing this along with using the money you gathered that storing in your bank account for a ship would be very money-conscious.

Then you have a place to store your Deadric artifacts and niche enchanted gear at without worrying about selling it accidentally.

Thank you for reading and critiquing

I mostly don't bother with crypts any more, simply because I've played the game a lot and don't feel the need to buy houses and collect all the artifacts. Consequently, I get plenty of money simply from doing quests - by the time I've achieved Archmage I've got over 300K gold anyway. And at low levels shops don't stock many decent items worth buying/stealing.

I also don't bother enchanting magic items because it makes the game too easy, particularly since my usual favourite artifact is Azura's Star.

And vampirism and lycanthropy are fun once, but not repeatedly.

Overall, I like Morrowind best for the storyline whilst still having reasonable skills and magic. Daggerfall's main story is good, but the guilds are poor, however it's skill system and custom class creation is the best. Oblivion lacked any real challenge for me, which highlighted my liking for lower levels, and is rather simplistic compared to Daggerfall. I haven't (yet, anyway) played Skyrim.

A better plot for each guild or faction, coupled with decent graphics, but using Daggerfall's skills/etc systems would suit me nicely, but is rather unlikely to happen.

Gilarius

I find it interesting how many features of the game can easily become exploits, yet at the same time learning all those intricacies still contributes to interesting ways of playing.