Do "Critical Strike" skill affect Damage?

[Dragonborn]

Sorry to resurrect an old post, but I'm really curious about this one. I'm a long time player, played hundreds of hours of classic Daggerfall, and I'm now getting into playing DF Unity. Experience in DF Classic has shown me that characters with high critical strike skills consistently one-shot enemies, even humans, except for one warrior classes like Barbarians. So when someone on the wiki says that it only affects to hit chance, where are they getting that information from? Without source code, how can we know except through personal experience playing? It's not a definitive source, but even the Infamous Beginner's Guide to Daggerfall mentions critical strike causing more damage.

There's already bad info on the wiki on other aspect of the game, so if that's the source of this idea, I'm skeptical. For example, there's someone in the discussion page of Races that *insists* that high elves are NOT immune to paralysis because according to them, class advantages/disadvantages overwrite racial perks, and they somehow proved this by using a hex editor to view the values. Personal experience shows how silly of a statement that is, because spiders/scorpions seem to paralyze you every other hit if you are not a high elf.

[Jay_H]

So when someone on the wiki says that it only affects to hit chance, where are they getting that information from? Without source code, how can we know except through personal experience playing? It's not a definitive source, but even the Infamous Beginner's Guide to Daggerfall mentions critical strike causing more damage.

Welcome to the forums

On the fourth page of this discussion, Interkarma identifies that it came from Allofich, who did much of the reverse-engineering of Daggerfall's code. We don't have Allofich's notes available, but the work came directly from Daggerfall's original code, reconstructing it in Daggerfall Unity.

There's already bad info on the wiki on other aspect of the game, so if that's the source of this idea, I'm skeptical. For example, there's someone in the discussion page of Races that *insists* that high elves are NOT immune to paralysis because according to them, class advantages/disadvantages overwrite racial perks, and they somehow proved this by using a hex editor to view the values. Personal experience shows how silly of a statement that is, because spiders/scorpions seem to paralyze you every other hit if you are not a high elf.

There have been tons of bad information on the UESP wiki, and we've tried to clean it up where we can. But they are a separate site, after all.

[Ralzar]

If you mod it, it doesn't matter what it originally was

[Dragonborn]

On the fourth page of this discussion, Interkarma identifies that it came from Allofich, who did much of the reverse-engineering of Daggerfall's code. We don't have Allofich's notes available, but the work came directly from Daggerfall's original code, reconstructing it in Daggerfall Unity.

Wow if that's the case, I'm not sure how I never noticed that before.

I'm also surprised that Dodging is broken in classic as well. I guess I never noticed that because Dodging was so hard to level, and as a result I never had a character with really high Dodging skill.

[N_Molson]

Very interesting. On a sidenote, I started playing Daggerfall when I was like 13 yo, and back then I had no idea the whole D&D franchise even existed, so I was completely "naïve" to the combat system. And from the manual and what I thought I was observing in-game, I believed that armor reduced the amount of damage (while my characters were only leveling, gaining HitPoints), and indeed that Critical Strike was like a dagger stab right in the vitals, doubling the damage or so.

And well, I was completely wrong. Armor is implemented through the "old" D&D "TAC0 system", and now at 37 I just learned that Critical Strike is well, not what it looked like.

Funny thing is that Bethesda reverted to a more "mathematical" system from Morrowind, with armor actually reducing the damage received and - as far as I know - letting go the whole Critical Strike system (now in Skyrim we have "Perks", which look a bit like the consequence of an hybridation with the Fallout franchise).

Now, is one system *better* than the other ?

I don't think so. Daggerfall is largely inspired by "pen-and-paper" roleplaying, and nowadays DFU is quite unique in that niche (during a pen-and-paper D&D session, the Game Master will always cheat some dice rolls a bit against the players, just to keep things balanced, and so the rules are purposely opaque). Other RPG franchises have evolved into very rational, "transparent" games rules. This is a consequence of technical game engine improvements, that now allow a smooth game experience with "arcade" gameplay elements (like actually blocking blows with your shield, or hiding behind a tree to dodge an arrow) that were, back in the 1990's mostly consoles stuff. In Daggerfall trees were mere sprites without collision boxes and you could not take cover. Instead, you had the "Dodging" skill, which is a pen-and-paper-like workaround.

Today I find Skyrim very "cold" (no pun intended), because you deal with fixed values and there's little room for surprise. In Daggerfall you can fail horribly any fight, because you can get 20 awful dice rolls in a row. Magic is awfully unreliable, with damage dice rolls ranging from 1 to 20.

Its a *different* kind of experience. Now in DFU we have mods (and in Skyrim PC too), so it is the player responsability to choose his own set of rules. Well in Skyrim you sure won't get the Steam awards if you use mods, but in 2020 it won't stop you to use them, because the vanilla game is, despite of being an international hit - let's be honest - quite dull, especially when you played the game a couple of times. DFU offers complete freedom, which can be scary - its what freedom often do -.

I totally understand approve the "stick to the original game" approach, despite of flaws and poor design choices. What is important, IMHO, is that it gives us a free and bug-free base on which we can develop and install all the mods we want.