Daggerfall Workshop Forums

It occurred to me that if you were silenced, a side effect would be that you would be 100% stealthy. If someone was looking the other way they simply would not hear you. Does anyone know if this was implemented in the original game?

While I don't have experience with it in classic, I think "Silence" is intended to be like the mute button on your TV. You can mute it and make it stop producing sound, but if it falls over, no Mute setting will matter

Well, to me it's just that "silence" etymological root is the latin word "sileo" which could mean absence of speech; That's still one of the meanings of silence...

As Daggerfall was modeled largely on P&P RPGs like D&D, I would assume the model would tend to follow the same idea and the D&D version has a radius effect on the target who can resist. I don't recall if it was model this way in the original game.

It's likely also that since silence was designed to be an offensive spell the benefits might never have been modeled.

At the time of these games, there was often discussion about what sort of gestures, vocalizations, and so on were needed for spells. I forget the exact names, for some reason somatic is one that comes to mind, but I forget what it means.

Anyway, the probable idea for the word SILENCE was to silence Vocalization, Chants, speaking of powerful magical words.

So, the spell probably just SILENCES the enemy Caster and any other vocalization in its area of effect, or if cast on an individual it silences just that individual.

Different games at the time talked about , well also in some great manuals for various Pen & Paper RPG games, whether a spell required a special component, or a focus or container after spoken or created, whether it needed access to certain things in the environment (such as daylight or darkness, weather of some kind), spoken words, communing spiritually with some spirit or other realm, so on.

By breaking access to one of those components or requirements to the spell, it was possible to shut down the ability to cast the spell at the time, provided that was required, or weaken it if it was simply part of what empowered it but not required for the actual success of the spell.

Still a good question though. Whether it shuts down sonic vibrations, paralyzes the tongue, surrounds the user in a Dome of Silence LOL or not, I don't know. Silence would probably not shut down certain natural spell casting or telekinesis. I think the AD&D manuals over the years had some of those type enemies, forget their name. One looks like an octupus attached to a brain, otherwise humanoid in body, and was very powerful.

NoobioDF wrote: ↑Sun Jun 30, 2019 9:51 pm At the time of these games, there was often discussion about what sort of gestures, vocalizations, and so on were needed for spells. I forget the exact names, for some reason somatic is one that comes to mind, but I forget what it means.

Somatic refers to of the body. In spell casting terms this means any bodily movements, gestures, etc. needed to cast a spell.

I think this is one of those ask Julian questions.