[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqEPyRS5M2Q[/youtube]
In case you haven’t seen the video, what makes the “awful everything” class so awful? Well for starters, there are the skills.
- Capture.PNG (623.6 KiB) Viewed 3271 times
Spoiler!
You will notice almost all of them are languages. The only skills that are easy to train are Etiquette and Streetwise, but even those are not very useful, and only one Minor skill counts toward leveling up.
Then, the attributes
Spoiler!
Strength and Agility are low, so melee combat will be very difficult for this character. And with low Endurance and Wil, even the lowliest of foes will be a serious threat. But 75 Intelligence means that magic will be good, especially because one of the special advantages is 3x Int in spell points. Or at least it would be, if magic wasn’t disabled in the special disadvantages. Additionally in the special disadvantages are damage from sunlight, a critical weakness to magic, and forbidden from using iron or leather, to make starting out even more difficult. And Jwalr chose to be an Argonian, since their racial bonus is very situational.
That’s about it. Italics is the story and non-italics is my out of universe comments.
From a very young age, Artina was fascinated with reading. She was in the library every free moment, getting lost in stories of brave heroes and daring adventures. One day she found something that confused her, a book whose words she could not understand. She asked the librarian and was informed that this book was written in the language of the giants. Her life was never the same after that day. She got her hands on every book written in another language that she could, and studied them all. Why should there be knowledge that is not available to her; she needed it all.
Years later, she embarks on a journey to Daggerfall. She has read stories of grand adventure long enough, now it is time to write her own. But when the ship is blown off course by a storm, she is faced with a harsh reality. She is hardly cut from the same material as the heroes of old. She just barely makes it out of the cave she washed up in and drags herself to the nearest village.
I ran through Privateer’s Hold, not attempting to fight anything. I got hit a couple times but made it out on my first try, thanks to the 75 speed. There are a few skills I can safely train in Gothway Garden. I made a basic loop where I wake up in the inn, train climbing, etiquette, and streetwise, then run outside and train running and jumping on my way to a shop, where I buy and then sell some cheap clothes for mercantile. At night I also did some swimming outside the mages guild. Then back to the inn, sleep for 6 hours, and repeat. Most of those skills aren’t exactly useful to increase my survivability, but honestly I was just taking any strengths I could get at that point.
I hit level 5 just from getting 74 etiquette. I put all the points into Endurance, since it is more valuable the sooner it’s leveled up. I also spent over half my money on an elven katana. Then I was offered a quest to go back to Privateer’s Hold, and I just had to take it for the roleplaying potential.
Stats at this point
Etiquette 74
Streetwise 67
Medical 29
Jumping 57
Mercantile 43
Climbing 64
Swimming 49
Running 48
Artina spends a few months in town, talking to the citizens to learn more about the surrounding area, while also training her body. She climbs, swims, and runs around town. She finds that after years of training her mind, training her body comes naturally. The cold of winter combined with the exercise greatly increases her endurance. She is disappointed to find, however, that she can’t adjust to the sunlight. She had always preferred to stay inside and work in the light of candles or a warm fireplace. Every time she had to go outside, she rushed to get back to the comfort of inside as quickly as she could. She expected to be able to adjust with this new change in lifestyle, but finds her eyes and skin continue to burn no matter how many days she tries. She is not deterred from her goal though, she will just have to travel at night. And once she is deep underground in a cave or dungeon, it won’t matter.
One day the innkeeper asks for her help. The job is fairly straightforward, but requires going back into the cave she just barely made it out of months ago. But she is stronger now, she thinks, and accepts the quest. She buys a blade with the remainder of her money and heads back to the cave after nightfall.
Her journey through the dungeon is slow and painful. She keeps pushing forward, fighting as best as she can, and then having to fall back and tend to her wounds. She is grateful for some medical knowledge she picked up in her studies. She encounters a couple imps, but her attempts to communicate received only fireballs in response. She does however meet a thief who agrees to be civil and they watch each other's backs. She is grateful for the help, and leads a couple skeletons, who seem to shrug off every hit with her blade, into a trap. The thief is content to wait around corners and backstab them as they come past, and they are no match for the two of them. She parts ways with the thief and pushes deeper into the dungeon.
She is still pulling back to rest and tend to her wounds, but she is also finding she is learning to anticipate her enemies’ attacks and dodge them, and more effectively use her own blade. She finds some steel chain armor and gladly puts it on. Finally she finds the loot she is after and returns to the surface. The innkeeper gives her several hundred gold, almost replacing the cost of her blade. But more importantly to her, her ability with the blade is increasing, and she itches to get back into another dungeon.
After finishing the quest I had
Stealth 26
Dodging 29
Critical Strike 29
Backstab 11
Long Blade 31
Artina asks around about any work and is informed the Fighters Guild usually has something. Many heroes she has read about got their starts in the Fighters Guild, and after the training she has been doing, she feels confident enough to join. She is given her first task, to kill a giant that has carried away several villagers. It is one giant, how hard could it be? She makes the week-long journey to the dungeon the giant is hiding in and starts her search.
She continues much as before, pushing forward, then looping back to rest and recuperate. But on one of her routine rests, she has a strange dream. She dreams of the moon, and of a man that is less than a man. It concerns her; she did take a nasty scratch from a werewolf a few hours ago. She checks her make and sees a temple of Kynareth only a few hours away. She makes a mental note to stop there before returning, and if she feels any worse, head there right away. She is feeling fine now, so she pushes on.
Before too much longer, she finds the giant. He is, well, giant, but pretty slow. She has never defeated a foe of this size, but she is pretty sure she can get away if she needs to. She strikes out with a flurry of attacks. The giant roars in pain, and she hears the roar echo down the halls. She continues her onslaught. Then she hears a crash behind her. She spins around to see a door smashed off its hinges, and another giant making its way toward her. Fearing she will be trapped in the room, she tries to slip past him, running low to the ground. But he smashes his club into her back, knocking her to the ground. She gasps for breath and uses all of her strength to crawl through the doorway before he can grab her or bring the club down again. Once she is through she climbs to her feet and breaks into a run. She turns a corner, then another, then climbs on an elevator to take her up to the next floor. Surely that will give her some time. Finally, she collapses to the ground and catches her breath, then starts pulling the splinters out of her hands from when she crawled over the ruined door.
After a few hours, she is feeling a little stronger and takes a look around. It looks like the elevator leads to a dead end, and no one has been up here in ages. The only other thing up here is an oversized bat, which she killed, just in case it was spreading disease. As she turns to go, something catches light, maybe a few gold coins in the corner. She blows away the dust and finds it is something much more valuable than a few gold pieces. It is a large blade, probably dwarven, based on its age, but still in usable condition. She tucks her old blade into her pack and heft this one to her shoulder. It is heavy but not too heavy, and may be what she needs to give her an edge over the giants.
She rides the elevator down and then peaks around the corner. The giants aren’t in sight, but she can hear them stomping around nearby, probably looking for her. She eventually finds them, and waits for them to split up, then takes them out one at a time. She has some close calls, but is able to slip away if another one shows up before she is finished with the first.
Finally she makes her way back to the entrance, waits for night and then heads out. She makes her way to the temple and they inform her that she has in fact caught a type of lycanthropy, and she would probably have succumbed to the disease if she had come a day later. The cost for healing is more than the guild promised to give her on her return, but she had also found some gold in the dungeon, and with the dwarven blade at her waist, she considers that she came out ahead either way. She waits another day to make sure the healing took effect, then gets ready for the return journey.
This quest kicked my butt. On my first attempt, I had maybe half of the dungeon explored, and then I got poisoned. I had no potions and obviously couldn’t use magic. So my only option was to go to a temple. There was actually one close by, but I tried several different ways, traveling recklessly, sprinting vs not, seeing if I could restore any hp by resting, and I got over half way to the temple, but there was no way to make it there before I died. I ended up reloading the save right after accepting the quest.
My second attempt started off similarly, I had the dungeon partially explored, and then contracted lycanthropy. I didn’t want to lose my progress, so I continued. That just meant instead of having a 100+ day time limit to complete the quest, I had a 72 hour time limit. So I just had to use my resting very strategically. And since it was my only way to heal, that means I was running from most fights, just staying long enough to see that the giant wasn’t there and then moving on.
I found the giant and made another save. But I just didn’t have enough DPS to kill the giant before it killed me. I had no way to do ranged attacks. Technically I could use a bow, but I didn’t have one because my carry weight is 40, so everything not critical gets sent to the wagon. And I had 3 archery so it probably wouldn’t have helped. I needed to get a few good hits in, then run away and rest. But of course, once you do any damage, it starts spawning more giants. I eventually survived all of the giants spawning, so I could rest if I ran far enough away. And then I killed one of them, which wouldn’t be that significant, except that it dropped a dwarven Dai-katana, a pretty big upgrade from the Elven Katana. (Yes I changed how I got the Dai-katana for the sake of the story. A giant carrying it didn’t make as much sense.) So now I could do some decent damage. I probably still died a few more times here, I don’t remember, but I ended up killing the quest giant and made it to the exit.
So I was in the clear now? Of course not. I exited the dungeon and remembered it was day. No worries, just go back in and rest 4 hours, then travel. But for some reason, the game decided that since I re-entered the dungeon, it had to respawn the giants. I couldn’t rest. I didn’t want to run too far away from the exit and have to find it again. But I noticed that even if I failed to rest, time was still advancing a little. So I exited, re-entered, rested until I was interrupted by a giant spawning, and repeated that until it was night. All together this quest probably took 4 real life hours. Not the longest amount of time I’ve spent in a Daggerfall dungeon, but definitely one of the more frustrating.
After finishing the quest I had
Stealth 34
Dodging 37
Critical Strike 36
Backstab 11
Long Blade 39
And level 6. I technically got level 6 before starting the quest, but it fit better here.
I am having a lot of fun with this and will continue my playthrough and the story, but wanted to go ahead and post what I have so far. Let me know if you have any feedback on the writing, gameplay, or anything else. Thank you for reading!
