I always thought silence prevented you from harnessing the magic that emanated from Aetherius, and thus rendering you unable to cast spells. But it seems some people think it makes you not able to talk, as in, not able to say the incantations. Now I think that is false, because you have been able to enter into menu mode and dialogue with NPCs in every tes game released when you have been silenced. What do you guys think silencing is actually doing? It has never been elaborated or clarified in anything canon or official by the developers, so it's kinda just up to us.

What do you know, there's a book written about the silence spell in Morrowind! Here is the book, http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Silence_%28book%29.

From the looks of the book, it's bending sound like how a glass bends light.

The closest thing we have on the subject. http://www.imperial-library.info/content/morrowind-silence while not being technically lore I believe it is close enought to say that it actually describes the machanics of the spell of silence.

edit: need to type faster next time

Why isn't it technically lore? The info sounds...sound :shifty: . Heck, there's an alteration book that describes what it is like to breath water, and I've yet to believe it's false. Perhaps both stories are just tales, sure, but the magic effects read to be genuine.

exactly what I meant the stories could very well be just that stories but even so I do agree that the info on how the spell works is true. Take for example even if a fantasy book has real life physics in it it doesn't make the fantasy part real but the physics still is.

Oh I totally bet those stories are not really real, but like with some works of fiction I have read, it will go into detail on the technical aspects of how the hero's pistol is firing, in order to make it seem so very cool. Plus, the end of silence definitely make it look as though it was fiction. Silence on the wife, best idea eva!

Fetchin' Silence, how does it work?

Like a magically powered version of this effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_noise_control

Good read. I'm confused, because he silenced Egroamaro and he was unable to speak. But then Silverthorn silenced his wife and she was still talking but Silverthorn could not hear her. That's contradictory right there.

I made a test spell that silenced the player on casting for 60 seconds. When I cast it, all my spells had chance x/0, instead of the usual x/100 (I set all my magic skills to 1000000 for testing). BUT, I was still able to initiate dialogue with NPCs. So who knows what it's really doing. That story doesn't go into detail enough for us to make a cold hard fact about it. I hope after TESV comes out, the Meet the Devs thread will be turned into an "Ask the Devs" thread, where we can ask questions. But good lord, they will be utterly bombarded with questions.

The story is supposed to be silly. The whole story was leading to the punch line that dealing with a wife is much more dangerous than an evil battlemage. Also, game mechanics.

True, and the story did make me chuckle a bit. Well, eventually we'll know. Thanks guys.

I'm still not satisfied with the conclusion at which we have arrived. Game mechanics ya'll say? It wouldn't be hard to script it so that upon being silenced, if you clicked on any NPC, you'd get something like If ( OnNPCActivate == 1 ), Return or If ( OnNPCActivate == 1 ), MessageBox "You are silenced and therefore cannot speak".
It wouldn't be hard to enable that into the game. But since that's not what happens when you're silenced, I'm guessing silencing is something else and not making the Player unable to speak. Besides, if you know a spell well enough, you should be able to think the incantation without even having to say it aloud.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Mysticism_Spells placed "silence" under the Mysticism school. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Illusion_Spells#Silence & http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Silence placed it in the Illusion school. I think it fits more appropriately in Mysticism, as I believe it is creating some kind of magical barrier that hinders you from utilizing your magic even though it is constantly penetrating you from Aetherius, much like how radiation and cosmic rays can penetrate us (except we don't acquire magical powers from it).

Others could argue that it fits under Illusion because it is tricking your subconscious mind into believing that you cannot cast spells. With that, you'd be able to still say all the incantations you could muster but your subconscious would believe that you cannot utilize magic and therefore render the words you're saying useless.

The Illusion category is easier to understand but I like the old Mysticism category it was under during the TESII Daggerfall days because it's more, well... mystical and mysterious. It was like Silence was this unknown phenomenon that some mage figured out thousands of years ago probably, and didn't quite know how he did it or what was actually happening, but he learned it and passed on the mystical knowledge.
That's one of the things I loved about the Mysticism school was that its spells were unknown and possibly dangerous to play with. Pity they removed it from TESV Skyrim. I'll mod it back in come hell or high water. It's a huge part of lore and a large part of the Psijics' ways of life, damnit!

But what are others' thoughts on Silence? How do you think it works? And does it make more sense for it to be under Mysticism or Illusion?

Understanding magicka is like understanding an anology.
This is why they have parables and stories that teach people how to use spells like water breathing and silence, right?
Even if the explanation isn't to be entirely trusted, that concept helps you understand how it works.
I trust it.

In both cases the effect was the same. The mechanism of operation of the spell is fairly well explained.

As for being able to initiate dialogue... Well, it's a minor spell effect and I'm sure they just couldn't be bothered. Just game mechanics. Don't take that as indicative of anything about how the actual spell works.

If Magnus can't hear you how does he know where to go? All magic is supplication, after all.

You could, but it would make the game more annoying. I'd be annoyed if I had to stand around and do nothing while a 30+ second silence spell wears off, before I could talk to someone and progress a quest or get info.

You think it was intentionally left out? In all my years of playing Elder Scrolls games, it has never crossed my mind to have that happen. I'm sure no one in the development team considered it either.

I've still never really bought that magic spells require a spoken incantation though. I can sneak behind an enemy, cast a spell, and they don't hear a thing. I've never heard anyone say any incantation while casting spells at me and I've never said any when casting spells at them. You'd think if it happened, and if it could be Silenced, it would be audible. But then the Dragon Shouts require incantations and they are clearly audible, even if they must be whispered.

I've always been under the impression that Silence is called Silence so people would know what it did. It's a popular term that RPG fans acknowledge as a spell that prevents their opponents from casting spells. The book, Silence, suggests otherwise but doesn't give a proper explanation to why no one says anything when casting spells, so I feel like I could take it or leave it, and I'd prefer to leave it and stick with what makes sense to me.


They did not remove it, it's just part of Illusion now for the sake of gameplay and convenience. All of the skills are there, they're still just as mysterious as they've ever been. Don't get caught up on the superficial things.

Lore and gameplay will always be separate entities that will not always match up. I don't think its a good idea to look to much into this, soon you will be opening a Pandora's box of questions.

For example, if the 'sun' is just a hole, how do plants grow? Why are there seasons? What about gravity? There will never be satisfactory answers to these questions, because the questions themselves are unimportant.

Reasons could be made for those things quite easily, and the fact that they aren't has nothing to do with gameplay. It's just that the questions are indeed unimportant.

Seconded. I've been noticing a lot of these types of questions lately in this forum.

No, what's unimportant to you may not be unimportant to someone else. It is entirely opinionated. So to me, they are important. To you, they're not. It is subjective.



@Velorien, true I've never heard anybody say anything, but I doubt BGS would hire voice actors just for the sake of hearing your character speak the magical words. It's cheaper and quicker to just let the Player roleplay that they are saying them. And yes, when you sneak up on an enemy, I imagine that you're not saying anything aloud either, and that you're just thinking it. Spells obviously have magical words and incantations. Every time I bought or made a spell in TESII Daggerfall, it would say "This spell has been scribed into your grimoire." And I don't think they were just writing the spells name in your book, but how to cast it, i.e. the magical words.



@Megaton Hammerstein, you mean like praying?

Well they had voice actors in Morrowind and Oblivion, available to say such lines as "STOOPID!" and "This is the part where you fall down and bleed to death!" Yeah, I suppose it would get annoying to hear the same lines over and over again every time someone casts a fireball spell or summons a monster, but if it's supposed to happen, I don't see why not. As far as the grimoire, you could just be writing down how to cast it, such as imagining the fireball forming in your hands, channeling the magicka in the air, things like that. Same goes for the Spell Tomes in Oblivion and the scrolls in Morrowind.

I've just never really liked the idea of speaking some incantation to use a spell (even less so now that Dragon Shouts are being implemented with that system, what's the difference?) because no one ever says anything when they're casting a spell, and the Silence book is the only source I've ever seen that says otherwise, unless I've missed another instance somewhere. In times like this, I'd rather take what I see and hear in-game over what a book says to the contrary.

No offense. I just mean that mechanistic explanations of TES phenomena are out of place, and contextually irrelevant. It doesn't matter how the plants grow in TES, because the plants don't grow in accordance with some universal law or natural philosophy. It is a "thou" world, not an "it", if you're familiar with the terminology of mythopoeic thought.

But of course, the importance of any interpretation, regardless of intended context, is up to the individual to decide.


On the subject of magic, and how it's cast... I think that it *does* involve ritual or incantation in some way, although not necessarily verbal. "Silence" could be metaphorically "silencing" your will, or your thoughts, or cutting you off from the source of magic, or it could just be a name of convenience for its association to DnD magic systems (it is a name that goes back at least as far as Daggerfall, after all)... Basically, I guess I have no clue.

I had always thought that it was forming a barrier around your mind, stopping all thoughts from leaving, so that you couldn't speak the incantations, or when you're skilled enough, cast the spells simply by thought.

in the book http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Mixed_Unit_Tactics it metions a group of Khajiit sneaking up on some bosmers under the cover of a magical silence. So they used silence to make them unable to make a sound at all.