I haven't the slightest idea if this is possible or not, but I do think it'd be an interesting thing to discuss.

Let's consider, for a moment, the Boots of Blinding Speed. A fantastically powerful artifact with two constant effect enchantments that would be -impossible- to make with the game's current enchantment system. You simply can't enchant a pair of Netch boots with such great enchantments. A friend and I were playing through the game as a conjurer when we came to consider this oddity, and my friend suggested that it was implied that the boots were able to have such a great fortify speed enchantment because they had such a terrible blind enchantment.

That is kind of the idea of the boots, right? You practically get them for free, but they are meant to be useless without being clever. But WHAT IF the in game enchanting worked exactly like that? That is, what if the player could enchant any item with incredible enchantments so long as they balanced it out with negative ones? As it stands now, the game is blind to the difference between a blind spell and a fortify attribute spell: both will cost the enchantment points of the object even though one is beneficial and one of them is not. It stands to reason that a negative enchantment should actually free up more enchantment points depending on how negative it is.

This would make enchanting items far more interesting. A player could, for instance, craft a sword for himself with amazing power, but one that drains his health at an alarming rate. That is only an example. I hope I've explained the idea well enough in that jumble of words up there.

Is it possible? For some reason I think not, at least not with the construction set alone.

You could just do all this with a spell/enchantment. If the effects require too many points, you can just make it in the CS.
I'd imagine that you could do many of these enchants that you're looking for this way.

I'm nearly certain this can't be done with the original CS; I don't know enough about MWSE to say if it could be done there, but I'd be real surprised. It's certainly something they should consider putting into the next Elder Scrolls game.

You could, however, use scripting and dialogue to do a limited version of this. Define a number of combination enchantments, like the sword you mentioned. For each, define the base object (it would have to be a specific weapon, armor piece, or whatever), the cost, and the soul required. The player would choose which enchantment he wanted from a menu. If he had the required money and items, they would be removed from his inventory and replaced with the enchanted item. The number of enchantment combinations available to the player is limited only by your imagination and willingness to do some rather tedious scripting and dialogue management.

Well, yeah. I certainly could just make neat items in the CS, but it'd be much cooler if this was supported in game directly within the enchantment dialog.

To be clear, it's not that I actually want "a sword that drains the players health but is otherwise quite powerful". I could care less for such an item. I just think this kind of enchanting could make for some very interesting options in game, especially earlier on when mega artifacts aren't so easy to come by, or even in the late game when you have constant effect items that could offset whatever negative things you might put onto an otherwise crazy enchanted item.

That sort of thing would not be quite as graceful as true support in the enchantment dialog. I figured it couldn't be done in the CS, so I'm just going to hold onto this idea in my head until one of the alternate engines being developed gets to the point where they are adding features.

I think this is a really good idea. If you can't do this with enchanting, I wonder if you could do this with alchemy? I'm not too familiar with alchemy in Morrowind so I'm not sure if it could be done.

Edit: Typo

This is quite good idea, but there is many exploits in this. For instance warrior could enchant all his items with drain magicka, stunted magicka(if there were one),drain/damage all magicka related skills to 0 and then you could put massive positive to reflect damage, resist magicka, fortify strength to 1000 etc...

It is good idea but it has many exploits (thought this i singleplayer game so exploits should′t be a issue )

I'm confused. If the CS couldn't make negative enchantments, the Boots of Blinding Speed wouldn't exist.
Nor would Fury. Nor any constant effect item in the game with negative enchantments and positive ones.

Maybe I got confused over what you said, Rex Little.

Also, considering I know of several mods that have menus where you choose the item you get, that ability shouldn't require MWSE.
Off the top of my head, Qwert's Undead Dungeons has a forge where you can create things if you have the right ingredients.
The Marksman mod, has potion creation and arrow creation via scrpting done in the CS.
And I'm sure there's others.

What Enzo Dragon wants to do is allow the player to make his own enchanted items with negative effects bringing down the Enchant value so that larger positive effects can be put on an item than would otherwise be possible. For instance, let's suppose you want to enchant an amulet with a constant effect Fortify Magicka. Let's further suppose that the largest value of Fortify Magicka the amulet will take is 50 points. Enzo would like to make it so that if the player adds, say, a 50% Weakness to Magicka to the enchantment, it allows the Fortify Magicka value to go up to, say, 100. What I said was, I don't think there's a way to enable the player to do this using the existing CS capabilities. You can certainly use the CS to create an amulet with Fortify Magicka 100 and Weakness to Magicka 50%, but there's no way to allow the player to do so in-game.

I'd love to see this implemented in-game, but I don't know how it could be accomplished accurately.

As a side note: Is it possible to use the CS to change the cost of adding multiple enchantments? In other words, the cost of adding spell effect B along with spell effect A = cost of B + 2 * cost of A. A large number of pre-made enchanted items in the game grossly exceed the enchantment capacity of the items they enchant. Any way to change that 2x multiplier to a different number?

This would be a nice addition to the game if it could be properly balanced, but a full implementation (i.e. not a limited pool of premade items) would be MCP/OpenMW territory. I am pretty sure that MWSE doesn't have the capability of defining new enchants and applying them... though I'd be happy to be proved wrong =)

The shame of it all is that this exact feature already existed in Daggerfall and was left out when the developers created Morrowind.

However, Daggerfall's enchantment system was modular, which allowed the developers to assign some "modules" which were bad and others that were good. Then the player simply customized the various values within the modules and stuck them all together to form the complete enchantment. The kind of modules one would see included things like:

Blindness on self for 2 minutes
Unable to regenerate magicka in sunlight
Unable to use or equip daedric items
Fire damage [ A points + B points per level of the caster ] per second for C seconds in D radius on target (lots of variables in that one)

Morrowind's enchantmaker is much more flexible in some respects because it eliminated the modular aspect of enchantments. Unfortunately, it was the modular aspect that lent itself to negative side effects, because the definition of what constitutes a negative side effect is a judgment call. The daggerfall development team made those judgments when creating modules. The Morrowind enchantmaker is incapable of making them. There are variables which can be used to adjust the cost of a specific effect, but none of them individually can be used to determine if the effect is positive or negative. Since the enchantmaker is hard-coded, even a set of rules to simulate those judgment calls by saying effect X is negative if cast "on self" and positive if cast "on other" is impossible to add. To make matters even more complicated, most of those negative modules weren't even spell effects, which would make simulating them in Morrowind absolutely impossible.

The bottom line (IMO) is that the enchantmaker simply isn't capable of determining which spell effect is truly disadvantageous, nor is there a variable in the game settings that would allow the enchantmaker to reduce the cost of an enchantment for containing one even if it was capable of detecting it.

On a side note, the formula for calculating enchantment cost is also hard-coded. The formula itself cannot be modified in the CS, although the game settings act as variables within the formula allowing a certain amount of flexibility where those game settings exist. There are no game settings controlling the cost of multiple effects, so that aspect of the formula cannot be changed without modifying the hard-code (e.g. Morrowind Code Patch)

Excellent post, Toccatta. I had no idea that Daggerfall's enchantment system worked like that, and now I really wish Morrowind's had been more like Daggerfall's. What is even more disheartening is that Oblivion's enchantment system is like Morrowind's and not like Daggerfall's which suggests that the next TES will have a "Morrowind" type enchantment system, too.

I don't know if the MCP would be able to do this. It sure would be awesome, but it seems more likely that we'll have to wait for an open-source alternative to the engine to arise.

I keep forgetting how rudimentary MWSE is compared to OBSE.... Not that MWSE is bad, mind you, but it certainly pales in comparison to the awesome powers OBSE can do to TESIV. We need to kidnap scruggs and get him to work on MWSE.

Possibly, you could have a script that provides a mold for holding enchantment-like effects. Then have a menu that lets the player customize what they want. Then have the script fill in the mold and target it to an item to simulate an enchantment. The two problems I see are having a unique ID for each item, and having a wide range of effects to fill in the mold. You would have to make a large catalog of both items and cookie-cutter effects. ( 1% blind, 2% blind, etc.)