Yep, I was wondering about a few of the rules as I plodded on through the game today :read:

Stealth



Running



Lockpicking



Critical Strike



Race



Armor Pieces

1) This sight http://www.izhtex.com/tes2/ has a lot of nice info. Read "Skill Development"
2) The only thing I've noticed is "the lower the skill, the easier it is to raise". I've never noticed Primary/Major/Minor/Misc making any difference.
3) I play a Nord and Frost Daedra still knock me for a loop. Don't know whether resist frost would stack or not.
4) The Open spell does not train Lockpicking.
4a) I play a lot of Daggerfall but I'll never try zero-magic/zero-enchant. Good Luck!!
5) I've never noticed the chances of finding various types of armor "peaking". However, I think it's obvious that the percentage of Iron armor would be greater at the lower levels. Again, good luck when it comes to finding Silver armor, it's rare.
6) I don't want to worry about leveling up, but I do want to be able to "control" it. For me, this means weapon and spell skills along with things like running, climbing, and jumping. Stealth seems to level up at the same rate as my weapon skills without doing anything special.

Stealth
Stealth is always checked, and is a function of your movement speed as well as your skill. In fact, the only thing the "stealth" button does is slow your movement speed so you get better results. It is possible to sprint up to someone and have them not notice you, because you're so damn cool.

Running
No, picking skills as primary/major/minor/misc only affects their starting values, and of course which ones contribute to your leveling up.

Lockpicking
The eq may be in the DF Chronicles. I'll check when I get home (if I remember ).

Critical Strike
Considering this one just gets checked each time you hit something, the only way to train it up past what paid trainers can do is to continue to whack on things.

Here's what I'll do sometimes when I'm looking for some weapon training: get yourself a soultrap spell, but don't buy a soulgem. Then go find some stupid creature that won't hurt you too much (like a rat) and cast it on him. Whoop on it, and when it'd normally die you'll get a message saying "http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y217/Jormungandr83/Daggerfall/fall_072.png" because you don't have soulgem. Basically, you have an immortal punching bag for the duration of the soultrap spell.

Race
Yea, high elves and nords are the only races with specials. They still don't look as cool as dark elves, though.
Not sure about stacking in that instance.

Armor Pieces
I've wondered the same thing, especially with regard to Silver armor, which is notoriously rare. Once you get high level, it seems you are always getting Daedric weaponry and not much else of exceptional quality. Of course, enemies rarely have more than 2 or 3 superior items anyways.

Immunities can be pretty much given in the Character Creator. DF's racial differences are mostly masked by the complex skill generator and skill points distributors, anyway, and I kinda like it more that way. In MW I almost always pick a clear cut racial template, like "Nord Warrior" or "Breton Mage".

What's funny is that the game is actually supposed to alter your attributes a little based on your race, but those racial changes are immediately overwritten by your class

Thanks a lot for the answers, guys. It looks like the issue of armor quality is the only truly unsolved mystery among what I was asking. But I never knew silver armor pieces existed, apart from helms, and I've played a lot of Daggerfall.



Many of these questions basically occurred to me as I'm playing my first attempt at a zero-magic character. I've never found much use for the lockpicking skill until now, since Open always succeeds. Before I rolled the PC, I was theorizing on what kind of advantages a zero-magic PC could aim for, since he required no expensive, magical traits, and would be getting serious boosts to the leveling Dagger from "Inability to use magicka" daylight and darkness, and stunted magicka. I even toyed around with this setup here:

• Spell Absorption
  
• Increased Mana: 3x Intelligence
  
• Inability to use magicka: daylight
  
• Inability to use magicka: darkness

...with the intention to see if he could get unlimited spell absorption (since your energy pool never fills) and thus total immunity to all forms of magical attack. I've tried a few variants on this, including the addition of 1-2 immunities, but things are completely inconclusive so far. Based on repeat trials against the imps in Privateer's Hold, I just can't figure it out. Sometimes the PC appears to absorb spells, and other times very obviously not. What I would like to know is if anyone else has experimented with this kind of thing, and what they found.

For the mean time, I saddled my PC with total immunity to everything (magic, frost, shock, fire, poison, paralysis). Eat that, Tamriel. The problem here is not the leveling dagger, but the space... having six immunities is 6/7slots taken on your abilities roster. It only leaves room for one extra ability. I have gotten to level 12 and can say that it doesn't make for a particularly exciting, dynamic fighter. Well, apart from the fact that he runs into crowded rooms shrugging off ALL magic, and is therefore unstoppable against the toughest enemies. But there's not much else to him.


Well I can comment on this, at least. You're feeling the Daedra Snowman's very high-strength melee attack. He has less AGI than other daedra, though, meaning that your own AGI and your dodge skill are handy against him.

I've played characters with Immunity to magic along with critical weaknesses to poison, paralysis, and disease. These characters have never been poisoned, paralyzed, or diseased. Don't know whether or not you need the critical weaknesses to enable this to work, but you could eliminate two of the abilities (immunity to poison and paralysis) this way.

Alright... great to know!

Yeah, I am kind of glad for that though - gives you a bit more versatility in your character background and class design. Don't tell Lucius about this little oddity.

Just checked on Immunity to Magic preempting paralysis, disease, and poison. It would seem that it works for the first two, but not the latter. This seems intuitive, I guess, since poison is actually a damage flavor in the same mold as fire, frost, and shock.

The spell absorption advantage is not 100% effective. The chance is based on your Willpower, IIRC, so with a high Will you'll absorb spells more often. Out of curiosity, why did you take Increased Magery 3x along with those magic-crushing disadvantages? Seems a waste of a slot.

As for non-magic characters, I enjoy them. I usually go for more of a rogue than a rush-in-kill-everything warrior, but that's just my preference.

I had no idea that WIL affected spell absorption. I thought that absorption was always 100 percent effective, at least when you took it as a trait, and that's why the Area-at-range spell trick is impregnable.

I tried a lot of things. Absorption is limited by your magicka pool and you absorb 1:1 for what your opponents spend in magicka (or so I thought) so one of my tricks was to try a character of below-average intelligence but a high maximum magicka. I also kind of like the idea of taking a trait and not using it for its original intent, hehe.

As for sneaking around, I think the best TES implementation for rogues is in Oblivion (just in the way sneaking, lockpicking, illusion, backstabbing, etc. works, and how immersive it is), so I get it out of my system there

Critical strike: use the weakest weapon you can to attack so you need to hit enemies more times. Using an iron or steel weapon to fight animals, humans, etc. An easy way to get a large amount of enemies to 'practice' on is to run around town killing townies then pickpocketing the guards that turn up. This might be a bit hard to RP though..