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Teach me about CRPGs

Adrenaline

Post Reader
(He/Him)
You're not doing anything wrong. The combat in Morrowind is all dice rolls and early on you're going to miss a lot.

You can level up in Morrowind after increasing any combination of major and minor skills 10 times. If athletics is not one of those skills, increasing it will do nothing else.

You need magic or a magical weapon to hurt ghosts.
 

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
Oh, wild, okay. So jumping everywhere is just an easy way to level up early on, then? And thanks!
 

Adrenaline

Post Reader
(He/Him)
Yes, but it's not always the most efficient way to do it, because the improvements you gain for leveling are better if they're tied to the skills you used to do it.
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
Alright, so it's Morrowind time! I've installed OpenMW (which was surprisingly easy on Steam Deck - enable Luxtorpeda and it just downloads OpenMW for you) for stuff like widescreen and whatnot, but I have some basic questions about gameplay:

1. I'm playing as a warrior, or at least a melee fighter anyway, and the combat seems weird to me. I'm a Redguard which means I'm supposedly proficient with longswords, but I seem to be missing a lot - am I doing something wrong? I have "always do best attack" or whatever enabled in the menu and I'm currently equipped with a longsword, so I'm wondering if I just don't "get" how to do combat.
Adrenaline did mention it's all dice rolls, but another critical thing to keep in mind is that your current stamina affects accuracy. Unless this is an option to turn off or something like that in OpenMW, having 0 stamina makes you miss a whole heck of a lot more than full stamina. It's really not a great gameplay choice, and one of the first things I almost always wrangle up at the beginning of a character is to enchant a piece of clothing or a ring with a "Constant Effect: Restore Stamina" for like 2 or 3 stamina points, so that just walking around won't drain your stamina bar.
 

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
Oh, geez, yeah, I didn't know that, and one of those enchantments would be nice. I'll have to figure out how to do that - in fact I'll just ask: how do I enchant stuff? Is it an innate skill I have or can get, or do I have to find an NPC that will do it for me?
 

Poster

Just some poster
2. The only thing I've really known about Morrowind all these years is "jump everywhere". What is the purpose of that? I realize my Athletics skill levels up, but what does that enable me to do? Does it just decrease the amount of stamina I use when running/jumping?
Hulk jumping across the landscape is fun, but you want to pair it with slowfall so you don't hurt and/or kill yourself from fall damage.

Later on though, you can learn to fly.
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
Oh, geez, yeah, I didn't know that, and one of those enchantments would be nice. I'll have to figure out how to do that - in fact I'll just ask: how do I enchant stuff? Is it an innate skill I have or can get, or do I have to find an NPC that will do it for me?
It can be both, but it's easier to find an NPC to do it for you. The basic idea is: you need 1) a soul gem with a captured soul, and 2) you have to know a spell with the effect you want to enchant with. For #2, any kind of restore stamina spell will work, so finding a cheap one is fine. For #1... well I know there' merchants somewhere around that have pre-trapped soul gems for sale.

But essentially there's a special effect in the Mysticism spell school that's called like "Soultrap" or something, and casting that on a monster and then killing it will trap their soul inside an empty soul gem in your inventory. The "quality" of the monster and the grade of the soul gem combined together to determine how strong your enchantment can potentially be. But for the stamina restore thing I'm talking about, I think you need a pretty strong soul gem? I can't point to who specifically to go to for these things, but any of the Mage's Guilds are a good starting point.
 

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
That's fine - sounds like soul gems in Skyrim, really, which is the only other Elder Scrolls game I've played. I've found some empty soul gems but I'll poke around in the inventories of the few shops I've seen and see if I can find a pre filled gem and try to figure out where I can learn an enchant stamina spell. Thanks!
 
I would suggest reading this to understand leveling: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Level

Increasing miscellaneous skills isn't completely wasting time because it affects what multipliers your attribute increases will have.

I just want to add that although you should definitely try to understand this, don't try to perfectly do "efficient levelling" every time unless that seems like something you would enjoy. Unlike Oblivion and Skyrim there's (mostly) no level scaling, so you're not really punished for inefficiency. However, it's helpful to get a general idea of what an efficient level might look like and plan your activities accordingly in a broad sense, even if you're not going to take notes to make sure you're getting the maximum possible multipliers every level. In other words, don't worry too much if you accidentally raised Restoration a bit because you needed to cast a heal spell too many times even though you don't plan to raise Willpower so technically the multiplier is "wasted," but maybe do think things like, "I'd like the max Strength multiplier next time, so I'll mostly use Long Blade and also jump a lot for this level." Or, "I'd like to raise Speed, so I'll take off my armor (or some of it) and use a Short Blade this level." If you enjoy self-imposed challenges, this can potentially be fun enough that always aiming for a perfectly efficient level is enjoyable, but if you don't, don't worry about it except in this kind of general sense that you should do the kind of things that will increase the attributes you want to raise, but that you won't gain a level until Major and Minor skills increase 10 times.
 
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Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
Ok so even if I completely goof around and screw up my leveling/character build, it's fairly unlikely long term that I'll build a character than is unable to complete the game or at least most of it?
 

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
Awesome! So I'm good to just do what I want and have a good time with it, it sounds like. I mean I'm playing melee, so I'll try to focus on that, but I won't want to reload if I level to early or something. Rad.
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
Awesome! So I'm good to just do what I want and have a good time with it, it sounds like. I mean I'm playing melee, so I'll try to focus on that, but I won't want to reload if I level to early or something. Rad.
I'd say just having knowledge of how stat-multipliers-on-level-up work is good enough.
 
I'll add that the "best attack type" is referring to weapons having multiple different types of swings which can have different damage types and damage ranges, and without that setting the type of attack will depend on your directional movement when starting an attack. Best attack type will use whatever will do the highest minimum damage from just pressing the button, and to get the higher damage ranges for each type of attack you need to briefly hold the button to wind it up. Sometimes the best attack setting can lock you into an attack with lower maximum damage but in my opinion it's less troublesome than trying to remember which type of movement causes which type of attack.
 
edit: This is duplicative of the previous post, but I'll just leave it up there since I wrote it anyway... This is kind of complicated so maybe two slightly different explanations will be helpful...

Another piece of advice about not feeling like your Long Swords are doing that much damage:

In addition to low stamina dramatically decreasing accuracy, how long you charge an attack matters. There are dice rolls for accuracy, but damage is based on whether or not you're charging your swing. So, a basic Longsword does 1-18 slash damage. That's not random. It does 18 damage if you fully charge the attack (hold the button). If you're just pressing the button once, try holding it and you should see more damage.

The "always do best attack" setting is not about stamina/accuracy, and it's also not about charging your weapon for more damage. It's about a third mechanic: whether you use a chop, a slash, or a thrust. Normally, you do a thrust by attacking while moving forwards or backwards, slash by attacking while moving left or right, and a chop by attacking while standing still. "Always do best attack" just has your weapon defaults to one of those three. But to get the most damage, you still have to charge it. (I don't like this setting, personally! I like the default system of chop/slash/thrust being based on your movement, but it depends on your weapon and playstyle.)
 

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
Weird. I'll play around with that setting on and off and see what feels better. Does the animation change depending on your attack, or does it always look like an overhead chop? lol
 
Weird. I'll play around with that setting on and off and see what feels better. Does the animation change depending on your attack, or does it always look like an overhead chop? lol

Yes, the animation changes if you turn off the setting to default to the best one. With some weapons, this matters a lot more than others. If you have a spear, it's rare to want to do anything but thrust.
 

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
Later RPGs have spoiled me, because there are some personality based stuff I simply don't get in Morrowind. I've found Balmora, I've joined the Thieves Guild and Fighter's Guild, and while I've been able to figure out the Fighter's Guild quests so far, I'm stuck on the second Thieves Guild quest. I'm supposed to get the boss of the guild a key to the upstairs of one of the rich manors, and he gives me hints that I should either get it from the owner of the manor or his servant. However, neither have anything on them when I attempt to pickpocket them (which I'm probably doing wrong, as every time I exit the inventory menu after a pickpocket attempt, I get attacked lol), and I can't find a dialogue prompt that makes either of them indicate I could convince them to give me a key. I assume completing the quest has something to do with either intimidating them, bribing them, or flattering them, but they all seem like dice rolls and since I've only leveled once so far and didn't choose personality stats to level, I fail almost every time (and even when I've succeeded, their disposition towards me only goes up a little bit, and I don't see any new dialogue options or anything anyway). So, what am I missing?
 

Adrenaline

Post Reader
(He/Him)
Pickpocketing someone without getting caught and passing any dialogue tests are both very hard with low skills.
 

ThricebornPhoenix

target for faraway laughter
(he/him)
I believe your stamina ratio affects success for *every* skill that can fail, from Alchemy to Speechcraft.

However, neither have anything on them when I attempt to pickpocket them (which I'm probably doing wrong, as every time I exit the inventory menu after a pickpocket attempt, I get attacked lol)
How much of the target's inventory you can see is another skill-based RNG thing. Also, you get skill checked twice per attempt in vanilla MW, and OpenMW probably retains that behavior.
 

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
Oh wow, so I'm better off attempting like lockpicks and pickpocekts with full stamina? I really need to find a person who will teach me a fortify stamina spell quickly, because none of the mages in the Mage's Guild in Balmora will teach me one (I mean, they probably will if I join them, but... I've got other quests I want to do lol).
 
The problem with that quest shouldn't be stamina, because you're just chilling out in a house. It should be easy to have high stamina there.

It's what Adrenaline said: Your character doesn't have the skills to pickpocket or persuade anyone. That's an early Thieves Guild quest, but if you don't have the relevant skills it's next to impossible. If your character is good at combat but not thieving, your options are to murderer them for their keys (if you taunt them to provoke a fight, it's technically not illegal to defend yourself!) or do it later when you've paid someone to train you in Sneak or Speechcraft . (You can also train Sneak by toggling Sneak on and standing in observation range of a character but in a position where you character will sometimes briefly successfully enter Sneak status, if you want to do it organically. But the chance of successfully entering Sneak status is so low at low skill levels that you're better off paying someone for at least the early levels.)

But, basically, it's not like Skyrim where any build can do the Warrior, Wizard, and Theives' guild quests and a character who can't cast a spell will become the head of the Wizard's College because he's the protagonist. If you're a warrior, you're going to hit a brick wall with quests asking for skills you don't have unless you start to seriously train them. (Although, like in this case, sometimes this can be solved by being using the thing you are good at, melee combat, to do a murder instead.) There's a Wizard faction in Morrowind, and their whole town is designed to be inaccessible unless you can fly, for example. There are enchanted objects that you can find (or make) to help a warrior get around this, but it's easier for a magic user. This early thief's guild quest is a similar situation. Maybe at some point you'll be able to do this the right way, but probably not now without a lot of savescumming for the best possible outcome.
 
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Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
Oh, okay, that makes sense, then. I will try to taunt one of them so I can kill them, that's great. I assume bottoming out their disposition and continuing to try to piss them off will eventually make them attack me? Well, I'll find out haha
 
One thing I'd add is that there's a connection to be made between the previous discussion of Levelling and this discussion of how low skills in Morrowind really do limit your character options.

If Sneak is Misc skill and it's starting at 5, it's going to take forever to train it organically. But the flipside of that is that training a Skill costs less the lower your skill is, so to train it from 5 to 15 is pretty cheap. So, let's say you have the chance to gain a level and you know that you're only going to have decent multipliers for 1 or 2 skills out of the three you can raise. (You can also quicksave before levelling to see what your multipliers will actually be if you're not paying close attention.) That's a great time to pay for 10 levels of cheap Sneak training to get a 5x multiplier for Agility. (Or 10 levels of whatever other Level 5 Misc skill you have that's connected to some other attribute that's hard for your character to raise naturally.) Basically, there is a kind of advantage to having Misc skills at low levels that contribute to stats that are hard to raise just by playing. And this also means that there's a good chance that by the end of the game your character will be pretty good even at some of your Misc skills, because even though they'd take a long time to raise naturally, eventually money stops being concern (you can pick up and sell anything, every human enemy drops a full set of equipped armor, Alchemy is basically an infinite money glitch even without trying particularly hard to exploit it, etc.).

In Oblivion they make this slightly harder to manipulate because your multipliers are locked in once you become eligible to Level, so you have to remember to do this before you've raised 10 Major and Minor skills. This was a mistake, in my opinion, especially given how much that game also punishes you for inefficient levelling with its scaling enemies... (It doesn't really matter though, since you can just slide the difficulty slider down at any time to fix the game balance if you find you're not damaging enemies any more or being constantly one-shot...)
 
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also this thread is making me want to go back to Pillars of Eternity... i played enough of it a few years ago to know that i really liked it but got too busy with real life... have been thinking about protagonist builds for a new shot at it constantly since this thread popped up...

i have the problem that too many of the companions i want to use overlap with the kind of protagonist i'd want to make... i'm thinking maybe i make a far ranged/incantation based chanter (short phrases to get as many strong incantations as possible) to differentiate it from kana as a mid/close-range phrase based chanter (eventually aiming for dragon thrahsed on autopilot) when i also want to use him... hmmm....
 

Sarge

hardcore retro gamin'
I'd like to go back to Pillars as well - strangely, it's the only game in the Infinity Engine style that I've finished. I did beat it, but I didn't smack down the boss in The Master Below quest - I got stomped multiple times, 'cause it's really, really tough! Many of the fights, I'd be dead in seconds.

EDIT: Hmm, apparently paralysis is my friend. Might look at jumping back in eventually.
 
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