Esreverian - The Game

What the best type of custom character to play in Daggerfall is a source of ongoing debate in the group and largely the answer is that it depends on what you're trying to do. If you are trying to create a superman who can kick ass and take names, naturally you will be looking to create a different character than if you are trying for a character more in balance with the game that will be more of a challenge to play.

If this is your first time through the game, so you probably want a tough character, able to survive the worst of what daggerfall can throw at you, but not so tough as to totally unbalance the game. Such a character might look something like this:

Primary Skills: long blade, restoration, critical strike
Major Skills: dodging, medical, mysticism
Minor Skills: alteration, thaumaturgy, stealth, backstabbing, destruction and mercantile or running

I don't really find destruction or mercantile all that useful, but I couldn't think of anything better. If you want the character to go up a bit faster, take running as the last minor skill. If you want the game to be more challenging, substitute short blade for long blade as a primary.

RACE: Probably the best race to play is a High Elf (Summerset Isle) because they are immune to paralyzation, a common form of attack.

SPECIAL ADVANTAGES: 2X intelligence in magery (or 3X magery if you want to be more powerful)

Special advantages and disadvantages are to me, the heart of the character. Here is where you determine how hard or easy the game will be for you. It's largely a matter of personal choice here.

SPECIAL DISADVANTAGES: As far as this goes, it all depends where you want to set the difficulty dagger. Personally, I like to set the dagger about the middle of the scale, or a little higher. The character will advance a little slower this way than if you set the dagger lower. Choose from the following disadvantages:

Critical Weakness to Frost
Forbidden Weapon Axe
Forbidden Material Silver
Darkness Powered Magery (lower in light)

If you want more disadvantages without taking advantage of bugs, I like darkness powered magery (lower in light) and forbidden material silver. I don't see a lot of this stuff anyway. For sure skip critical weakness to paralyzation or poison, two fairly common forms of attack. How many you want all depends on where you want to set the difficulty dagger.

Also note that you can create a much more powerful character than this. If you are looking to create a super powerful character, there are bugs in the game you can take advantage of. Pick a high elf and then select critical weakness to paralyzation. This drives down the difficulty dagger, but doesn't cost you anything because he is immune to this form of attack.

You can choose things that make your character a superman, like immunity to magic. Due to a bug this also bestows immunity to disease, paralyzation and poison. Then you can choose critical weakness to disease etc. as disadvantages, driving the difficulty dagger way down. The resulting character is a virtual steamroller.

Another very powerful character type is the spell absorbing character. These can cast area damage spells without limit because they have a 100% chance of absorbing their own spells. They can also train quickly by making custom spells that include spells from one or two other schools in an area damage spell. This allows them to raise stats in as many magic skills as they want every 6 hours. On the other hand, if you're looking for a challenge, this type of character is not for you.

HEALTH POINTS: Somewhere around 15 to 20 HP/level ought to do it. Much of this depends on how much of a challenge you wish to face. 30/level is the max and 6/level is the minimum (too few).

Remember, if you don't like your character after a few dungeons, you can always start over and beef him up or pare him down.

ATTRIBUTES: As far as the changes you can make to the character's attributes (strength, intelligence, etc.), it is largely a matter of style of play. As a general strategy, I consider personality unimportant and knock it down to 30 or 35. Luck I push down to 40. Since I always choose a decent amount of hit points (to make the difficulty dagger go up so the character doesn't advance too quickly) I set endurance down to 40 as well. The resulting 35-40 points I use to push either speed to 75. I add the rest to intelligence and agility or strength. Try to get endurance to 50 when you spend your bonus points. Keep in mind that most bonuses kick in at multiples of 10 so you get just as much immediate benefit out of an agility of 50 as you do of 58 or 59.

Extremely Random Thoughts on Character Creation

When choosing skills for your character, keep in mind how the advancement system works. The formula used to determine this takes into account only six skills: all three primary skills, the two highest major skills and one minor skill. That's why choosing running as a minor makes the character advance faster, because running goes up so fast if you run when you're in town.

The only other thing I think is vital is take only one weapon skill, unless the second is ranged weapons. Taking more than one weapon skill will make both go up more slowly, and leave less room for more useful skills.

Almost anything you do has to be better than any of the standard character classes.

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