Secret Service 42

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DATE: 10/25/96 THE ORDERS If you chose a character that has certain attributes, and juggle it just right, you can theoretically join up to 6 orders. They include the Mages Guild, Fighters Guild, Thieves Guild, the Dark Brotherhood, a Knightly Order, and a Temple. Of course joining all of these orders will subject you to a great amount of expectation from each faction, so it is quite a juggling act. You ask how can you join the Dark Brotherhood and a Knightly Order at once? Just don't let the Knightly Order find out. After all, the Dark Brotherhood is a secret organization, and your membership should be secret as well. TEMPLES Chose a Temple wisely. You can only join one, and your membership is permanent. Pick the Temple that has access to certain exclusive benefits that will suite your needs. What if you find out you don't like the Temple that you have joined and want to join another one? There is a way to do it: get kicked out. Do things which will rile the feathers of the Temple you joined, and they will eventually disassociate you. Once you are kicked out, you will not have access to all the benefits that they offered before. Note that getting kicked out is not an easy task to do. You have really work at it. INGREDIENTS FOR POTIONS Need more ingredients to conjure up your next batch of magical potions? Certain enemies tend to carry more ingredients. If you kill them, you can search their body. Harpies and Imps tend to carry a number ingredients. MAKING MAGICAL ITEMS- SOUL GEMS It is possible to use a soul gem to increase the magical potential of an item. First, make sure you have a soul gem in your inventory. Cast Soul Trap on a monster. Kill the monster while the spell is still active. Now carry the soul back to a guildhall that has an Item Maker. When making the item, select the special advantage Soulbound. You will be shown a list of available souls to use. COMBAT- IMPACT Some enemies are considered light in weight, such as skeletons and rats. When attacking these creatures, try to fight them when they are against a wall. Your attack can strike an enemy and send it flying back from the force of your attack . If it hits the wall from the force, it can take on extra damage. It's quite amusing to see a particularly extra light enemy take a hard hit, fly back a few feet, hit a wall and die from the impact! COMBAT- AVOIDING IT The higher your skill in communicating with particular creatures, the more likely you can avoid deadly combat and can go about your way in peace. This skill is listed under Miscellaneous Skills in your Character Sheet screen. In order to communicate, you must have your weapon put away (who would want to talk to someone who looks ready for combat?) If you successfully convince a monster not you attack you, they will go about their own business. However, if you are truly the devious type, you can attack with its back turned! Your success in communicating is the % rate listed by the specific skill. Thus if your skill % rate is 80%, you have an 80% success rate in attempting to communicate. Every time you attempt to communicate with other creatures, even if you fail to successfully do so, your skill in communicating with that particular creature will improve. Language skills increase at a greater rate if your intelligence is higher. CLIMBING DOWN PITS You see a big pit before you, and you want to enter the abyss. Unless you know that you can survive a long fall, it is best not to jump straight down. For those that can cast a Slow fall or Levitate spell, your descent will be easy. For everyone else, you are going to need a magical item or potion that will grant you the ability to get down there safely. Often times, there is more than one way to get to a certain area. Try looking for another way down before jumping into a pit. Also make sure you can get back out! DUNGEON SECRETS- TRAPDOORS All trapdoors that you find cannot be opened directly. You have to find a lever, or solve a puzzle to open them. Most of time, the lever is evident and can be easily found. Other times, the lever could be a chain hanging from a ceiling or a floating skull. There are one or two dungeons where lever is one of the torches hanging on the wall! Trying to find the right torch can be downright mindnumbing! DUNGEON SECRETS- SECRET DOORS Secret doors and chambers are often hard to find in dungeons. Unless you check your automap. Secret doors to hidden areas are shown as empty spaces in the automap. Rotate the dungeon around to look for these anomalies. This is also a good way to locate the exit to the dungeon if you get lost. The exit is indicated by a green marker. It's hard to see, so you have to look carefully. DUNGEON AUTOMAP You can left click on a piece of the dungeon to make it flash. Clicking on the gray bar at the bottom of the screen produces a cursor. Whatever you type in there is attached to that piece. To see the description again, click on the dungeon piece, and its description appears in the bar at the bottom of the screen. You can right click on a piece of the dungeon to hide it temporarily. If you are having trouble seeing parts of the dungeon, this is a good way to reveal the solution to the maze. ARGH! TOO MUCH INVENTORY! You may be a burly man/woman/thing, but in the end you can only carry so much inventory. A wagon can be bought to carry many things, though it doesn't come cheap. Instead, what you can do is rent out a room from an inn for a long period of time. This way, you can store excess inventory in the room while you go out and adventure. Obviously, in the long term, this isn't very cost effective. One day, you will have to get a wagon, or a house, or a ship to store all the treasures you gathered from your adventures. Remember that gold is heavy. Your encumberance will be high, even if your inventory is low, if you are carrying around lots of gold. One way to lighten your load is to trade the gold into credit at a bank. There is a small transaction fee, but a letter of credit stating you have $100,000 in gold is much lighter than $100,000 in gold! TAKING PICTURES For those that want to capture the moment, there is a way to take BMP pictures anywhere in the game. Simply create a PICS subdirectory in the DAGGER directory that is installed on your harddrive. Now whenever you play the game and see something truly spectacular, all you have to do is press the / key (backslash key) and a BMP picture is taken and stored into the PICS subdirectory. To view the picture, simply exit the game and click on the file in the PICS subdirectory. You can now document your adventures through Daggerfall and share them! DATE: 10/01/96 TRAVELING- TIP 1 You have several methods of traveling, ranging from foot, horse, to ship. Each one has a distinct advantage and disadvantage. A wagon is not considered a mode of traveling, but it can reduce your encumbrance whether on foot or horse. FOOT Walking around can be a leisurely activity, however it can become tedious, especially in large towns and cities, and can also drain your character of energy and leave you fatigued. This goes double for running around. However, running around does build your running skills. This results in faster travel, when on foot, and is particularly useful when questing in dungeons and castles, as you cannot ride a horse in these environments. Your Speed Attribute affects how quickly your running skills increase. HORSE Having a horse can make travel much quicker, especially when you are in large towns and cities (i.e. Daggerfall, Sentinel are Wayrest are especially large cities.) Though buying a horse is expensive, once you own one, it will never die nor will it get sick or fatigued. You can mount a horse in any outdoor environment. Riding a horse, however, prevents you from building your running skill, as you are not running on foot. SHIP Needless to say, buying a ship is extremely expensive. However, owning a ship has two advantages, besides being a status symbol! First, a ship can reduce travel time across the ocean. If you own the ship, travel is free across the water, otherwise it is quite costly if you use it regularly. Second, a ship can be used to store all of your belongings and treasures. You need not worry about pirates and thieves, as your ship cannot be attacked at sea or docked in a harbor. TRAVELING TIP- FAST TRAVEL When you travel from town to town, and from province to province, you can fast travel to get there quicker. CAUTIOUS VS. RECKLESS Traveling cautiously takes longer, but your character always arrives in daylight, when the city gates are open. INNS VS. CAMP OUT Camping out is always free. However, it increases travel time a bit to account for the need to hunt for your food. BREAKING DOWN DOORS When a door has nothing to fear from you, it means that your lockpicking skills just don't cut it. But there is a way around this. You can break the lock on the door by beating on it! Use your weapon or foot/hand and continually pound on the door til it opens. It may take quite a number of hits before you succeed. There are some notes of precaution. Using your weapon to break a door open will degenerate your weapon, and eventually render it useless (then you will have to find a blacksmith to repair it.) Use your foot/hand as often as possible. However, this method will take longer to get results compared to using a weapon, and it also leaves you vulnerable to attack since your weapon is not ready. Be caution in monster-infested dungeons and castles when attempting to break open a door. Also, magically held doors will not break down by this method. BREAKING AND ENTERING If you want to be a thief at least think like one. Break into houses during the night. Check around to make sure as few people are around to see your activities. You may successfully break into a house, but stealing may set off alarms to the household, and the guards will come after you. Remember that breaking into a house, and stealing are two different skills. Also, if a house has a second floor, there might be a door into the house from the second floor. Breaking and entering from the second floor will attract less attention. BAD BEHAVIOR CAN BE COSTLY It sure is fun to break into people's houses or steal from stores. Or you may be the immoral type that kills innocent people for no reason. Either way, you should know that your behavior can have harsh consequences. If you are caught too often and brought into court, you could be banished from a town. The result is that you cannot get in for a long period of time. If you are the type that likes to run away from the law, you can outrun the guards, and escape from the town. If you do, you can enter back into the town and the guards will not recognize you. That is, if you do not pull anything criminally excessive off, like kill a dozen innocent bystanders. The guards will recognize you if you exit and enter the town again, and they will chase you down. STORES AND MERCHANTS Pay close attention to the text that appears whenever you enter a store. If the text indicates that the store is of good quality, you want to look around to find rare items for sale which are hard to come by. There tends to be high quality items in these stores. However, you should never sell your inventory to these stores. These merchants tend to be shrewd business folks, and can often negotiate better than you. However, if the text indicates that the store is of shoddy quality, you want to sell your inventory. The merchants that run these stores tend to be worse at negotiation, thus you will be able to get more money for the things you sell. Note that if you want to purchase merchandise from a store, click on the shelves where the merchandise is located. When buying and selling items, a COST bar appears above your character portrait. The first number is the base value of the items being exchanged. The second number is how much gold your character is carrying. Beware! You will never buy or sell items for the price shown here. However, you can find out how badly you bargained or how dramatic the economic conditions of the region are influencing prices. Even in the best of circumstances, there will be a significant difference between the buying and selling prices of items. TAVERNS If you rent a room in a tavern for many days, you can leave your stuff there safely. So long as you return before the time expires, your stuff is safe. When you enter a town, a message appears on the screen if you have a room at any tavern anywhere in that town. Once every four hours you can buy food or drink at a tavern. This will restore a small amount of health. QUESTS- EXTERMINATION Some quests will have you out to kill creatures that have infested a house or a tavern. When you attempt to kill these creatures, be aware that there could be a variable number of them infesting a certain location. Do not let them gang up on you! You do not have to kill all of the creatures to successfully complete the quest. Generally, the quest is completed once you kill about 2/3 of all creatures. Text will generally appear to indicate that you have successfully completed the quest. QUESTS-YOUR A HITMAN/HITWOMAN You may be called upon to kill someone. When you discover where that person may be hiding out, note that the door may be locked. It's locked for a good reason. He/she knows that hitmen are out there! You may have to break the door down. Also, you may not find your victim at certain times. They too have lives, and may be located at different locations at different times of the day. Often times if you wait at your victim's hangout, they will eventually come in. One quest has you going after someone who sleeps in his house at night, works during the day, and drinks at a tavern after work. He can be found at one of those locations. If you ask around, someone might be able to direct you to him. QUESTS- DON'T ALWAYS BE A HERO Often times, a quest giver will threaten you if you do not take a quest. Do not take his/her word too harshly, as ultimately his threats will have little consequence in the game. Make sure that your skills are advanced enough, and that you have the proper equipment before you accept a quest. Failing a quest will have a greater negative effect on your reputation than turning a quest down. COMBAT- ARCHERY TIP 1 Using a bow and arrow as a weapon can be extremely useful in avoiding hand to hand combat, especially against creatures that can paralyze you. You do have a limited supply of arrows, and the number of arrows you can carry depends on how much encumbrance you can take (check encumbrance level on your Character Sheet screen.) What do you do when you are deep in a dungeon and run out of arrows? Try searching the body of dead enemies which you killed with an arrow. Chances are you can successfully find the arrows and reuse them. This also goes for arrows which are shot at you. Check your inventory, and see if you managed to pull the arrow out to reuse! Now that's recycling! There is a distinct disadvantage when using a bow and arrow. When enemies manage to get close in and attack you, it will take a few seconds for you to switch to close range weapon, thus leaving you vulnerable to the first attack. DATE: 09/25/96 STARTING OUT AND EXPLORING CITIES There are over 16,000 locales in the game Daggerfall, ranging from dungeons, towns, farms, castles, to cities. Some of the most impressive sites are the main cities in each province. Take some time to explore the cities of Daggerfall, Sentinel, and Wayrest, each located in their prospective province by the same name. The main quest will have you visiting these cities one time or another, so explore them at your leisure, and enjoy the sites. Of particular visual beauty are the central castles in each city. It is not recommended to visit the city of Daggerfall at night. It is haunted by the undead, which are difficult to kill. You can avoid these creatures by staying indoors at night. CONTROLS When you start the game, experiment using the View Interface. This is the interface used in many 3D action games including Terminator: Future Shock and the other game equivalent to "Ground Shaker". Basically, your movement forward and backward are controlled by the keyboard, and your ability to look around is controlled by the mouse. Most of us here at Bethesda prefer the View Interface, though Julian Lefay and a few others prefer the Cursor Interface. Since you are going to be sitting down with the game for a long time, get comfortable with an interface which you think will be the most effective and efficient for you in the long term. BUILDING YOUR SKILLS: TIP 1 Never do anything normal in Daggerfall, because it doesn't build any skills. Daggerfall is designed so that when you use a skill more often, the better you get at it. Even simple things like exploring a town and dungeon can become training grounds. When in a town, always run around. This builds your running skill. When in a dungeon, sneak around since this builds your stealth skill. BUILDING YOUR SKILLS: TIP 2 Always try to build your primary and major skills. Your advancement in level directly depends upon how quickly you build up your entire group of primary and major skills. There is a specific formula that is used, but to go into detail of how it works is like math class. However, what I can tell you is that since skills advance at a decreasing rate as you become more proficient at that skill, it will take more effort into building that skill. However, there are certain skills which you do not use often and will naturally be lower. Train in guilds to build these skills. They will initially advance faster, and the faster you advance in overall primary and major skills, the faster your level advances. Remember, it is the sum of skill points in the primary and major skill categories that advance your level. WHO KNOWS WHAT ABOUT WHAT It can be trying attempting to get information you need from someone. You just have to know who to talk to. Certain types of people tend to have more information about things than others. Folks walking around the streets tend to know more about specific places in towns and locations. Scholars in guilds tend to know more about specific objects. Merchants and the underworld (thieves, prostitutes) tend to know the gossip about certain people. By the way, prostitutes are generally found in taverns. And no, you cannot partake of any unscrupulous activities with them. ETIQUETTE/STREETWISE SKILLS These two skills play a factor in several things. TONE OF COMMUNICATING When communicating with others, you can speak to them in several tones, which include polite, normal, and bluntly. Your etiquette skill influences your ability to speak to others politely. The better your etiquette skill, the more likely those well received from polite conversation will address your needs. Nobles and knights are just a few examples of those that demand polite conversation. The more you use polite conversation, the more your etiquette skill will develop. Your streetwise skill influences your ability to speak to others bluntly. Thieves and other uncouth sorts will respond towards this tone better, and in fact prefer it. The more you use blunt conversation, the more your streetwise skill will develop. STANDING BEFORE A JUDGE There are several instances where you must appear in court (i.e. killing a townsperson, and then surrendering to a guard.) If you deem yourself not guilty, you have the option to debate or lie to clear yourself. Your etiquette skill influences your ability to debate. The better this skill, the more likely the judge will set you free. The more often you debate, the more your etiquette skill will develop. Your streetwise skill influences your ability to lie. The better this skill, the more likely the judge will buy your story. The more often you lie, the more your streetwise skill will develop. COMBAT: TIP 1 When engaging in close combat with an enemy, you should move back and forth often. When you swing your weapon, move in close to strike, then move back out to give you time to ready your weapon again and to dodge the enemy's attack. Note that enemies will only engage in combat when you are close to them. They will not react and swing their weapon if you are out of range. Of course this only applies to enemies that do not have long range attacks.