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pandora rec’d a nickelback song to me but i had already used up my skips for the hour and it autoscrobbled to my last.fm

lambda-m:

blobone:

the self ownage is palpable

not quite as bad as having darude sandstorm playing for 3 hours as a joke while studying with your headphones off, and having ALL OF THE PLAYS be scrobbled to last.fm

my compatibility with tools increased 100fold that day 

i bet at the end of this you and i will end up with 100 percent compatablity, favorite songs: nerdcore and linkin park

pandora rec’d a nickelback song to me but i had already used up my skips for the hour and it autoscrobbled to my last.fm

the self ownage is palpable

part 5: what to do as a new player

some of you were probably waiting for me to stop yammering and get to this part. posting a detailed guide would be way too involved, i could fill dozens of pages, but heres a few things to keep in mind if youre a newbie:

1) if you dont know what skills to take and hate the idea of restarting because you picked the wrong ones, heres a basic build that wont cripple you five levels in:

major:

long blades (any weapon skill will do, long blades are probably most common and powerful, avoid spears and bows for your first game)

light armor OR heavy armor (do not pick medium armor, theres a severe shortage of good med armor in the game, note that light armor is cheaper)

security (otherwise you need to find keys to open shit, this gives you way more options)

sneak

alchemy (this is a good skill even if you dont exploit it with the intelligence thing)

minor:

armorer (saves you money repairing your equipment yourself and is more convenient than having to wait until you go to town)

enchant (do not try to enchant items yourself, you will fail and waste your soul gem, only use this skill to recharge items with souls)

mysticism (dont bother with combat spells, this is only useful for almsivi intervention, divine intervention, mark and recall)

speechcraft OR mercantile (id recommend speechcraft)

restoration (dont bother using it in combat, useful for restoring health after a fight without using potions and restoring drained skills or curing diseases)

signs:

pick either the lady (for thieves) or the warrior (for warriors)

this build can do pretty much anything except combat magic.

2) pay attention to the tutorial and ingame conversations. its easy to exit the first building and have no idea where to go, but my advice is to look at your journal and talk to everyone in the first town. theres a bunch of people there who will explain some basic mechanics like buying spells and using scrolls and ease you into the game with easy quests

3) only use weapons that youre trained in. the way combat works is that when you swing and connect with the enemy, theres a certain percentage chance that you will hit them. youll know you hit if theres a thwack sound and a red blood spot, you miss if it makes a whistling sound. as you level up your weapon skill the chance you hit goes up as well. make sure that the weapon type youre using matches what your major skill is. also only equip the armor that youre trained in. you can equip any armor, but you have an armor value that determines how effective the armor is. if youre totally untrained in an armor skill armor of that class is going to do jack shit for your armor value and itll just weigh you down.

4) the leveling system is obtuse. how it works is after you increase any of your major and minor skills a total of 10 times you gain a level and can increase your governing attributes. so if you increase a minor skill 5 points and a major skill 5 points you gain a level. lower level skills level faster and are cheaper to train, unlike in future games in the series there is no limit to how much you can train per level. the only limiting factor is your gold. also, which skills you level effects the bonuses you get for increasing your governing attributes on the level up screen.

what i would suggest you do is talk to everyone in the first town and do all the missions you can there (feel free to skip the bandit cave if they keep killing you). thisll set you up with a fair amount of gold, enough to get some ok equipment at arilles. when youve exhausted seyda neen, talk to the guy standing in front of the big bug near the hill in the north end of town. hes a silt strider operator, meaning he can transport you to other towns for a fee. go to balmora, its pretty much the beginner city. from there talk to caius cosades in his house on the northeast side of town (across the river). he can give you some tips and beginner friendly quests, or if you want join a guild and do theirs.

some misc tips:

every point of strength lets you carry five pounds of items, up to 500 pounds (attribute max value is 100, though you can increase it higher with magic effects)

the default run speed is very slow. there are two ways to combat this, one is to look up how to get the boots of blinding speed and equip them, the other is to just use the console to increase your speed a couple hundred points. speed doesnt really affect anything other than run speed in the game, so i dont really consider it cheating.

give fargoth his ring, just trust me on this (youll get it back soon enough)

buying ingredients, making potions from them and selling the potions to the ingredient vendor is a good “honest” way to make money. to make potions you need to buy or steal a mortar and pestle, then use it. then you combine two to four ingredients to make your potion. note that in morrowind it doesnt auto disable options that dont have the same effect, so its more cumbersome than in later games. as your alchemy score increases you can see more effects of ingredients. 

you can steal anything and sell it to any merchant, but dont try to sell items to people you stole them from or theyll recognize it and youll get a bounty posted on you

invisibility will disappear right before you steal an item, if you want to steal aided by magic use chameleon spells, they wont disappear until their effect expires

almsivi intervention teleports you to the nearest temple. divine intervention teleports you to the nearest imperial garrison. recall teleports you to the spot where you cast the mark spell. there are scrolls and items you can use for these effects but buying the spells (look in the mages guild and temple) and training mysticism until you can cast them without fail is well worth it. ditto for “restore skill/attribute” spells and restoration, nothing is more annoying than having your strength drained and having to drop all your items until you can get to a potion vendor and fix it.

“constant effect” items are much rarer and more valuable in morrowind than in oblivion and skyrim. most common are “cast on use” items where you can select the item in your magic menu and cast it like an instant spell, or “cast on strike” weapons that do something every time they hit (and drain their charge.) to recharge these items you need a soul gem, filling one works the same way as it does in later games. you can also pay enchanters to make a custom enchanted item with any spell effect, but its really expensive to make good ones so dont bother until after youre rich

anyway i think that should get a new player started on morrowind fairly well, if you have any questions feel free to ask. i can also recommend some mods which imo make the game tremendously better, but id recommend playing vanilla first and finding what bugs you the most. now go kill some cliff racers.

part 4: the setting is great because absolutely everyone is a Complete Dick

now im not an expert on morrowind lore, i prefer focusing on the mechanics of the game rather than the background, but even to someone like me there are fantastic parts of the world. take the houses

there are three Great Houses in morrowind, and each and every one of them are total cocks. house hllalu are corrupt polticians and bureaucrats, most of their missions involve fucking over the other houses in trade maneuvers and bribing people. house redoran is a house of stern honor bound warriors, except theyre not really any more honorable than the other houses, most of their missions involve killing shit. house telvanni (the best house) is a house of wizards and mages. they are usually hundreds to thousands of years old, and their architecture involves growing massive tree towers for them to reside in. the interiors of these houses dont have stairs to the upper stories, you have to levitate to the top of them because if youre not a wizard you dont belong in them. one of their members is completely insane and decorates her house with hundreds of rotting eggs, her missions are totally nonsensical (one of them involves bringing her a “bow which smells of ash yams,” with absolutely no directions or hints given) and she attacks you if you do them wrong. another one of them hates men, if your character is male she calls you a thing and refers to you in the third person. other house missions include killing a member to get her robe (you are rewarded with 10 gold for this quest) and generally being a backstabbing power hungry bastard. the house philosophy is that if you kill another member, you were obviously in the right in your argument.

another city is made of giant pyramids on top of a lake connected by bridges, ruled over by a holy order that worships a living god who actually lives in the city. if you ever wear a piece of their armor every single member will attack you on sight for violating their holy code. there are natives to the land who reject these gods as false and hate outsiders, and each and every one of them is the victim of a curse that affected their entire race. theres a secret order of spies working for the emperor who are trying to stop morrowind from being taken over by a corrupted god who curses people with a flesheating disease that turns them insane, immortal and hideously strong. theres a group of racist assassin thugs who kill people for being “outlanders” (youre an outlander). an entire race of dwarves mysteriously vanished spontaneously from the land hundreds of years ago, and nobody knows what happened to them. the only thing left is their rusted ruins and weapons and armor. 

unfortunately the poor graphics of the game make the world look muddy and dull and if you dont talk to people much you dont know what the fuck is up with the mushroom towns and glowing satanic ruins. morrowind doesnt hold your hand and explain the world to you, you have to go and find out what is what yourself. mods can fix the graphics, but its possible to completely miss all this if you never read the ingame books or conversations about history.

part 3: the brokenness fixes itself

the most hilarious and fun thing about morrowind is that there are so many exploits that if you know what youre doing any rule can be broken. this is ultimately what makes the game so fun. an example:

in the previous post i said not to play a mage because they cant compete with warriors. however, if you go FUCK YOU I WANT TO BE GANDALF (understandable, i did too) you can be a mage. typically the way to do this is pick the atronach sign first, because that increases your max mana at the cost of never being able to regenerate it by resting. then you use the alchemy exploit to make potions that regenerate insane amounts of magicka every second, like 40 or 50 points at least, and last for hours. then before every fight you cast levitate, which lets you fly. note that there is no levitate spell in oblivion or skyrim? thats because its broken as fuck, becasue NO ENEMY IN THE GAME CAN FLY OR CAST LEVITATE THEMSELVES (except cliff racers. fuck them). that means theyre standing down on the ground like a doofus with a sword while youre flying in the sky raining fireballs down on them like a scene from the old testament.

the alchemy glitch by the way is that you can brew potions that increase your intelligence. intelligence is the governing stat for alchemy, meaning that boosting it increases your alchemy score temproarily, meaning you can brew a more powerful potion that increases your intelligence even more, until in a recursive clusterfuck you are brewing potions that increase your intelligence by thousands of points. if you make a mana restoring potion during this time it will be ludicrously powerful.

now to this you may say “i dont want to turn myself into a god, i want a challenge.” well in that case dont use exploits, but if you dont then youre gonna be limited in what you can do, in which case you really should not play a mage. sorry.

part 2: Morrowind Hates Mages

the best advice for playing morrowind i have is FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON’T PLAY A MAGE, heres why:

first off, mages have a chance of failing to cast a spell if their skill isnt high enough, but this still takes the same amount of mana as if you succeeded. this means that for high damage spells, youre not going to be able to use them until you gain like 20 levels and pump all your points into intelligence to boost your mana. this sounds reasonable, except that morrowind allows you to enchant items to damage an enemy as if you had cast a spell on them, which depletes the “charge” of the item (which varies depending on how powerful the soul its enchanted with was). however, this charge is always gonna be bigger than your mp pool. so a mage character casts a spell that might fail, that depletes a chunk of his mp (which, by the way, does not regenerate in vanilla morrowind unless you rest), and to top it off he has to go through a casting animation to cast the spell, which takes about 1.5 seconds (he just waves his hands basically). casting a spell from an item is instantaneous, will never fail, and can be recast at the speed you click your mouse button. this means if you enchant a weapon with 50 fire damage on use, every time you click you do an instant 50 fire damage to an enemy, guaranteed, and you can rapid fire click to deplete their health like youre a fucking magic machine gun. this means item casting is superior to mage casting pretty much always.

secondly, magic cannot compete with weapon damage. say you make a fire spell that does 50 damage when you cast it. youre only gonna be able to cast it a few times before your mana is depleted, at which point you need potions to restore it in battle, or rest if out of it. while it is technically possible to have a ton of mana restore potions to the point where you never have to worry about running out (more on alchemy later) doing so is inferior to just swinging a sword. the most powerful longsword in the game does up to 60 damage on a swing. you can swing it roughly once a second for max damage, it will take a very long time (hundreds of hits at least) for its condition to degrade to the point where you cant use it, and you can enchant it with cast-on-use magic to turn it into the previously mentioned magic machine gun. you will never get enough mana to be able to compete with someone wielding a powerful blade, and even if you could you still attack slower than they do.

third, at high levels practically all wild enemies have the reflect effect on them. there is a very high chance that if you cast a 100 damage fire spell on an enemy it will drain your health instead, which, since youre a squishy mage, will kill you instantly without them lifting a finger. why do they have reflect? because fuck you, mages, thats why.

there are workarounds (read: exploits) to all these effects, and if you heavily mod the game playing a mage can be a fun challenge, but in vanilla morrowind its more trouble than its worth. just enchant items and use those instead. play a thief/warrior hybrid instead.

part 1: what you need to know about morrowind

morrowind is a broken game. i mean that in an almost literal sense. the engine is buggy and the mechanics allow for roughly half the skills to make you an unkillable god warrior if you exploit them right (the other half are useless newbie traps (athletics you motherfucker im looking at you)), your first character is undoubtably going to be an ineffectual pansy who cant hit shit, this is normal and the point most people give up at after an hour of whiffing. but if you stick with it, remake a few times, learn the mechanics, you can start making characters who can actually survive for a few levels and fight things deadlier than mudcrabs w/out dying.

the problem is that the game doesnt tell you a ton of shit about what works and how to make your character effective or why youre not actually hitting the enemy and your sword is clipping through them. it doesnt hold your hand at all, even when it should. this is the frustrating part of the game, but the flipside is that if you know what youre doing you can turn yourself into an unstoppable juggernaut who can kill anything within 20 seconds. this process takes roughly 45 minutes.