Spell Effects – TES II: Daggerfall – ADG Pro 10

Today for a DG pro we’re gonna be doing something I’m surprised no one’s really taken the effort to do by this point and that’s investigate the spell effects in the elder scrolls too Daggerfall now something I understand about Daggerfall and in fact most Elder Scrolls games is

That the spells themselves are simply a means by which to produce effects and that it’s the effects themselves which do all the interesting things in fact it’s this entire effect system which led to that one oversight I mentioned before with how you can give yourself a critical weakness to paralysis and a

Permanent immunity to magic and then never ever suffer from paralysis since all paralyzing effects need to roll a magic elemental check and yet that combination also makes your character easier to level up but this is Daggerfall it’s got enough bugs to be considered a technological biohazard and

Thus begs the question do all the spell effects actually work and if they do are they working as expected or intended or are they doing something entirely different well I did this search online ahead of time to see if anyone else to actually done this and after a lot of searching I

Found one and only one FAQ which made any attempt to discern the spell effects and even it didn’t get everything right well we’re gonna figure this all out together once and for all but before we can we first need to create a character suitable for the task

Now it’s gonna dump all six magical disciplines into the primary and major categories but then remembered that if I wanted any hope for this character survive they needed to be able to escape the starting dungeon of the game so I decided instead to just go with a more

Standard build for my character though make sure every magical skill was accounted for across all three categories primary major and minor and that way I wouldn’t have too many issues grinding them up to make it easier to do all this testing and I gained levels in

The process and I also made sure to give them a lot of intelligence that I could get maximum spell points actually I’m a pretty good path plotted out through privateers hold which requires minimal combat and only pits you up against a single imp and one optional imp if you

Want some extra treasure the imps are like the gatekeepers of this game because they cannot be harmed with iron weapons so new players are pretty much forced to upgrade to steel or better right away or rely on magic to take out the imps or just dodge the last one

Entirely once I’m out of the hold I go to a nearby town and join the mages and fighters guilds let me skill is what opens up the spell making mechanics so naturally we want to be a member the fighters guild is a good bonus too though because we can sleep

Inside a fighters guild for free and for as much as we ever need to whereas if we try on the mages guild will be charged with vagrancy then it’s just a matter of getting some better gear leveling up a bit and acquiring some cash before we can begin our spell

Testing shenanigans when I took a few jobs of the mages and fighters gilts to rack up some reputation – since your reputation with guilds constantly decreases over time and I didn’t want to accidentally hit a point where I’d be expelled for failing to do my duties because yeah that can happen with the

Guilds those y ranking up through them and maintaining your relationship with more than just a couple or three guilds it can be kind of troublesome anyways my character prepped it’s time to make some spells as you can see here in the spell maker there’s an extensive list of spell

Effects we need to test 37 in all many of which have additional variants to test as well although for some things like differences between witch tributes are affected we’re just going to assume that if it works for one it’s gonna work for all and save us a bit of a headache

So let’s get started with the first spell effect the list chameleon the in-game description of the effect being target becomes difficult to see well okay so what does that mean and we become difficult to see as a benefit us also note that there’s both a normal and

True variants of the effect with the true variant lasting until it expires well the normal variant will expire immediately if you attack something well I set myself up with a couple chameleon spells but I got to figure out what exactly this thing’s gonna do for us I tried pickpocketing people and it

Didn’t seem to make a difference there and I tried to see if maybe the guards would be affected differently following but no I just chased me around regardless of anything so is the spell even doing anything I decided next to go to a nearby crypt and test it on some enemies in there

Instead and I wasn’t noticing anything different until I compared letting a bat lay into me with its fangs and discovered through some trial and error that all the spell effect does is make it so enemies miss you with physical attacks more often so yeah not exactly the result I was

Expecting but at least it’s something and yeah the normal and true variance work is expected though with the normal variant just swinging a weapon isn’t enough you actually have to hit something with it to cancel the effect charm is next on our list of spell effects and according to the dialog it’s

Supposed to raise our reputation with the target now given the terminology used in Daggerfall there’s actually a huge list of reputation values being tracked behind the scenes which Turbots how likely you’ll get positive or negative reactions from certain NPCs depending on what faction they belong to plus it can

Affect mercantile bonuses as well when buying and selling so on the surface charm seems like it would be very useful and except there’s one little problem you can’t hit NPCs with spells ever the NPCs and Daggerfall are controlled through an entirely different system compared to enemies meaning if you click

On them to do a touch effect it just activates their normal dialogue interaction and if you attempt to throw a range spell at them it just passes right through them I don’t think I didn’t spend several minutes trying to get this to work naturally you can hit

Enemies with a charm spell but then all you’re doing is potentially raising reputation with them which to be fair if they haven’t spotted you yet may allow you to avoid combat but that’s only because pacification checks are only run once when an enemy spots you and then never again so raising reputation with

Them once they start attacking you is pointless so yeah charm is pretty useless spell bores I mean it’s doing anything at all climbing is the next spell effect which supposedly doubles our climbing ability now it sounds like it might have its uses except one you don’t do a lot of

Climbing in this game and – even though my character’s climbing skill is only 4% they can climb things just fine so long as they’re not fast climbing I detest fast climbing with the climbing spell effect octave and it did help prevent me from losing my grip as often but again

For freaking % the spell effect really isn’t worth the effort especially given some other effects are gonna see soon comprehend languages some next effect and this one actually surprised me a bit so anyone who’s played Daggerfall will likely recall it there’s several language skills you can give your character including cinterion Daedric

Dragonish giant ich harpy impish nymph orcish and spray gun which yes is as excessive as it sounds basically anytime a hostile creature notices you a language check is made if they happen to belong to one of those language sets and if the language checks succeeds set creature will be made

Passive and will not attack first no matter what you know the comprehend languages effect is basically supposed to be a raw boost to every language check performed so to test this out I went over to a place where I knew a bunch of orcs resided and

If I just attempt to go in all gung-ho they pretty much all start going after me but if I start out my comprehend languages spell before entering most of them won’t attack also since this is part of the language check which is only world once as soon as the comprehend

Languages effect wears off the works which have been pacified still don’t attack me now granted the big question is how useful is this effect really and the answer is practically worthless and I think the original idea was that if you wanted to play through the game as a

Pacifist the tools to do so would be there but as it stands the mechanics in place are not detailed or varied enough to really make that viable thus it’s better to just defeat your opponents instead of pacifying them and then take their stuff continuous damage is the

Next effect the idea here is that you can craft a spell that does damage every round to either health fatigue or spell points for a particular length of time with a single round equal to an in-game minute which roughly equates to about 6 seconds of real time this is also a good

Time to point out that any spell you craft needs to have a method of targeting and an elemental with some of these selections restricted based on the effects you want to perform targets can either be the caster on touch at range the area around the caster which still

Requires you to touch something or an area at range which acts almost like a bomb that you can’t see the blast radius of the elements you can choose from for the effect are fire ice poison shock and magic which again are elements don’t confuse the magic element with general

Resistance to magic spells and use the poison element to actual poison effects the terminology in this game can be a bit confusing at times due to repeating words used in different contexts anyways test a spell effect I decided to go with an area at range and made sure

All of my three status bars would be affected by it this way I could just aim it at the floor and boom are bright so another thing I need to point out is that every time a spell with negative effects it’s a target including yourself as saving throw is made based on a

Number of variables and if successful the spell has zero effect on set target this is also why I had to make the spell fire based because I always make my Daggerfall character’s immune to that magic elements anyways trying again the spell effect does indeed take hold I’m losing health and spell points as

Expected but my fatigue isn’t quite dropping as fast as you’d think it should no it did some more testing discovered that pretty much every spell effect which reduces fatigue reduces sub units as opposed to actual units yet your stats actually have sub units to them which I mean it’s not surprising

But that makes any attempt to reduce fatigue a pointless process given how expensive it would be to make proper use of it now I also made sure to test the continuous damage effect against actual enemies and yes it does work although I failed to record it working as intended

Now I’ll create item is a spell effect which basically lets you form items out of thin air which is supposed to last until the spell effect ends you need idea in theory but instead it turns out that this spell is totally broken for starters the items you make end up being

Permanent but what ends up happening is that you can’t successfully cast the spell again until the effect wears off so you actually want the duration to be as short as possible to conjure up lots and lots of items the other problem though is that despite being given a

List of things to choose from I typically wouldn’t get what I asked for and would instead end up with stabs or pauldrons so at least it’s a useful money-making spell from selling all the loot you create cure is kind of a difficult spell to test as it can be

Used to cure either disease poison or paralysis well my character can’t be paralyzed and humanoid enemies don’t start carrying poisoned weapons till way later and and then it’s completely random if they have them or not but we can test disease easily since all rats in the game carry

Diseases so I went to the cripton let a couple rats bite my face off for a while only to discover I wasn’t getting diseased they accept the game thought I was when I went to fast travel so yeah much like in real life diseases and Daggerfall take time to incubate and

Until they do you won’t know you have them I wanted to show the process taking hold but as soon as it did yeah that didn’t end well a freaking dieing in my sleep eventually decided to just settle on testing of cure disease would removed the disease while it was still

Incubating and sure enough it did so I think it’s probably safe to assume the other cure spells work too but it’s also pertinent to point out that you can cast spells while paralyzed in this game those why a cure paralysis spell even makes any sense damage is a pretty straightforward

Effect that I don’t think I need to explain and sure enough it works exactly as expected save again for the fatigue values being reduced by subunits instead of whole units detect is a curious effect you can either detect treasure enemies or magic well the only one which

Works properly is detect enemy and even then the detect spells rely on the compass from the full size status bar which takes up a lot of the screen it’s kind of annoying on top of that it only detects the closest enemy and even then the range is very limited noww detect

Treasure almost works right as it does indeed detect treasure piles except once the treasure pile is removed it’s still the text set so if there’s multiple treasure piles in a room you’re still gonna have to use your eyes for the most part as for detect magic I couldn’t

Figure out what this is even meant to detect disintegrate is an instant kill spell which simply rolls a raw chance to instantly kill a target now it works as intended but has a really high magic cost to have even just a fair chance of success so isn’t necessarily gonna be

Worth it just for fun though I tried to inflict this effect on the player but every time it got passed my character saving through the effect would just fail instead dispel is a very weird spell effect and it has three forms to spell undead dispel Daedra and dispel mad

Now from what I’ve read online those first two are supposed to be sort of a global effect which causes undead or danger to disappear from the world but I couldn’t confirm this was happening in fact it may not do anything at all a dispel magic on the other hand does

Indeed work for removing spell effects from the player but with one major caveat the window which pops up asking which effect to remove does not pause the gameplay and well you can select effects with the mouse double clicking doesn’t confirm the selection like it does with everything else in the game

You have to use the Enter key this can put the game into a very weird state of this menu isn’t closed properly before other things start to happen drain is in effect which works as intended but not in the way you might expect if you’re used to playing any

Elder Scrolls game for morrowind on work and in those games drain as a temporary effect which reduces stats for a period of time and then goes away while damage results in a permanent decrease the hearing Daggerfall damage is only used for health fatigue and spell points while drain is the equivalent for

Attributes allowing you to permanently reduce attributes when I tested this out a bit and you can affect the player with it but it also does indeed work against enemies as I test a draining strength in this orc here without a strength drain he hits pretty hard but with a strength

Drain his attacks start doing pathetic amounts of damage elemental resistance is kind of a weird one especially given the differences in descriptions and the spell maker this effect says target becomes immune to blank damage as you can set it to any of the five elements in the game but in a

Spell book the description instead reads causes target to become resistant to blank target which takes half damage of spells unsuccessful well after testing this out it turns out both descriptions are technically accurate to some degree but what’s actually going on is a two-fold effect the first part of it is that whenever

You’re hit by an attacker spell matching a particular element the saving throw gets boosted by this spells chance to succeed and if it does you see the save versus spell message however if the saving throws still fails the second part of the spell effect comes into play

By having the damage received it’s a bit convoluted but at least it works fortify attribute is really straightforward it just temporarily boosts one of your eight attributes although attributes still cap out at a hundred so unfortunately there’s no making yourself ultra powerful or anything like that free

Action is again kind of hard for me to test given my character built but I’m informed it works it’s basically a more advanced form of cure paralysis which not only cures paralysis but temporarily makes you completely immune to paralysis as well now given how much paralysis sucks in this game

I’m not surprised there’s a spell dedicated to dealing with it but again it’s better to just give yourself a critical weakness to it with an immunity the magic element and then never ever have to worry about this heal is another straightforward spell used to heal drain tributes health or fatigue all working

Is intended including the fatigue which is curious given that any attempts to damage fatigue with a spell effect reduces the sub-units but here healing fatigue affects whole units as you’d expect identify as another spell effect that works as you might expect though with a couple weird twists when you activate it

The standard identify screen pops up and at this point no magic has actually been consumed yet you then place items to identify in the side panel and each attempt down the list consume spell points based on the cost of the spell the other weird twists though is that

Because this is using the same interface as the identifier NPC if said NPC is loaded and present in the area you’re in casting the spell simply interacts with the identifier as opposed to trying to perform the identification yourself invisibility has no effect on NPCs as

Expected so didn’t allow me to go on a pick pocketing spree but I quickly found out that yes invisibility works pretty darn well against enemies basically if you get outside of a particular range from an enemy for more than a moment they’ll lose sight of you and once

They’ve lost sight of you they can’t get it back unless you either attack them where the spell effect wears off I think I had perhaps a little too much fun with testing this one as a side note I’m informed that undead creatures can see invisible things so don’t try this

Against zombies or vampires or such jumping as a spell effect I was prepared to see fail as everything I read online said that this spell effect didn’t work so to test here’s my jumping height normally with my view angle so that the tip of the roof is just

Touching the top of the screen now let’s cast a spell and oh yeah I’m definitely jumping higher so yeah the jumping spell effect works as intended I don’t know why everybody says this thing doesn’t work levitate is one of the most useful and practically required spell effects

In the game so it’s no surprise that it works properly though I kind of noticed there’s a limit to how high it can take you when you’re outside such a nice view of the Tao I’m okay just a couple broken legs but I’m okay actually let’s go a

Little out of order and combo this with testing the slow fall effect the sole fall it’s basically a spell meant to prevent you from falling to your do now testing the spell it’s clearly working there’s a couple very important things to note in Daggerfall you have zero air control under normal circumstances

Meaning your trajectory and viewing direction are locked well in the air this means when slow fall is in effect and you’re falling you can’t look around or control where you descend to furthermore you can’t jump while the effect is active either so that’s something to keep in mind to that end

You’re better off having a short duration slow fall that you can simply recast if you need it for longer than just a few seconds this would be a good time to point out that some of the spell effects so far may have seen a bit overly expensive in terms of magic costs

The way spell effects work here and in many Elder Scrolls games is that the more experienced you are with the school of magic that the spell effect belongs to the less expensive the casting cost is thus why some of these spell effects may have seen a bit too expensive to be

Practical because they totally were given how low I left some of my magical skills once I got bored or training them up light is the next spell effect which when active creates a floating candle in front of the player which lights up the area around the candle it’s a neat

Effect it definitely helps to brighten things up but the floating candle can be a bit of a distraction at times also note that it only effects objects and dungeon segments not terrain Locke is a spell effect which doesn’t seem like would have many uses I mean why would

You ever need to lock a or in this game nevertheless I tested it out and it seems to work fine although once I got this door open again I’d shut it and then suddenly it would be locked again ok it doesn’t make sense well maybe if I leave the crypt and go back

In it’ll be unlocked again well wait now this door is locked too what the heck and if I get through it all the other doors are also locked oh except this one which locked as soon as I closed it ok I see what’s going on so the lock

Spell effect does indeed work but the casting status of it isn’t being cleared after it does its thing so you just start attempting to lock every single door you touch yeah I can’t say this effect it’s gonna be winning me over anytime soon speaking of the open effect

Happens to be next in the list and it’s pretty well known that the chance roll is only checked in dungeons town doors are handled differently and any attempt to use an open spell of any level of power on them will always succeed this is also a good time to point out that if

You’re in the mages guild you’re still gonna want the standard open spell anyways because there’s a handful of quests in the game which rely on you casting very specific spells meaning custom spells using the same effects are not going to work an open happens to be

One of those spells pacify is a spell which basically induces pacification into an enemy on demand as opposed to relying on a language check now especially considering it’s only used against enemies which don’t make the standard language checks and upon testing it does seem to do its job but

When making the spell I noticed that once upon a time this spell supposedly had a duration to its effect but the duration was then removed to become a permanent effect well just for the heck of it I tried pressing the buttons to adjust duration despite nothing showing up and the spell

Cost started changing and I later noticed this wasn’t limited to just this spell any spell which doesn’t use duration can still have its duration values altered this makes it possible to make certain spell effects cheaper if they don’t have a duration to their effect unfortunately this glitch only works

With duration chance and magnitude values are properly locked off when they’re not present paralyze is an effect for paralyzing a targets and yeah works as intended though it’s pretty expensive effect so you’d likely get a lot more mileage out of invisibility or an effect or just straight-up the feats of targets

Regenerate lets you slowly regenerate a quantity of health every round for a period of time but what the heck is up with these casting values this seems like it might be a little too overpowered of a spell effect and sure enough when bringing this region spell

With me to the Crypt and letting the rats bite into me they weren’t able to overcome the massive amount of healing I was getting from the spell even this orc was having trouble cutting through and it actually took a considerable amount of time for me just standing there and

Taking it to the face before he finally managed to cut me down by sheer chance so yeah regen isn’t just good it’s amazingly good shadow seems to do the same thing as chameleons making it so enemies miss you with physical attacks more often although what I’ve read

Online suggests that it only works in darkness I didn’t really have a good way to test if that was the case or not but if it’s true that just means shadow is a budget version of chameleon and does not really any more useful shield is an effect which basically gives you a

Hidden second health bar that you can’t see for a limited period of time but just for comparison I decided to see how well this would last versus this orc and yep he broke through that shield in seconds regen is way more effective than shield ever will be silence is an effect

Which prevents spells from being cast now when I use an area arrange spell to inflict it upon myself sure enough any attempt to cast a spell is simply immediately aborted will silenced but I had a heck of a time getting us to work on an enemy for a

Couple of reasons but firstly any enemy capable of casting spells in this game will just rapidly shoot off every spell they can the instant they know you’re there and that they can hit you with their magic so just having an opportunity to inflict this on anything

In the first place is hard enough on top of that ranged spells which don’t affect an area at range have no effect at close range basically if you shoot a ranged spell and the bolt immediately fizzles out because the targets too close it does nothing that made testing this effect against enemies extremely

Difficult but once I finally got it to stick to a nip here it did indeed function as and the next three are spell absorption spell reflection and spell resistance all which work is intended by adding an additional check whenever you’re hit with a spell the absorption check when successful will simply increase your

Spell points by the casting cost of spelling were hit by and the gate that spells effects against you it should cludes your own spells so this can actually be useful when you’re dabbling with area at range spells the reflection check when successful causes the caster to be affected by the spell

Instead of you unless you’re the caster in which case doesn’t really matter the resistance check when successful simply nullifies the effect of the spell that you’re hit by the only drawback is that these are all very expensive effects and have been in every scholar scrolls game to date teleport is an incredibly useful

Spell effect which simply lets you set an anchor or teleport to an existing anchor and you can play set anchor literally anywhere you want nealy catch here is that the anchor disappears once you teleport to it meaning you’ll have to make another anchor following if you want to be able

To make set teleportation again and there’s also an interesting bug with using this and the spell maker since the teleport effect has no variables to alter it skips the screen where you’d set the variables up and as a result also skips the gold cost calculation meaning that as long as you don’t touch

Anything else following you can buy a teleport spell from the spell maker for free transfer is basically a combination of a drain or damage effect with a healing effect for the caster those allowing you to damage an opponent’s health fatigue or attributes while healing your own at the same time and

Yes even with attribute points it works as intended though again it’s only a restorative effect later Elder Scrolls games have an absorb attribute effect which is a timed effect that temporarily fortifies your desire to tribute while draining the targets the last two spell effects kind of tie into each other and

Are both absolutely necessary if you want to survive dungeon diving water breathing and water walking lets simplest way to put it is that water in this game sucks it just sucks in every single way possible it’s dark and gritty looking you move extraordinarily slow in

It yet insta die if you run out of air while diving into it and water is found free Dean everywhere in this game however water-breathing gives you an infinite air supply until the spell runs out at which point you get a full air meter as a last chance to

Escape or get water breathing going again while water walking despite saying it lets you walk on top of water actually lets you move through water at full speed now both spell effects are pretty cheap too so really the best way to handle it is it just putting both

Effects into the same spell and there you go you never have to worry about this game’s water again and with that we’ve covered all of the spell effects in Daggerfall well all of the spell effects in the latest officially patched version anyways mods and unofficial patches exist which may alter these to

Some degree but those didn’t exist back when I was playing the skin so I felt it was better to cover the spell effects with the game in the state I remember at best new Daggerfall is an incredibly broken game with a lot of unfinished qualities and countless bugs but it’s

Still fun to mess around with and going through these spell effects was actually pretty revealing for me and might adjust the way I approach some of my spell casting in future runs but the majority of the spell effects at least did something beneficial and amazingly I didn’t have a single crash while making

This video I mean this happened at one point when I was trying to go through a door but you know this is Daggerfall being Daggerfall and you that’s all for today’s episode of ATG pro next week will be episode 260 of ancient dos games where we’re gonna be looking at a game

So old that it’s actually considered to be a launch title for the IBM 5150 the very first dose computers ever made yeah I can’t get any more ancient than that although there’s very little to say about the game itself so the focus on the video will be a little different

From the usual so be sure to stay tuned for next Saturday to learn all about this game Thanks for watching everyone and extra special thanks to those of you supporting me on patreon here’s just a small random selection of you all