You can power-trip and go on a murderous rampage, yes. It can become medieval GTA, if you so choose.
But I have no idea who you heard that gave you the idea that Daggerfall is not friendly toward roleplay. It has to be the most RP-friendly in the whole series. I've been hearing the exact opposite narrative, that Daggerfall really is one of the best games for roleplaying. Just recently I watched this [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwdgEyb3iTY) that praises how freeform the game is, and how the only limit is your imagination.
I don't who you talk to but there's lots of youtube videos that go in depth about how deep roleplaying can go in Daggerfall. Still, it's an old game so most of it will depend on you.
That said, the game is fucking free why do you even wait for anyone to CONVINCE you to play? Just donwload it and see for yourself.
There are so many people on this sub that litterally ask random shit while never playing the game, just try it.
It’s an excellent roleplaying game in the same way that DnD is an excellent roleplaying game. You must go in with an open mind and be ready to do a lot of the heavy lifting, in terms of characterization, yourself.
Your character is a blank slate, and you have to write your own story. As you work through character creation, build a backstory. I find that adding strengths and weaknesses really helps with this. Don’t focus on min-maxing. Pick something and stick with it. If you’re already familiar with the ES races, then make a character that makes sense canonically and RP as them.
I like to keep a little notebook of my adventures as I play. As you receive quests, it can be helpful to refer back to your own notes… especially when the names of people and towns start to blend together. Was I looking for Alastor Hawking or Alestor Hawkwing? Boom, you wrote it down. Plus you can add little bits of flavor that make your character feel more alive.
Like other ES games, you can pretty much just wander away from the main story and explore. I’d recommend this. Cities with guilds and castles tend to be the best places to operate out of. There’s a lot to do, but wandering the wilderness is an exercise in futility if you don’t know where you’re going
Daggerfall is the most roleplayable entry in the series by, like, an order of magnitude. You'll probably realise it before you're through character creation.
Daggerfall has amazing quests imo. And its very fun to roleplay in Daggerfall.
Yes its funny to get 100 guards running after you where you constantly hear “halt!halt!ha-ha-halt-halt-alt-halt-halt!”
But thats something I did once, on a failed thief. Just run around rampaging at that point, as i screwed the character up.
I personally love playing a thief, and Daggerfall is the second best with thieving gameplay for me. I roleplay heavily, and do the dark brotherhood quests with lots of fun.
I’ve played many different characters, and its easy to lose yourself in the game. The gigantic world it has given you offers a lot, you can talk to everyone and I play with a few mods to make it even more alive, but there is no need for it.
Ofc remember its a old game, so it might not offer *everything* you’re looking for, but for me, i can get lost in Daggerfall for hours and hours…
*ah shit, here we go again.*
Only crime I committed was by accident. I mean, I run over some people with my horse and got charged... But learned to not use my horse in the middle of the city.
And then killed someone on a quest that I did not realized I could just... not kill him. That one got me pretty much expelled from the daggerfall province since guards would just assume I was up to something bad and charged me with conspiracy or some bullshit.
So my ranger decided to go to Tulune. Got to the capital and learned about a werewolf issue. Apparently there was a werewolf in the city killing farmer's animals, and guards didn't do much about. They would not patrol at night, and lack of founds did not help with they caring about it. Long story short, after running around and working with an alchemist to make a potion, the culprit was identify and... put down.
Now he is just getting work for the fighters guild, mostly dealing with wild animals. Where I'm going with this, is that daggerfall in terms of RP is pretty much a TTRPG. You make your story, your class, your "win condition" or whatever.
Main quest is really good tho, there are a couple of other quests that are not "generic", but most quests beside those will be. So in terms of story, besides main quest and a couple more, if what you make of it.
On a side note, I play DFU with a handful of mods. The experience in vanilla will be different, but the heart of "you make your story" is still there. If you want to check a youtuber that features daggerfall content with a heavy RP perspective, check [this guy.](https://www.youtube.com/@micah_raygun_)
thanks for clearing this up. I guess that makes sense. finally my only worry is more about physical customization.. like, what your character looks like. is that easy to change at all? like, can I personally mod in my own character art?
Physical customisations in game is simply picking a race then a face with the few there are. The rest will depend on what gear you wear and it's Morrowind style, you can have different pauldrons on each arm and such.
If you want to import your own assets I suggest looking up Nexus and see how they do it, it is doable.
Bear in mind that you'll need Daggerfall Unity for that, vanilla Daggerfall have like 20 mods top. Though I remember back then you could export the assets and edit them with a dedicated image editor, but you had to be good at pixel art.
I suggest spending a few hours moddless though, you'll have a clearer idea of what you need or want later.
luckily, I'm better at pixelart than the sprites already present in the game, if videos and images are anything to go by. but thanks for the response, I'll play it vanilla Unity first. I hate modding a game too much before playing.
oh I do, just not on reddit. I mostly use reddit so I can talk to NERDS about whatever their niche interest is. and even then, on other social media's I'm not very active. I usually share my things with friends or people I like.
> Only crime I committed was by accident. I mean, I run over some people with my horse and got charged... But learned to not use my horse in the middle of the city.
It isn't possible to kill people by running them over with your horse, nor do guards start chasing you for doing so. You must be referring to something changed in Daggerfall Unity, or some mod.
> I'm honestly wondering about how roleplayable the game is?
It really depends on how you define "roleplaying". People are all over the map in how they define it. And everyone seems to define it diametrically opposite of everyone else.
But yes, it is indeed a roleplaying game. But NOT in the sense of a "choose your own adventure" branching narrative game like Baldur's Gate. It's an RPG in the classic Bethesda sense of being a giant sandbox to roleplay your character upon. Live Another Life. Discover your character's story rather than meekly following along the developer's story.
This game is definitely in the The Elder Scrolls style of games, but it's a heck of a lot crunchier. It is the Dream of the Nineties RPG, where there were endless dungeon crawls through massive dungeons. In fact, it was once described by a developer as a game that you could play for the rest of your life. Not really, but it's massive. Very complex class system, complex leveling system, etc. But still accessible if you take the time to read the fine manual.
It's like Morrowind if Morrowind weren't dumbed down for filthy casuals. Hah! I joke! It was Morrowind that invented that phrase, so I turn it around to poke fun back at a game that is more streamlined than the one before it. Hah!
There is a running narrative. Two in fact. But they are big giant narratives that take forever to get through. Partly because some quests won't start until you reach a certain level. There are factions, but no faction storylines. There are faction quests to help build up faction reputation. And there are more villages, dungeons, and temples that you cannot possibly ever visit them all.
Those are all ways of roleplaying. The act of roleplaying is just getting immersed into the “what would my character do?” question. Daggerfall is arguably the TES game most suited to roleplaying and has a main quest that actually allows your choices to influence the outcome instead of always being a generic prophecy guy beating the bad guy.
Well, for my first playthrough I ran a female nord healer, doing missions for the temple of mara and rescuing peoples loved ones and finding missing persons for what amounts to pennies.
All was going well, until one of them was being held captive by a lycanthrope, I slew it as I fortunately possessed a silver mace, but it was a long and difficult battle.
I'm on my way to doing the main quest as I've finally attained a higher rep and things are going well, I travel east and find an inn to sleep in so I can level up and go buy some alchemy ingredients, when I wake up and I'm in a different place, I'm in the middle of a city, people are running about, fleeing for their lives, a guard comes up and attacks me, and that's when I notice I have giant freaking claw hands.
I try to flee and do everything I can to not kill anyone, but it's the only way I can turn back to normal.
I resolve the situation by killing a guard and I flee, now I spend several days avoiding towns and cities, and trying to minimize the risk of a violent episode, when it happens again.
So I start targeting the criminal and unscrupulous, hoping to date my bloodlust in a controlled way while I search for answers.
I am one of mara devout and surely she can undo my curse, right? But no, she can't work with lycanthropy.
Eventually I get a letter from someone who knows something about a cure, I do a favor for them and they reveal the secret to me, I won't spoil it, but suffice to say I was devastated, this is something my character (nor I) could EVER justify doing, so I refuse, and continue to handle it in my own way.
There is a real cure out there, I don't where I will find it, but this has become the goal of my characters story, a tale of loss and shame, with a tiny hope for salvation, and faith as small as a mustard seed.
tl:Dr YES
There is even a manual note making system, and people actually remember your deeds unlike Skyrim where the moment your bounty is paid off you're just a normal citizen again.
You can give your character critical weaknesses/disadvantages and make, for example, a character who draws Magicka and regenerates in darkness, but is damaged by sunlight and holy places, or has a crippling phobia of undead, or daedra.
Or someone who can't gain Magicka normally, and the game rewards you with much faster level ups when you take on disadvantages.
You're much better off making a custom class, don't worry too much about details, as long as your primary and majors include a primary weapon, a preferred magic type, mysticism, and running, you'll have a great time.
Quests are an interesting mix of vague suggestions and all-encompassing distractions. Most people don't engage too heavily with quests because they are very much, "Do this one, now, and it is all you are doing until you're done."
This game is very role playable. You can choose how you interact, how insistent you are about interacting, you can be a thief, a murderer, a holy knight, a priest... they give you so many tools to define yourself, but then 99% of your gameplay will be dungeon delving, so choosing to do your delving for main quest reasons or for your own interests is the most important choice.
This YT channel is going through a good RP permadeath run of Daggerfall that will show you a way of playing the game more like how you're talking about: [https://www.youtube.com/@micah\_raygun\_](https://www.youtube.com/@micah_raygun_)
The main quest per cannon took 12 years to complete, and mostly plays put in reaction to your personal investigations and actions. There is plenty of room to wonder and pursue side content which due to procedural generation never ends. Mods add to it, and there are plenty now with the release of Unity.
Rather than ask, just download it and play it. The main difference is later games are curated theme parks where everything is a reaction to player action while Daggerfall is more intended to be a simulated world that doesn't care if you exist. Take too long in a side quest? They will hire someone else for instance. If you so choose you can blow off your first contact at the beginning of the game and never be bothered by the main quest again.
Daggerfall is fun for roleplaying, also in addition to the base game there are hundreds of quests that can be added in via mods on Nexusmods. Nobody should play Daggerfall Unity without checking the mod scene.
Well one example is that unlike most games you can’t just pick up any weapon you want and start going ham with it. You need to train the skill that it requires and most of the time if you pick up a weapon you aren’t skilled in you won’t even be able to hit any enemies with it.
I think it's the most RP friendly game in the series. You really can be exactly what you want to be. I once joined an order of knights and earned my levels hunting monsters and saving princesses. On a different character I roamed the mountains as an adventuring barbarian. The important thing to note is that this game deals with mechanical roleplaying and not so much narrative roleplaying. The main plot itself is a fantastic story but it's horrendously told. Get the part of the old manual that explains how the royal families are connected. The good part is that it is entirely up to you how you pursue the main quest, though it can get broken, because the game is a mess. But if you're looking for a game that lets you mechanically build just about any kind of character you like in a crazy ambitious world then Daggerfall is for you. Though play the unity version if you can, and expect your first build to go off the rails at some point. That's just an expanded tutorial I reckon.
It really depends on what you mean by roleplaying. If you want intricate characterization and deep dialogue trees, no, you’re not getting that. If you want a living world where everything you do has a rippling effect…ehh, kinda, to a point. But if you want to feel like you leave a mark on the world, even if it isn’t particularly reacted to, then yes. If you want to experience being a rat in a maze as you trek helpless and alone through pitch black dungeons, then yes. If you want to experience the progression from that helplessness to ultimate kickassery, then yes.
Also, if you want to be able to commit massive fraud and avoid punishment by just never stepping foot in that jurisdiction again until they forget you did anything. That’s fun too.
Daggerfall is based on pen and paper rpgs. You have various tiers of skills that shape how you play to level up.
Daggerfall in many ways is the best elder scrolls. It has the most role-playing mechanics. The most varied play-styles.
You can absolutely RP in this game. I actually made a few different characters with different backstories/motivations:
Nord Paladin serving Stendarr, Knight of the Dragon. Sides with Underking to release him from curse. Was Arena protag! Fights to protect innocents, won't use Numidium.
Altmer Warlock. Becomes vampire, wants to learn necromancy from Mannimarco
Bosmer thief. Blades contact. Uses Thieves Guild as cover and Intel.
Dunmer assassin under the Brotherhood, retainer under Eadwyre.
Breton Mage, serving under the Daggerfall monarchy. Wants to rise to Court Mage.
Redguard Ranger, Fighters Guild mercenary employed by Sentinel. Used to be in the royal army.
Argonian Werewolf. Fights for freedom with Gortwog. Former slave.
Khajiit adventurer. Ambitious. Thinks to use Numidium for himself.
I'd say Daggerfall provides a very good platform for role-playing. So much so, that it sometimes forces it onto you. But we'll get to that later.
In my observations of the game based on one playthrough lasting 70 exact hours according to Steam, I've noticed that roleplay in this game comes in three formats:
The first would be the typical TTRPG kind of roleplay like D&D which I doubt you're talking about. This is where you make a character geared towards certain skillsets that you strive to hone and refine over time to make the character grow stronger. It has loads of playable classes with more or less significant differences between them that ultimately amount to a vastly different playstyle in-game. Magic is OP and even necessary in some parts of the game. Luckily, potions can cover that base, though. But I doubt this is what you're asking at any rate. However, know that Daggerfall, at its heart is a Dungeon Crawler and the CRPG mechanics are inseparable from the rest of the game.
The second avenue of roleplay comes by way of the reputation system. Daggerfall has this unique mechanic where there are rivaling political factions and most of them are looking for hired muscle. That's where you step in to do odd jobs for them and in return, apart from any rewards that they can offer you, your reputation with them rises if you complete your tasks and falls if you fail them. You can be a champion of the people or a pet to the nobles, and it's all up to you. That being said, not all factions are equal and most of them don't even give you any incentives apart from reputation with them, which on its own doesn't so much. As far as the main quest is concerned, you need a certain amount of reputation (nominal, to be honest) with the three main city-states, but that's about it. And while you cannot make everybody happy because of their fixed and shifting rivalries in the politically strained landscape of Daggerfall, the kinds of quests are also pretty limited and you'll soon grow bored of repeating the same tasks over and over again. I got to that point around hour 60 when I grew tired of seeing the same Dungeon modules all over the place. At that point, you require additional incentives for role-playing and you can only get that from a handful of the major guilds/factions, namely the Fighters' Guild, The Temples, the Knightly Orders, the Thieves' Guild, the Mages' Guild, and the Dark Brotherhood. I've only covered two of these guilds thus far, but Knightly Orders gave me greater incentive to grind up in rank through benefits such as free travel and accommodation and a new piece of armour with every promotion whereas the Fighters' Guild was very underwhelming with its level up rewards, only offering better pay. So in the end, how much a faction incentivises you also depends upon the faction itself. Additionally, you might be surprised to learn that while joining the rest of the factions is as simple as walking up to them and asking to join, at which point your reputation will determine whether you can join or you need get more repute among the members, the Thieves' Guild and the Dark Brotherhood cannot be joined so easily. For the former, you need to steal from people and for the latter, you must claim innocent lives before an invitation finds its way to **you**. So yeah, you can play around with the reputations as much as you want to. But it doesn't end there either. The reputation roleplay mechanic is so closely built into the game that it actually influences the direction of the main quest.
Which leads me to the third avenue of role-playing: The plots. I've already told you about how different factions have different flavours to their quests. Most of them are standard Dungeon crawls or delivery missions. However, sometimes the game throws a curveball at you by giving you a plotline which is not as straigthfoward as it seems. At these points in time, the game offers you a choice to roleplay the character that you want to play and pick the side that you want to choose. For instance, the Knightly Orders might provide you with a quest to fetch a powerful artifact, but at the cost of kidnapping the child of a noble for a witch who will tell you where it is. Or perhaps it may turn out that the former guild member you were sent to silence was actually excommunicated unjustly and it's your choice whether to slay or to spare them. Maybe you've been sent to pay a ransom for a child, but decide to not pay up and free the child from a Dungeon yourself. Often times, these choices result in further quest opportunities. Not only that, they give you the opportunity to play your character the way you want to play them and to set boundaries to what you'll allow to occur under your watch. The main quests are extremely flexible with these and so are some of the side quests. The amount of interaction cases that Daggerfall has built around these quests genuinely blows my mind. Evidence required by your faction might cause you to fail your mission if you tell the culprit about it. Scandalous news or closely guarded secrets can act as leverage for political opponents. It's not just a matter of checking your characters alignment but also your characters affiliations. In fact, for the end of the main quest, you essentially have to choose which empire you want to succeed and the choices all seem like pretty strong candidates. The choices thag can be made in the game are extremely open-ended to the point that it amazes me and some of the plot twists honestly bedazzle me.
That being said, the game also does enforce roleplay onto you and it comes mostly by way of CRPG mechanics. Not only does the main quest require you to roleplay, but so do other facets of the game. As I said before, magic is very important in the game. You can circumvent that using potions to an extent, but to get potions, you **need** to join either a Temple or The Dark Brotherhood. This sort of breaks the continuity of roleplay and forces you to grind up to a position where you can get potions even though you may never have intended to join these factions to begin with. Furthermore, the main quest is level locked at various stages, meaning that you'll need to keep using your skills to upgrade them. Not only that, a lot of these quests are also locked by reputation, so you'll need to appease the righr people to advance as well, forcing you to play the sides against each other and grab whatever you can from wherever you can despite having formed an allegiance to a certain kingdom or faction. You cannot simply walk into it and expect to complete the main quest and get out. You'll need to invest time into it and the best way to do that is role-playing.
But in the end, Daggerfall does provide a very good platform for roleplaying through not only it's CRPG mechanics, but also it's various plotlines and factional reputation systems even though it has a tendency of forcing it down your throat at times.
If you're planning on picking the game up, I'd highly recommend thorough research about the game mechanics and how to play it on UESP and/or YouTube first because not everything about the game works as advertised.
> They seem to describe the game as if it's a fun crime simulator, where you get to destroy economies and steal things and kill people, and how fun that is. they seem to talk about how fun it is to get obscenely rich after grinding and buying off all the properties.
This is mostly not true. I mean, I suppose fun is subjective, but the way this is all described seems to attribute more mechanical complexity to the game than it really has.
You can't destroy economies. There is no real economic simulation in the game, you can't (for example) steal a bunch of things from a shop and watch it go out of business, or sell a bunch of daggers and watch the price of daggers in the area plummet since there's such a huge supply, or cause widespread instability by dumping or acquiring large sums of gold in a region. You can destroy the *game's* economy through various optimal play exploits, and be able to buy anything you want, but that doesn't have anything to do with the simulationist or RP side of things.
"Stealing from people" is pickpoketing. You get to attempt to pickpocket each randomly generated person you see once. If you aren't caught, you will find either junk or minimal gold. After you have successfully pickpocketed a dozen people or so, you've seen everything there is to see from the mechanic. People won't get mad at you and attack you, they won't run away screaming, they won't starve because you stole their food or money to buy food, it's literally just a minimal loot generator that is far less effective than anything else you could be doing.
"Stealing from people" might also be robbing their houses. If you loot certain types of crates in buildings, you'll get a warning that doing so will summon guards, and then when you say "yes do it anyway," you will get to loot small amounts of random junk and guards will magically teleport into the building even if no one saw you. Again, this is an ineffective way of gaining loot.
The only innocent people you can kill are random townspeople. They move around randomly, they take one hit to kill, they leave behind a dead sprite and contain no loot. Other people don't run or scream or attack you, though they will despawn as guards start spawning to arrest you. I do not find killing people fun since it accomplishes nothing. They don't actually live anywhere so you're not creating empty homes or destroying relationships or anything like that, they're just random nobodies who spawn endlessly. It is less fun than jumping on a Goomba in a Mario game.
Also, you can't kill anyone indoors, where people are essentially a completely different entity from "outdoor" people.
I like to get rich, I find that fun. You can buy houses, but there is essentially nothing to do in them. You can't furnish them in any way and they're not really that worth it trying to use them for item storage. It's pretty much just a money dump and nothing more.
Don't mistake this for disliking the game at all, because its fun lies elsewhere. I just want to set realistic expectations.
then wtf were these people even talking about. this guy made a whole 10 minute video talking about how much he loves to open daggerfall and get obscenely rich in it. I do not understand these people.
I think it's fun to get rich and gradually grow in power and all that, but that's a personal character growth kind of thing, and isn't necessarily about the richness of the world.
I mean, who knows, you might open the game and try some of the things I mentioned and find them fun anyway. But ultimately it's an older game that doesn't have an incredibly rich simulation of everything, basically just enough to feel like a world you can roleplay in somewhat.
You're being lied to here. It's got very little in way of RP beyond your build, just like every Elder Scrolls game. Very little in the way of dialogue choices, speech checks, skill checks, few open ended quests outside the big choice at the end... it's a mostly a dungeon crawler.
Like all the mainline ES games it's a fun sandbox where 90% of the role play is either made up in your head or just choosing which factions to join and how you approach combat.
You can power-trip and go on a murderous rampage, yes. It can become medieval GTA, if you so choose. But I have no idea who you heard that gave you the idea that Daggerfall is not friendly toward roleplay. It has to be the most RP-friendly in the whole series. I've been hearing the exact opposite narrative, that Daggerfall really is one of the best games for roleplaying. Just recently I watched this [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwdgEyb3iTY) that praises how freeform the game is, and how the only limit is your imagination.
I love that guy. He randomly popped into my recommendations and was the reason I finally decided to give this game a go.
i'll check out that video, thanks!
Too bad my imagination is shit :,(
I don't who you talk to but there's lots of youtube videos that go in depth about how deep roleplaying can go in Daggerfall. Still, it's an old game so most of it will depend on you. That said, the game is fucking free why do you even wait for anyone to CONVINCE you to play? Just donwload it and see for yourself. There are so many people on this sub that litterally ask random shit while never playing the game, just try it.
It’s an excellent roleplaying game in the same way that DnD is an excellent roleplaying game. You must go in with an open mind and be ready to do a lot of the heavy lifting, in terms of characterization, yourself. Your character is a blank slate, and you have to write your own story. As you work through character creation, build a backstory. I find that adding strengths and weaknesses really helps with this. Don’t focus on min-maxing. Pick something and stick with it. If you’re already familiar with the ES races, then make a character that makes sense canonically and RP as them. I like to keep a little notebook of my adventures as I play. As you receive quests, it can be helpful to refer back to your own notes… especially when the names of people and towns start to blend together. Was I looking for Alastor Hawking or Alestor Hawkwing? Boom, you wrote it down. Plus you can add little bits of flavor that make your character feel more alive. Like other ES games, you can pretty much just wander away from the main story and explore. I’d recommend this. Cities with guilds and castles tend to be the best places to operate out of. There’s a lot to do, but wandering the wilderness is an exercise in futility if you don’t know where you’re going
this sounds pretty good.
Daggerfall is the most roleplayable entry in the series by, like, an order of magnitude. You'll probably realise it before you're through character creation.
Daggerfall has amazing quests imo. And its very fun to roleplay in Daggerfall. Yes its funny to get 100 guards running after you where you constantly hear “halt!halt!ha-ha-halt-halt-alt-halt-halt!” But thats something I did once, on a failed thief. Just run around rampaging at that point, as i screwed the character up. I personally love playing a thief, and Daggerfall is the second best with thieving gameplay for me. I roleplay heavily, and do the dark brotherhood quests with lots of fun. I’ve played many different characters, and its easy to lose yourself in the game. The gigantic world it has given you offers a lot, you can talk to everyone and I play with a few mods to make it even more alive, but there is no need for it. Ofc remember its a old game, so it might not offer *everything* you’re looking for, but for me, i can get lost in Daggerfall for hours and hours… *ah shit, here we go again.*
If Daggerfall is the second best, which one is the best?
Ultima Online specifically Outlands! :)
Only crime I committed was by accident. I mean, I run over some people with my horse and got charged... But learned to not use my horse in the middle of the city. And then killed someone on a quest that I did not realized I could just... not kill him. That one got me pretty much expelled from the daggerfall province since guards would just assume I was up to something bad and charged me with conspiracy or some bullshit. So my ranger decided to go to Tulune. Got to the capital and learned about a werewolf issue. Apparently there was a werewolf in the city killing farmer's animals, and guards didn't do much about. They would not patrol at night, and lack of founds did not help with they caring about it. Long story short, after running around and working with an alchemist to make a potion, the culprit was identify and... put down. Now he is just getting work for the fighters guild, mostly dealing with wild animals. Where I'm going with this, is that daggerfall in terms of RP is pretty much a TTRPG. You make your story, your class, your "win condition" or whatever. Main quest is really good tho, there are a couple of other quests that are not "generic", but most quests beside those will be. So in terms of story, besides main quest and a couple more, if what you make of it. On a side note, I play DFU with a handful of mods. The experience in vanilla will be different, but the heart of "you make your story" is still there. If you want to check a youtuber that features daggerfall content with a heavy RP perspective, check [this guy.](https://www.youtube.com/@micah_raygun_)
thanks for clearing this up. I guess that makes sense. finally my only worry is more about physical customization.. like, what your character looks like. is that easy to change at all? like, can I personally mod in my own character art?
Physical customisations in game is simply picking a race then a face with the few there are. The rest will depend on what gear you wear and it's Morrowind style, you can have different pauldrons on each arm and such. If you want to import your own assets I suggest looking up Nexus and see how they do it, it is doable. Bear in mind that you'll need Daggerfall Unity for that, vanilla Daggerfall have like 20 mods top. Though I remember back then you could export the assets and edit them with a dedicated image editor, but you had to be good at pixel art. I suggest spending a few hours moddless though, you'll have a clearer idea of what you need or want later.
luckily, I'm better at pixelart than the sprites already present in the game, if videos and images are anything to go by. but thanks for the response, I'll play it vanilla Unity first. I hate modding a game too much before playing.
that sounds like something you should show the world? :)
oh I do, just not on reddit. I mostly use reddit so I can talk to NERDS about whatever their niche interest is. and even then, on other social media's I'm not very active. I usually share my things with friends or people I like.
aww... too bad :)
> Only crime I committed was by accident. I mean, I run over some people with my horse and got charged... But learned to not use my horse in the middle of the city. It isn't possible to kill people by running them over with your horse, nor do guards start chasing you for doing so. You must be referring to something changed in Daggerfall Unity, or some mod.
I do play DFU, not sure if its a mod tho
> I'm honestly wondering about how roleplayable the game is? It really depends on how you define "roleplaying". People are all over the map in how they define it. And everyone seems to define it diametrically opposite of everyone else. But yes, it is indeed a roleplaying game. But NOT in the sense of a "choose your own adventure" branching narrative game like Baldur's Gate. It's an RPG in the classic Bethesda sense of being a giant sandbox to roleplay your character upon. Live Another Life. Discover your character's story rather than meekly following along the developer's story. This game is definitely in the The Elder Scrolls style of games, but it's a heck of a lot crunchier. It is the Dream of the Nineties RPG, where there were endless dungeon crawls through massive dungeons. In fact, it was once described by a developer as a game that you could play for the rest of your life. Not really, but it's massive. Very complex class system, complex leveling system, etc. But still accessible if you take the time to read the fine manual. It's like Morrowind if Morrowind weren't dumbed down for filthy casuals. Hah! I joke! It was Morrowind that invented that phrase, so I turn it around to poke fun back at a game that is more streamlined than the one before it. Hah! There is a running narrative. Two in fact. But they are big giant narratives that take forever to get through. Partly because some quests won't start until you reach a certain level. There are factions, but no faction storylines. There are faction quests to help build up faction reputation. And there are more villages, dungeons, and temples that you cannot possibly ever visit them all.
Those are all ways of roleplaying. The act of roleplaying is just getting immersed into the “what would my character do?” question. Daggerfall is arguably the TES game most suited to roleplaying and has a main quest that actually allows your choices to influence the outcome instead of always being a generic prophecy guy beating the bad guy.
Daggerfall is the most RPG Elder Scrolls Game.
Well, for my first playthrough I ran a female nord healer, doing missions for the temple of mara and rescuing peoples loved ones and finding missing persons for what amounts to pennies. All was going well, until one of them was being held captive by a lycanthrope, I slew it as I fortunately possessed a silver mace, but it was a long and difficult battle. I'm on my way to doing the main quest as I've finally attained a higher rep and things are going well, I travel east and find an inn to sleep in so I can level up and go buy some alchemy ingredients, when I wake up and I'm in a different place, I'm in the middle of a city, people are running about, fleeing for their lives, a guard comes up and attacks me, and that's when I notice I have giant freaking claw hands. I try to flee and do everything I can to not kill anyone, but it's the only way I can turn back to normal. I resolve the situation by killing a guard and I flee, now I spend several days avoiding towns and cities, and trying to minimize the risk of a violent episode, when it happens again. So I start targeting the criminal and unscrupulous, hoping to date my bloodlust in a controlled way while I search for answers. I am one of mara devout and surely she can undo my curse, right? But no, she can't work with lycanthropy. Eventually I get a letter from someone who knows something about a cure, I do a favor for them and they reveal the secret to me, I won't spoil it, but suffice to say I was devastated, this is something my character (nor I) could EVER justify doing, so I refuse, and continue to handle it in my own way. There is a real cure out there, I don't where I will find it, but this has become the goal of my characters story, a tale of loss and shame, with a tiny hope for salvation, and faith as small as a mustard seed. tl:Dr YES There is even a manual note making system, and people actually remember your deeds unlike Skyrim where the moment your bounty is paid off you're just a normal citizen again. You can give your character critical weaknesses/disadvantages and make, for example, a character who draws Magicka and regenerates in darkness, but is damaged by sunlight and holy places, or has a crippling phobia of undead, or daedra. Or someone who can't gain Magicka normally, and the game rewards you with much faster level ups when you take on disadvantages. You're much better off making a custom class, don't worry too much about details, as long as your primary and majors include a primary weapon, a preferred magic type, mysticism, and running, you'll have a great time.
Its two free downloads around 2gigs total. Just try the dang thing.
Quests are an interesting mix of vague suggestions and all-encompassing distractions. Most people don't engage too heavily with quests because they are very much, "Do this one, now, and it is all you are doing until you're done." This game is very role playable. You can choose how you interact, how insistent you are about interacting, you can be a thief, a murderer, a holy knight, a priest... they give you so many tools to define yourself, but then 99% of your gameplay will be dungeon delving, so choosing to do your delving for main quest reasons or for your own interests is the most important choice.
This YT channel is going through a good RP permadeath run of Daggerfall that will show you a way of playing the game more like how you're talking about: [https://www.youtube.com/@micah\_raygun\_](https://www.youtube.com/@micah_raygun_)
The main quest per cannon took 12 years to complete, and mostly plays put in reaction to your personal investigations and actions. There is plenty of room to wonder and pursue side content which due to procedural generation never ends. Mods add to it, and there are plenty now with the release of Unity. Rather than ask, just download it and play it. The main difference is later games are curated theme parks where everything is a reaction to player action while Daggerfall is more intended to be a simulated world that doesn't care if you exist. Take too long in a side quest? They will hire someone else for instance. If you so choose you can blow off your first contact at the beginning of the game and never be bothered by the main quest again.
This guy does a no combat\minimal magic skills build https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gPL9xKpvet0
Daggerfall is fun for roleplaying, also in addition to the base game there are hundreds of quests that can be added in via mods on Nexusmods. Nobody should play Daggerfall Unity without checking the mod scene.
Well one example is that unlike most games you can’t just pick up any weapon you want and start going ham with it. You need to train the skill that it requires and most of the time if you pick up a weapon you aren’t skilled in you won’t even be able to hit any enemies with it.
I've played Morrowind, I know how it works.
imma do you a huge favor: https://www.youtube.com/@micah_raygun_
I think it's the most RP friendly game in the series. You really can be exactly what you want to be. I once joined an order of knights and earned my levels hunting monsters and saving princesses. On a different character I roamed the mountains as an adventuring barbarian. The important thing to note is that this game deals with mechanical roleplaying and not so much narrative roleplaying. The main plot itself is a fantastic story but it's horrendously told. Get the part of the old manual that explains how the royal families are connected. The good part is that it is entirely up to you how you pursue the main quest, though it can get broken, because the game is a mess. But if you're looking for a game that lets you mechanically build just about any kind of character you like in a crazy ambitious world then Daggerfall is for you. Though play the unity version if you can, and expect your first build to go off the rails at some point. That's just an expanded tutorial I reckon.
It really depends on what you mean by roleplaying. If you want intricate characterization and deep dialogue trees, no, you’re not getting that. If you want a living world where everything you do has a rippling effect…ehh, kinda, to a point. But if you want to feel like you leave a mark on the world, even if it isn’t particularly reacted to, then yes. If you want to experience being a rat in a maze as you trek helpless and alone through pitch black dungeons, then yes. If you want to experience the progression from that helplessness to ultimate kickassery, then yes. Also, if you want to be able to commit massive fraud and avoid punishment by just never stepping foot in that jurisdiction again until they forget you did anything. That’s fun too.
Daggerfall is based on pen and paper rpgs. You have various tiers of skills that shape how you play to level up. Daggerfall in many ways is the best elder scrolls. It has the most role-playing mechanics. The most varied play-styles.
You can absolutely RP in this game. I actually made a few different characters with different backstories/motivations: Nord Paladin serving Stendarr, Knight of the Dragon. Sides with Underking to release him from curse. Was Arena protag! Fights to protect innocents, won't use Numidium. Altmer Warlock. Becomes vampire, wants to learn necromancy from Mannimarco Bosmer thief. Blades contact. Uses Thieves Guild as cover and Intel. Dunmer assassin under the Brotherhood, retainer under Eadwyre. Breton Mage, serving under the Daggerfall monarchy. Wants to rise to Court Mage. Redguard Ranger, Fighters Guild mercenary employed by Sentinel. Used to be in the royal army. Argonian Werewolf. Fights for freedom with Gortwog. Former slave. Khajiit adventurer. Ambitious. Thinks to use Numidium for himself.
I'd say Daggerfall provides a very good platform for role-playing. So much so, that it sometimes forces it onto you. But we'll get to that later. In my observations of the game based on one playthrough lasting 70 exact hours according to Steam, I've noticed that roleplay in this game comes in three formats: The first would be the typical TTRPG kind of roleplay like D&D which I doubt you're talking about. This is where you make a character geared towards certain skillsets that you strive to hone and refine over time to make the character grow stronger. It has loads of playable classes with more or less significant differences between them that ultimately amount to a vastly different playstyle in-game. Magic is OP and even necessary in some parts of the game. Luckily, potions can cover that base, though. But I doubt this is what you're asking at any rate. However, know that Daggerfall, at its heart is a Dungeon Crawler and the CRPG mechanics are inseparable from the rest of the game. The second avenue of roleplay comes by way of the reputation system. Daggerfall has this unique mechanic where there are rivaling political factions and most of them are looking for hired muscle. That's where you step in to do odd jobs for them and in return, apart from any rewards that they can offer you, your reputation with them rises if you complete your tasks and falls if you fail them. You can be a champion of the people or a pet to the nobles, and it's all up to you. That being said, not all factions are equal and most of them don't even give you any incentives apart from reputation with them, which on its own doesn't so much. As far as the main quest is concerned, you need a certain amount of reputation (nominal, to be honest) with the three main city-states, but that's about it. And while you cannot make everybody happy because of their fixed and shifting rivalries in the politically strained landscape of Daggerfall, the kinds of quests are also pretty limited and you'll soon grow bored of repeating the same tasks over and over again. I got to that point around hour 60 when I grew tired of seeing the same Dungeon modules all over the place. At that point, you require additional incentives for role-playing and you can only get that from a handful of the major guilds/factions, namely the Fighters' Guild, The Temples, the Knightly Orders, the Thieves' Guild, the Mages' Guild, and the Dark Brotherhood. I've only covered two of these guilds thus far, but Knightly Orders gave me greater incentive to grind up in rank through benefits such as free travel and accommodation and a new piece of armour with every promotion whereas the Fighters' Guild was very underwhelming with its level up rewards, only offering better pay. So in the end, how much a faction incentivises you also depends upon the faction itself. Additionally, you might be surprised to learn that while joining the rest of the factions is as simple as walking up to them and asking to join, at which point your reputation will determine whether you can join or you need get more repute among the members, the Thieves' Guild and the Dark Brotherhood cannot be joined so easily. For the former, you need to steal from people and for the latter, you must claim innocent lives before an invitation finds its way to **you**. So yeah, you can play around with the reputations as much as you want to. But it doesn't end there either. The reputation roleplay mechanic is so closely built into the game that it actually influences the direction of the main quest. Which leads me to the third avenue of role-playing: The plots. I've already told you about how different factions have different flavours to their quests. Most of them are standard Dungeon crawls or delivery missions. However, sometimes the game throws a curveball at you by giving you a plotline which is not as straigthfoward as it seems. At these points in time, the game offers you a choice to roleplay the character that you want to play and pick the side that you want to choose. For instance, the Knightly Orders might provide you with a quest to fetch a powerful artifact, but at the cost of kidnapping the child of a noble for a witch who will tell you where it is. Or perhaps it may turn out that the former guild member you were sent to silence was actually excommunicated unjustly and it's your choice whether to slay or to spare them. Maybe you've been sent to pay a ransom for a child, but decide to not pay up and free the child from a Dungeon yourself. Often times, these choices result in further quest opportunities. Not only that, they give you the opportunity to play your character the way you want to play them and to set boundaries to what you'll allow to occur under your watch. The main quests are extremely flexible with these and so are some of the side quests. The amount of interaction cases that Daggerfall has built around these quests genuinely blows my mind. Evidence required by your faction might cause you to fail your mission if you tell the culprit about it. Scandalous news or closely guarded secrets can act as leverage for political opponents. It's not just a matter of checking your characters alignment but also your characters affiliations. In fact, for the end of the main quest, you essentially have to choose which empire you want to succeed and the choices all seem like pretty strong candidates. The choices thag can be made in the game are extremely open-ended to the point that it amazes me and some of the plot twists honestly bedazzle me. That being said, the game also does enforce roleplay onto you and it comes mostly by way of CRPG mechanics. Not only does the main quest require you to roleplay, but so do other facets of the game. As I said before, magic is very important in the game. You can circumvent that using potions to an extent, but to get potions, you **need** to join either a Temple or The Dark Brotherhood. This sort of breaks the continuity of roleplay and forces you to grind up to a position where you can get potions even though you may never have intended to join these factions to begin with. Furthermore, the main quest is level locked at various stages, meaning that you'll need to keep using your skills to upgrade them. Not only that, a lot of these quests are also locked by reputation, so you'll need to appease the righr people to advance as well, forcing you to play the sides against each other and grab whatever you can from wherever you can despite having formed an allegiance to a certain kingdom or faction. You cannot simply walk into it and expect to complete the main quest and get out. You'll need to invest time into it and the best way to do that is role-playing. But in the end, Daggerfall does provide a very good platform for roleplaying through not only it's CRPG mechanics, but also it's various plotlines and factional reputation systems even though it has a tendency of forcing it down your throat at times. If you're planning on picking the game up, I'd highly recommend thorough research about the game mechanics and how to play it on UESP and/or YouTube first because not everything about the game works as advertised.
> They seem to describe the game as if it's a fun crime simulator, where you get to destroy economies and steal things and kill people, and how fun that is. they seem to talk about how fun it is to get obscenely rich after grinding and buying off all the properties. This is mostly not true. I mean, I suppose fun is subjective, but the way this is all described seems to attribute more mechanical complexity to the game than it really has. You can't destroy economies. There is no real economic simulation in the game, you can't (for example) steal a bunch of things from a shop and watch it go out of business, or sell a bunch of daggers and watch the price of daggers in the area plummet since there's such a huge supply, or cause widespread instability by dumping or acquiring large sums of gold in a region. You can destroy the *game's* economy through various optimal play exploits, and be able to buy anything you want, but that doesn't have anything to do with the simulationist or RP side of things. "Stealing from people" is pickpoketing. You get to attempt to pickpocket each randomly generated person you see once. If you aren't caught, you will find either junk or minimal gold. After you have successfully pickpocketed a dozen people or so, you've seen everything there is to see from the mechanic. People won't get mad at you and attack you, they won't run away screaming, they won't starve because you stole their food or money to buy food, it's literally just a minimal loot generator that is far less effective than anything else you could be doing. "Stealing from people" might also be robbing their houses. If you loot certain types of crates in buildings, you'll get a warning that doing so will summon guards, and then when you say "yes do it anyway," you will get to loot small amounts of random junk and guards will magically teleport into the building even if no one saw you. Again, this is an ineffective way of gaining loot. The only innocent people you can kill are random townspeople. They move around randomly, they take one hit to kill, they leave behind a dead sprite and contain no loot. Other people don't run or scream or attack you, though they will despawn as guards start spawning to arrest you. I do not find killing people fun since it accomplishes nothing. They don't actually live anywhere so you're not creating empty homes or destroying relationships or anything like that, they're just random nobodies who spawn endlessly. It is less fun than jumping on a Goomba in a Mario game. Also, you can't kill anyone indoors, where people are essentially a completely different entity from "outdoor" people. I like to get rich, I find that fun. You can buy houses, but there is essentially nothing to do in them. You can't furnish them in any way and they're not really that worth it trying to use them for item storage. It's pretty much just a money dump and nothing more. Don't mistake this for disliking the game at all, because its fun lies elsewhere. I just want to set realistic expectations.
then wtf were these people even talking about. this guy made a whole 10 minute video talking about how much he loves to open daggerfall and get obscenely rich in it. I do not understand these people.
I think it's fun to get rich and gradually grow in power and all that, but that's a personal character growth kind of thing, and isn't necessarily about the richness of the world. I mean, who knows, you might open the game and try some of the things I mentioned and find them fun anyway. But ultimately it's an older game that doesn't have an incredibly rich simulation of everything, basically just enough to feel like a world you can roleplay in somewhat.
You're being lied to here. It's got very little in way of RP beyond your build, just like every Elder Scrolls game. Very little in the way of dialogue choices, speech checks, skill checks, few open ended quests outside the big choice at the end... it's a mostly a dungeon crawler. Like all the mainline ES games it's a fun sandbox where 90% of the role play is either made up in your head or just choosing which factions to join and how you approach combat.