And when you seek these people out for training, and ask them about local rumors, they have unique (and interesting) responses because they're in the intelligence service. It's really beautifully done you can go a long way with the Blades trainers, but you're still probably going to have to join a guild to cover the gaps. Most of the magic skills are covered, but not alchemy, and the mage trainer who covers destruction magic is a bit out of the way. Long blades and shield use are covered for fighters, but not heavy armor. Stealth is covered for thieves, but not short blades or marksmanship. These trainers cover a wide range of skills, but not such a wide range that you can rely on them alone unless you have a pretty weird build. The Blades also have about six NPCs who are pretty decent early-game trainers (better than the entry-tier guild trainers, but worse than the second-tier guild trainers). Without training, your interaction with the Blades is pretty much restricted to that one questgiver. The Blades give out the first half of the quests in the main questline. Heavy use of training also changes the player's feeling about the Blades (imperial intelligence service) dramatically. This is nice, because a lot of the guild quest rewards in Morrowind are rather lackluster. So heavy use of trainers increases the utility of guilds, because they make trainers more available and doing quests makes training less expensive. Getting about halfway up the ranks in guilds also opens up a second set of trainers, who usually have higher skills (and can train you to higher levels) than the first tier of guild trainers. Guild rank increases how much guild members like you, and if they're trainers that means they charge you less. Heavy use of training also changes the utility of guilds. If a couple of skills rise while you're out on an adventure, you have to take them into account when you're spending your money on post-adventure training, but it's pretty manageable. But if most of your skill points are coming from training rather than skill use, you eliminate the grind, and reduce the window for uncontrolled skill increases to mess up your ability score increase plan. If you're not using training, you really have to grind skill uses to get good ability score boosts, and you're likely to incidentally raise some skills and waste some multipliers. It tames the worst parts of Morrowind's leveling system, where you can raise ability scores based on what skills you raised during the level.
Go to wilderness, get money and magic items, return to city, spend money on training.Īnd the heavy use of training changes the way the whole rest of the game works. Morrowind's development began in the mid-90s, and its descent from AD&D is apparent in its training mechanics and the relationship between wilderness and city. Having seen the OSR, this "money for XP" thing now makes total sense.
So I just accumulated money and ground out levels. Spending money on leveling was immersion-breaking, incompatible with my 3E-flavored understanding of fantasy worlds. There's hardly anything worth buying in terms of equipment - there are a few vendors in out-of-the-way places that carry high-quality items (the glass armor guy, the grandmaster alchemist), but all the good weapons can only be found by adventuring. When I was a kid, coming from a 3rd Edition D&D background, Morrowind's economy made no sense. I stopped and thought about that for a moment, and everything kind of clicked. I started a new game and one of the first things the first questgiver in the game does is give you some cash and tell you to get some training or gear. I went and did other things for a month and came back to it. When I finished, I was way overpowered and had a tremendous amount of cash.
#Morrowind heavy armor trainer mods#
Returning to Morrowind via OpenMW as an adult, I re-downloaded and re-created a couple of simple mods that I had used, and played through the game. So I downloaded mods that changed how it worked and it was fine.
When I was a kid playing Morrowind, I thought its leveling system was horribly slow and convoluted.