As the newest apprentice mage in the guild Fault has been assigned the tedious task of hiking out to a certain swamp and bringing back some alchemy research materials. But before she heads out on that quest she chats with the local mages until she find someone selling conjuration spells. Fault’s demon dagger is nice but she’d really prefer to be using Bound Spear, which sells for a modest 60 coins.
Spear in hand (or more accurately in head) it’s time for a field trip. Fault follows the path of the nearby river until it lets out in a swamp full of mushrooms. It barely takes any time at all to collect research material for Fault’s senpai with the only moment of excitement being a sudden giant rat attack that mostly proves Fault really probably shouldn’t be using a spear.
Morrowind mechanics time! In Morrowind hurting an enemy with a weapon is actually a two step process. Step one is to use your action gamer skills to hit your target. Step two then involves the game looking at your combat stats, rolling some virtual dice and then deciding whether or not your hit really counts. Since Fault has no training in spears and very low agility she constantly winds up missing even though I, as a player, am doing a perfectly good job at hitting my targets.
My mage build is bad at physical combat? Who could have seen that coming?
From Oblivion on they “fixed” this by making all hits depend purely on player skill and using character stats only for calculating damage. That means a hit is always a hit even if it doesn’t do much damage. While that’s probably a more satisfying system I must say that Morrowind’s “hit for a chance roll at hitting” really isn’t bad as long as you know what to expect and can tell the difference between missing because you’re too far away and need to correct your aim and missing because you “hit” but have too low of weapon accuracy to actually connect.
Still, it’s not much fun watching Fault useless flail in combat so on the way back to the mages guild she stops by the fighters guild and spends most her gold on five points of spear training. We’re pretty much broke again but who cares? We weren’t planning on using that money for equipment anyways.