The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Author's Foreword
Creating Your Character (An Overview)
The Skills
The Races
The Signs
Controls
Magic & Combat
Crime & Punishment
Goods & Services
Coming Soon
Version History, Credits, & Contact Information
Morag Tong Guild
Power Leveling Skills
I'm not sure what kind of ideas you might have gotten from the previous section, but you'll eventually learn that townsfolk actually do serve purposes other than target practice. They also exist to offer your character a wide variety of services, which I'll go over and explain in detail in this section. From bartering to travelling to offering your character training in return for a small monetary fee, there's a lot of services to be taken advantage of in the world of Morrowind.
When you talk to people, a list of conversation topics will appear on the bar to the right of the message window. At the top of the list, separated from the list of topics with a line break, is the option to persuade this particular individual. Below that, there may or may not include a list of services from which to choose. Select a service in order to initiate dialogue.
First of all, let's go over the process of persuasion. You'll notice that every character in the game has a general disposition towards you, which is represented as a numerical value between 0 and 100. Initially, this value will be based entirely on your character's personality stat. The persuasion menu offers you four methods by which to alter an NPC's disposition towards you: admiration, intimidation, taunting, and bribery.
Admiration and bribery are both attempts to raise an NPC's disposition towards you. Bribery is more reliable, but the minimum alotted bribe is all it should take for even those of the dullest persuasion to make a friend over the course of a few minutes of saving and loading. Intimidation is an attempt to temporarily raise an NPC's disposition, as a successful intimidation will drop the disposition of an NPC drastically when you stop talking to him or her. Lastly, taunting will attempt to lower the disposition of an NPC, which is usually something you should need little help in doing. Its theortical use is to inveigle people in full public view to attack you, thus saving you from the legal hassles of assault. However, I've found that a good frenzy humanoid spell or enchantment is far more reliable and easy to use.
So then, what benefits are conveyed to you by making an NPC like you? Short answer: the more someone likes you, the better prices you'll get for goods and services from that person. The other factor is that NPC's will not respond to topics of conversation unless they like you enough. Normally, this won't be too much of a problem, since someone has to really hate you for this situation to occur. But should you encounter such a dilemma, the solution is as simple as raising his or her disposition towards you. Just don't feel bad when an NPC alternates between being insulted by your attempts to bribe him or her and happily accepting your money.
As far as services go, the most prominent service you can recieve from any NPC in the game is the opportunity to barter. The trading of goods and cash is not necessarily limited to shopkeepers, though you're probably not going to find much in the way of selection when trading with random people in taverns. The barter interface is fairly simple to use, and I'm not going to insult your intelligence by explaining most of it to you. But I would like to point to that little price adjuster at the bottom of the screen. At your own leisure, you can suggest (and usually get) better deals than you are initially offered. Your chances of getting those deals and the magnitude of the deals you can get will be determined by your Mercantile skill. I'd also like to mention that the Tribunal and Bloonmoon expansion packs both added a "max sale" button that would automatically set the selling price to all of the money that the other guy is carrying.
Every person in the game, including merchants, has a set amount of cash on them at any given time. This is meant to discourage you from selling someone a couple million gold worth of crap, but is offset by the fact that their cash reserves are reset to normal every 24 hours. With a little patience, you can get the most out of selling your expensive items by trading them for the most expensive items in the other guy's inventory, and then seeling them back to him for more gold, and so forth.
It also is worthy of mentioning that not everyone is interested in buying anything you have to sell. Rather, people buy the types of items they deal in. Normally, this is kinda obvious: armorers deal in weapons, armor, and repairing equipment (hammers and prongs); alchemists deal in potions, alchemy ingredients, and alchemy equipment; booksellers deal in, quite obviously, books. Outfitters and traders are two more generalized titles, though the former is usually more geared towards weapons and armor and neither one will buy or sell lockpicks or probes. The one type of merchant who will buy anything you have to sell is the pawnbroker, which makes them useful to have around on that front. Aerille, the trader from Seyda Neen (the first town in the game) techinically counts as a pawnbroker, since he will also buy and sell lockpicks and probes.
Another biggie to keep in mind when shopping is that not everything you can aquire in this game is necessarily legal to possess. You'll know when you've got contraband in your bag, because about 99% of the merchants in the game will refuse to do business with you until you get rid of it. Keeping in step with the gloriously brilliant AI the game possesses, this is as easy as dropping it on the floor in front of them, and then making sure to take it with you when you leave (which is something I'm really bad about forgetting to do).
Though you'll find a few different illegal items in the game, I'll mention the number one offenders here: skooma and moon sugar. The former is a potion and the latter an alchemy ingredient, but both are generally considered to be Morrowind's equivalent of narcotics and have been outlawed. Of course, much like marijuana in the real world, don't expect to have difficulty finding any skooma or moon sugar just because they're illicit substances. In fact, the drug-like properties of these substances gives them a rather high street value.
Now, what makes this important to know is that some people actually will buy your skooma and moon sugar, which translates into big cash profits for you. "Which merchants?", you might ask. Well, if you'll go back and carefully read section I.C. of the FAQ, you might notice that I make reference to one specific race in the game being rather prone towards drug habits. Might I suggest that you look into doing business with one of them?
Besides bartering, the other major service offered to you in the world of Morrowind is training. Believe it or not, you can actually pay someone to raise your character's levels in his or her skills. While this may seem a little overwhelming at first, believe me when I say that it would likely take forever to max them all out manually. Even though training isn't cheap, it's defnitely an opportunity to take advantage of. Naturally, there are a few limitations to this process that are meant to prevent its abuse, which I should probably go over right about now.
First, you can only train a skill as high as its governing stat. If your character's strength is a mere 40, for example, then that's as high as you can train up, say, your Long Blade skill. Though proper planning should eliminate this from being much of a problem, the really easy way around this rule is to make a spell or enchantment that temporarily raises the appropriate stat for about one second.
The second, more constricting limit to your training capacity is that any character in the game may only train you up as high as they themselves possess the given skill. And the really shitty thing about this is that there's no way to actually know what that limit is until you hit it, though the majority of trainers typically have all of their skills somewhere between levels 50 and 60. However, for each skill in the game (excepting Armorer and Medium Armor, both due to glitches), there exists one trainer in the game who possesses that skill at level 100. These guys are called "master trainers", and given the large number of people in the game willing to train you, are rather difficult to locate. I don't know where any of them are, and even if I did, I certainly wouldn't talk about it in a beginner's guide. I'm merely letting y'all know that these guys actually exist.
Aside from what I've discussed already, there are quite a few other services to be found in the game. Spells are bought separately from other items, so there's always a special option to buy spells whenever applicable. The game has a myriad of premade spells available from many different folks, which is a striking contrast to going anywhere and buying the same generic "fire 2" spell from everyone you meet. Spellmaking and enchanting are two extremely important services, as well, and are discussed at length in sections III.B. and III.C. of the FAQ, respectively. All armorers in the game offer a service to repair broken or damaged weapons and armor, which is usually a lot more convenient than doing yourself (as I said earlier in section I.D. of the FAQ). And lastly, several folks offer various methods of transportation for a small fee, which is another important service given the ludicrous size of the world of Morrowind. The first method of transit you'll be introduced to is the Silt Strider, a giant insect that is a ridden like a horse, but you'll also eventually come across the chance to travel by boat, and even by teleportation from one mage's guild to another.
And that pretty much wraps this section up. If I could choose a note to close on, it would be something I made mention of in section I.D. of the FAQ under the listing for the Mercantile skill: money is probably the last thing you need to worry about in this game. That's still no excuse for not knowing how the system works, however.
Last Update: December 11, 2005
Contributors: BTB
