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I am playing the "vanilla" Steam release of Daggerfall which purports to be version 1.07.213.

When you reach the Add Bonus Points screen of character creation, Primary Skills are meant to range from 28 to 31, Major Skills range from 18 to 21, and Minor Skills range from 13 to 16. Presumably, choosing background options which increase these skills should boost them by the stated amount, e.g. a Primary Skill of Jumping boosted by +6 should have a range of 34 to 37.

This is not what happens.

For the sake of example, you could test this yourself: create a custom character class which leaves the attributes and advantages at default, and choose the following skills (terrible, but just for testing purposes):

• Primary: Blunt Weapon, Running, Jumping
• Major: Etiquette, Streetwise, Dodging
• Minor: Climbing, Backstabbing, Critical Strike, Stealth, Pickpocket, Lockpicking

You should be asked an Acrobat-ish set of background questions. Answer the skill-increasing ones as follows:

• "You have a certain degree of training with:" Blunt Weapons - Blunt Weapon +6
• "What thieving skill have you been studying the longest?" Lockpicking - Lockpicking +6
• "What motivates you into a life of adventure?" Fun - Streetwise and Etiquette +3 each
• "One of the most important survival skills you picked up was how to:" ingratiate yourself - Etiquette +6
• "You were an active child, ___ than anyone else your age." a better climber - Climbing +6
• "The one skill you could not work without must be ___" stealthy movement - Stealth +6
• "As a child, your nickname was ___" Rabbit - Jumping +6

This should result in a broad set of increases across most chosen skills. But for me, when I reached the Add Bonus Points screen, every skill was at expected default values, not reflecting any of the above increases, except for Etiquette alone which was at 24 (meaning it received a +3 to +6 increase). Proceeding on into the game itself didn't result in these skills being added later, they were the same as when character creation ended.

Repeating this same test again resulted in the same thing: Etiquette at 24, the rest random values among the expected defaults.

I repeated this test again, but swapped Climbing and Jumping (so Climbing was a Primary Skill and Jumping was a Minor Skill). I was asked a different set of questions which seemed more generic and offered less opportunities for skill increases, but chose as many choices as possible which would increase Climbing. To my surprise, Climbing got a 6 point boost, but look at some of the other skills (forgive me, not allowed to post non-UESP links, I hope this is ok):

i. imgur. com/B4aAC1M.png

Running, Dodging and Jumping are all 1 point lower than the supposed minimums!

What in the world is going on with Backgrounds and skill points? Is it possible that some of the questions don't give a bonus directly to the skill, but instead give a silent, passive bonus to rolls made with the skill? Or perhaps some questions just don't do anything at all?

I can't find any mention of this odd behavior anywhere else online. Has anyone tested this before?

Also, did the developers of Daggerfall Unity encounter this issue, and how did they handle it?



EDIT: I have looked into this further.

There is some discussion of how Background questions are handled here, including identifying some errors and inconsistencies in the files (which were never noted on the UESP Background page). There is also a post here from someone who combed through the relevant files and cleaned up inconsistencies.

I am unable to post external links, but the Daggerfall Unity Github contains the BIOG files with fixes included at daggerfall-unity/Assets/StreamingAssets/BIOGs/. And in testing Daggerfall Unity, I discovered that it does properly provide skill bonuses depending on your answers.

I'm not sure why the DOS version does not, or why apparently no one has ever noticed that it does not. I checked a much older installation of Daggerfall which I had archived, the original free version from Bethesda's website, and it's just as broken in that version.

I've continued looking into this behavior. Last night I was taking stock what I was observing and I think I had an epiphany. I think I know what's going on under the hood, and it's possibly not even a bug.

In the experiments I did above, all the skills that I boosted through Background but didn't observe anything higher than defaults were actually on the high end of default values, i.e. primary skills can be 28 to 31, and all three were 31, because I boosted them. The piece I was missing was to realize that those skills have already got their bonus points. Etiquette was higher than expected at 24 because one question I answered ("what motivates you," "fun") gives +3 to etiquette and streetwise, and then a second question ("one of the most important survival skills," "ingratiate yourself") gave +6. 24 minus 3 minus 6 is 15, which is where Etiquette must have started.

Here's how skills actually work at character creation:

• Primary skills begin with 25 points, Major with 15 points, Minor with 10 points, and Miscellaneous with 0 points.
• If a skill is modified by Background, those bonus points are tallied up over the course of the questions and added to the skill. It is not randomized at all.
• If a skill is not modified by Background, it is increased by a random roll of 3 to 6 points.

This makes a lot of sense as 25/15/10/0 are nice round starting numbers that I could easily see the devs choosing.

This also explains why in my first post example, three skills were lower than what's normally the minimum: one question only adds 2 points to those particular three skills ("Whenever you had a chance growing up you liked to spend time ___" "practicing acrobatics").

You could view this as a bug -- maybe skills should start at a random value and then get boosted by Backgrounds on top of that -- or you could see this as an intentional decision to keep skills from starting out too high. Someone with +6 to a skill is still receiving some benefit, in that its value it not random but maximized among the defaults. And further questions can increase it higher. The main reason this could be intended behavior is that the more skills you start with, the lower your potential level cap, and doing it this way keeps just about everyone in that level 29 to 32 range.

Having solved a 26-year-old mystery, I will add this information to the wiki when I get the chance.

Thank you for exploring and explaining this.

Those default starting values are a bit similar to Morrowind's, although there are differences. You can definitely see how the system they first devised for Daggerfall was streamlined and modified a bit for Morrowind.