#Morrowind mod guide mods#
Thus, all the mods in this subcategory are workarounds.Īzrael's Magicka Based Spell Advancedment, is, perhaps, the most successful, as it circumvents the limitations of Morrowind's scripting engine by using Aerelorn's (which must, obviously, be installed and run with Morrowind for it to work), allowing the game's leveling mechanism to recognize magic skill gains normally. The authors have worked out a system to get around this, but it isn't a seamless integration. The problem is that skill increases don't count towards levelling up and they don't influence the stat multipliers.
#Morrowind mod guide update#
The mods keep track of magicka usage and update their own counters. As a result, while the mods they've created are excellent and worthy of worship, they have certain inevitable shortcomings, through no fault of the authors. Those authors have gone to incredible lengths to work around the Morrowind scripting engine's limitations namely, that you can't update the skill progress bar with native Morrowind scripting functions.
There have been a few mods which have attempted to rectify this situation Magicka Based Skill Progression by Hotfusion and Improved Skilled Magicka by PirateLord are the two I am familiar with. It is, apparently, not at all an easy thing to pull off technically, as Azrael explains in his readme for Magicka Based Spell Advancement: The mods in this subcategory try to change that by making the game system recognize the Magicka cost (and therefore the difficulty) of the spells cast in order to translate higher-power spells successfully-cast into accordingly more skill gain. In the end, as in the skill system overall, the game encourages exploiting its quirks, while punishing smooth, natural play. While the need for practice is certainly realistic, the game loses out in both realism and playability when success at difficult castings to provide no more progress than success at the most trivial. I personally remember using travel time to repeatedly cast Bound Dagger and spells like it while auto-running in order to develop Conjuration, and it is not uncommon for people to make a custom spell that costs 1 Magicka just for the purpose of training the skill. This means that developing one's magic skills will tend to involve casting low-power spells repeatedly, and often for no other purpose than the practice, or simply buying training. It simply incremements the skill progress counter by one every time a spell, any spell, of that magic school is cast.
The problem, which many to be a rather serious flaw in the game system, is that game's method of recording skill progress does not differentiate between a spell that costs, say, 5 Magicka and much-more-powerful one that costs 50 or 200. The problem is worse for some skills than others it is easier to increase, say, Destruction by virtue of the repeated castings that will come naturally in combat, but skills like Conjuration are notoriously difficult. However, because of what many consider an oversight in how skill gain is implemented for spellcasting, the unmodified game requires a great deal of tedious "practice spellcasting" of small, useless spells to improve magic skills. Morrowind's skill system is intuitive and well-designed in many ways. For now, I'd very much appreciate feedback as to layout and so forth, as I'm experimenting with that.
Status Update: This guide is now hosted at MW Mythic Mods, and I won't be updating it here at the thread anymore. Gluby's Comprehensive Magicka and Spell Effect Mods Guide/FAQ