Morrowind:Skills

There are 27 skills in Morrowind, each of which determines how well you can perform various tasks. Each skill is governed by an attribute; there are three to five skills governed by each attribute (except Luck). Each class has five major skills, five minor skills, and seventeen miscellaneous skills. Each time your character increases any combination of major or minor skills ten times, they become eligible to gain a level. Each skill also belongs to one of three specializations.

The base starting value of each skill is 5, but player choices regarding race and class modify those starting values. Each of the five major skills receive +25, and each of the five minor skills receive +10. Each skill governed by the character's chosen Specialization receives an additional +5. Each Race receives additional bonuses to starting skill levels. The highest possible starting value for a skill is 50.

Attribute	Skills Governed by Attribute
Endurance	Heavy Armor	Medium Armor	Spear
Strength	Acrobatics	Armorer	Axe	Blunt Weapon	Long Blade
Agility	Block	Light Armor	Marksman	Sneak
Speed	Athletics	Hand-to-hand	Short Blade	Unarmored
Personality	Illusion	Mercantile	Speechcraft
Intelligence	Alchemy	Conjuration	Enchant	Security
Willpower	Alteration	Destruction	Mysticism	Restoration
Luck	(none)

Specialization
Combat
Stealth
Magic

Increasing Skills

Skills primarily gain value through use. Many actions the player can take (such as attacking, casting spells, or getting hit) will grant skill progress equal to that action's specific value. These values can be found on each skill's page, and can range from as low as as low as 0.02 (Athletics, for running for one second) to as high as 30 (Mercantile, for negotiating an extremely good deal.) The game displays a skill's current progress towards the next increase as a percentage, rounded to the nearest whole number. The total amount of progress required to gain +1 in a skill is equal to:

TotalRequired = (SkillValue + 1) * ClassFactor * Specialization

• SkillValue is the current value of the skill.
• ClassFactor is 0.75× if the skill was taken as a Major Skill as part of the player's Class, 1× if the skill is a Minor, and 1.25× if the skill is a Misc.
• Specialization is 0.8× if the skill belongs to the player's Specialization.

Skills can also be increased directly in a variety of ways: by paying for trainers, by reading skill books, and occasionally as quest rewards. When a skill is increased in this way, the current progress remains the same, but the amount required for the next point increases, so the skill's progress appears to go down by a factor of (NewValue + 1) / NewValue.

Skills can be permanently damaged (though retrainable) by jail time, and – in theory – by the Damage Skill effect, though the latter is not encountered as an effect used against the player character except in early, unpatched versions of the game.

Notes

• The following skills from Daggerfall are not included as skills in Morrowind:
  • Backstabbing: Replaced with a flat sneak attack damage bonus
  • Climbing: Characters can no longer climb, but higher Acrobatics allows ascending steeper slopes
  • Creature language skills: The sole instance where your character knowing another language is important is decided by a simple Intelligence check.
  • Critical Strike: No longer occur randomly in battle, although sneak attacks grant damage multipliers
  • Dodging: Superseded by Unarmored and Agility
  • Etiquette: Merged into Speechcraft
  • Medical: Diseases are now automatically diagnosed
  • Pickpocket: Subsumed by Sneak
  • Lockpicking: Merged into Security
  • Running: Merged into Athletics
  • Jumping: Merged into Acrobatics
  • Stealth: Merged into Sneak
  • Streetwise: Merged into Speechcraft
  • Swimming: Merged into Athletics
  • Thaumaturgy: Spells shifted to other schools