Daggerfall:Quest Related Hints

The quests in Daggerfall outside of the main questline are varied in form, content, and complexity. These quests can be categorized in several ways. They can be categorized by the type of quest-giver (a guild or the nobles of a province, for example). They can also be categorized by the style of adventure that the character needs to undertake to complete the quest (dungeon crawls, deliveries and puzzle-solvers are examples of these styles). What is included here are various techniques for solving them.
 
Quest Sources
Besides the major storyline quests, there are a plethora of quests available in Daggerfall. These quests are available from a number of sources, and vary widely in tone, type, time required and style. The sources of these quests are the various guilds, factions, and various people of Daggerfall.

In general, the objectives of these quests will reflect the interests and goals of the quest-giver. The skills needed to resolve these quests are rarely too specific. However, a few, namely some Mages Guild quests, require specific circinate spells to complete.     

Guilds
Fighters Guild
Mages Guild
Thieves Guild

Other Organizations
Dark Brotherhood
Knightly Orders
Temples
Witch Covens 

Other Quest-Givers
Merchants/Innkeepers These quests can also attained from any NPC that offers "talk" from their menu when clicked on.   
Nobles

Time Limit
Most quests, except for some of the Main Quest, give you a set amount of time to complete a quest to the questgiver's satisfaction. Therefore the way you are traveling to destinations must be considered before embarking on a quest. If a quest's time limit has expired, it counts as a failure and will result in the loss of a certain amount of Reputation with the questgiver's faction and, depending on the quest, with certain other groups as well. Any objects related to a quest (item, random NPC, etc.) will be gone from the game world after its related quest is over.

Reputation and Quests
When a character engages in a quest for any faction, reputation with that faction is impacted. What is less obvious is the impact various quests might have on reputation with other factions. Noble quests, for example, often involve smuggling, which adversely affects reputation with the Thieves Guild.   

Member Quests: Member quests are only given to the members of a given guild, temple, or order. Also, reputation within the Guilds/Factions determines which quests are offered to a character. 

Non-member Quests: Temples, the Fighters and Mages Guild as well as Knightly Orders offer non-member quests. Covens are not open to joining by characters, so their quests may be considered non-member quests in most ways.



Dungeon Crawls
Dungeon crawls are the most common type of quest in Daggerfall. Here are some guidelines to dealing with Daggerfall's dungeons. 

Maps
Daggerfall features large, complicated dungeons composed of interlocking sections. Each section usually intersects with two or three other sections and contains a combination of several wall textures across several different floors.

The map used to view the explored areas of these dungeons requires some getting used to. It can be used in both an overhead (straight-down) mode and an adjustable oblique-angle mode. The map shows things that are not always visible in-game, including secret doors and closed pits.

Doors
Dungeon doors can usually be opened simply by activating them. Others are locked or even magically locked. Some locked doors can be opened by various combinations of levers, wheels and/or other items that need to be activated. These opening mechanisms may or may not be in the immediate vicinity of the door itself, but they will always be in the same section of the dungeon as the doors they open. If a locked door is closed after being opened, it will have to be unlocked again.

The lockpicking skill, spells, and bashing can be used to open locked doors, although picking or bashing does not work on magically locked doors. Spells with the Open effect tend to have high magic costs, and since magically-locked doors may not lead to any valuable treasure, some players may wish to ignore them. Bashing doors with a weapon damages the weapon in the same way that combat does, so it may be useful to carry a spare weapon for opening doors.

Some enemies will automatically open doors, even some locked ones, if they detect players nearby. This can be a useful (albeit risky) method of gaining access to locked areas, though closing these doors will still result in their being locked.

If enemies can be seen through cracks in doors, they can be attacked with archery and some ranged spells; however, enemies with ranged spells can also attack players this way.

Most doors will remain open until manually closed, so leaving them open can help players remember which areas have already been explored.

Trapdoors can be opened manually, with switches, or by walking on them. Some trapdoors may not actually open; the ones that do will appear as holes in the floor on the map screen.

Hidden doors tend to look like normal dungeon walls that, when moved aside, reveal normal doors or corridors. They can be picked or bashed open, though some secret doors must be opened with switches. Hidden doors appear as gaps in dungeon walls when viewed on the map screen.

Portcullises can only be opened with a switch and are represented as a long, thin portion of a corridor on the map screen.

Obstacles
Dungeons have a wide variety of obstacles, including underwater sections, trapped doors, and pitfalls. Skills such as climbing, jumping, and swimming are frequently useful in traversing difficult terrain in dungeons. Spells with Levitate and Buoyancy effects are also very useful in passing certain sections.

Dungeon Dressing
Many dungeons contain decorative items such as spears, iron maidens, and bottles. These items are usually decorative and do not serve any function when activated.

In some cases, quest items may look like dungeon dressing; these items are always found on the floor, and will cause a message to appear on-screen when activated.

Some decorative items provide magical effects or teleport points when activated, and are most frequently disguised as free-standing torches, brick walls (which normally indicate a terminating dungeon connector; they may need to be walked into or clicked), and human skulls.  Direnni Tower contains a unique teleport trap that players may not even notice at first.

There are three kinds of dressing elements which commonly act as switches: wall levers, ground levers, and cranks (these switches may disappear when viewed from certain angles). Others are disguised as torches, animal skulls, and (in some cases) statues. Switches open locked doors, portcullises, elevators, and other obstacles.

Traps are rather infrequent in dungeons; most involve walking over part of a corridor or activating certain dressing elements.

Attacking Quest Targets
Some quests requiring you to kill or capture an enemy have certain triggers which require you to damage a target without killing it in order to complete the objective. Stronger characters may have difficulty completing these tasks, as they may kill the target with a single hit, preventing the triggers from occurring and making the quest impossible to complete. It may be useful to carry around a weaker weapon in such cases to avoid killing a target before the triggers are completed.

Quest Items
As of patch 175 any item related to a quest has a   in the inventory menu, so it can be distinguished from other items of the same type. Only this specific item can be used to complete the quest it is related to. Any other item of the same type can not be used to complete the quest. If you have sold a quest item by accident, you can not get it back, and in case the sold item is required to complete the quest successfully, than this can not be done anymore.

As it is the case with other quest related objects, any quest item will disappear once the quest is over and it has not been used or handed over to its acceptor.

There are however two means which can be used to gain some profit from quest items that are no longer needed:
#They can be sold if the quest is still active.
#Any item dropped to the ground will create a small treasure pile. Even when the quest is over and the item has disappeared from the treasure pile, the treasure pile will still be there and will contain some random loot, sometimes quite valuable loot, which can be taken.

Finding People
Often quests require you to find the location of a particular person. This can be done by going to the appropriate town and talking to an NPC. There are two methods which can give you information.
Ask for Where -> Location -> General. This will give you the location of the palace, if one exists, and named houses.
Ask for Where -> People. This will give you the location where a particular person can be found, like a tavern, store, house, etc.

If NPCs offer to mark a location on your map, check it to see where to go. If they don't give it to you, keep asking them and they will mark the building on your map eventually. If NPCs say they don't know where a location is, you must ask another NPC.

Delivery Quests
Many Noble, Thieves Guild, and other quests are basically of the form: take item A to such-and-such person and collect the reward. Permutations of this model include: having to go get the item; trading the item for another and taking it elsewhere; and having enemies trying to intercept the delivery. 

Most of these quests can be considered as smuggling operations. Most of the time, trouble can be avoided by moving quickly; the enemies spawn at a certain rate, and can often be outrun. When such a quest originates from the Thieves Guild, city guards should be avoided unless you want to lose reputation with the Thieves Guild. Doing these types of quests for anyone but the Thieves Guild also lowers your reputation with that faction in most cases.

Rescue Quests
Several quests require the character to rescue an innocent. These are usually Noble or Merchant quests. These quests pose a hidden danger; success often means a drop in reputation with the faction that has taken the hostage, namely the Thieves Guild or the Dark Brotherhood. A character that belongs to either faction may lose reputation to the point that expulsion from the faction is the ultimate result. Expulsion from either faction is permanent. 

Otherwise, these quests involve gathering information, tracking down developed leads, and a confrontation. Gathering information and tracking down leads involves dialog with "townies" (a high "Streetwise" skill can help here). At the confrontation stage, the character is usually offered a choice: ransom or fight. Opponents at this stage are humans, and are generally about the same level as the character.

Twisting Endings to Quests
Many quests can be done in several ways. In one quest, you are asked to fight a duel to solve a love triangle. Rather than fight the duel, you can find the woman involved and talk to her, and she will pay you not to fight. Though this method gives greater rewards, it will negatively affect your reputation with the questgiver's factions. When deciding how to settle a quest, make sure to consider all the pros and cons of each method.

Problems finding random quest locations in towns
Sometimes when you are asking for a certain location in town e.g. a meeting place, hide-out etc. you will only come up with a topic named "(your characters 'first name) house". The game engine often has problems when a quest uses more than one house in the same town. Cities on the other hand may be large enough so that this problem may not occure there. However this also means that the specific quest location does not exist which usually means you can't complete this quest. There is nothing you can do about this, either wait until the quest's time limit has expired or re-load a save game before you took this quest. There are also a couple of quests containing bugs, that prevent quest locations from being revealed to your character. Just take a look here to learn how to get rid of these quest bugs.

General Quest Hints
Quests that involve dungeon crawling are easily the longest, but provide the greatest opportunity for rewards and skill advancement.  
The Fighters Guild quests to kill multiple  giants or harpies in dungeons can be finished quickly by resting near the entrance and killing the monsters that interrupt the resting process.