To anyone on the EU servers who might've stumbled upon odd and erratic behaviour from a Wood Elf player, I'm very sorry. Maybe you saw me running as I was chased by everyone in a dungeon. Maybe you saw me being attacked and jumped in, only to wonder why I had been speedily circling an enemy while spamming cloak and doing jack-all. Maybe you saw hints of me creeping through a delve and then, the moment you took on the boss, saw me swoop past to take the objective and leave.

I had an urge over the Christmas season to revisit the game. Wanting a refresher but also not really wanting to just repeat content again, I decided to mix things up with a challenge: to beat the game without killing anything. At least, not officially. Not a unique idea to me: I've seen some threads here on pacifist characters and while preparing for this I found this old Reddit report from Zenitharr. But hey, four years have passed since that post, Vets are no longer a thing, and One Tamriel dropped -- so perhaps it'll be interesting to give it another look.

I originally posted this on Reddit and, since I figured some would get a kick out of it, was planning on sharing it here earlier; but I realised, whoops, I never actually signed up for a forum account when I first got the game.

Terms and conditions
The rules I set for myself were relatively loose. My goal was to get to level 50, and there were just two firm, unbendable rules to follow while doing so:

1) Keep those kill counters at 0.

To my knowledge, a kill is added when an enemy you have dealt damage to is reduced to 0-health. If a quest needs you to 'weaken' an enemy or just 'challenge them to a duel', it'll generally be safe to do (just watch out for other players). Non-combat objectives that result in an enemy dying do not, generally speaking, count.

At one point I was doing a quest and was tasked to burn down some slaver tents; "Hell yeah," I yelled to no one in particular, "No more tents for you!" Immediately after, an animation of a slaver running out screaming and burning to death played. This is what is known in pacifist circles as an 'oopsie', but it did not increment the counter. Rule of thumb: if you attack and damage something to death, that's a kill; if you press E on something and an enemy explodes, you're probably in the clear.

2) No grouping up with killers.

I generally prefer to do these sorts of challenges without interfering with other people's games. If another person feels like grouping up for some sort of pacifist raid, well, maybe that could be fun, but you can probably understand why it'd be a little dull to write a post about "Can you sit back and let other people kill and do quests for you?" (The answer's yes.)

Still, I didn't bar myself from interacting with other players entirely, and every now and then you walk into a dungeon where everybody's already dead or you get credit for another player jumping in and defeating people. That's fun! Emergent gameplay, sort of. When opportunities made themselves apparent I used other players to my advantage, but I never explicitly asked anyone to tag along or gank a guy.

The build
Overall a simple one. I made a Magicka Nightblade with a Restoration Staff, using Medium Armor to enhance my stealth and sprint speed. In hindsight the Khajiit's racial stealth ability would've been nice here, and a race with boosts to Magicka would've had its charms, but Bosmer was decent enough even if not a particularly optimal pick.

Life mostly revolves around your cloak: you can pretty much just sweep through to the end of a dungeon with it. Get enough Magicka and you can practically run through most places. Sometimes confrontation is inevitable due to the time it takes for your character to interact with things -- but there your cloak comes in handy again. Turn invisible and everyone tends to freeze in place. So if someone's lured away from what they're guarding... and if you have the time to walk back and just interact with it before they can hit you... bye bye. Alas, it's a strategy that's a lot less consistent than it sounds.

Note: Since you don't tend to actually fight, a Restoration Staff isn't amazingly necessary. For the first 20 levels I had actually resigned myself to not having the Restoration skill at all. You can't kill something to pick it up, and Restoration seems to have no skillbooks to let you bypass that. So how do you get it? Er... I don't know. When beating someone up with the staff, the skill popped up mid-fight. I have three theories, then: 1) if you manage a certain amount of hits with a weapon without killing anything, it's automatically added; 2) I had been carrying around a Resto Staff and, as a failsafe, a skill's stuffed onto your character if it somehow reaches level 20 or so without being learnt; 3) I just accidentally hit a random 1-HP spider or rat during the fight, didn't notice, and it didn't increment the counter.

What can you do?
More than I expected, to be honest. Quests where you have to kill -- as an objective -- are common, but compared to other MMOs there are plenty of quests where combat is technically incidental. The game will set you up for a fight, but it won't always demand it. I ran into plenty of scripted ambushes that you can just... immediately cloak away and ignore, quest proceeds as normal.

Sometimes you'll stare at a delve boss aggressively standing in place and psyched for a fight, and you'll realise there's absolutely nothing stopping you just walking past them. That's always funny.

Which isn't to say this was a walk in the park, exactly. Presumably to stop exactly what I was doing, interacting with objects takes a noticeable amount of time. Which means sometimes, yes, you can just cloak past someone and do the objective while they're still turning to face you, but that's not always practical and sometimes takes a fair amount of maneuvering to pull off. If you're not willing to deal with the frustrations of possibly getting caught and having to flee and try again, you'll cut off most quests.

Nor is it to say that you won't get through a quest and hit a sudden roadblock where, uh oh, the objective suddenly does require outright combat and you'll have to abandon what you were doing. I'd say the story quests can be worse than sidequests here, as they're more likely to end in a climactic fight and leaving them undone is more likely to lock off other content.

What was it like?
There's an inherent fun in just bending a game and doing something you weren't meant to do. There's something fun about there being a dungeon and you just swooping through it. Did that wear off? Ultimately I ran into frustrations from the game not being designed to support me doing that -- arbitrarily suddenly being locked off a quest, progression assuming I'd be a killer, the amount of quests on offer in an area being very feast-or-famine, etc.

But the One Tamriel update was kind to this playstyle. This is not a character who'll ever have a complete track of the overarching main storyline, and they'll never officially mark a delve as complete -- but they can absolutely wander the world and dive into delves, stumble upon quests and attempt a lot of them, and gather skyshards or lorebooks or whatever else. Just be aware that I did most of this using double-XP from the New Life Festival, and I found towards the end that I was running the XP-well dry with just the base game. (I only started trying out DLC areas once I'd gotten to level 50.) Note that I got most of my XP through questing and exploration; it'd be theoretically possible to sit there and craft your way up to 50, but I was curious how much general content I'd be able to do.

It was interesting. I was, for most intents and purposes, locked off the main and faction questlines, albeit able to dabble here-and-there in the latter. The end result was that I pretty much lost all sense of direction. The flipside is that it freed me up to go anywhere, do anything. I got used to questlines not always having much of a conclusion and sort of adopted the mindset of a wanderer occasionally helping out. Jumped about a little and wasn't too certain on where I'd end up next. I did heroic things, but I wasn't the hero; indeed, the whims of other heroes charging about could have an immense impact on my gameplan.

I also had a lot less loot, obviously. I'm wearing the Servant's Robe disguise there, because my actual armour is pretty patchwork. Maybe not an experience I'd wholeheartedly recommend, overall, but an interesting enough change-of-pace.

The end
And that about wraps things up. I uploaded my character to ESO-Database and, while I'm not sure the stats are entirely accurate, you can see their quest history here; that'll give you some hints on what I was able to accomplish and what I wasn't. My Achievements are here.

If you see me in-game feel free to give me a /wave. Just don't invite me on a raid. My damage-per-second is terrible.