Skyrim Stories: The Whittling

As usual when playing an RPG, I've treated Skyrim's skills menu like a gadfly student at a fresher's fair, signing up for and then abandoning all sorts of stuff. It's left me with a lot of weak abilities, no strong ones, and the ability to be killed in one hit by anything larger than a mountain goat.

This means that most battles are not epic tales of a mighty warrior, but long-drawn out sagas of grim determination - imagine if the Shawkshank Redemption had just been footage of him digging the hole, and you get an idea of the sort of excitement I face. I'm still playing, obviously, because I played World of Warcraft for three years and you don't spend that sort of time in Azeroth without completely burning out the bit of your brain that tells you that mindless grinding is a bad idea.

It was a fairly straightforward quest - I'd been conned into helping with a ship heist, only to be rewarded with attempted murder. The corpses of my attackers revealed that my double-crosser was in a nearby cave, which turned out to contain a trapped pirate fleet and a lot of quite high-level guards.

Using my rudimentary sneak skill, a handful of high-damage arrows and shameless abuse of the save function I worked my way to the end of the cavern, where I discovered a converted ship containing heavily armed guards, my quite high-level betrayer and his even higher level boss. And they were all watching each other.

Distant sniping from the other side of the cavern didn't work: they'd all just Benny Hill around to the ledge where I sat and kill me. Direct attacks didn't work, they'd just turn around and kill me. Magic didn't work, my abilities were too useless to work at that range.

Eventually, I worked out that there were two routes to the building - the long one around the side of the cavern and over a natural rock bridge, or a shorter one over a drawbridge in front. If the bridge was down, I realised, they'd run down the stairs to use it because it was the shortest route across. But it took them a few minutes to get down, and I could control the bridge from where I sat on the other side. Right. Stuff magic, you bastards, I'm taking you down with science.

The half-hour was spent lowering the bridge, hitting somebody with an arrow, trying and failing to hit them again as they and the entire gang ran down to the bridge, and then raising it just as they got there. After several minutes running on the spot, they'd decide that the arrow still prominently protruding from the first man's head "must have been nothing" and return to the start point. Repeat.

As I approached the sixty-minute mark, I'd successfully killed three guards and had nice rhythm going. And then Lydia got involved. Emboldened by my leaving the bridge down until the last possible minute, she ran over and started fighting the guy I'd attacked. Great - but the others kept coming. Should I go to her aid? Course not. I raised the bridge and left her trapped the other side.

This revealed a new attack method, even more long-drawn out than the one I'd already been using: Lydia fights until she's been incapacitated. When she's down, the enemies stop attacking her. After a couple of minutes she gets better, stands up, sees the guards again and attacks them. Cue another twenty minutes waiting for her to whittle down another guard or two. I spent this looking at Twitter and trying not to think about what I was doing with my life.

Eventually, fortified by a dozen potions and the crippling knowledge that I'd spent nearly three hours trying to do one piddling side quest, I went over to deliver the coup de grace to a bandit leader and the one remaining guard, both of them heavily abraded by Lydia's attacks and with arrows sticking out of them. And even then it took four tries. It was a victory, but it didn't feel like it.

Got any more Skyrim Stories to share?