Folks, we may have found the least persuasive Dragonborn in the history of Skyrim. Reddit user NoAdministration1070, who claims that no extraneous mods or exploits were used in their Xbox One version of the RPG, reportedly found that their character's Speech stat had abruptly plummeted to -100,000, effectively ruling out persuasion tactics by making things like bribes cost millions of gold. If their story is true, this Dragonborn couldn't sell water to a fish, and according to them, the inexplicable drop in charm came out of nowhere.
"Help please," our hero pleaded in a Reddit post that's found remarkable traction amongst the Skyrim community, sitting at 14,000 upvotes and climbing. In an interview with GamesRadar+, NoAdministration1070 adds that they noticed this little error just under 46 hours into their playthrough.
Help please from r/skyrim
I had three theories when this post first came up. Well, technically four, but for the moment I'm going to ignore the possibility that this is all a hoax. One, maybe this is the result of a mod gone wrong? But NoAdministration1070 says no mods were used beyond the well-known Unofficial Skyrim Patch that cleans up a wide range of issues.
Two, it could be the result of some weird integer overflow caused by a skill that was over-trained through XP exploits, or perhaps mistakenly tabulated in the background. A clean -100,000 would be an odd result if that was the case, but I've learned to expect the unexpected from Bethesda game engines. NoAdministration1070 insists they didn't knowingly get into any funny business, though an unintended interaction of this nature still seems like the most probable explanation to me.
Lastly, this could be the effect of an enchantment exploit. As many Skyrim players pointed out in the comments on the original post, you can glitch your way into game-breaking equipment with absurd bonuses that, when removed, can bring on whiplash like a car crash. We've seen such accessories drop a player's health into the negatives (we in the business refer to this as "death"), so maybe the same could happen to Speech? But NoAdministration1070 says they just became really, really unlikable all of the sudden when they were out completing Dark Brotherhood quests around Windhelm – or at least, that's where they first noticed the problem.
There is good news, though. Hilariously, Skyrim is apparently pretending that everything is fine despite the Orc-shaped black hole of charisma that now stalks the landscape. The game is running and checking Speech as normal, NoAdministration1070 says, as evidenced by a screenshot showing a bribe that runs north of 20 million gold. "I [can] still sell stuff for lots of gold but I can’t persuade or bribe," they explained in a Reddit comment.
"I can't persuade anyone. I think I would fail the Whiterun guard letting me into the city," they tell me.
NoAdministration1070 says they can still technically level up their Speech even if it feels more like paying off a mountain of debt one penny at a time. Bethesda boss Todd Howard's famous phrase comes to mind: "It just works." They were apparently at -99,975 for their Reddit post after trading some items, and at the time of the interview, they said they were up to a whopping -99,970. Pretty soon they might be eloquent enough to sell sheep to a hungry dragon.
For the time being, NoAdministration1070 says they're seriously going to try and pay off this Speech debt, partly because they don't want to give up their beloved character, and also seemingly for the meme. "I've tried everything. If I loaded to an older save I would lose so much progress because I’ve been playing with it for so long," they said. "My plan is to carry on with the character until I get my Speech back into the positives, then I will lay it to rest."
I realize that many Skyrim skills can be farmed to ridiculous levels – shoutout to this level 1,337 Illusion spammer – and that Speech has several exploits tied to hidden merchant chests, but I've still got to wonder how long it would take to grind out nearly 100,000 Speech levels even with the cheesiest methods possible. I hate to say it, but it might not be feasible. I floated the idea of maybe, just maybe, using a mod to fix this purportedly random bug, and NoAdministration1070's reply arrived without hesitation: "Haha maybe."
