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How can I level up my speech skill? Does selling items and persuading people increase my speech skill? Does it increase my speech skill when I wear fortify speechcraft and haggling clothes and drink fortify haggling potions?

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This has been patched and is no longer possible.

There is also a glitch that you can use to get speech up to max really fast:

Summary for those who can't watch the video: Go into the Black-Briar Meadery in Riften (after 8:00am, when it opens) and talk to the guy working there. Ask him about Maven, choose the "(Persuade)" option, repeat. (You might need to bribe him the first few times to get your Speech high enough to have a Persuade option.)

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    Nice to know this is there, I will only use it when I just really need a high speech level. I don't want to ruin the game for myself by cheating with this. Will just start turning normal weapon into enchanted one and sell them.
    – b01
    Commented Dec 24, 2011 at 0:38
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    Could you summarize the video for people who are stuck on dialup over the holidays? :)
    – Brant
    Commented Dec 24, 2011 at 5:09
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    @Brant: Go into the Black-Briar Meadery in Riften (after 8:00am, when it opens), talk to the guy working there. Ask him about maven, choose the "(Persuade)" option, repeat. (You might need to bribe him the first few times to get your Speech high enough).
    – Joachim Sauer
    Commented Dec 24, 2011 at 8:24
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    Unfortunately this seems to have been fixed in a patch. I could only persuade him once
    – user9876
    Commented May 15, 2013 at 18:42
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    @Jim Yes, this answer is outdated, but that doesn't mean you should edit it to be something completely different. If you have a good answer, submit it using the Post Your Answer button.
    – Sconibulus
    Commented Dec 12, 2015 at 20:37
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Does it increase my speech skill when I wear fortify speechcraft and haggling clothes and drink fortify haggling potions?

These are skill modifiers. They provide an increased speech skill while working, but do not raise your speech skill or provide skill experience.

How can I level up my speech skill? Does selling items and persuade people to tell the truth increase my speech skill?

You can persuade people, but the opportunities to do so are few and far between.

You can also find a speech trainer to convert gold directly into skill levels. This gets expensive above skill 50.

Instead, the fastest way is to interact with a merchant. Both buying and selling provide speech experience. The amount of gold determines this amount. Selling 5 items for 20 gold each or 1 item for 100 gold grant the same skill experience.

If you just buy and sell the same item back and forth to a merchant, you'll rack up a bunch of skill experience while only losing a portion of the item's value in the process. You could also combine this with other skills... Buy ingredients, craft a potion, sell it. Buy materials, make a weapon, enchant it, sell it. The more money that changes hands, the more speech skill you will gain.

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    Buying and selling the same item back and forth isn't feasible, at low speech merchants only pay about 1/3 of an item's value and sell at about 3 times the value, so you would be buying it back at 9 times what you paid for it. See gaming.stackexchange.com/q/38173/1561
    – jwaddell
    Commented Dec 23, 2011 at 23:55
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    @jwaddell at low skill, you should put your gold into training. After 50, when points start costing 2k gold each, you might buy/sell instead.
    – Amy B
    Commented Dec 24, 2011 at 2:30
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I found it very effective to try and steal from guards, then persuade them to overlook it. They will let you go once. Every guard will let you go exactly once, the second time around that exact guard will not look the other way, but instead he will arrest you.

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    This is clever. I like it.
    – LessPop_MoreFizz
    Commented Dec 24, 2011 at 0:18
  • This is a pretty cheap and easy route. However, to make this really effective, do it at the Palace of Kings near the barracks. Pickpocket a guard or get caught picking a lock aka get a low bounty. Bribe each guard, this isn't free but you get a decent skill raise for ~350 gold. The key here is wait 24 hours to repeat. You may have to leave town/come back. It's time consuming and not free but it's much faster and cheaper than bartering.
    – Dave Jellison
    Commented Dec 13, 2013 at 21:30
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The fastest way is to barter i.e sell stuff to merchants. Persuading people also increases your speech skill, but it is easier to increase it by selling items since finding people to "convince" is more time-consuming.

Good luck!

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  • This is my approach. I was trying to find out if experience depends on the quality of the item or just the quantity, but the bar moves too slow for me to tell.
    – RobotHumans
    Commented Dec 23, 2011 at 21:13
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SPOILER, even larger glitch

Fastest way to increase speech is by geting something with fortify alchemy (eg ring), create fortify restoration potion and drink it, then unequip and reequip the ring and create another potion. Repeat until you have effect like +6544564% alchemy (just masching numbers, but ingame it looks similar) and create superstrong and super expensive potions. Sell just one and you have 100 speech (and in the process you got 100 alchemy) ps don't megaboost enchanting it can crash your game when you want to enchant with +much% enchanting

This exploit is game breaking, you can use it to make bows that oneshot anything (500+ damage), and other unreasonable bonuses. And then its even easier than playing on easy, so why bother. But its easy way how to get last few points of alchemy/speech, so I recomend not using it or using it ONLY for those level ups (and then use "normal" falmer helmet trick to make strong equip, but not so ridiculously strong).

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  • Does it work even though merchants only have small amounts of gold with which to buy your crazy-expensive potion?
    – jwaddell
    Commented Dec 24, 2011 at 0:00
  • Yes. And this way you gain multiple level at once, so you lose multiple oportunities to get payed training (Both when creating first such potion and then when selling it). So better is to make moderately expensive potion and level one potion - one level, and get some payed training.
    – user470365
    Commented Dec 24, 2011 at 10:52
  • Does this still work, or was it patched?
    – IQAndreas
    Commented Jul 24, 2014 at 5:12
  • Still works just fine. You can craft crazy potions in vanilla Skyrim for crazy profits. The speech skill bonus is a side effect.
    – Nelson
    Commented Nov 24, 2015 at 5:56
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Try taking 20 cabbages, sell them and then buy them back. It costs very little because of the low item cost.

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    Doesn't it also give very little skill because of the low item cost?
    – kotekzot
    Commented Feb 5, 2013 at 17:50
  • -1 Skill points in speechcraft are not awarded based on the number of items bought/sold, but on the amount of gold that those items cost. 100 items at 5g each will yield the same experience as 5 items at 100g each.
    – Michael Francis
    Commented May 24, 2013 at 10:40
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    I haven't tried this approach, but the rounding of price may work in your favor.
    – Amy B
    Commented Jan 14, 2014 at 19:10
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What I did was make a new character (Breton or Nord, since they are the only ones that get +5 to speech) and then I picked all the plants and killed a bunch of animals, combined with the stuff from Helgen Keep. I got a couple of level ups from selling the stuff to Lucan. Do this a lot whenever travelling and then you will make a lot of money and level up speech a lot. Also level up stamina when doing this, so you have a larger carrying capacity.

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Go to riften and go to the black briar shop speak to Ungrien and speak to him about maven black briar then after that persuade him to tell you the truth if about 10 mins you will have 70 speech then go to riverwood and speak to the man in the shop next to the forge and invest in his company then do two 24 hour time passes then go back in the shop and sell loads of items and u will have 10K gold

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  • Good answer at the time, but both of those glitches have been patched in the most recent version of Skyrim.
    – IQAndreas
    Commented Jul 24, 2014 at 5:11

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