This Skyrim player was almost murdered by their own in-game son

A Skyrim player was nearly killed by their son after handing them a dagger in-game.

Skyrim's Hearthfire DLC allows players to build a home and adopt a child to live in it. Once you've given a home to your new son or daughter, you can interact with them, playing games or granting them gifts. Those gifts, as well as dolls or items of clothing, can include daggers, which is where this tale of woe begins.

In a post on the game's subreddit, user Miserabell uploaded a clip of them handing over a dagger to their son. Little Alesan was delighted with his new gift, and took off to play with it in a different part of the house - children can playfight with their knives using training dummies.

Some time later, Miserabell was passing near that training dummy when their son nicked them with the knife. If Alesan's gift had been the iron dagger that the player had in their inventory, perhaps they would have suffered little more than a few points of damage. 

Unfortunately, they had instead handed over a Daedric Dagger of Petrifying. As well as dealing twice as much damage as that iron dagger (and being worth about 1,600 gold more), the dagger of petrifying has a 25% chance to paralyze its target for six seconds. That slight graze triggered the paralysis effect, sending Miserabell tumbling to the floor as if she'd been instantly dispatched by the blow. Alesan didn't seem to care - he carried on swiping without so much as a glance at his stricken mother.

Ten years on, Skyrim seems as popular as ever - prompting one player to power on their ancient laptop to create a version of Skyrim that looks like first-person Runescape.