Failure chance is one thing that I am glad was removed from Morrowind. It encourages save scumming and is completely annoying TBH. Oh look, I need to recharge my enchanted weapon with a soul gem! *FAILURE* Damn it all! Reload the save. *FAILURE*

It got old.

Furthermore, one of the complaints for Oblivion was that you could be a "jack of all trades and master of all". There's a reason why OOO was really popular: it forced you to actually specialize; the "Major Is Minor" system simply meant you would get RoflStomped especially in early levels because you actually needed the major skill boosts to have a snowball's chance in hell.

And speccing in a Kill Skill is a good idea regardless. Unfortunately, the traditional magical kill skill, Destruction, just doesn't compare to the others.

___ I like the idea of modding the leveling system and perks. However I would rather see it change so that when the next TES game comes out the Bethesda could earn from its experience (harvesting mod from Oblivion being a great example).
___ When trying to fix something we need to think whats best for the game experience rather than real life solution: breaking down armor and weapon (like for enchanting) to learn recipes isn't a good idea, but making it a quest to talk to someone, bring and read a book and then eventually bring one special quest armor piece to reassemble is much more fitting in therms of game logic.
___ I think that at the end of each tree the master perk shouldn't be like any other. Player would have to quest for it, but also gain it through that hard quest, as he proven that he deserves it by this quest, improved skill and others perks invested.
___ Instead of removing the importance from non-combat skill we need something better to do with them - speech and others usually comes down to possessing lots of stuff and money, which means that we could have character invest their money. If instead of grinding weapons I could buy myself a bodyguard I wouldn't be afraid to become non combat character.

___ I love the idea of character's stats (health, magica, stamina) improving though normal playing - they would just increase with the skills - if you want to try giving something to a player at the level up I suggest 3 new stat points: strength (gives additional damage to weapons), dexterity or agility (that makes character move faster) and magic power (that adds to the power of spells). I don't know how much the new stats should improve the character (should the bonus be added before or after the skill multiplication), but that's something to calculate and test out. New stats will allow to make custom character, while removing the need to decide on how much health and stamina should a mage or thief have.

___ I'm very found of the idea that TheCastle have mentioned before about disallowing the stat to progress unless an perk is invested in them. This also helps with the problem of grinding the skills you don't use.
___ Some may complain that this way we won't be able to play as master of all, but the perks had that in mind, while the Bethesda wanted rather play it safe and do the changes to TES more slowly (e.g. you can kill off one guild - the Dark Brotherhood, the other one is the war quest line that suggest multiple play through, which suggest that in the future we can see more of such harsh possibilities for the player do choose since people didn't flip about that, and accepted such possibilities).
___ Grinding every skill to 100 is something unnecessary and not for everybody, and be honest - there's pokemon games for people that likes that in game.
___ Unaccessible skill progress suggest that a player with limited amount of perks won't be able to reach such high level as 80 with the current level number, which will also require to redesign the whole world leveling - dragon and dedrastic weapons/armor become easier to find at level 70th than 40th.
___ To better test that the beta character should have all perks available at the beginning in order to see how much he can progress he can made and how much skills unlock. This would later show when and how much perks should the player gain - on level ups or maybe through questing? What perks should be required to unlock further improvement of a skill: a number or already decided skills. In magic school the novice - adept would be a easy place to set designed blockers, but different skills with not so linear progression would suggest that the number is a better choice.
___ The number of perks invested in skill should increase the speed of training it. The player should be able to increase many skills to certain degree rather than mastering all selected ones - e.g there could be a perk that the player is interested at 70th skill level, or mastering of lock-picking isn't an necessity to keep playing.

I leave that here for discussion, since I guess that's enough to chew on

EDIT-
Athleticism skill:
It should be a combination of both athletics and acrobatics and if it would allow a player to climb - it could be just climbable walls at the beginning (building could have walls like that), but that gives additional possibility for archer characters since not every archer wants to be stealth character.

I guess that this skill should improve all moment: running, swimming, jumping and climbing. It all would be done faster and at lesser stamina cost as the skill progress but some things shouldn't be possible without the right perk. Perks itself would spread into 4 branches:
running: allows dodge moves > sprinting changes over time into dashing (after few moments of sprinting character starts running even faster) > bash move (pushing to stager opponents executed by dashing at them)
jumping: allows roll move > reduces damage from falling > allows to battle while jumping
swimming: allows to swim in armor (going into deep water unless your argonian could cause death) > allows to fight while swimming > improves fighting while swimming (damage and speed would be reduced under water, so this perk would lessen it - it could be branched to close range weapons and projectiles, and I don't know about magic)
climbing: allows to use ropes > allows to use climbable walls > allows to battle while climbing

Of course like with sneak skill it's easier to improve this one while using something more than running and jumping (that would be a chore, and protect people that aren't interested in it from leveling too fast - everybody runs but if you fast travel you still can level it normally without big disadvantage) - cause sneak improve the best with sneak attacks, so athleticism would improve best while fighting under water or climbing.

Master perk could involve an quest which would add to the walking,running,climbing and swimming speed and jumping height. Only one branch would be required in order to reach the Master perk after reaching 100 in this skill.

Just had a thought. I think it could be a great idea to replace starting perks with a "major skill" perk. In other words, it simply makes all skills with this perk selected work like selecting your specializations/class in previous games, except with a Skyrim twist. There could be a restriction to make it so you can only select 5 or so of these special perks.

Basically their purpose would be to act as a "gate" to get to the other perks in a skill, promote specialization while still letting players have some freedom in deciding skills early on, and to give a small boost in skill learn speed (maybe non major skills would level up 30% slower, while major perked skills would level up normally in speed).

EDIT: I also just had a thought on the usefulness of pickpocket. Ultimately I feel like it is a totally worthless skill that doesn't need to exist the more I think about it. Its just so damn situational, and I'm pretty sure older ES games just had that ability bundled into sneak, which makes a tone of sense. I'd like it to be replaced with an agility related skill personally and have all the relevant perks be implemented into sneak. Because right now the "stealth" category of skills are pretty much entirely dedicated to sneakers. If you wanted to be a ranger or a sword-buckler type warrior, you only really have two or three skills that would work well with that because half of the stealth skills literally can be consoldated into sneaking skill alone.

Only problem is that such a major change is liekly impossible without making some majjor changes to gameplay/ not to mention compatability issues. I just dont know anyone who seriously uses pickpocket for thier characters, because its a skill that literally only works with beggar/theif archetypes, and even then it would be better to be governed by the sneak skill anyways.

In the past it has been the "Security" skill, which was functionally the same. The problem is that the minigame alone can't support an entire tree of perks. I attempted to diversify the skill a bit to encompass the general idea of looting with this mod:
http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=6593

It's not perfect, thematically or mechanically, but it at least makes investment in the tree somewhat useful.

What lockpicking /really/ needs is for the minigame to not freeze time. That alone would add a great amount of depth.

Just had a thought- pickpocket would work better in security than my previous suggestions, good idea.

I think it would be a great idea to make it soso that lockpicking is in real time, but maybe aa tiered perk would let you go into various stages of slowtime, to simulate being quick and focusing.

Also how did yyou edit the pperks? Was it easy or did it require a bit of hacky modding to get it to work? Can you add perks?

hehe, now I wanna sneak up on bandits and fill their pockets with gold for damage buff.

@wizofloyd: nice.


Agreed on the slo-mo perks.

I did it with SkyEdit -- it's easy once you've learned how to use it, and you can add perks. The SkyEdit topic is somewhere on these forums.

I'll post what I've written so far in the recent TES VI threat:
About Athleticism and Marksman skill Unarmored skillSkill progression classes based on skills more on leveling might be repeating myself
If armor skill were to be mostly based on perks like they are now, then the armor skill in itself could be in one skill three, but divided into two or three groups - light, heavy and unarmored. The first real choice between them (perk wise) would require special classification like majoring the skill, and untill it's mastered the others would be unavilable. However the choice would be much clearer if they all had skill threes on their own.

I think pickpocket is just fine as a skill, unlike lock picking it can actually be used in a wide variety of situations. I have a pure thief character who clears dungeons by stealing enemies armor and weapons before engaging them - which is definitely fun. Of course it cannot compete with a brute force approach, but it's at least not as narrow a gameplay element as lock picking.

@Wolcik: I like your ideas on Athletics and Unarmored, but I don't get the focus on "spreadsheet nightmares". It's a good thing for a player to know detailed information about their character; hiding that stuff takes control away from the player.

If your concern is immersion, you could have much more success by removing information from the enemies. Instead of facing "Relentless Draugr" or "Draugr Deathlords" just name them all "Draugr". Same general effect, but not as punishing to the player.

Actually I wrote on forums about removing the names on enemies few days ago

The idea behind removing atributes and replacing them with choosing simple stats, was to steamline the process between gaining skills and improvment of the character - I'm not saying that giving the player something to choose from to make the character build more unique is bad, but atributes weren't working well and current choice could be simply streamlined too.
So what to choose at level gain? (if we don't make the leveling automcal like it's in most mmo when your character just shine and you can learn new skills from npc - lingeage II) I'd go with something like additional damage to close, ranged or magic combat - and if speachcraft were to return there could be forth bonus to persuation and bargining (That's of course under the assumption that there would be more pros of developing non combat character with limited skill access to).

Though I agree with you that pickpocketing is less narrow than lock picking, I consider them both not worthy of a separate skill tree.

So I've fully redesigned the prototypes of how the heavy armor and 2Handed skill will work, as well as their entire perk trees. Obviously this all isn't implimented yet (still at the design phase) as I want to wait until the CK is release.


Allright, so I've finished my "design" of the revamped two-handed skill and it's perk tree.

Here's what I got:




Slowly working my way through all skills. Once I finish warrior skills, I'll go to magic and then finally theif skills. Some skills may change more drastically than others, especially in consideration to the limitations of the CK and what exactly is possible.

Oh and if you steal my work/design and run off to put it in your own mod I'll hunt you down

EDIT: I Need to mention this is all just the design phase so things can change. I.E. I might decide to totally axe the limitation that you can only level a skill past 75 if you select the "Specilist" perk depending on feedback.

Wow. Amazing job, KorJax. I love the expanded perk trees and new concepts of how perks should work for Two-Handed and Heavy Armor. It's a huge improvement over vanilla.

I'm not sure how possible it would be to limit the amount of specific perks you can take across all skills, but that's a great idea. How do you plan on handling perk points though? With the newly expanded trees, we'll certainly need a lot more than 80 to specialize in multiple skills.

For perk points:

1. The orignal system would stay the same (1 perk per level)

2. You'll get a bonus perk every 5 levels. Maybe I could even do the morrowind thing where a popup comes up saying how the more you struggle, the more you learn, which was a really awesome touch they did when you'd level up to certain levels

3. You can buy perks at Trainers, at the cost of 3-times-trained per level. I'd probably have perks cost a flat rate of 3k-5k though per point, just so somebody doesn't go to a trainer with a skill they have nothing in, and then get a perk for only 500 gold.

4. 3 Dragon Souls = 1 perk if you choose to "cash them in"


All of those combined should allow people to earn enough perks for their enjoyment. I'd also love for quest rewards to involve perks, but that's outside of the scope and would be pretty hard to balance right.

Not to mention you'll only ever be able to put perks into a max of 5 skills, which will cause you to focus more and not feel like you have to get "all the perks".


EDIT: Oh and per the request of someone else on another forum, I've recently changed all references from "Thor" to "Stendarr"

I decided to make http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1339722-idea-streamlinked-class-leveling-system/ to write down my ideas. I don't see myself doing anything soon since I have a big sculpture to do this school year, so I'm just writing and maybe calculating the skills for a while.

Then you're not playing a thief character, obviously. Pickpocketing is the perfect addition to balance out the different playstyles. And in contrast to many other skill trees, it's actually very well-balanced.
Really, when we talk about redesigning the skills, we have to look at that problem from all angles. And thieves are a popular character type, so don't say their skills are useless just because you don't use them.

Speaking of Pickpocketing, I think what's wrong with it is that it is based on a chance system that encourages you to quicksave and reload often. There are basically two ways to tackle this problem:
One, give the player a 100% chance for items with a value smaller than X, but 0% chance for items with values over X. Basically like any other skill (e.g. Smithing).
Two, make failure an actual option that is fun to play. For example, add a perk that the player gets the item he was trying to get even though he was spotted in the attempt ("Forceful Robber" or something like that). And another perk that removes all your bounty (or sets it to 1, which causes guards to say "Wait... I know you") when you manage to run away without getting caught.
(Three, combine both options.)

I'm all in favor of making failure more interesting for the player. Just imagine if you had that first perk where you get items even when spotted: You'd suddenly be that thief who's running away from the guards, hides his valuables in some secret stash, and then spends some time in prison until he can get his loot. And once you got the other perk (which actually should be a Sneaking perk, I guess), you become that thief that runs away from the guards and then hides in the shadows until they give up the chase.
I don't know, it's just so much more fun that way, I believe.

That sounds like a pretty great idea for pickpocketing.

The issue I have though is that it seems silly to base an entire skill and skill tree around it, when it worked perfect as before when it was a sub-set of the "security" skill. Ideally I'd like to see lockpick replaced with security, and have secuirty govern both the act of picking locks and also pickpocketing. Each "skill" would have its own tree if you will within Security. Then replace pickpocket with something like an acrobatics or finess skill, that would determine how well you move, how fast, how high you can jump, maybe some form of climbing/dodging, running across water (like the Oblivion mastery "perk"), etc. Or perhaps a different "theif/light" class skill.

Sadly I'm not sure how flexible the CK will be in terms of altering/adding existing or new skills in how they work fundamentally.

The thing is, with almost every other skill, you can use that skill with a wide variety of character "classes" or playstyles. With pickpocket, you can only use it specifically for thieves, and only ones that want to pickpocket. It's insanely specific for being an entire skill, to do an act that isn't even required or encouraged by the game design/questing/etc. Not to mention most of the time, it is going to be a waste of time with the default loot system, and the fact that you never really -need- gold in the game (something I'm hoping some mods will be fixing in the future, like PISE or anything else out there).

I don't know how limited the CK could be, because this post could be invalidated by the limitations it presents...



Can we actually have Skill perks, (i.e. - Power Bash : Deals +15 Damage and stuns the enemy if not blocking with a shield : Costs "X" : Cooldown is 13 seconds). I know its really old RPG stuff, but the combat in Skyrim is like a dodge %.

Take LoL, they removed Dodge because the inconsistent last hitting misses would really upset a player because a "magical dodge chance" happened.



These are wishful thoughts... but I would like to re-design the entire combat system if possible. No more pausing to drink potions, swap weapons and spells out, and this whack-a-mole (WoW combat style) is just getting annoying. Adding the roll animation to the player and NPCs so they can actually dodge attacks. Theirs alot I want to go over, but I'll make another Thread about this.

Read my posts, I don't plan on making this mod to really "redesign" the combat system, but I might end up having to do that in a way that is inspired by how Dark Souls handles character progression so it fits better with my perk tree re-designs

The goal of all perk trees is to compeltely get rid of perks that simply add damage or replace what the skill should be doing, and instead add more functionality or bonuses to what the purpose of the skill is. See my Two-handed description and perk tree for an example. As a side effect, I'm going to try and make all skills feel stronger, more unique in their leveling and usage, because I honestly think Bethesda's system of your skill just being a flat damage modifier (for example) is terrible and really saps all the potential depth away from the RPG system they've made. They have a good foundation IMO - its just way poorly implemented, in a way that IMO ends up being worse than Oblivion from an RPG-design standpoint. Which is why so often, all characters just feel the same, because its less about making *THAT* character or *YOUR* character, and more about making your every-day badass.

The part where I'm disagreeing with you is "it worked perfect as a subset of Sneak" (you say Security but it was actually Sneak). It never worked perfectly, in fact Skyrim is the first TES game that actively encouraged me to try pickpocketing, before I could never be bothered with it. And now I'm loving it and think it's a great addition to the game. I seriously don't consider the pickpocketing of Morrowind/Oblivion even worth to be called a feature of the game. If you were good at Sneaking, you could do it, but if you svcked, then you always got caught - you couldn't even check out whether the NPC had any good items because doing so already triggered the detection.

And I also think that having skills that only thieves can really put to use is a good thing. Because that's what Two-Handed, Blocking and at least one Armor skill do for warriors, you literally don't have any use for them if you're a character that's also focused on stealth or magic. I would also argue that Alteration is barely useful for anyone besides mages, especially when you look at the perks it gives you (except for the Master perk, which is pretty good I believe).
Each specialization has its special skills. Stealth has Pickpocketing and Speech, and I'd say that Speech is the less useful one of the two here - it only gives you better prices, which is worth nothing when the real problem is that the merchants don't have enough money to pay you those better prices.

Again, think of the stealthy players. There are ways to play this game where Pickpocketing is just as important as Sneaking. I find myself pickpocketing people all the time, while other people find themselves using shields in every combat - which is something that I'll likely never experience.

Concerning Acrobatics:
That skills has always been useless. Jumping never gave you any advantage, and there are few realistic situations where it should (and running across water is fun, but not exactly useful). Climbing, well, that's a different matter. We all know from Daggerfall, Thief or Assassin's Creed that climbing is an incredibly rewarding experience. But it has to be done right, and in a way the game needs to be changed quite a bit to do so. None of the dungeons are suited for climbing, neither are the cities. I don't know, I could go on about how there are problems with this skill, but in the end it comes down to this: If someone manages to implement it, great. Adding something to the game certainly won't hurt if it's done right. But you can't possibly say that Acrobatics/Climbing has more purpose in Skyrim as it was designed than pickpocketing.

Update - Finished my design of One-handed.

some seriously good ideas, I like Blood wound especially.

You really need to check if 5 major skills is enough for player to create a reasonable character, or maybe there should be more major skills - and especially when you start the lock on 30%. And this 70% thing almost have no real benefit.
If you give player more perks and ways to gain them all you don't need to use major skills. Blocking progression of a skill until perk is chosen is already a good way of making sure nobody grinds unnecessary skills for new perks (since he can hunt dragons for that), and this way player can have all skills maxed the way it used to be in previous games, and the game is perk based.

The point of "major skills" was I wanted to make sure a player has an incentive to specilize into skills. The problem with Skyrim's default system is that it pretends you can do anything at any point in the game, but in reality you can't. If you don't specilize and make hard choices on what you want to do as a character, you'll be insanely underpowered during your mid-to-high levels.

By still allowing players to decide on "what is right for them" as they play early game (like default Skyrim), but encouraging them to spend their starter perks in major skills, they are encouraged to specilize into specific skills, which means they are far less likely to get gimped late game, and it makes the whole system much more focused. And because their perk points can only be spent into skills that they've focused on, it enforces an idea of you developing a specific character or class, much like a how a class would focus only on specific traits of that class. This also has an advantage of making it take a little longer to develop your character, because one of the major faults with default Skyrim is you just level too fast, and half of your XP points for leveling later on will involve a lot of leveling up useless skills you dont care to level up.

However at the same time, a lot of the power of a skill would be focused on the skill itself. So if you happen to sneak a lot but it's not a major skill, you'll still get good at sneaking unlike in vanilla (where you only get good at a skill through perks) - it just won't contribute as much to your level ups (30% slower leveling), and you won't specialize in it through your perks.

The reason why these trees are so "large" is because I'm purposly making it so the idea is to not unlock every perk ever - you choose to unlock the perks that are relevant for you. It's highly impractical to spend all your perk points into filling up one-handed, because you can only use one or two weapon types at a time. There ARE more perks, but the perks are all designed for you to choose which ones you want, NOT to choose them all. You wouldn't spend anything into Waraxes unless you planned on seriously using waraxes to specilize. Furthermore, because your skill is now the determining factor to your ability to use something, NOT the perks (which just add boons or abilities for specilization), you don't need to spend perks to be decent at something. There may be more perks, but it just means there are more options for specializing rather than just trying to get them all.

EDIT: That said, I might get rid of the specialist perks. The idea was that you wouldn't be able to max a skill unless it was one of your focused skills, to prevent everyone from being 100 at everything. I'll need more feedback on that though, and I'm not sure if its really going to be nessicary considering non-major skills already level 30% slower, and the only way to get skills outside of your "focuses" to 100 is to grind them (aka break the flow of gameplay) anyways.