Hey.

I wanted to start a new game and have trouble deciding which leveling mod to choose. I wanted to use both with Fundament for it's nice features (like leveling alchemy through eating ingredients etc).

I've used nGCD for a long time before and was happy with it although I remember it reduced HP and fatigue quite drastically compared to RL, when I tried both although sticked to using nGCD.

I use both, for different characters and different stories I want to tell with my characters. They are both great mods. Here's how I see the differences:

Realistic Leveling. Realistic Leveling is a great, easy-to-use, character leveling mod that does not attempt to do anything too fancy or too complex. If you are not interested in getting deep into the nuts and bolts of leveling and only want a "plug-and-play" leveling mod, this is the one. If you want to play "pure" archetypes or uncomplicated hybrid characters, this is the one.

NGCD. If you like to like to micro-manage the parameters of leveling or if you play eccentric characters, nGCD might be a better fit. NGCD gives you absolutely unparalleled control over every aspect of leveling, via three detailed .ini files. You can literally make this mod do anything for you.

If you play oddball characters (like I often do) nGCD is a blessing. For instance, I once played a bitter, anti-social fur trader/scavenger who spent her entire game collecting pelts and other items to sell to merchants across Cyrodiil. I wanted this character to do a ton of bartering but I didn't want her Personality to go up. This would have hard (if not impossible) to do with Realistic Leveling but it was accomplished easily with nCGD.

Also, I use Fundament in about half my games which can affect my decision as well. I always use Willful Resistance when I play a mage. Willful Resistance requires Fundament so when I play mages I often go with nGCD.

Thanks for the overview of how the mods differ. I am in plan of playing a hybrid character - for the first time I am going to invest into speechcraft and personality to tame creatures and use them as an aid in battle (thanks to MOO), fight both melee and archery while sneaking and using magic one school of magic I am not sure yet, so that would actually fit nGCD more.

It's also a mod I've been using for a long time, so I am pretty much more confident to use this one as of now.

One thing that bugs me though Is a thing how the leveling mod affects the amount of health and fatigue. I am in plans of using Duke Patrick's Combat mods with OOO and I suppose that the fact nGCD reduces them would make the game harder than it's supposed to be. I am all into realism and high difficulty but I wouldn't like it to happen that I'll die much easier than any other NPC in the game. I take into account the fact that leveling mods modify stats of PC only (I presume..).

Is there an easy way to tweak these variables? I thought about looking into other characters stats in CS and then adjusting the .ini so that mine will be closer to them, while taking into account the differences in out classes, attributes.