I hope this does not turn into another SKYRIM IS OP!!11 thread. I am looking for constructive advice here.

I am not interested in grinding my skills to 100, I am just looking for a normal and NATURAL way to level Smithing/Enchanting/Alchemy.

Let's take my first character, a 100% melee Two-Handed Nord warrior. He is not gifted with magic at all, so does not use ANY of the magic skills.

So what's the problem? I don't really see any need to go to the blacksmith to create my own equipment. Sure, occasionally, I'd find a nice weapon that I want to stick with, I go to the grindstone and improve its damage rating and... that's about it. I don't see any other reason to keep coming back to the blacksmiths, because most of the time, I'd settle with a nice set of equipment and I'll stick with it.

If repairing was implemented in the game, then YES, I can see a reason why I'd have to keep going back to the blacksmith.

So without having the need to craft new items, my Smithing skill pretty much does not move.

"But you need Smithing to create Daedric amor!" No, I don't want to grind it unaturally just to achieve Daedric crafting abilities.

The situation is different with the Two-Handed skill. I NEED it. I fight enemies all the time. It gets used a lot. If I don't use Two-Handed, I die. But I can't find a reason why I'd NEED smithing. But I want my Smithing skill to improve naturally.

Same goes for Enchanting and Alchemy. Without resorting to unnatural grinding, how would one actually NATURALLY advance these skills, just like how One/Two-Handed, Destruction, etc, level up naturally just by playing the game normally?

Hope I made sense.

No.


edit:
well, from the other thread i created yesterday i got two solutions

1. enhance found items before selling. "to make it look better and sell for more. Coin never hurts"
2. there is a transmute spell, it transforms iron ore into gold, which speeds up jewelry making. Again, coin is profit.

And by doing so smithing is leveled.

so you NEED 2 handed to get better and you NEED better quality 2 handed weapons to survive but you can't find a reason you need smithing? that about it?

all i got to say is....

Get a job as a smith. I heard Eorland is looking for an apprentice. Or the smith in Riften might like you enough (maybe too much) to make you his lacky.

RP smithing is easing which side of the war do you support? if you support the Imperials make weapons/armor in Solitude/Whiterun(Adrianne's not Eorlands) if you support the stormcloaks head to windhelm and make weapons/armor there and sell what you dont want to the respective smiths and RP that you are helping said army in the war effort. Same works for enchanting and alchemy only sell back what you dont need to shops in the cities that support your side of the war.

You could sort of normally level enchant by recharging weapons. I'd use a soul trapping weapon for it probably, but without 2x enchants isn't quite normal as you're just burning through gems for the sake of grinding it. I guess if you got fiery soul trap effect early on. Personally I don't think there's an RP friendly or "normal" way to level smithing though. People suggest improving gear they pick up to sell, but I can't consider that anything other than an excuse to grind.

Alchemy on the other hand is pretty straight forward, since potions are something you use and there is a significant profit to be made even from crafting ones that you won't use.

Edit:

This I'd consider a valid way to level smithing normally actually, it'll take you a long time however unless you rest to refresh vendors or mines though which isn't quite normal.

Valid ideas. Thank you.

Keep them coming!

Just man up and boost it. I boosted my enchanting, smithing, and alchemy up to 100 before starting any missions. Makes the game on master difficulty so much easier when you can create a mace, and bow that does over 100 damage with no perks in the skill trees. And heavy armor that is close to the cap limit with heavy armor only at 15.

*sigh* is all I say! LOLOL

If YOU can't think of reasons on how to RP smithing, then maybe RPing isn't your thing, or you just don't have a lot of imagination...

Uhm, also... define "NORMAL" LOL

why you need smithing ? Find a blank weapon you like, enchant some smithing gear, drink a smithing potion and upgrade your weapon. No need to use smithing in the first place.

All I can say to your post is . He finds a weapon, upgrades it once and that's it, he has no reason to upgrade and smith every single thing he finds and every piece of equipment to legendary if he doesn't play on hardest of difficulties.

On the other hand, if you want to be able to make daedric equipment eventually, but wanna keep using smithing at this pace, I'm afraid there is no natural way. It's like me saying that I only oil my car's engine here and there, change the tiers, and fill the gas, but that I'm hoping to be able to make a Bentley from scratch one day in my pretty life. You NEED 2 handed so you use it all the time, that's why what you see as natural is actually a quick progress You're using 2 handed weapons daily, and you are becoming better and better at it. That's what a swordsman does. A smith that wishes to create masterpieces of arms and armor will spend his time above the anvil 24/7, making ancient iron daggers and hide bracers and make an art out of his trade.


On a more serious note, this. Nothing more, nothing less.

Probably been said, but doing things "Normally" basically means collecting the materials on your own and making things for coin. Need to justify why you're smithing? "I want money" should be good enough.

Basically how I would do this is by killing every animal that has some form of pelt that I would come across (for use of their pelt, of course). Along with that, I would carry a pickaxe around with me and head towards any and all mines that you see on the map. It's not really "grinding unnaturally" if you're going far out of your way to actually dig up the materials and then smith it for coin.

Alchemy is the same way: Don't go out of your way looking for ingredients, just pick stuff up when walking around. If you're not purchasing them en mass for leveling and gathering them naturally, I don't see a problem with leveling that way. (I also found that alchemy is the most profitable skill in all of Skyrim through that, so yeah. Coin.)

On a side note, if you just craft iron daggers, your troops would really svck.

Nah everyone should have a boot knife

I just hunt deers and elk and whatnot for petty souls to recharge my enchants, and make leather gear for a little extra coin with the hides. I also use the transmute spell to turn iron ore into gold and create jewelry, rather than just selling the raw gems.

If you don't want to increase it that way or by grinding, train it. That's what I do with restoration.

You start the game penniless and in rags. The crafting skills are a way your character can pay her way, alongside the more mercenary stuff you do for quests. I find that just using the raw materials you find in the game world to improve the loot you get levels smithing pretty naturally.

If you want an RP reason for your character to be a more dedicated smith, there's plenty to be had. For my thief character I had a backstory that her parents were hunters, so she was accustomed to working with hides and leathercrafting. This brought her into contact with Balimund as she would use his forge after helping him acquire fire salts. They ended up getting married. After that, I shifted her smithing to more metalworking because I figured he would be training her in how to do it. So she was more of a dedicated smith after that. For my orc character, I figure she would have some smithing skill from her parents, so I'm leveling her quickly in smithing to reflect that (it's a bit of an RP fudge). My Altmer character only makes jewelry, out of transmuted ores. Her smithing score will not end up being very high.

It is very possible to RP enchanting, how? disenchant useful enchantments, create enchantments that you will actually use, and the secret, recharge your weapons with soul gems. I was able to get to 52 enchanting through recharging alone.

Blacksmith....uh yeah I'm not going to be able to weasle you out of this one. There is absolutely no way i can think of to rp this unless you made a new set of armor each time your blacksmithing skill reached a certain level ( for the microscopic armor rating bonus).

Alchemy is possible as well but a but tedious, simply use the potions you're going to make instead of making high valued potions solely to raise skill level. I also wish that stormcloak and imperial camps had a potions trade who would buy your restore health potions for gold seeing as every camp has dead or dying soliders.

Thanks so much to everyone who replied with useful ideas on RP'ing these skills. I got my answers already.

As to those of you who play to level them to 100... good for you.

Honestly I don't know if there is a way or "normally and naturally" raise up Smithing / Enchanting / Alchemy up to high levels while "role playing" because I don't see any one character that is reasonably going to be good in each of those highly divergent fields.

If you make a profit by improving weapons that you sell I guess that's a justifiable reason to get some Smithing XP ....

Making useful potions [fortify health + restore health for example] would be reasonable and a way to improve Alchemy ....

Having a strictly non-magical character boost enchanting seems odd to me as I consider Enchanting to be quite magical ...

RP reasons can give you all the freedom you want to use Smithing moderately OR totally abuse it. You don't even need to factor for the war.

You can just RP a former Smith's apprentice who got tossed into the wild world of adventuring. In the course of this new found profession, this character constantly realizes flaws and weaknesses in the arms and armor he's lucky enough to acquire. With a little practice in the proper techniques (aka "grinding"), the character is confident they can learn to make the necessary adjustments.

Furthermore, as profitable as adventuring can be, nobody ever turns out a better return on investment. Clearing out that bandit cave seems to have netted you 5 leather armors, and you've got 5 wolf pelts that you've acquired along the way. As a smith you can improve the armors so they're worth more than the sum of selling the armors and pelts separately. Why wouldn't you?

RPing a smith adventurer with a mind for commerce, I find it impossible NOT to grind the skill at every opportunity.

Well yes and no. Yes, because youre obviously correct. No because im not sure it matters. Observe the sequences of restocking in Morrowind and Skyrim:
M: get repair tools, repair everything, sell, put repair tools back, adventure
S: get ingots, upgrade everything, sell, put ingots back, adventure

They are identical, selling repaired gear gives more money, so does upgrading. I was very surprised to find myself doing a flawless Skyrim restocking run with my Morrowind habits. Basically in M. we are repairing gear from 90% to 100%. And in S. "repairing" from 100% to 110%.

The real problem i think is that anyone who has played any TES game, has a huge mental block installed, a 6th sense, warning and blocking any action which could lead to a god mode status. And god knows there are alot of these things. And tempering with items for money is definitely very high on that list of forbidden things. I have yet to sell any selfmade potion or selfmade item with enchants on them. It immediately breaks the economy. Why should smithing be any different? Thats the real question i think. And i dont have any answer. But, profits from smithing so far, hardly outdo, if at all, profits i made from repairing back in Morrowind. So i think this could be made an exception. (no logical reason, selling selfmade gear is still evil)

Someone who regularly delves into ancient ruins filled with undead monsters and dwarven automatons should take to making their own gear if they want to survive. Who wants to trust someone else's shoddy craftsmanship when it is your own hand you should trust? It could mean your life. Plus, the profits are nice so you can buy yourself a base of operations and buy whatever gear you don't make yourself.

That doesn't really help. Create your gear (once), then upgrade your gear (once), then... nothing, until the next tier becomes available. Once you create and upgrade your gear, there's no reason to continue using smithing except to grind it. "To sell for money" only works until about mid-level, as by then you'll have more money than you'll ever need (and the more you "grind" smithing for money, the more you'll get earlier). In addition, it seems odd to tie smithing so closely to speechcraft like that.

Alchemy is somewhat useful as it's a good alternative to buying potions from a store. You can use potions often enough so that you'll want to regularly mix new potions to replace what you use. Enchanting goes up by recharging your enchanted items, which you'll do regularly if you have enchanted weapons... that in addition to creating new enchantments for various purposes. Smithing, however, is something you only need to do once for each material as they become available. It will likely need mods to make armor/weapon upgrades wear off from use, giving you a reason to keep going back to the grindstone and work bench (though not necessitating it, to avoid it becoming a "required skill"). Not giving you such strong equipment freely so close to the start of the game would help, too.

My character is pretty much like yours, only argonian...

You don't really need to do much smithing to get up to 60+, which is high enough to make your (skysteel) weapon and (orc) armor extremely effective. Every few levels you crank out a handful of daggers / hide bracers, plus you occasionally improve stuff you find before selling it. I call it a side job.

Alchemy takes a bit more concerted effort, but if you know the right recipes it can both be absurdly profitable and not require you to make that many potions to raise it. Again, I consider it my character's hobby; even a hardened barbarian can have an intellectual side. And a barbarian MERCINARY can certainly take interest in non-combat money making; the vikings were excellent traders, in fact.
Enchanting... well, if you go through dwemer ruins, you end up with more soul gems than you'll know what to do with (assuming you aren't going bonkers with magic weapons / staffs). I put anti-undead enchantments on the daggers I make because hey, who wouldn't want a dagger that scares off vampires? I do it as a public service, and a highly profitable one!

Truth told, past level 30 I did start aiming to maximize the alchemy -> enchanting -> smithing synchronicity, mostly out of curiosity. Its damn tempting to keep going once you get your armor rating up over 450, because each point (up to the cap of 586 or whatever) actually provides noticibly MORE of a protective boost at that level. But if I find some piece of armor I like I still wear it, even if the orc stuff I make is technically a bit better.

I hate the idea of grinding any skill. Just a personnel preference. I'm on my third playthrough, a two handed warrior as well. So I'm doing a bit of smithing for the first time. I just improve pretty much everything that I loot before I sell it. Every once and a while I'll make something like my plate armor I was using until last night when I made some ebony boots, gauntlets helmet, and greatsword. To go along with the ebony mail (awesome piece btw). But no iron dagger cheese for me. It felt natural getting up to 80 in smithing.