Using magic is a matter of both controling your horse (riding skill) and casting (destruction/ alteration/ etc skill). You can combine these and not clutter the interface. Having too many combat skills like the heavy shield (that can also be calculated as a combination between parry, heavy armor and strength) needlessly increases complexity and clutters the interface. Things like fishing or weaving don't but they would have to be implemented into the game so that they are usefull but again not overpowered. Overpowered doesn't revolve around enemies, making money too fast can be overpowered, sneaking can be overpowered etc. I would also like to ask why leveling? Why levels at all? Why not keeping things simple and fluid and try to achive a good level of balance and detail without spamming skills and perks?

Thinking about the various ideas being discussed here...

I think you could get rid of levels, and bring back a set of limited Attributes that really affected skill use. Make the Attributes dynamic, so that if a skill is being used (practiced), its governing Attribute will rise, but the remaining unused Attributes would all decline fractionally, keeping the average of all Attributes steady. Skills would be awarded increases as they are used, just as they are now.

Thus the character would gradually get better at doing things, but there would be no need for anything in the world to be scaled.

Levels make the insecure players feel like they are accomplishing something. Other than that, they're just a "yardstick" to judge how far you've come from when you started. In my opinion, that's too far to be believable in EVERY TES game.

I'd rather see a much toned down progression, not totally flat, but not a steep and absurd as now. Balance is less of an issue with a milder slope, and using a mix of static and levelled content gives you a good mix of challenge and surprise, with a sense of improvement against the known types of static foes. When you struggled to kill a giant rat at the start, and now dispatch them with one hit, it tells you "I'm more powerful". When you start killing dragons like it's no big deal, then the game is ridiculous.

post limit?

I think you missed the a couple things. Like where I specifically laid out that leveling is taken care of in this system by a GCD like system combined with the removal of caps. Such a system is such that you can literally just play and it will work wonderfully and smoothly. It is such that you can sit and plan out every aspect of your character from start to finish and it will still work just as good. It is such that you can intentionally ruin a character and you'll be able to change that into a winning character easily.

Or where I specifically stated that a lot of the skills I put up there were just made up on the spot and shouldn't necessarily be taken literally as potential skills (though out of all those many would be good to see as skills, especially if one wants to move towards the idea of making non-combat a viable playstyle that can have as many variants as combat playstyles do, which was the whole point of letting Skills of the State and Citizen affect leveled rewards so that quests could still result in decent rewards for non-combat players).

And no, having a lot of combat skills does not increase complexity and presuming the stat screens were done right "clutter" would be a non issue.


Thats precisely what that system does. Skills that need total balance overhauls regardless (like say smithing and alchemy) aren't fixed by such a system but that isn't the intended point of the overall system to fix individual skills. It takes non-combat skills (that needlessly inflate a character's level) out of the level equation while simultaneously reworking how leveling works in order to provide for a smooth and simple leveling system.

All my system amounts to, as far as the player is concerned, is:

• Only those skills within the Skills of the Adventurer (short: Combat Skills) category affect your combat level, which indirectly influences your derived attributes of health, magicka, and stamina.
  
• All skills affect your attributes directly, which affect the world in a variety of different ways and make the base functions of your skills more powerful, as well as directly augmenting your derived attributes of health, magicka, and stamina.
  
• Your combat level is derived from every 10 skill levels above 20 in any of your combat skills until skill level 100, at which point every 10 skill levels adds 3/4 of a combat level, 200 every 10 adds 1/2 of a combat level, and so on. (Attribute increases work in the same way, though I don't have a formula just yet that would work well)
  
• The class system (outside of its roleplaying benefits) is a way of choosing how your skills raise from the beginning of the game, and during any point afterwords one can change these settings for in-game fee of gold and depending on which state is being switched into or out of, XP reductions or possible bonuses will occur for a short-while afterwords. You may deny a class altogether for direct control over how your character levels, but it will be slower to level than while using a class but will end up more powerful than a classed character by the end-game.

Thats it. If thats complicated or inexplicably unbalanced then I'm a fricken Valkyrie.

And besides, its a single player game. Balance isn't THAT necessary and more importantly this system is meant to further satisfy roleplayers, not players that treat the game as just a game, and as such feel the need to have totally balanced mechanics. Slight imbalances here and there are not going to affect the roleplayer, and quite frankly given the functions present in my system players who do like to play the game like that shouldn't have much a problem with it. And presuming this system ever saw fruition its not like it couldn't be balanced out for these sorts of players. But the intended point of the system is not meant to cater to them, and especially not initially.

Also, this system would be coupled with another idea I had for dynamically random spawns (bad name is bad) for mobs that actually takes scaling out of the question entirely and makes the best compromise between a static world and a randomly generated one. Every area you go into will have a random chance of spawning different types of mobs, at different levels with every reentry to that area. So in this way one could enter a cave and all you'd find is rats. You could come back a week later after killing them, and bandits have moved in. Clear them out, trolls have made a nest. Slay them, a dragon moves in. And so on forever. And the best part about this system is that if you enter an area and find yourself overwhelmed by that enemy (like say, you run into a den of Giants at level 1) then you could leave and come back to face down the enemy that scared you away when you're more powerful. And there would of course be the option to make static areas/dungeons so that quests are supported as well as for providing specific High level areas and specific low level areas for players to complete. Bleak Falls Barrow would be an example of a static, low-level dungeon. Skuldafn would be an example of a static high-level dungeon.

Post limit.