Its pretty much unbalanced that an artisan, alchemist, thief.. etc. character reach high levels before visiting the first 2 towns and end up with low combat skills but high speech craft + lockp icking for example
So we need primary skills (armor, weapon, most magic skills...), and secondary ones ( sneak, pickpocket!!, alchemy, ...), maybe a 3rd column off skills to balance things out.

primary skills counts as 1/10 or 1.5/10 till level up
and secondary,tertiary skills 0.25-0.5/10

That should be fairly easy to do when the construction kit is going to be released, but maybe its possible to do without it too?

Seconded. I said this in the general req thread, only I used about five times as many words to get it across.

I plan to take a crack at this once I have the CK. (Don't wait up though.) I don't even understand how people are making mods without it though, so I'm not useful yet.

I like this idea. Just because I also really like minor skills like alchemy and speechcraft, but don't like that they contribute just as much toward levelup as my major skills. Makes for a kind of unbalanced experience when I have high speechcraft, alchemy etc. but low combat skills but am meeting strong monsters tailored to my level.

I totally agree with this on some level. As every skill in the game is currently treated as a primary skill and levels you up. I hate reading books that increase my conjuration or illusion when my character doesn't even use magic and it levels me! I also think this approach will help with the dungeon/monster scaling issues some people have.

It would be nice if the player could choose his own Primary and Secondary skills though, like in previous games. Or have a script that determines the players 'Primary' skills as the game evolves. Meaning as you play and change the style of the way you play your primary skills change with you. Dont want to wield a two handed sword anymore? start using one handed swords and a shield! The game should track this and realize that your two handed skill is no longer your primary skill...

Stuff like that tends to be hardcoded. There may be ways around that, but they tend to be everything else but "fairly easy". And without the CK? Uh oh.

I think you would have at least to create an appropriate menu to choose the primary/secondary skills and then change skill progressions based on your choice. Also, I suspect that skill progression is a global setting, so even than that would not work... \so definitely not without CK and probably not without script extender.

Why choose them in the first place? They just need to be flagged as 'minor skills' and count less towards leveling. All the non-combat skills should suffer this fate. Why? because Skyrim is primarily a combat oriented game. If it was possible to finish quests using a high speech skill... then I would agree it would imbalance the game a little. But as we stand with this action-rpg, it's more than apropriate to flag all of the non-combat skills as 'minor' and close this issue once and for all

Like marcat said, the choices would be for most players that are gonna use this kind of mod the same.
Keep it simple and let the mod handle that, but maybe an option where you can set the values how much a skill increase counts towards a levelup would be nice.

bg2408
Fairly easy for me that is
Cant wait for the CK to try it out

By default, Skyrim counts high-leveled skills as more of an increase to your character level progression than low-level skills, presumably on the assumption that the skills which are higher are "primary" to your playstyle/class. Seems like a reasonable assumption to make, given that the skills you either use most or choose to train most will be the highest-leveled, no?

Granted, it doesn't notice when you change playstyles - in the example you gave, 2h would continue to count for more towards character level progression than 1h until your 1h skill caught up with it - but, by and large, what you asked for is already in there.

I agree, very definite case of 'We don't know what we had until it was taken from us'. In hindsight I prefer the old Morrowind & Oblivion system of levelling. The power levelling didn't bother me to be honest, I found that if I didn't think about it or abuse it and just got on with the game it resulted in a nicely rounded character. Skyrim's system is just too simplistic!

Some of us knew what we had.

With the vastly reduced number of skills, and the general agreement that alchemy, crafting, etc. are not "major", I think we could simplify that menu down to a handful of preset classes and please most people who want this mod. If it helps, which there's no real way to say it will or won't for now.