The problem: When a fight gets tough, open menu, spam health potions. Or blast away fire balls only limited by mana potions. My experience is that this flattens the danger level of encounters. Boss fights are reduced to how many health potions i brought. It also keeps me rummaging in the menu, instead of enjoying the fight. And its unrealistic.

The reason: The gameplay concept Bethesda works with is always giving the player an "out". Keeping the player out of unwinnable situations, and keeping the action flowing no matter the skill level. Thats why you always find yourself with a large amount of potions that you can turn to when the battles get harder. Thats why you get access to a Nuke so early in Fallout 3.

The solution: Remove menu pausing. No pausing in menus, or Q quick select.

It would make potions less effective in their current state, but remove potion spamming. I think potions should behave more along the lines of The Witcher. They are for preparing for specific encounters and last a long time. It would also make restoration more usefull, for example. And the battles much more exciting and rewarding. You will have to rely on preperation more, and your preferred combat skills.

This would be AWESOME. Can somebody please please mod this?

Any quick and dirty fix for this is very welcome, if possible!

I can agree on this.. especially when we do get real time carriage/cart rides.. I want to be able to sit back and open a book while traveling.

Something you can't do currently as reading a book is still with in the pause/menu system.

Actually it makes sense for a menu to pause because you are thinking faster then you can react to in game. But having potion spamming is a serious problem. If one adds a drinking animation and eating animation like how drawing your weapons take time, then I would find this a lot more useful then no menu pause. Also the problem would be fixed. The whole carriage thing is a matter of personal opinion so I wouldn't want the two bundled because bundled mods often have a higher chance of crashes from my personal experience as a mod user.

I don't understand this generation anymore..

I agree a drinking animation would be another way to adress this. And it completely eliminates potion spamming. I would love both.

And yeah, there is something magical about sitting in the in reading a book in real time.

Terra: I am 28... Been playing games since forever. I simply want to make the game more challenging and highten the immersion..

If the game actually had a decent UI that could be navigated quickly and efficiently I'd be for it. Right now, not really.

One exception: I'd really like lockpicking to be in real time, so you run the risk of getting caught while doing it.

Yeah, lockpicking is another good reason for this mod.

Lockpicking is a must, imagine picking a master lock and hearing footsteps coming around the corner. AWESOME. we have non pausing dialog so I can't see why it isn't possible.

Another way to circumvent the potion grated invicibility is to change the potions to effect over time and limit the number of potion effects you can be affected by (have seen on these boards that someone will implement it). But unpaused while in menus... not for me. However during lockpicking/encanting etc an unpaused option would be nice.

Yea I agree with the OP!

@Tissek, yup! In OB it was much better with being able to only drink a limited amount of potions (4, if I'm not mistaken) - that helped with the potion spamming!

@Lazureus That would be nice! Also, random encounters should be included too... Like bandits stopping the carriage, or a dragon or a bear attacking etc. etc.

Also, this should be added to sleep too... so things are happening around you - just like in Morrowind how you could wake up in the middle of sleep because some bug attacked you etc. (or a gang of 5 cliff racers.... true story )

+1 to this, I was just about to make a topic about it actually.

Add Real-time reading too and I would be a happy man.

Something like...

Int bDisallowMenuBegin GameMode	If (Player.IsInCombat != bDisallowMenu)		Set bDisallowMenu to (bDisallowMenu == 0)		If bDisallowMenu ; Map & Journal			DisablePlayerControls 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0		Else			EnablePlayerControls 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0		EndIf	EndEnd

...should work provided the scripting language is similar to Oblivion and the Fallouts. Only time will tell...

I aim to put a "No menu while in combat" option in [BORG].ESM, so you might wanna keep an eye on it *link in sig* once the CK is out.

I think all we need for the potions is a cooldown between uses. Maybe 10 seconds at most.

Actually, what we need is better potion handling in general.

You shouldn't be able to eat 4 whole flanks of raw elk meat in the space of an instant, and for that matter, not in one sitting. (And not without vomitting after what eating that much raw meat would do to your intestines.) Neither should your liver, kidneys, and bladder be capable of handling you guzzle 8 gallons of potion in the space of an hour.

While perhaps a potion-drinking animation is perhaps a bit much, there needs to be a limit to the number of potions you can take at the same time, which is, oddly enough, something we actually HAD back in Oblivion.

You can compensate for this by just making health items more useful overall - why do food items give you 2 health? I liked it better when food was just another alchemical ingredient. All-in-all, something Oblivion actually (GASP!) did better.

But then, I'd like to see some sort of short-term potion limit (a few seconds of cooldown or a 4-potion limit), as well as a long-term potion limit (some sort of liver/kidney/bladder meter for how much crap you can imbibe in a day without passing out).

Awesome! This is exactly the kind of mod im looking for. Thanks!

I totally agree a potion/eating overhaul would be great. As I stated earlier I think potions should work more like in The Witcher games, where they are something you prepare for certain situations - every potion being very usefull and lasting a longer time. If they were more usefull in that way, you would just make like a couple of resist fire/ice/boost mana regen potions, and some anti undead potions/anti elementals for example.

Some way of reducing potion hoarding should be considered as well.

The system should be quick and not time consuming, requiring little OCD like ingredient farming, but being interresting to do... Maybe its a skill to extract ingrediences from monsters. Maybe the better the skill the more interresting ingredient you can gather, like animal gathering lets you take a trolls third eye or something.

Maybe you do need some system of destilling, where you have to destill properties so 5 wheat = wheat powder, ingredient 1/2 for 1 healing potion. You can do a healing potion with 1 wheat and 1 deadric heart, but 5 wheat and 2 deadric heart makes a stronger potion with enhanced effects. So that way you can burn up most of your collected ingrediences every time your at the alchemy table, and its worth something to you, instead of being more annoying than usefull.

I think a better idea would be to limit the amount of potions you can use at once. Such as only 5 potions can be drunk, then you have to wait a minute or two before you can use some more.

For me I think one potion at a time, with the cooldown being the couple of seconds it would take to play a potion drinking animation, would be about right.

But then I would still be tabbing out every few seconds drinking my potions. Doesnt fix it for me.

That does mean you spend an awful lot of time in combat watching an animation play whilst you lose control over your character, which is not really satisfying. It's one thing to die whilst attempting to heal because you didn't quite cast Close Wounds fast enough, it's another thing to die whilst your character is completely unresponsive in a mini-cutscene- removing control is a quick way to add frustration.

Really this is a problem that's already been solved; make potions heal over time. Already done in hardcoe mode of New Vegas, and modded into pretty much every other Bethesda/Gamebryo game fairly quickly. That way you can't chug 5 potions at once because only 1 of each type will actually take effect (same-potion buffs don't stack) and you can't use potions as a last-minute fix (because a hit will kill you before the full benefit's kicked in). Alternatively, just replace all healing potions with "Increase Health Regen" potions for the same effect, except with better scaling so a warrior doesn't need to drink 5x as many potions as a mage to heal himself up to full from 10 HP.