Skyrim XP

Skyrim XP is a levelling system replacement aimed at bringing the Dungeons & Dragons character progression ruleset to Skyrim. Unlike in Oblivion, skills are no longer tied to attributes, but the levelling system is still easily exploited in some areas and unnecessarily difficult in others. There is also no experience reward for completing quests or tasks, other than money and equipment.

With Skyrim XP, you gain experience points for performing a variety of actions, including but not limited to completing quests, defeating enemies, picking locks and smithing weapons & armour. When you accumulate enough experience points, you will gain a level, granting you points to spend on improving whichever skills you prefer, instead of advancing skill levels by using them. Each level allows you to increase health, stamina or magicka, and pick a single perk, just like in Skyrim's original system.

Dungeons and Dragons Style Levelling

Even if you've never played a game using the Dungeons and Dragons ruleset, you're most likely familiar with the core principle its based on. The experience point system is used in almost a majority of titles featuring any kind of character progression (also known as RPG elements), from Dragon Age to Mass Effect, Deus Ex to Battlefield, Fable to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, this way of improving the proficiency of your character through experience points is and has been almost a standard in video game for many years.

In short, each accomplishment — such as killing enemies, completing quests and finding secret locations — grants you a relative number of experience points, of which you need a certain amount to get to the next level. With each level up, you improve your character in ways that are thematically unrelated to how you acquired the experience points. Given the significant differences between Skyrim's levelling system and the Dungeons and Dragons ruleset, Skyrim XP includes balancing measures taken to ensure that the player levels at an appropriate pace along with the rest of the world and its challenges.

Design

I will be working on the design of Skyrim XP over the next few months. I need to devise the levelling algorithm — how many points you need for each level — and I also need to determine how many points quest rewards should give, as well as all the other point earning opportunities. At this point, I think that the miscellaneous tasks that grant experience points will be restricted to activities like smithing, creating potions and enchanting, in other words activities that require skill. However, I would like your opinions on what should give the player experience points.

I will be updating this thread with details on exactly what tasks will grant the player experience points. Also, once I start designing the level-up screen, I will post screenshots and ask for feedback on that as well.

Features/Details

I'll post the design decisions or features here as I progress.

• Unused training sessions will carry over to the next level.

Team

Development and design: AndalayBay
Menus and design: Xae

Skyrim XP's public forum is hosted at http://www.darkcreations.org/forums/forum/138-skyrim-xp/. Drop by to see how far along we've come, make a couple of suggestions of what you'd like to see in the mod and peek at the screenshots we'll be posting of recent developments. If you're a scripter, or have technical experience, you're more than welcome to pitch in on the stuff under the bonnet and help us move faster towards a stable release.

Been waiting for this since the game came out. I'd love to help beta test if needed.

Good luck!

This rules. Oblivion XP was awesome.

Huzzah! One of my favorite Oblivion mods. Great to see you back!

This is my most anticipated Skyrim mod, ever. Good luck!

I notice that you are planning to implement XP for crafting... I'd like to suggest that unless you can base XP rewards on how valuable the components used are, then it'd be too abusable to be worth the effort to implement.

Instant "Follow this topic" click for me. Looking forward to this mod very much Good luck!

Good point. I haven't actually decided on what will earn points and what won't. I'm looking at using the 3rd edition D&D levelling formula, which will mean that it only requires 1000 points to go from level 1 to 2. Now I can tweak that, but I have to balance the point rewards for quests and killing stuff against the points needed to level. So if I did reward points for miscellaneous tasks, it would have to be a very small amount. And perhaps activities like smithing don't earn points because they are subject to exploitation, just like it is with the current levelling system in Skyrim.

I'm looking forward to this and will gladly help test when you reach that point. I'll post further on the DC forums.

Definitely agreed... thinking about it further I think it might be best to not award any XP at all for crafting/enchanting/brewing/etc. These tasks are already very grindable for monetary gain which, depending on what your plans for training are, may already translate directly into skill gains.

Yes, I forgot to mention: I intend to carry training sessions over! That has been driving me completely and utterly insane.

Used this mod for Oblivion.

This is great news. Can you make it so we can give ourselves xp via the console(and take away xp)? As long as the basic system is in place that allows you to allocate points to skill during level up and monsters give you xp the rest I can just reward myself with for quests or anything else I feel is worthy of xp(did this all the time with the Fallouts). Are you planning on the xp gains being customizable like Oblivion xp was? That was hamtastic, as I significantly change the xp rewards to my taste and desired leveling up speed.

Used your mod in Oblivion. It was one of my favorites. I loved it to get Experience when i found a new place. I am really thankful that you make Skyrim XP. I am full of anticipation!

This is great news!

I could never, EVER play Oblivion without Oblivion XP. Thank you for doing this for Skyrim too!

I haven't done any crafting in Skyrim (and haven't really played since December) but since you need materials to do crafting wouldn't it be harder to get experience for that then killing monsters, picking locks, ect. I know you can buy the materials but that still costs money and you have to do other things to get money. I don't think crafting is any more exploitable then picking locks for getting exp and it would be better to put it on that then putting the exp on gathering the materials since it requires skills to do. If you can't base it on either the strength of the weapon/armor or the value of the material then you could keep the exp amount low. If people don't want that then just have an ini where people can set what they want and since I'm not planning on exploiting the crafting system I would like to get exp for doing it.

Can't wait to use this one in Skyrim as I had in Oblivion.

Excellent! That's been bugging me too.


One of the problems is that it encourages illogical and un-fun behavior. If crafting gave XP, then I'd be encouraged to create items, smelt them down as much as possible, then create them again, and so on for as long as possible. While there aren't too many smeltable crafted items in vanilla, with a smelting mod it might get a little painful. Either way it might encourage you to waste your materials in an otherwise nonsensical fashion.

I am similarly concerned about lockpicking granting XP due to NPCs' doors getting re-locked on a regular basis.

That said I'm fine with having the option (I'd probably disable it) but because I'm impatient I'd rather say "skip crafting" so then I can have Skyrim XP that much sooner

It sounds like you are planning to implement: a misc task to clear out a bandit den would gain no exp, but a misc task to pick do a tutorial on making a dagger would gain exp.

But, this seems somewhat backwards, in my opinion. Risky actions should, in principle, gain exp. And non-risky actions should not gain exp. (But doing limited, non-repeatable actions should count like you were doing something risky -- the only risk is that you cannot do it again, but that risk is 100%.)

And, for that matter, didn't D&D give originally you some exp for random encounters? That said, the downside of the original D&D approach was that people became "homicidal" in-game, simply because killing things was the most reliable form of exp. So it got tweaked: only when you do things "in character" does the risk count. Doing something stupid and contrary to your character concept does not count.

But that is difficult to implement on computers, so we use a "if it's a quest, it's in character" hack.

Perhaps, instead, it would be good for a person to declare what type of game they will be playing? In simplistic form, maybe: If they are primarily a crafting character they would get experience for activities relevant for crafting. If they are primarily a thief character they get experience for activities relevant to thievery, and so on...

This would maybe have a 50% overlap with skill and perk trees, and would involve rating various quest and/or quest outcomes on a qualitative basis. (And would probably be best handled with some community input, to gather the information, and to handle modded quests and so on... .actually, this might be too hard, technically, to deal with in the context of modded quests.)

Maybe instead, rate "opponents" based on character type and how they are engaged? (One kind of character might need to wait for hostility to engage opponents, while another type of character might get no experience from combat unless they initiated it themselves against opponents who had not been hostile, ...)

Anyways, you can tell I do not have any answers...

No. You get XP for discovering the location and you get XP for killing the bandits. I got an excellent suggestion from Ysne58 on Dark Creations that I should split the XP reward for locations like this. Basically you get half for discovering the location and half for clearing it. I think what I'll do is reward points for discovering locations and reward points for clearing locations. The amount of points that get rewarded will be dictated by how it impacts the levelling curve. The game seems to have a mechanism for tracking when you "clear" a location so it should be something I can latch on to.

The current thought with crafting is to keep the point rewards to a small amount. Ysne suggests to reward the points at a declining rate. Basically you would get the maximum number of points for the first item, fewer points for the second and so on until you get no points for the tenth item, or something like that. Still open to exploitation, but ultimately, whether you spam a task for points or not is up to you. And as usual, this will be configurable.

For lockpicking, I'll probably keep Oblivion XP's method that you don't get any points if you break too many lockpicks. I'll have to adjust the number though... I know I break a lot of lockpicks when trying to pick a master lock when I've only got the Apprentice perk. I'll also scale the point reward to your level. So you get more points in that scenario than you would if you are an Expert picking a master lock.

I also plan to offer a base reward for completing a quest - any quest. This should help alleviate the mod compatibility and support issue we had with Oblivion XP. This means that all quest mods will have some support. Then if mod authors add Skyrim XP support to their mods, you will get an additional point reward tailored to the difficulty of that quest. With Papyrus' object-oriented programming structure, this should be pretty easy. I just need to hook into the quest ancestor class. I think I'm going to love doing this in the new CK.

One of the things I had in mind here is to discourage spam crafting. So in order to keep getting the small amount of experience, the player would have to quit out of the crafting session and then start a new one. I was also suggesting that even that first item of crafting get something like 1/1000th of the experience that the player would get for exploring or combat, and then get less and less experience per item until after 10 or so, no experience for that crafting session.

I really like what I'm seeing about quest experience from mods Andalay.

That wouldn't help; it would just be an extra nuisance. "Waste the player's time" is pretty much always a bad design solution.

Ditto. I also "follow this topic" as well.

Anticipated issue: killing stuff.

Luring mobs into traps
Using misdirection to allow sneaking/backstab
Magical Traps (Fire Rune, &c)
Kills by a Follower/Summons
Fus-Ro-Dah! off a cliff
If a dragon kills a giant (or the giant kills the dragon!) after you train it into the giants camp, does it count?

To avoid a nightmarish quagmire of issues for deaths whose cause you cannot detect, suggest you create an xp multiplier for deaths in your vicinity that you did not directly cause, and drop it to zero (or very low) during certain quest -- i.e., the civil war battles, and the battle for the Karthspire. (Ideally, only when at the actual quest location.)

Prison could cause unused xp to decay, but what if you've held back on leveling up?

Also: I think there should be a cap on training session carryover, maybeso max 20 sessions?

True, but I think that creating 10 of the same item shouldn't reward points for each one. It should only reward points for the first. Now the problem with that is it was always hard to detect when the player was creating "the same item" repeatedly in Oblivion. I'll have to see what the CK offers. This may not be an issue.

I think we're agreed on the concept that crafting should reward points when it's used for its intended purpose: crafting items to use. But we want to decrease those rewards if it's being used for mass production, whether it be to earn points or to sell stuff - it really doesn't matter. Basically I'll try to set this up so I don't break the entire levelling algorithm!


I don't think you've ever played Oblivion XP. These things regarding killing aren't an issue. I might have to implement a skill penalty for prison sentences though, like Oblivion did. An XP penalty is meaningless since it just means it will take you slightly longer to level. And there won't be any skill progression with Skyrim XP. So I'll have to lop off a point or two from a skill, depending on the length of the sentence. Losing all of your level progression would be a good penalty if you're almost ready to level, but meaningless if you've just attained a new level. Unless I can set your current progress to a negative number... That might a be possibility too. Hmmm...

We never had an issue with the training session carryover in Oblivion. I never found a need to limit it. Those are your training sessions - you are entitled to them. Why should you be penalized because you level so quickly that you don't get a chance to use them? That's the problem I'm having right now. Don't forget you only get a limited number of skill points to spend each level - it makes the training sessions vital.

OMG YES love this idea.