But then again, if you let them change, they become redundant with skills.
That's why in my opinion the best model is:
- attributes that pretty much stay the same and depend on race and advantage/disadvantage system at character creation to simulate character's persona. Attributes are there to represent physical and mental setups, and adjust in-game stats accordingly (health, fatigue, speed, magicka, and so on... are all stats that should be determined by your attributes, not by your skills/perks)
- skills that tell how much you have learned in the activities they govern. These can follow the great TES method (they increase if you often use that skill), but you should not be able to max out every skill in the game (why not have them capped at a max level depending on how high your attributes are? For example, if my Personality is 50, my dialogue skills should be capped at something like 75. This would also mean I can not learn the best tricks aka the best perks related to dialogue skills ). Unlike attributes, skills should determine the outcome of the activities I do in-game (i.e. health is not an activity, that's why it should be governed by attributes ... same for fatigue and so on; on the other hand, crafting outcomes should certainly depend on a skill, not on an attribute).
- on top of that, perks are the tricks that let you specialize your style of play in a particular skill (it's good the way you select them in Skyrim, BUT there should be a lot more perks and specializations AND there shouldn't be "increase X by Y%" AT ALL (they're garbage because they're skill-redundant)).

EDIT: Of course, all of the above would work wonderfully and increase replayability dramatically, but it is essential that the game contains a lot of situations where my attributes, skills and perks can be measured against (a dialogue skill should have meaningful impact in the game through dialogue choices; perks should allow to specialize in either admiring OR intimidating, for example).

Attributes should be able to go down under certain circumstances, such as when someone who's playing a warrior suddenly decides they'd like to become a wizard, but without starting a new character and losing all the equipment they've collected and such. As they spend more time learning spells from books and teachers, and ignore their combat and athletic skills, those skills and related attributes should begin to lose value.

I think what I'd most like to see Bethesda do is simply revise aspects of the character development system, rather than all-out remove or replace them.

To me that would make it more of a Fallout kind of thing where your attributes rarely change at all. I think it would make things more interesting if the Attributes rose and fell with how you played. Say you don't have any control over your Attributes, they start off, based on how you select your basic skills for a class for instance, just to show that you're character did something with their life. The attributes have relatively minor effects, like Strength allows you to carry a little more or hit a little harder, but you don't control it's leveling, it just goes up based on how you play, or drops if your not using skills assosciated with it, the decrease could be a tad bit more drastic than an increase, for instance, we all know it's easier to build muscle rather than lose it, or learn somethnig rather than forget it, so it would make sense. This would add realism to a game and REALLY make a game character unique because every alteration in your play style or character developement would adjust your attributes accordingly. Of course there could be limits to how much it's going to drop and it could relate to OTHER attributes as well, for instance if your training a speed skill strength drops slower than if your training intelligence. It adds chemistry and realism to the game if it's done this way.

EDIT: Better yet, as a revision you could say skills get a small increase as well when other corresponding attributes go up or down. For instance...


Train Alchemy a lot = +2 intelligence +1 Willpower, -1 personality -2 for rest.

Another exmaple: Train Blade a lot = +2 strength, +1 endurance, -1 agility, - 2 for rest.


Obviously they could add a few more attributes if they want to balance out the negatives and the positives but hey, this would be a relatively decent system that also gives them an excuse to add additional skills, take away useless perks like damage boosts and have a working system that adds to independent character developement and variety.

Upping base attributes was the big source of character variety in the old model because they influenced so many things. They not only scrapped the attributes, but then didn't replace everything that they used to do. "Extra special unique tricks on top" aka perks are a TERRIBLE replacement. If there was a real replacement for the attribute system I'd be fine, but they didn't.

Right now my game is paused. My "agile" ranger is stuck leaving a cave right into an auto-leveled bandit. He's in full iron armor, I'm in light armor. [censored] outruns me and kills me in a couple hits, even using ~200 worth of stamina potions to run away he actually catches up with me. I have no dodge change. Agility dodge was the WHOLE POINT of lighter armor. It's locked up in a +X% perk I can't get yet. There's no athletics skill or speed attributes or agility anything to help my character be. So yeah, there's the "WTF happened to half the character variety" with missing things.

The other big issue with scrapping base attributes for "perks" was this chunkyness. The perks are CLUNKY as hell in that regard. In the attribute system, my character would gradually improve in the aspects the perks (mostly, some were missed) replace and I could enjoy the benefits. Instead, they're locked up in rediculous 20-25% chunks 50 levels down the road. Attributes skyrocket? You [censored]ting me? You'd get +5 at the most which was a tiny % improvement at whatever. Now you can pour +100% damage into a skill at will. THAT is skyrocketing. The perks lock away benefits and then give them in giant chunks. The hell? How is this better than gradual improvement with relevant skill?

The Galsiah Character Development mod for morrowind was hands down the best model. You didn't have you worry about maximizing the attribute multiplier. There were no hoardes of auto-leveling enemies to make you worry about permenantly ruining your character's growth. It was reasonably slow character growth with nothing locked away into giant perks. There was MUCH more variety to characters because there were many many influenced factors. There was more to leveling up than just +10 health every level (Magika cost reduction and stamina potions everywhere, there's literally NOTHING worth improving or even anything else to improve about your character in Skyrim other than +10 HP).
Smooth as a baby's ass it was and better than anything Bethesda has and will ever put out.

I think you should, but it should be difficult if not damn near impossible to master all skills at once. Meaning, it should take more work to become a wizard once you've mastered being a warrior, or vice-versa.


This is sort of how Morrowind works, and quite frankly, I find it extremely annoying and overly limiting. I think the best solution for this would be for skills to be connected to attributes behind the scenes, but not by knowledge of the player, and for every skill level increase to raise the connected attribute(s) accordingly. Meaning, I train my Alteration skill from 20 to 30, and any connected attribute(s) raise(s) by ten points.

It would also help if training certain skills, primarily magic ones, required a bit more work than they usually do in these games. For example, instead of just hitting things with a sword a lot in order to raise ones long blade skill, you would have to study under a master swordfighter, who spars with you on occasion and gives you real instruction. This is obviously more difficult to pull off than adjusting the math for character development though.


So what if a perk offers a little extra boost to ones ability to kill things with a warhammer on top of the mastery they already have of such a weapon? Remember: No matter how good you are, there's always someone better than you. A Blunt Weapon skill of 100 doesn't necessarily mean the player's character knows everything there is to know about fighting with a warhammer. If Jackie Chan's Kung Fu skill is 100, then Bruce Lee's was probably 250. You know what I mean?


This would make things interesting. It could be tied into race and physical appearance as well, bringing a greater amount of impact to ones decisions in those areas. For example, a pretty, petite, young elven female should have some very different options available to her in terms of negotiating with a stubborn NPC with information the player needs than a big, ugly, brutish Orc covered in nasty-looking plate armor and a claymore at his side.

Magical skill should have an impact too, like if the player casts a Charm spell on the NPC, they shouldn't just like the player's character more, the player should be able to say things that wouldn't normally work.

This. GCD is a realistic leveling system. It's the sort of thing that should go in every Beth RPG. Leveling itself isn't really realistic but something that remanined from the "kill monster get xp point level" system. Why can't characters smoothly increase their attributes in the same way they do with skills and automatically gain a perk after reaching a certain skill level (like in Oblivion) or killing a certain amount of enemies (like Fallout NV)? Beth won't have to worry that much about game breaking balance and the game will be a true RPG where you do get better by doing things in game and not choosing stuff in the interface. But they can't do that since games seem to need leveling.


Considering the huge lifespans wizards have I suspect many of them mastered a lot of things other than magick



I think the character should be able to be top dog at at least one skill. I mean the player characters always do things like defeating gods being in charge of all the guilds and walk around being just awesome so they would be top dog. Also perks don't offer little boosts more like huge improvements that don't really make sense.

While GCD's gradual increases in Attributes through the use of skills was far better than the "vanilla" system of "multipliers", it gave absolutely no freedom to intentionaly focus the character on a new profession (except by paid training). MADD Leveler was very similar to GCD, but reserved three 1-point Attribute increases per level for the player to distribute at will. 3/4 of your increases were "learn by doing", but that remaining 1/4 allowed you to shape the character slightly toward what you were actually trying to become (in your "spare time"), while remaining a "lesser" effect. Otherwise, GCD was the better mod.

Personally, I'd prefer to see Attributes return, but limit increases to ONE point each level of voluntary change, and have attributes gradually work to "rearrange" the existing ones, so that each skill increase would give a 0.1 boost to a related attribute (or several even smaller boosts to several relevant ones), and a 0.1 decrease divided up among several unrelated others. Over the course of play, you'd see a couple of points of "natural" growth in you most heavily used Attributes, and a corresponding minor decrease in those that had "atrophied" from lack of use, but a very slight net gain due to the voluntary point per level. Having any Attribute change by more than 5 points should be an improbable event over the course of anything less than a year of the character's life.

The massive jumps in abilities due to badly designed Perks make them unrealistic, badly balanced, and instantly "game-changing", with effects as drastic as if the character suddenly became twice as strong, or twice as skilled. Perks have the potential to be a great addition to the character development system, but were implemented in a poorly reasoned manner, and in place of Attributes instead of in addition.

The removal of so many "items" is another matter completely. Not only were there less types of armor and weapons in SR than in OB, and less in OB than in MW, but the "unique" items from MW were mostly simplified in OB by reusing the same generic textures and meshes as the common items, but with a unique name and different stats. I haven't been able to play enough of DF to compare the variety of equipment. In Oblivion, they were "unique" in their abilities, but usually nothing notable to look at; in Morrowind they were more often quite obviously "unique" at a glance.

There is absolutely nothing "realistic" about spell failure - Either you know how to cast a spell, or you don't. Either you have the magicka available, or you don't. I don't know of many other RPGs that use Spell Failure, especially not modern ones.

I disagree with you utterly on this. (If you're looking for "realistic" you're in the wrong genre, but... )

It depends on your conception of what "spell casting" is. If you think of it as "pulling a trigger," then I suppose you're right. But if you think of it as executing a complex formula, which must be performed just right, then a novice should experience failure.

I'd compare it to a musician performing a piece of music. The more adept you are (and the more you've practiced), the more likely you are to perform adequately. Magic is supposed to be an arcane practice, and difficult (master level) magic should be hard to master.

I'm playing MW atm (after 1000+ hours of skyrim) and I can honesly say they did not CUT anything

skyrim is just a slightly different game in terms of game mechanics and engine.

only thing MW still beats skyrim (some what) in is the mystery (of the MQ) and amount of quests and NPCs but thats becuase MW was text based game (sort of)

I have to keep asking this, but no-one ever seems to answer...

How have you had time to play 1000+ hours? That's 12 hours a day every day since release? What sort of lives do people lead where that sort of investment is possible? Even if it is possible, how can it not drive you insane?

Yes I forgot about MADD and it's system is a good balance between customization and realistic progression in attributes although you could progress even in GCD if you just did used your other skills. Sure the learning curve could and should be adjusted. A lot. But you don't need to work with 0.1 increments. You can just make attributes slightly less powerful and that would also fit with the perk system if used properly so that you have natural progression and a degree of customization. But the whole "I don't have as much control over my character" thing that people fear is absurd. You should have control over your character's ingame actions. That is realistic. All the choose a perk from a tree isn't.


I can't say that I am ok with spells failing so often as they did in Morrowind since if you can cast the spell at least once you must know something about it but the fact that fatigue plays no role and skills play a minor role in casting spells is weird. Fatigued characters should have a harder time doing things. Yes the game will be a tiny bit harder if this feature is properly implemented but then you can adjust how though your difficulty slider.

Well you just mentioned two things that are being cut: quests and NPCs. There are more like armor, weapons and attributes. More than that Skyrim was built by about 100 people. Morrowind was built by 30.

I never used MADD, I must admit. I tried GCD develeopment first and never had a reason to change after that. No free attribute points into things you weren't training never bothered me that much as I did just get around by paying trainers to train relevant skills, which IMO makes more sense both logically and game balance-wise. Rather than getting free points to throw into INT for your barbarian, getting INT was a money-sink. Morrowind NEEDED money sinks.

A lot of people are going to hate me for this, but I miss Major/Minor skills. I could train non-major/minor skills and it WOULDNT ARTIFICIALLY INFLATE MY LEVEL with stuff I wasnt regularily using.


http://alltheragefaces.com/img/faces/large/misc-jackie-chan-l.png

Are you like 10 years old or something?

Spell failure being a long-running part of pre consol-itis RPGs.

Aside from that, there's a good reason for it to exist. Balance. I tried a mage in Oblivion once, and decided it was dumb. Gave it another shot in Skyrim, [censored] stupid it was. Physical weapons have no failure chance (aside from hit-chance, which was ALSO gutted ). They don't break either (well, not anymore ). Magic WAS very powerful, BUT very limited and a total and complete gamble. Once they removed the gamble, they had to nerf it. Once they removed the gamble AND nerfed it, then it was functionally indifferent from a bow and arrow. And to top that off, magika regenerates now in real time. So there's not even a point to bows and arrows unless you can pull arrows out of your ass every few seconds with that.

In the current skyrim model, there's literally no functional reason for destruction magic to exist. The other effect spells, IE illusion, with the 100% effects garuntee, there's no gambling attraction. It just always works. It's boring.

I will never understand why Bethesda thought it wise to jack with the Major/Minor/Miscellaneous skills system. I wanted MORE detail when it came to character development in Oblivion, not LESS. I wanted a fourth tier: Central. Basically, that would've been the most important skill that the character puts stock in, the skill that's saved their hide numerous times, the skill that they would never abandon. Rather than be something the player comes to favor through their experiences playing the game, by their own volition, it would be acknowledged by the game as their most important skill, their greatest singular focus. It would be a vital part of both character generation and character development.

Oh, what could have been...

Its these sorts of ideas that make me wish Beth would give us free reign to reshape character development in whichever way we see fit. If they did that I could have a field day. Because not only would I adapt something like that for classes, but I'd also split skills into three categories, and several sub-categories. I'd have something like:

Skills of the Adventurer (combat skills)

• Weapon Skills
  
• Armor Skills
  
• Magic skills
  
• Shield use (both offensive and defensive)
  
• Rogue skills (things like dodge, parry, etc)

Skills of the Citizen (Crafting and General use skills)

• Smithing
  
• Alchemy
  
• Enchanting
  
• Fishing
  
• Cooking
  
• Mercantile
  
• Athletics and Acrobatics (These two may or may not be combined with Dodging)
  
• Climbing
  
• Etc

Skills of the State (these skills would accompany more political quests, true warfare mods, etc)

• Speechcraft
  
• Tactics
  
• Debate
  
• Leadership
  
• etc.

Legendary Skills (quest specific skills that can only be unlocked through quests or other similar means)

• Thuum (the Obvious one)
  
• God related skills that grant specific abilities based on the gods that grant you these powers. Talos' Skill would be based around combat and warfare, Hermaeus Mora for magic, Mephala and Namira for assassins and thieves respectively, Zenithar for crafting etc etc.

And I would redo perks to accompany all of these. Some perk trees would be small some would be quite vast.

There is so much that one could do, if only the possibility to do so were there.

That's an excellent way to classify the different skills. Would that be how it looks in-game during character generation?

i dont want classes because i dont like to choose mage or warrior or thief i just think that they should add the lock spells for what you are saying

Actually on second thought, I think you mean you don't know of many CRPGs. If you really meant RPGs in general, then I stand by my assesment of that statement as really stupid.

There's another reason for casting failure: It's not the "You must be at least this awesome" system in the later games that is so damn consol-itis. It made more sense with the skills to have casting chance. As it is, if you know a spell, you can cast it just as perfectly the first time as the millionth irregardless of skill. They might as well have removed the "skills" for magika altogether. Rather than unlocking tiers, you gradually increased casting chance for more powerful spells. This was such that a rookie mage could occasionally cast something spectacular, which saved my ass numerous times. Then in skyrim with reduced magic reqiured to cast, it completely nullifies the +10 magika level up. Combined with the auto-regenerating magika, this further cements the "There's no point to destruction magic and ranged physical weapons existing at the same time" issue. Seriously, the ONLY thing worth leveling up in skyrim is HP. They might as well have removed leveling options all together.

Brilliant! Then you could auto-level appropriate aspects of the game, rather than having non-combat skills inflate combat difficulty. You could craft/fish/cook/this-isnt-runescape-why-is-dev-time-going-into-this for the fun of it without getting thrown under a bus for it.

There never were "classes". You could select ANY slew of skills you liked.

Err, the major/minor skills artificially kept your level down. If two otherwise identical characters train security to 100, for example, why should one gain levels and not the other? Either training a skill improves your character level, or it doesn't. It shouldn't improve your character level only if you want it to. That's artificial.

Though character level in general is kind of artificial itself in a game like this anyway. It's supposed to represent your overall character, which includes all your skills and abilities, regardless of how much or little they're used. I've seen the idea thrown around before about doing away with character level entirely, and just working on your skills and stats directly... something like that might be interesting.

I just imagined Elder Scrolls 6 going Final Fantasy 2 on us and make max health only increase through taking damage.

Indeed. I would imagine class creation to have a base menu where you can name it, create a description, pick your main specializations (from each of the categories besides legendary. Combat, Magic, Stealth for adventurer. Crafting, Work (for lack of a better term. For stuff like cooking, fishing, etc), Fitnes, for Citizen. Warfare, Speech (again, for lack of a better term), etc for State.) and you could then select your class skills, which would be central skill, majors, minors, misc. Which could all be mixed and matched as you see fit. Your attribute bonuses would be generated according to the skills you took.

For example, lets create a male Nord Knight using numbers from Morrowind as a base. (Some skills are just made up on the spot)

Nord

Agility 30
Intelligence 30
Endurance 50
Luck 50 (I bumped it to 50 because balance should dictate that I think unless you pick a birthsign that says otherwise)
Personality 30
Strength 50
Speed 40
Willpower 40

Specializations:
Combat
Work
Warfare

Central Skill: Longsword

Majors:

Heavy Armor
Heavy Shield
Athletics
Tactics
Horse Riding

Minors

Restoration
Enchanting
Speechcraft
Mercantile
Smithing

So with that class picked and a birthsign of the Lady (Personalty +25, Endurance +25), we would end up with the following stats (note that these are just mostly just arbitrary numbers. The real thing would have a real formula that would do it properly):

Health 150
Magicka 75
Stamina 200

Strength 75
Endurance 75
Speed 45
Intelligence 40
Willpower 45
Personality 65
Agility 30
Luck 50

Combat Level: 8

From here you could also pick character traits such as favored gods, political alignments, etc. Or leave these options blank and let them grow over time

Now obviously those numbers seem rather high for something claiming to be balanced (even despite the fact that I made those numbers up) and the automatically assigned character level, but this system would be coupled with my solution of combining GCD-like leveling with a removal of caps, so in truth it wouldn't be unbalanced at all, and with proper scaling where appropriate most of the world would adjust to your characters beginning level.

This class system wouldn't be permanent however, as there would be not only be an option to deny a class altogether (where your combat level, attributes, etc would be derived from all skills. This option would be slower to level than a by using a class, but would give complete control over how you level (for those that like that) and would eventually come out to an even end-game regardless if the same sorts of characters were created, just sans class. Perhaps this option could result in more power. Or not.) but also the option to freely change a class (with penalties to xp rates for a short time, and cost in gold) or abandon one at any time.

And of course to make this even further viable as a system, one would need to see attributes fleshed out more so that they influence the world and in order to encourage class use NPC responses would have to be overhauled to respond to character traits if only in a subtle way that would be beneficial and balanced. Increased and/or decreased dispositions would be basic (and as such, increased or decreased rewards), Hostility a bit more complex, Worldly events (like visits or visions from the gods, assassin or mercenary attacks with greater reason behind them, etc etc) in the advanced.


In fact doing this makes me want to make a new topic just for it.

Inflating my level = random encounter bandits with 9999 HP in Daedric armor when I'm not capable of that.

The underlying issue in inflated levels is that there is only really one major difficulty multiplier with auto-leveling in the recent games. As Morrowind didn't really have that much, technically, the Major/Minor barely mattered in Morrowind but would make a huge difference in Skyrim or Oblivion in which I try to under-level.

If skills were selectable in a "Base the game difficulty around this" like the old Major/Minor or they were split into seperate combat/social/etc difficulties as in Zzar's idea then I'd hate the auto-leveling less than I do.

I think Zzar's idea is a better method with separate skill-types difficulty multipliers, and though I still hate Borderland's syndrome in modern game design I'd at least be able to tolerate auto-leveled bandits if it was done that intelligently.

Indeed. Levels seem far more apropriate for xp based games and are quite bothersome in TES. It seems to me that the devs wanted a GCDish levelless system for Morrowind but were afraid to remove all the player-character leveling interaction that has been around for a long time. And then people complained about the lack of chalange and so the devs used and continue to use the leveling system to throw things at powergamers who exploit the system without scaring away the non-powergamer population.

Zzar's system would add a huge number of skills many of them redundant. Why do you need horse combat skills when you can take the riding skill and the equiped weapon skill and use them to calculate the outcome? Why climbing and dodging when you can combine athletics and acrobatics. Is fishing really that skill dependant ? More skills would be nice but having 80 skills and half of them being redundant isn't better than having 30 well defined skills. Also balance is a problem. Skyrim has 18 skills and it still manages to have useless skills like lockpicking and overpowered ones like enchanting.

Except redundancy wouldn't matter to much in my system, because the only skills that would matter as far as leveling is concerned are combat skills (only one category out of three) and within that category the point is to give full control over the exact character you want to create. Sure, the skills might sound redundant but that misses the point entirely.

And thats not even going into the fact that simple horse riding is very different from fighting from horseback, especially once you get into using bows or spells from horseback.

And besides, nothing in that post indicated that some skills were not going to be combined. Quite the opposite. For instance Horse riding could be combined with horse combat, just the same as athletics and acrobatics could be combined together and/or with dodging.

No need to wonder about a system like that, Daggerfall had that. Primary/Major/Minor/Misc. skills.