I prefer the current system to the one from previous Elder Scrolls games, but I would be in favor of adding an attribute system like Fallout.

I don't mean it has to be exactly like Fallout, same attributes and everything, but by that I mean attributes that ACTUALLY MATTER. Attributes that are generally fixed, you pick them at the start of the game and that's it! If you want to increase them you have to spend a high level perk on them.

Each race would have their own opening stats, for example an Orc might have:
Agility - 4
Endurance - 7
Intelligence - 4
Personality - 3
Strength - 6
Speed - 5
Willpower - 6
Luck - 5

Then you would get 5 extra points to put wherever you want.

5 points might be a bit too much if you are already factoring in the race bonuses, I'd go with 1-3 points.

What is so great about the Fallout system is that it is flexible.
If attribute distribution was solely a race thing and if there were only 3 to distributem this would take away the thing that makes the system great.
You should get a fixed number of points at the beginning and distribute them as you see fit.

I mean those are the race "bonuses". The 5 points is so you won't be locked into a playstyle. You should still be able to have an orc with max intelligence. But this would prevent you from having max everything like in Oblivion or Morrowind.

I think 45 points spread across 8 attributes isn't too much.

I changed the luck thing also because I remembered Imperials are supposed to be extrodinarily lucky.

Also the minimum for each race would be 1 point below their starting number. NO MORE DUMP STATS!

My ideal system would be picking 2 of the attributes at level up, with the attributes available being:
Agility: Increases rate at which you swing a weapon, draw a bow, or raise a shield, as well as Stamina.
Speed: Increases movement speed.
Strength: Increases weapon damage and carrying capacity.
Endurance: Increases Health and Stamina.
Willpower: Increases Spell Magnitude and Stamina.
Intelligence: Increases Maximum Magicka.
Luck: Works behind the scenes.

I agree I like the flexability of the special system and it's been that way since the original Fallout all those years ago. I change my mind, 5 points is fine in that instance as long as it's static for the rest of the game. Hopefully someone can create a mod using a Fallout type Attribute system.

The main problem I see with the current system is there is no reasonable way to fall further, run faster, jump higher or carry more. Strength & acrobatics might not be important to some people but they are to me. I'm ok with the removal of those attributes, but they didn't really support it at all with a perk so I'm peeved about that.

Indeed that dash speed is just a measurement. it's also descriptive of said person's "speed attribute", since 40 yards in 4.4 seconds isn't something everybody can attain. Of course it's under optimal conditions. So what? He'll be slower under realistic conditions but he's still going to outrun someone like me, who could maybe some day reach 7 seconds.

Right. A melting pot. Which means you're trying to make characters that have strength when using a 1H weapon but no strength whatsoever when using a giant hammer. You want to tell me how that makes any damn sense whatsoever? You want to tell me how it makes sense that a warrior with fully perked 1H and 2H but few points in stamina is stupidly strong when swinging a hammer but can actually lift less than a spaghetti-thin pickpocket with the extra pockets perk?

That's the problem. It doesn't make sense. All actors in the game world, and really all people, have a strength attribute. It may seem artificial to put a number on it but we do have such an attribute, and it defines a fair number of things for us. How well we climb up a rope, how well we lift things, how hard we can swing a big hammer (if at all), and so on. Those synnergies would seem natural and once you realise this, not having those synnergies makes a game feel terribly artificial. You may like the fluidity of the gameplay more, but the world becomes much less sensible.

Depends on what game you're trying to play. If you want to "be" your character then obviously the character's abilities should matter more than your abilities. If you're trying to play flexible action game with many routes to the same goal then obviously player actions should matter more.



Dated? It feels dated that there's a remotely reasonable and detailed model behind the character you're trying to create? It sounds to me like you don't actually want to role-play your character as much as you want a better and more in-depth action game. No offense.

Uhm, yeah. First of all, there is experience in the game. Very much so, as it happens. Every skill you have gets various amounts of experience from certain actions and requires an continously increasing amount of experience to level up. You can't see the specifics but it happens, behind the scene. Every time a skill levels up, it provides experience to your character level equal to that of the new skill level. Character levels are defined as a base of 75 + 25 * old skill level. So, to get to level 2, you need 75 + 25 * 1 experience, meaning 100 XP. If you bring up five skills from 19 to 20 then you get exactly 100 XP and so you level up. It's all there, it's all numbers, but you only get to see a vague representation of it.


Next, you say you prefer a more organic form. Great, I don't really mind, as long as the attributes are actually there. What BGS did was remove attributes that ought to be there and simply worked around with completely idiotic "melting pot" perks and derived stats, resulting in a character model that doesn't make sense and feels utterly fake to anyone who actually cares to think about it.


I can make a character in The Sims or in an FO game or in a D&D game and I can identify with those characters because they feel like abstracted humans, to some extent. I can't do the same in Skyrim because those characters inevitably feel fake. When getting my 1H skill to 80 by killing 783 enemies in melee combat did little to improve the damage I do with a mace, while perk points from enchanting a ton of different items do a whole lot, it feels like I'm playing Diablo 2 and investing skill points. As much fun as D2 was, I definitely wasn't RP'ing in it.

You can hide numbers, but they're still there. But the thing is, I'm not asking for the numbers per se. I'm simply asking for what they represent to be there. You can represent the weight of your keyboard in grams or stones or pounds, or simply as a feeling of how heavy it is, but it still has a weight. And whether you can lift that weight depends on your muscles. You and I can, but starve away our muscles and we'd lose that ability.

I can strap a 40 lb backpack on my back no problem, but my 57 year old mother can barely lift it and my 80 year old grandmother can't lift it at all. When I ask you why I can lift and carry around what they can't, your answer is ultimately going to be that I'm stronger. I'm stronger for a number of reasons, of course, but I AM STRONGER. That's real life for you. In real life person A can be stronger or weaker than person B. The same isn't true in Skyrim, because there is no strength at all. That really old bugger of an enchanter in Winterhold is essentially just as "strong" as Ulfric or any of the warriors in the game, because neither of them have any actual strength.

However...the people who argue your point aren′t action gamers, they all have a solid background in traditional role-playing games. In fact, among devoted pen-and-paper roleplaying gamers there is a common conception that obsessing over classes, stats and numbers are representative of power-gamers that are only interested in hack-and-slash and lack the imagination and creativity to understand the depth that comes from roleplaying without numbers and stats.

That is not really a fact. Depends on your group and what game you are playing. Limits, backed up by rulesets are also very popular amongst pencil and paper (who the [censored] uses pens lol) gamers that have zero interest in munchkin gaming.

I'd go with 5, I actually miss getting my ass kicked for rolling a Bosmer Barbarian in older games.
If they don't want to do extra dialogue they need something to define the races (in my opinion, of course)

Oh yeah I totally see that. (In Skyrim) I can't level up by shooting guys with arrows and then get better at Two Handed Weapons when I place my perk point. /sarcasm off .... Seriously, arguing with you guys is borderline unfair.

Well, you still actually have to have increased your skill in two-handed to unlock the perk. The comparison with Fallout is valid since I can increase any skill in Fallout when leveling up.

Why would that keep happening to you, it′s not like you couldn′t simply grind a few different skills on some slaughterfish and then raise your attributes to fit a barbarian...

Have you played Daggerfall/Arena?

Ah...those were different, then you couldn′t even make it out of the start dungeon with a wood elf barbarian unless you picked the ebony dagger.

Skyrim's system is clunky and unrealistic. They've traded the ability to increase whatever attribute you feel like at level up with the ability to pick whatever perk you feel like at level up. Anyone who says that this system is somehow more elegant that earlier ones has to be kidding themselves. You're still forced to grind skills outside your class if you want as many perk points as possible. This is no different than grinding for x5 multipliers. It's contrived. Perks are an inorganic element in a system that should flow smoothly with very little player input after character creation.

The player should select preferred skills at character creation. From there on out, any and all skill/attribute/ability improvements should be entirely organic. They should evolve from what you do, not from what you do and then every so often from what you choose from a power-up screen. That is an elegant system.

You really do not need attributes. If you think about it, pure classes only need a couple of attributes anyways. You can quite easily homogenize and condense these down to 3 stats. Hybrids, however, have to invest in multiple or nearly all stats so their effectiveness is not as high as a pure class in any particular area - but above average in most areas. This further creates an itemization nightmare. You have to find the right gear combinations and make so many sets to fulfill every type of player created - which is nearly impossible. I like how they handled attributes and surprisingly do not feel like they are needed.

I do however think that Perks are problematic due to how overwhelmingly weighted they are. I believe that they should move toward a hybrid system. This system would require you to pick Primary, Major, and Minor skills. These skills would receive modifiers to them (so say if you picked One-Hand as a Primary skill, it would act as 5/5 Armsman). The Modifer Perks would be replaced by Perks that grant unique skills and abilities (or spells). Skilling up, would also further be a little more special than it is now. There would be benchmark levels that would require a special quest by a trainer to show that you have mastered the tier you are at. A player at Novice skill then could not reach Adept Skill levels until they complete a unique and rewarding quest. Upon finishing it, this unlocks the next tier as well as grant a potentially new ability (passive or active). Further, leveling up needs to be more special. Picking 10 points in any given Stat tree is kind of deflating. I think, they should include a General tree with a branch for Race, Stamina, Magicka, and Health. This Perk tree would NOT share Perk points with your other Perks. It would have things like Atheletics/Acrobatics built into the Stamina progression tree, and Resists/Absorbs or Healing techniques in Health etc.

I prefer the elder scroll way where you get better at skill by using them, it feels a bit stupid killing supermutants to level you science skill to you can crack an computer.
This is why they introduced TES leveling in Daggerfall.

Not saying it's perfect but it makes more sense, if Skyrim had xp leveling people would go out and kill giants and mammoths from rocks to level up fast then complain that the game was to easy. I leveled heavy weapons in Fallout 3 but did not use them until skill 70 then I suddenly was good with them.

Back to perk, I miss them, mostly to differentiate races, however the old system of raising them invited to metagaming where you leveled minor skills to get the 3*5.
Yes you could automate it in Skyrim like some Oblivion mods. 2-3 point in archery gives 1 point in agility. However this would give you benefit using low skills as they was easier to level, this would not give the effect they wanted.

What class?? There are no classes so I am not forced to grind anything and if I focus on 5 skills, that amounts to 50-60 perks which is more than enough to stay within the effective level cap. So it′s in every way different...uh huh and snapping fingers...

The reward of getting a perk within one of the skills you are working your character around is so much more organic and in line with character development according to your own vision and image of your character than assigning an abstract number that have minimum impact on gameplay.

I'm not saying all who like perks are action gamers. I just don't think those "aaaahh, can't cheese between health / magicka / stamina, don't give me loads of attributes to choose between!!" types aren't really looking for an RPG. Same thing with the people who hated the old system because they had to grind skills to max their attribute gain. If that's why they hated the old system then obviously they cared more about min-maxing than about RP.

I don't want attributes back so I can grind skills to max my attributes faster. I want attributes back so my character stats become remotely sensible as an abstraction of the character I'm trying to RP. I want to make a character with a set of abilities and I want to play from the eyes of that character, and be stronger or weaker than other people, faster or slower, smarter or dumber, more driven or less driven, more lucky or less lucky, more agile or more clumsy, and so on. I want to see a world where people are actually people. And as I've already explained, people do have attributes.

I don't want to make "perfect" characters that max everything, I simply want to make sensible characters that actually feel like characters rather than D2 toons. I can't do that when all I have to work with are meaningless perks that can't be translated properly into real world terms.

The old system was too much of a mess and caused too many problems. Attributes should be static, not changing much over the course of the game like Fallout 3/New Vegas. That would be the only attribute system that I could support in a future TES title, anything else would be going backwards instead of forwards.

Static attributes would mean that Race selection would have an enormous and unalterable impact that would more or less force players to play the Race that is most suited for the class they are building. By traditional RPG rules, this is acceptable - however you are going to piss off a whole lot of TES gamers with this.

Your class is whatever character you happen to be playing. Saying you don't need to grind to create an effective character in Skyrim because you can get enough perks as it is is just like saying you don'y need to grind in Morrowind because you could raise your attributes to effective levels as it is. It doesn't matter what anyone needs to do if it's found that many players are actually still grinding their characters. That's a design flaw, and it exists just as much in Skyrim as it has in past TES titles.

Perks are not organic. They are the antithesis of organic. They are clumsy and stilted and lack any spectrum of granularity. They are assigned fairly arbitrarily rather than evolving naturally from your character's actions. If we were talking about Fallout, this wouldn't be an issue. Fallout's leveling system is contrived, and that's fine. It's a different way of doing things. But TES has never used that type of leveling system. There's been elements of it that sneak in every now and again, but the system used in TES is "improve through use". The logical evolution of such a system is to remove all direct player control after character creation. Any leveling is directly due to actions taken by the player character, not because the player selected X, Y, and Z from a menu.

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