Well, I already turned up Excel and started counting the level and skill progression along site with trying to make the streamlined stats progress. Adjusting the script is much easier than correctly calculating what we want.
For your new balancing system, I'd have to point out that 81 levels isn't the only option - I know that it require to change more variables, but it's something worth thinking about, cause 100 at all skills can get you higher than level 81 at current leveling system. 81 levels were designed especially for 251 perks and 800 stat gains.

If you really want people to think about their choices then some skills should even block each other. Like One and Two handed weapons couldn't be chosen at the same time. Maybe Sword branch in one handed weapon tree would block mace and axe branch - maybe not right away, but you could use the super advanced perks only from one.

Good points. At the same time though, I don't see why its impossible for someone who is good at one handed to also specilize in two-handed. The idea is to give players enough options to make it impossible to "have everything" and instead specilize in the things they want, but at the same time if they don't spend perks at all they won't be screwed either. The goal isn't to really a lot of hard choices, as I want to follow in a similar spirit to vanilla. Instead, its to encourage making certain choices and sticking to a "character plan" if you will (which vanilla pretty much requires but doesn't incentivise or make this clear at all), and giving players who want to make those choices the avenues to make them.

I'll really need to mess around with actual result in-game before I figure out what really works balance wise with how many perks you can theoretically aquire. I had the idea of making it so you can gain bonus perks by spending away 3/5 trainer points per level at the cost of 5k per perk. Someone else has already done a mod that makes it so you can use dragon souls as perks, which is a great idea to put use to them. But at the same time, 1 soul = 1 perk is pretty imbalanced even for my expanded trees, so I'd want to do something like 3 souls = 1 perk. But even then, seeing as dragons are infinitly spawning, even if you use a mod to reduce their spawn rates you're looking at some serious potential for abuse.

Then again, you have to think if someone's going to abuse the system and download the mod, they might as well just cheat when the mod is installed instead, so perhaps its best to design to system to work with people who want to use it legitmitly.

As you have already seen my threat I have a different approach to this - I keep on changing the first post to make it look cleaner, but also if I get a few days free to speer I will write down the classes and finish balancing stats.
When planing a level mode it's important to think about players that will respect the rules, but also allow to break them without breaking the game - add perks through command console and learning more skills (gaining xp) than you suggested.
If all perks and skills are available you must assume that someone might obtain them all at some point. While the idea of major skill is to reduce the skill that player might have in order to force multiply characters, and increasing the replay value - like adding new competitive fraction, e.g. joining Silver Hand and killing off Companions the way you choose from Stormclocks and Imperium. Restricting perks inside the skill however make the player focus on advancing only one, and so after the skill is mastered and all perks invested (e.g. sword perks) then all others should become possible to obtain in order to master the skill - I would add one arch master skill that would even require obtaining all perks in order to unlock it - gives something to do after you reach 100 at a skill the same way that master level spells do.

Another approach might be to change "perks" to "specializations".

In other words, give "perks" negative effects on other, related perks, such that if you pick all of them you are indeed powerful but a specialist would have increased power within a narrower scope. (And, I have not reviewed this thread to see if someone else has already suggested this -- if they have, I apologize.)

Negative effect in what context? In One handed weapon sword knowledge would lesser the damage of axes and maces? Or One handed weapon would lesser the effectiveness of Two Handed or One handed weapons would lesser the effectiveness of magic skill?

something like: the more you specialize in something the less effective its opposite becomes?

Yes, exactly.

If my only perk that increased damage was one handed sword, I would get a sizable bonus to one handed swords and a mild penalty on everything else.

If I then got a perk that increased enchantment damage I would get a bonus on one handed swords and on enchantment and my bonus from enchanted one handed swords would be higher than before and my penalties on everything else would be slightly steeper and my bonus from one handed swords alone would be slightly weaker than before -- I would be expected to also be using my enchantment perk to get full benefits.

And yes, this is obviously arbitrary, and would need to both be balanced for fun and designed with game play and story progression in mind.

To some degree this approach parallels the concept of leveling up opponents when the character levels up.

Since I was the one that brought up blocking branches I have to say that it's unreasonable to block it permanently, of course the way I would make that mod is completely different, but with unlimited perks gained from unlimited dragon souls we must leave the possibility that all branches will be selected. Like Korjax said - we need to allow player to make unbalanced choices like participating in both one and two hand weapons - even with limited access to skill number. If someone wants to be master of all armors and weapons let him.
So giving negative effect to one branch while improving other even if balanced would mean that when all skills are mastered they are less useful than specialized ones - which breaks the roleplay aspect of the game.

Skyrim is negative effect free zone in comparison to previous TES games, e.g. Altmers doesn't have weakness to all kinds of elements anymore, etc.

Instead of a flat dragon soul cost, why not have it increase for every perk purchased using souls?

That's a pretty great idea. If it's possible to do "soul conversion" then I'll definatly look into it.

I like the idea of some perks giving downsides, but I must stress that I want to try and keep this in the spirit of vanilla Skyrim. I'm looking to rework how the current system was implemented while also exploring how the skills actually function from one another, but not to redo the whole system entirely.

I should probably make an actual thread though since it's clear that this thread has left the conceptualization stage now that I'm actually working on the design of it. I'll probably do that when I finish Archery and/or Light Armor, which I'm currently working on.

Keep this threat operating, until you make all skills - it might hit post limit before that and you'll be creating a new threat anyway

I see what differences our approaches now - you try to stay within vanilla, and just fixing the balance, while I rather would change more than just skills in order to make the balance work.

For once Skyrim could work with 21 skill system if you add skills and even if you rather stay with 18 skill limit, you could merge two skills (remove enchanting) and remodel one into something new - athletics, or hand to hand combat.

I agree with your anolysis of the perk system, it was well thought out and true IMO. Some of your ideas to solve it could use some refinement though. I don't like the idea of a very long crafting animation. I think that smithing should level like alchemy does based on the value of the item crafted, then making iron daggers will get you nowhere.

I also don't like the idea of failure smithing, but why not just make it so you make weaker than default versions? So if your skill is 20 and you make deadric armor then it would be "crude daedric armor" and be not much better than iron armor. This seems much more realistic than "FAIL", and the user gets crappy armor until he can improve it to a normal level once his skill is good enough.

As for those heavy armor perks, I don't see any problem with a perk that removes the penalties, but seriously both armor skills need to be in one perk tree skill called ARMOR with similar perks, and a few specialization perks for light and heavy. Then a new tree should be made with athletics/speed/fall damage/acrobatics reimplemented back into Skyrim.

In spirit of Skyrim vanilla version any changes shouldn't add negative effects like failing at something - this is the reason why repairing has been changed into improving armors.

Armor skills should differ for each other, while without acrobatics/athletics skill we don't have nowhere to put fall damage and movement speed both armors should a different take one those. Light armor reduce the moving and fighting speed less, and heavy just gives hell lot of protection (e.g. from falling or being carved into pieces while you move in a slower rate).

I am not totally convinced that my suggestion was the right way to go, but note that I am not talking about blocking, for the most part.

You could have a game where if you took all perks you get exactly the current bonuses and still give specialization bonuses on each perk and negation penalties on all other perks -- this would mean that if you did not take all perks you would have some bonuses higher than in the current game. [I am not suggesting that this is a good idea -- I am just trying to illustrate the concept.]

I'm probably going to hold off on doing anything related to smithing or enchanting. For one, because IMO it needs a complete overhaul to really work well and be fun, to the point of almost being better off as a seperate mod. For another reason, because I already know that people are exploring redoing how smithing works anyways, and I'd rather just link to their work than try and bastardize my own solution that would take a ton of time to implement

I'm trying to avoid adding/subtracting new skills until I can figure out exactly how possible something like that is with the CK. If it's anything like past games, it's going to be almost impossible to put in new skills. And even if it was, it would have insane conflicts with things in-game (as the game wasn't designed to recognize those skills), with other mods that only do stuff related to the default skill, etc. It would most likely be a big nightmare to try and get it to work with everything else and other mods nice and smooth since its such a major change. The best action would be to get rid of useless skills like Pickpocket (and make it so pickpocket is governed like Sneak as before) and replace them with new skills to ensure compability, but even then the game or a mod might look at your "pickpocket" skill to determine something, but then this mod might change it to Acrobatics or something like that, and then there'd be this weird disconnect. And I'm not even sure if it's really possible to do that either.

Perks give Skyrim a real advantage over the past games though, in the sense that you can basically design perk trees to function like skills/attributes in the older games (assuming, of course, that they allow perk changes). For example, a lot of "acrobatic" skills would work well as perks under stuff like Light Armor or Sneak, as well as speed related perks. It's just like how we no longer have weapon skills anymore, but you can specilize with weapon types within a broad skill, theoretically making the skill system even deeper than it ever was before (by allowing you to get get good at specific weapon specilizations but also maintaining a degree of skill using a similar class of weaponry). Unlike before where if you good at blades, you'd be magically awful dealing any kind of damage to enemies with hand/war axes. It makes sense that you'd be less effective, but not as much sense that you'd suddenly have no skill in it.

FWIW I think acrobatic skills should fall under Light Armor. I practice martial arts and parkour and from experience I can say there's an overlap in the skills needed to dodge strikes and Kong vault a 6' box.

I understand the concern of compatibility, and changing and adding skills (no matter how hard - if not with CK, it's possible with raw scripting) might cause Npcs to start using them wrong - I've seen npc do sneak roll, so I'm assuming npcs have some extend of perk usage - dunno if it's all skills, or just leveling stats with few perks, cause you don't see them using more advanced spells.

Acrobatics and Athletic are in theory easy to pull off in their own tree since the stats for them are still in game, but linked to other skills and height. I can't wait to see if and how much the skill proficiency increases without perks.

Well, I feel like I'm gonna need to re-design everything because the more I delve into the CK and see mods like this pop up (http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1355654-relz-duke-patricks-heavy-weapons-combat-mod/) the more I think it's stupid to try and redo how the skills themselves work, when someone out there's already got stuff working that would take me months to figure out.

It's impossible to directly change how the actual skill functions via CK, and the only way to pull it off would involve heavy scripting and coding from 3rd party extenders I feel. Modders out there who are much more skilled at those tasks and who've worked with past games keep pulling off similar ideas (albiet slightly different than my vision) are able to release with 10X less effort and time it seems Much of the things I want to do with perks alone involve variables in the CK that are almost completely undocumented too, but at least I can experiment comfortably with that.

But as such, it seems like adding perks and cool new abilities is much easier to do. Hopefully I can still do the majority of what I want in my perk-tree expansions without changing how the vanilla combat system works (even though a lot of my changes were based on that), and then maybe make optional patches to work with combat overhaul mods by authors who actually have the coding experience to implement that smoothly and bug-free.

Don't be dicouraged! Your ideas are good, and although the CK is very limiting in what can be done, they are worth pursuing.
Yesterday, I released http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1356028-relwip-revised-character-system-beta/, which surprisingly tackles some of the same issues you mentioned about the perk system. Maybe it will give you some ideas on how to implement your design?

And I too think that full combat overhauls like Duke Patrick's and perk tree re-designs can work very well together. It's just too much if you want to do everything in one mod, and there's no shame in leaving certain aspects to people with better experience.

Yeah, I'm definatly not discouraged, I just need to tone down my ideas to be something I can feasibly accomplish. I went in designing this with "pie in the sky" ideas (in that I put in ideas despite how feasble they'd be, and if not I would just tone back) but it still kinda svcks knowing you can't do all you wanted to

The hardest part is how to tackle the re-design of my re-design My goals with the mod were to make it so the power was put back into the skill, and the perks offered the chance to truely specilize characters with weapons/styles/etc but not punish them if they decide to increase their skills to the max because they didn't get the stupid perks that give them flat damage bonuses. Seeing as I can't touch the skills other than a global damage modifier (which I will likely have to increase without the above mentioned perks like Armsman and etc), it's going to be hard to do what I want to do JUST through the perks.

Your mod looks pretty good! That deadly combat mod you linked to as well. I wondering how he did alot of that stuff though, especially without using a script extender? Because a lot of what I wanted to do with skills he accomplishes with that mod.

My only issue (that I feel makes specifically what I want to do impossible with my current non-existant coding skill) is that I wanted to tie such features like stagger, etc directly with the level of the skill, so the higher your level, the "harder" you'd logically cause status effects to happen without needing perks (though perks can boost it). It seems like, so far, most of the combat-related mods out there ignore the skill system entirely and almost pretend it's not there (just focus on making combat itself universally more tactile and skillful) while I wanted to incorporate such ideas into an RPG/skill framework, like in Dark Souls (which IMO is the only game I know to have a perfect action-RPG skill system).




EDIT: started taking notes from that Deadly Combat mod so I could see the process he took to get some of his ideas in. Not really looking to copy them, but just know where I can start on altering vanilla skills, if that's possible. But somehow... he's locked/encrypted his scripts? The editor won't let me read them for some reason and neither does a 3rd party editor. Odd. I wonder how he did that? Kinda svcks, it somewhat limits growth of the modding community doing stuff like that but I can understand if he doesn't want anyone to "steal" his work Even though I'm just doing research.