Indeed sir,

I just recently had a crazy idea that may actually be worth giving a shot. What if your actual skill in every category was capped at 20/30 points depending on what race you pick and the only way to raise the cap would be through putting points into the perks?
If I am not mistaken every race would have its own skill point caps set around the 20 to 30 mark. Combine this with a more even leveling curve and starting off with roughly 3 to 5 points to put into perks you may really change the entire dynamic of the system in a meaningful way.

No more being able to lock pick a master level lock without putting some points into that perk tree.

It's an interesting idea, not sure if it would work, but it might be more profound when experienced.

It doesn't fix lockpicking, though. You need very little (character) skill to pick master locks in the game. The actual mini-game needs tweaks, more than the skill itself. There's a mod that makes it much more difficult, and it still isn't enough (yet). There's no practical value in taking perks or even building lockpicking skill right now. You just take lockpick, speech, etc. perks as a waste basket for "role-playing".

@omphaloskepsis: Actually lockpicking skill/perks could be made useful without changing the minigame, if instead lockpicks were made much rarer.

However, the lower level perks are still stupid. It'd be nice to replace them with a single gradated perk that makes all locks easier by 20% per rank.

Well the thing is the goal is to make it so skills control stuff like "20% easier", with the perks being bonuses and additions that enhance your abilities without stepping outside the boundaries of what makes the skill unique.

The best way to fix lockpicking IMO would be just to make it so the lock position is reset every time you "fail" a lock. That would make the game much harder from the get-go. The higher your skill is, the less you'll break lock picks and the more leniance you'll have when picking locks. A high level perk could be that the lock-picking position never resets when you fail, though. Or maybe teired - such as I could have an "apprentence locksmith" perks that makes it so adept locks never reset when failed, while higher level ones would still reset unless you got the perk for it. The ideal goal is that if you try to pick a high level lock at level 25 or so, you are pretty much garunteed to fail due to the lock position resetting, running out of picks, and the angle of "attack" being very small.

Of course the big issue I have with lockpicking is, for the the most part, it's totally useless except if you want to break into people's homes. And why would you? There is absolutely no items of value in homes compaired to dungions, and dungions never have good loot in them anyways in locked chests. All due to leveling of items. Whenever someone gets around to de-leveling items and making it so it's worth actually stealing something, then lockpicking would be a much more useful skill to have. Not to mention if I can add the ability to lock doors, then it could be a very useful way to lock out higher threats in dungeons or something along those lines.

Not exactly on-topic, but I'd recommend you take a look at the http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1336mod. It makes lockpicking much more difficult and tweaks a few of the perks as well.

@wiz0floyd: cool mod there. I might give it a try, but I'm not seeing how he made earlier perks useful...

@Korjax: I've found tons of useful things in locked rooms and doors, so lockpicking doesn't seem useless at all to me. Although you're right that the +20% ranked perk is redundant. What I'd like to see is having lockpicking not pause the game world. And having a perk that changes it back to pausing the game (or slow time somewhat).

I think having the lock reset every time might be excessively harsh. I prefer being able to open a lock either by: investing in lockpicking skill/perks, or by expending lots of lockpicks. That way if the player needs to open a difficult lock, they can, but at the cost of opening other locks later. Perhaps there could be a limited number of attempts before it resets (starting at, say, 10) and perks could increase that number.

The main problem with the Locksmith mod is that while indeed I find it works well for me as I seem to be a pro at picking Master locks without perks at ~40 skill without the mod (with the mod I use up like 10x more lockpicks), a lot of chests that are locked and areas that are locked just have horrible loot in them. We really need the CK to check for locked chests and make sure they always have great loot in it. It's very often I find this scenario:

A locked Strongbox (adept) and a locked Chest (master) nearby each other (found this in the Botheia's Calling quest). The Strongbox is completely leveled so I can find Glass, Ebony, Daedric stuff in it. The locked Master chest, on the other hand, is static and only has ~30 gold in it with maybe a low-level scroll...not even enough to cover the cost of the lockpicks I used up!

@Eldiran: Yeah, reducing lockpicks would help. I'd still like to see locks require some character skill, though. Even with the fingersmith mod (which is well done), I can still pick master locks with about 35 - 40 skill and no perks. Way too easy.

@Korjax: I think your idea is great. My vote is to have locks reset if they're above the level of the character, either through skill thresholds (i.e. Apprentice = 25 skill) or through perks that become available at that elvel.

A hybrid system (overcomplicated?) might satisfy all tastes:
character with 20 lockpicking (i.e. novice), can try to pick any lock, but:
apprentice locks (1 level above) reset after 4 failures
adept locks reset after 3 failures
expert locks reset after 2 failures
master locks reset after 1 failure

character with 40 lockpicking:
adept locks reset after 4 failures
etc....

And perks allow either more tries before resets, or no resets for that threshold (novice, apprentice, etc.).

And as generalnmx said, we definitely need more static loot, especially for locked chests. Master chests should (usually) contain good or interesting loot.

General support for the, say, "direction" of this thread. I agree that perks should be bonuses, and not a major part of the progression of a skill. One of the first mods I considered was to make low-level, perkless Enchanting better (because you can make absolutely nothing useful with low-level Enchanting in vanilla), but remove the Enchanter perks.

just to be clear i dont know how possible some of my ideas would be to implement however i do think that simply making something more powerful is boring. the power of a skill should be determined by the skill and NOT the perks. so perks like making onehanded/twohanded do more damage? gone, better sneaking/higher armor? gone

a perk should alter teh way the gameplay within said skill functions.

good examples of these perks are the shield bash bullet time, shield charge, twohand power attack hitting multiple targets, sneaks roll perk.

these things alter how you play. expands your toolbox of abilities.

thats what perks should do imo, expand your toolbox.

meanwhile your skill determiens effectiveness

My input, heavily influenced by MW and number crunching, being as I'm more biased to that game/method. (Might also be a bit rambling, apologies up front!)

Saw a comment about getting enchanting up to max level from start, which then means at low level, you can make very powerful enchants on low level gear. This was anticipated in MW, and so all items had an enchantment level. When you built your enchantment, it took up a size. This then meant that powerful enchants couldn't be placed on that rusty old iron knife. In Skyrim, it's a case of, any enchant you know, on any valid item, with the soul gem controlling the overall power of that enchant.
Items then should at the least have a max soul gem limit, so basic iron can only hold petty souls, and as gear increases, so does the max gem that can be used.


Will admit, I'm abusing the smithing skill, and as a side effect, my level is higher then it should be, and some encounters are quite difficult as I'm not "perked" enough in the combat perks. Your smithing skill should control what smithing items are unlocked for you, instead of being a perk. Since Skryim is combat based, smithing perks should contribute a small bit to combat. Some perks could be "% lighter equipment made", "small % increase to item stats made" while others give you a small % increase to damage or armour (working that forge day and night builds up your strength and resilience).
Having items damaged would also be great. Player 1 finds some elven armour which is rare for his current level. So that's a good moment for the player. They are not a smith, and have no knowledge of elven gear, so they can't repair the damage to the item, so they will have to throw it away as useless junk or fork out a load of cash to a npc who knows how to repair it.
Player 2 is a smith, and so is able to maintain that armour. Smithing then is a more advanced form of MW's Repair Hammers


This then also balances enchanting, will you really put a great enchant on a bit of gear that you cannot maintain, or afford to maintain? Highly unlikely.


With the skills in general, when I saw that they were represented by constellations, I was fully expecting at some point to be asked to pick 4 or 5 of these skills to act as my "Main" skills, but that wasn't the case. All skills basically started equally in affecting your levelling.


Combat and Non-Combat skills need seperate influence on your level progress, and as indicated before (especially with smithing), gaining the same XP at 80 skill for making an iron dagger as at 20 skill is quite silly.


I see "Skill" as "Chance to succeed" at something. So if my skill is only 20, depending on that skill, I'm an 80% failure Sure, that's like Morrowind, but I liked my Nord Adventurer having a 20% chance of casting an healing spell and wasting his small mana reserve if he fails. Because chance has been eliminated, all that can really be done is perk up the % strength of abilities, but I feel that the % that have been chosen are too much, totally overshadowing skills contrabution to damage formulas.


Can't really comment much on the other skills, as from my gameplay, my character is a Smith who wears heavy armour, using 1H weapons but starts off fights sneaking with his bow (overpowered, stealth sniping), with a bit of destruction magic to spice things up. Pretty all over the place. Was silly that I smithed myself a full set of Dwemer armour before I had found any dwemer ruins.


Be interesting to see if NPCs do actually use perks. We've seen them perform perk type finishing moves, and I'm sure all the mages I'm encountering have perked spells. If NPCs do, then off course, players are going to get these new perks used against them.
I think though you might find the CK quite restrictive. MW and OB CK didn't allow you to change everything, and it seems that everyone thinks that Skyrims CK will be the holy grail. I expect quite a few people will be dissapointed.
The CK is most likely being delayed this long, as they are taking out functions/features from it, while ensuring it still works.

Yeah, I kind of expected that it would probably not let me change much, I'm just hoping I'd be able to add/subtract some perks at the very least as far as the "easy" stuff goes. Though sadly, I fear that the entire system is controlled by actionscript/flash, which is way beyond my reach. At least I think it is. I'll need to get Flash CS5

I think a great way to make "chance to succeed" to be replicated again would be to take a dark-souls approach, though I wouldn't doubt this would require quite a bit of work and some kind of script extender as well. In other words, you still won't fail casts or miss via dice rolls, but simply being able to use a weapon/magic will be much harder at lower levels. Imagine if you had a fully automatic gun IRL that you've never shot before, and tried to shoot it full auto down range to hit a target - the recoil and kickback would make almost no shots hit unless you were shooting with small ranges. However if you were skilled in the use of controlling your fire, you'd be able to sustain and land most shots. Basically, something that can reproduce that "feel" but in melee form would be ideal. Someone who has no skill in two handed might be pretty leathal with it, but it would be very hard to him or her to swing the blade properly and accuratly every time due to the weight, attack angles, etc. And not be efficent, causing more energy (stamina) burn when using it.

I think an awesome idea for the constillation trees would be to let players pick 4 or so "skills" when they start the game as their "major skill". Major skills would level at the normal rate, while all other skills would level at half that rate automatically, on top of the Bethesda system. Or maybe perhaps the Beth system would just go away entirely (aka where the higher the skill you have, the higher the progress), or just tweak it so its more of a bonus rather than the driving force behind level progression. It would also be cool to get one perk per level, and then a bonus perk per level that can only be spent on your "major" skills.

For the undecisive, there could be some kind of way to allow players to "respec" their major skills if they decided they wanted to change profession, but maybe this would cost the player to lose all their "bonus perks" they spent on their previous major skills?

Now I'm rambling with thoughts

PS: I love your creatures mod for Morrowind

I don't really like how the perk system works in Skyrim. I'd rather the skills become important again, with perks sort of supplementing them. I'd also like it if you didn't have to follow certain paths when choosing perks, with skill requirements and lack of perk points being the only thing keeping you from obtaining them. That would mean a lot of the current perks would need to be redone to keep them all fairly balanced, but it'd certainly be worth it.

The perk system in Fallout 3 was nice. It added unique features and abilities without allowing perks to completely replace the skills that are supposed to govern them. The perks in Skyrim are pretty bad in comparison, so I hope someone can come up with a good system that takes a thing or two from Fallout 3, but is specifically tailored for Skyrim.

You guys definitely have some great ideas. Hopefully the CK comes out soon.


As for smithing, I think it would be pretty cool if we had to learn how to forge new types of gear by dismantling and melting it down at the smelter or learning techniques from other blacksmiths in-game. Learning from other blacksmiths could cost a great deal of gold, but the benefit could be that you learn much quicker and without having to venture out and find existing pieces of equipment to "reverse engineer". However, if you're adventurous and do go out and find pieces of gear to learn from, you could obtain the needed resources to create new gear from melting them down at the smelter. That would cover pretty much all of the armor types in-game with the exception of Dragonplate/scale. Since you do need to kill dragons in order to acquire dragon bones and scales, the knowledge needed to craft those types of armor could be hidden away in Sky Haven Temple. Or, as you are Dragonborn, we could just assume you possess that knowledge inherently.

Of course, that would require a bit more than just altering the perk system, so heh.

Thats what I'd love for the smithing system to work, but everyone in this thread seemed super against the idea of having to "reverse engineer" something in order to smith variants of it yourself, even though that's basically how enchanting works

I think it would be more worth it if players could add their own touches to "their work" too. Like maybe a color, design, etc. But that would probably be very hard to do haha.

It's mostly that logically that's not how you learn smithing.
Several threads have touch upon learning from smiths or books/recipes which seem more fitting and which would also be a money sink.

The best way to learn something is to already have it before you -- the best way to learn how to build something is not by reading a book or listening to someone say a few lines of dialogue. It's by actually taking it apart and seeing how it works first hand. I don't see how that's illogical at all. That, and this is a fantasy world. How can you logically explain how enchanting works? The process of reverse engineering in order to be able to create a product has already been established as logical in TES.

My idea was to offer different ways of doing things. You can learn from an NPC, but you have to pay gold. OR you can learn by hunting down items of the same type, but you get resources in the end. I wasn't suggesting you need to break down an axe in order to create only another axe. I'm suggesting the need to break down an ebony weapon in order to create another ebony weapon, or break down ebony armor (any piece) in order to create ebony armor (any piece). Or just one of either to create both.

How does this sound? Make a mod that not only has the normal 1 perk per level, but also grants a perk every 10, 15 or so skill points earned in a skill? If you really work on a specific skill, that would mean you'd get a few extra perks to help really flesh it out, or to spread around to other skills than need one or two more perks...

Edit: The system needs much more tweaking than this, of course...

Now, it'd be nice if you had to try a specific smithing recipe, and depending on your skill and how advanced the equipment is, you have a chance of failure... until you successfully make one, whereupon you can now make it as you want. This would reflect trying to make something you haven't made before, vs. making something you HAVE made before and thus have a good grasp on making.

But you can't just break a sword back down. You can see how they attached the individual parts, for example how the leather was wrapped across the handle. What you don't see is how the metal was treated, how the alloy was made and what tools and how much force was used to shape the metal.
These are things that you learn by being thought (or experimenting) and not just by breaking it down.

That's the reasoning why a lot of people don't like reverse engineering.
For example how would you know to quench the elven gear in salted water?

Enchanting is already given ingame, you sort of absorb and so learn the spell that's imbued in the material.

Experimenting, sure, but for a lot longer than a single day. As for being taught, I'm still not sure. Countless times I've tried to cook something that came with directions, and countless times it has never turned out exactly like the image on the box. And that's food. Crafting a weapon is surely far more complex. One cannot create a perfect katana simply by reading books or being taught once, and in a single day. Logically, it should take years, or at the very least months.

There is no right way of doing it because every suggested route has its faults. I'd rather see an implementation that allows for weapons and armor to be created without having to invest a great deal of gold into learning.

As for enchanting, we all start out with Flames at the beginning of the game, so why do we need to destroy an enchanted item with fire damage in order to apply it to another item? There aren't a lot of things that make sense in Skyrim, so there's no real reason to try and make smithing a perfectly logical and reasonable process either.

Shame that enchanting can't be brought more back in inline with MW. Learn a spell, you can now use it's effect in enchanting. NPCs and a lot of gold will give you 100% of the enchant working, or you can try yourself, and have a chance of failure, but save a ton of gold.
But then, that uses a similar mechanic to spell making, and that was removed.....

I think the long animation for smithing is a bad idea. It would be a redundant wait for no good reason. You need the proper mechanics in there to make a good game, not ridiculous penalties that force the player to watch a boring animation.

I posted my thoughts on a perk discussion yesterday, if you can make use of any of this go for it:

@madmole:
In regards to tree requirements: That's part of the choosing what kind of character you want.
Perk points are a limited resource and by opening up all to be chosen only on skill level, while skill level is easily and "freely" upgraded means that you can create a master of all character. It limits your possibilities and forces you too choose which trees are most important to your character.
This also goes for your advancing other skills to earn more perks part. Perks is a limited resource. If you choose to distribute it over many trees it will become hard to get one tree completely filled.

On low level ranked perks: I have found that continued upgrading those in regards to armor and weapons can easily overpower you, though that's in combination with Smithing. Overall I don't feel that there is an actual need to constantly pump these skills unless for crafting skills.
For certain skills there is already a small influence the skill itself has, it's not as pronounced as the perks, but it's there.

Why not mix it up a bit (for crafting) ?

For example you can learn from a trainer ( = real practice), but it is split into theory and practice. Also, make a difference between learning the skill, and the perks (not just selecting them when levelling, but actually earning them).

- Theory you can learn by books, found or bought from trainer or library.
- Practice you need trainer, and you must pay additionnal fee.
==> this is to raise skill level in general, or a specific focus (perk) on a material or something.