Hello All,

I am glad that they decided to scrap the Medium armor in Skyrim, but I have a suggestion for making the Armor and Weapon crafting more indepth and more character centric.
Let me explain, currently there only "Light" and "Heavy" armors and these are divided up by material components that any character, independent of race, can make given a high enough Smithing Skill. This approach however, doesn't really help you to become more immersed in the game cultures and world history. For instance, I am sure that not all of the Elves in Tamriel would use just "Light Armor", nor would every Dwarf or Orc want to use "Heavy Armor". What I think would be a better approach is to have the armor types divided by racial style instead of materials.

If you choose to play an Elf, then you would be limited initially to only be able to create Elven base component armor styles - however, as your skill improved you could then fashion Elven style armors using the higher grade materials. This is because in the real world, your Elven character would be trained initially by Elven Smiths. Your starting armor smithing proficiency would be as it is now using Iron or low grade Hides, but you could make either Light or Heavy Elven variations of these armors. Progression through your Elven Smithing tree would look something like this sample tree:

Elven Smithing Ranks:
0-20 Light Elven (Low grade Fur / Hide)
0-20 Heavy Elven (Iron Armor)
21-40 Light (Medium grade Leathers)
21-40 Heavy (Bronze Armor)
41-50 Light (Scale / Leather combos)
41-50 Heavy (Steel / Silver)
51-60 Light (Chain)
51-60 Heavy ("Dwemer" or other named by it's special materials combiniation like Ebony)
etc. on up the ranks.

To learn other racial styled armors and weapons you would have to learn them from NPC Smiths of the other races in question. So if you're RPing your Elf as a racially biased bigot, you could decide that you would just stick to the Elven armor style traditions because you loathe the Dwemer and anything to do with them, or if you were playing a "more worldly" character, you could learn new racial style armors and weapons while out exploring and making new "Smith friends".

Let's say your Elf isn't into Daedras, why should they have to wear Daedra-styled armor. Why not be able to make armor that is Elven, but of the same defensive quality as Daedric, or make Daedric material armor in the Elven style?

Any thoughts on this idea?

bump

Not a bad idea. So would you say that there needs to be new models for each new 'teir' of armor. This means you may have to make another 10 to 30 new armors. Or would you just re-colour/texture existing armours, which would be kinda pointless unless done properly (blood red/black elvin would be good).

Overall good idea but probably to ambitious for now.

There is a mod doing something similar but not altogether the same.

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2933