So now I am going to annoy some people, because if I got the chance to change the game mechanics in Skyrim for the better I would strip away even more content. I have not come up with all these ideas on my own, several of them have come from discussions on this forum.

1. I would scrap the level system entirely, rather your character only develops their skills without any inherent level feature.
2. So what about the attributes, Magicka, Health and Stamina? The base values for these attributes are set during character creation and they don't change during the course of the game, except through the use of items, special effects and perks/abilities. Instead your effective level in these attributes develop as you develop your skills, your attacks use less stamina with high skill in weapons, you suffer less health damage with high skill in armor and you spend less magicka with higher skill in magic skills.
3. Perks are not gained by advancing in level, rather you gain them through training and in-game events and they become available once you reach a certain skill level. Some perks can be trained by regular trainers, by simply paying them, other can only be obtained through completing tasks, joining factions and doing services for NPC's. In order to avoid characters having all the perks, your character is restricted to a maximum of perks. If you spend all your perks at lower skill levels across the board you won't have any slots open for the expert level perks, so specialization is a key to effective character builds.
4. During character creation you have a set amount of customization points to spend on traits. Some traits raise your basic stamina, health or magicka, others give you bonuses to your skills, unique traits such as "athletic" makes your character move faster and jump higher, "acrobatic" reduces fall damage etc. Some traits are negative and give you more customization points to spend elsewhere, you can have no magicka to represent no inherent magic ability, you will never be able to cast spells, but you get more points to spend on other traits.
5. Level scaling becomes a hidden algorithm, since it can no longer go by character level, the scaling must instead take into consideration a wider range of the character's skills and perks.

In my mind TES could develop and really set itself apart by moving away from the classic and overused level system of other computer role-playing games and take a fresh, new, open character development approach.

So basically you want the Fallout system without leveling.

Got it.

Nothing I wouldn't agree with. Probably I wouldn't pick any trait though and there should be a way to avoid taking a not wanted perk from a quest if those coung for the max limit.

Of course, you would only be offered the training, and you can even decline at the moment and come back later and train it if you want (or maybe you didn't meet the skill requirement so you need to raise your skill and then come back and pick it up).

It would be good if you could turn you character around to see the back as well, plus scaled to see if one is small or tall. Usually you have to wait till you get into the keep to see a full view and then may not like your choice.

I'm not sure about this. I've been poundering about the whole system.
Excuse me if I swerve off topic a bit but:
Take, for example, archery.
Does it make sense that you, an Archer, are able to deliver more damage per arrow as your archery skill goes up?
No, not that much.

In real life, as your archery skiill mproves, you're able to:
A ) Draw the bow faster.
B ) Shoot more arrows per time unit.
C ) Increase your accuracy.

Type of bow and type of arrow should dictate the ammount of damage you inflict, not your archery skill. Let such skill affect drawing and shooting speeds and accuracy.

Now, let's re-evaluate every single skill and scrutinize it for consistency.

Don't you just love it when people post this stuff.

I actually prefer posts like yours.

It's a novel idea. However, levelling is required in order to scale the game to the character properly. It's much harder to scale the difficulty and enemies being drawn, or their general toughness, to a Skill. Because not everybody invests in the same skills.

And without level scaling the game would become pretty boring very fast.




That's not entirely impossible.

However, what would you use to define encumbrance? If Stamina doesn't rise than how would your ability to carry go up? Would that too be frozen from the start?



Yeah, I'm not really sure I like that idea. Because I can foresee the majority of people gimping their character easily early on, by filling those slots quickly. It also doesn't make a lot of sense if you are able to keep improving a skill but not being able to take the perks in it anymore.

Quest reward perks sounds a bit daft to me. It could either cut off a LOT of quests if you've filled your slots and so can't TAKE them, or allows you to do a lot of quests for no reward. Either way is a bad balance in my book.




I don't like that idea. Because it means a lot of your character is set in stone from day one. If you chose to change your style of play then you effectively HAVE to start over, or risk gimping yourself. It removes the flexibility somewhat, which kinda goes against what TES tries to do.




Which is going to lead to some really oddly balanced battles. It just wouldn't work in my opinion. If the game chooses to level scale off a skill your character is blatantly never going to use you'll get some really stupidly easy fights, but if you've trained up a skill you'll most likely never get to take advantage of it, because the scaled enemies will be ridiculously hardy.

No. I don't think it would work well at all.



It aint broke though. Trying to 'fix' it in the manner you're describing would almost certainly require a couple of versions of the game to achieve a satisfactory result. The two games in between would svck badly.

Let's look at it this way:
I am willing to accept your Health, Magicka and Stamina increase along the way, *BUT* due to relevant events not through an arbitrary increase mandated by an abstraction like a level upgrade.

I say let your Stamina increase if you train and condition your body.
I say let your Magicka increase after you trained under an expert Magician
I say let your Health increase as a result of your training in the Healing Arts.

Now taht would be interesting.

Now THAT might actually work.

It be properly RPG friendly, too.

Still really dubious about the ideal of level scalling of skills though.

SInce that wasn't my idea and one to which I'm not sure I'd subscribe, I won't defend it.
All in all, I think it's time for a new RPG paradigm.

The old one is old.

I don't entirely disagree. But it will take a long time to develop such a set of systems. I'd expect some really duff attempts and experiment to come before something satisfactory arrived.

Interesting post.

There's one issue that you could run into. Your character "leveling" serves another purpose, besides picking up skill poins/perks. And that is that a lot (if not most) players see this as an "achievement" or an "indication" of where they are/stand in the game. You could not do that in MMOs (such as/similar to WoW and others in this genre) without causing a revolt. However, in RPGs like Sky, you may be able to pull this of - although I still think you need some type of indication (maybe a bar that fills up as playing time passes, or as you reach certain predetermined points in the game) to at least have some idea where you are in the overall scheme of things.

Personally, I don't think I would enjoy a game where I loaded my character and not have a screen that I can go to and see where I stand as of that moment. Not that I'm achievement oriented, but not knowing if I'm level 1 or 50 would drive me crazy lol.

PS: As an aside, there have been 3 "great" forum debates in WoW.
1. Not being able to go into towns during the zombie invasion.
2. The Gear Score debate that didn't last long, but it was intense.
3. The everlasting "casual vs hard core gamer" debate that still continues - everywhere.

Eliminating "levels" could be the debate that takes the number one spot.

It would certainly tick a lot of people off not to have an overall Level, yes.

YE SOUNDS LIKE A GOOD IDEA

ye i already use a mod which rmoves all level scaling from the game - much it much more interesting and difficult.

actually there are mods for just about all your points

the only problem with your perks system is a character can become master at everything which to me is quite unrealistic
but still a good idea!

kinda like it yes....

The current scaling system isn't well balanced at all, I can be level 20 with only lockpicking and speechcraft skills. A different algorithm which for instance simply looks at the highest skills in attack, defense and magic respectively, then uses the amount of perks in these skills to generate a multiplier to come up with a total challenge rating, could easily balance the challenge level just as accurately, if not better, than the current level scaling.


Basically only through perks, though your starting max encumbrance could greatly vary depending on the traits you pick.


I can improve skills now without taking perks in it, it just represents a general good level of skill with no specialization. The system should be fairly transparent, and if not, the system could also allow for de-selecting perks in order to make room for new ones. Mainly I simply want to avoid characters with maxed out perks in all skills, you need to somehow make a choice.


The in-game possibilities represent story and faction immersion, if you want to master the art of necromancy you have to perhaps get involved in some dirty necromancer business. A guild of fighters might have a certain fighting technique that they regard as their own and do not teach to outsiders, so you must join and gain ranks within to learn it. All of it makes quests and missions seem like more than simply running some errands for someone, and offers more rewards than simply monetary ones.


From reading what some other people say about attributes, the jury seem quite divided on this one. The customization offers different approaches though, if you invest in some of the very dramatic traits, then yes, you have sort of chosen your path. But you could also leave it open and be quite average from the start and become specialized later.


See point 1 above.


They took the broken attribute system and implemented an entirely new system very effectively in Skyrim. There were not a bunch of bad implementations of perks in between Oblivion and Skyrim. It was a bold move and it paid off in an improved game experience, no reason why future bold moves couldn't have a similar effect.

They aren't exclusively connected to quest completions. Some common perks can be trained by going to your generic skill trainer and paying them for training. But other perks require you to join and gain reputation within a faction before they trust you with such knowledge. Others are found in "skill books" and become available if you find those books. And yes, there would still be level requirements, you can't learn the Thalmor art of implosion attacks without sufficient knowledge in destruction first (generic example).

So basically the development goes:
Use a skill -> skill improves -> find a trainer or guild or artefact that can teach you perks -> achieve sufficient skill level -> unlock perk

Yes. THis would be a Quantim Leap forward.
Imagine, no more endless fetch quests that grant you X gold. You'd be rewarded with perks, special moves, etc.

I never got how the casual vs hardcoe one is even still going. Its basically a bunch of people that have no lives crying about the fact that other people do and want to play the same game as them.

This is certainly a different paradigm. The leveling mechanism is one of those aspects of games that capture player's with a sense of achievement. It's part of that little invisible "game candy" dispenser machine that tells you are doing something right and encourages you to keep doing it. What I would suggest you try to achieve by removing the leveling system is replacing this abstract system of rewarding player progress with a direct system where your reward is connected to actual in-game content such as NPC's, story conclusions and player interaction.

It's interesting that in almost 20 years this topic hasn't become an issue in computer role-playing games, in traditional table-top roleplaying these were two quite distinct schools of thought, but almost every computer role-playing game has opted for the level-driven game mechanism.