Previous thread got locked due to post count: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1394238-why-i-wish-attributes-werent-removed/You can still "be who you want." You're just not telling the game in formalized fashion what that's going to be before you start playing. The game will learn it by what you do.

I advocate such a system for Attributes as well, I don't like telling the game in advance what my character is going to be like either. What I do like is the option to assign a small number of Attribute points at the start of the game to represent my character's past, although that is not the main reason why I want Attributes back. I could live without it.

I think very few defenders of Attributes here want the Oblivion implementation back. Minor/Major skills were a bad concept imo, and the way you had to choose Attributes when levelling up was horrible as well. They should be increased similar to Skills. Attributes are great because they provide a leak of ability between similar Skills. For example if you level Twohanded weapons your Strength also increases, which also affects Onehanded weapon damage. In vanilla Skyrim you can be a ferocious Berserker with a great axe, but if you switch to a Onehanded weapon you suddenly fight like a 12 years old, barely being able to scratch someone.

hmm

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I'm not sure what the similarity between a one-handed sword and a six foot long two handed sword would really be, beyond having the muscle mass to swing a large hunk of metal into an enemy's face. The different weight and necessary rhythm of a one-handed axe versus a two-handed battleaxe really does make it a wholly different weapon. About all you could ask is that there be some general "melee" skill, with more defined weapons skills as well - but then we're getting into the territory of unnecessarily multiplying the length of the list of numbers again.

Wait, what?

juicyfruit4, you need to get rid of this notion -god knows where you got it - that people "own" threads. They do not. There is no ownership and no copyright involved here.

That's exactly my point. If you are a veteran who has fought countless battles with a two handed sword you will have become very strong. If you'd then equip a one handed sword the techniques would be very different, but your great strength will still allow you to hit very hard.

I'm not saying that Twohanded usage should level the Onehanded Skill. I'm saying that there should be a Strength attribute to represent the above. Perhaps the wording "leak of ability" was confusing.

Certainly, and as I've said, the difference in male vs female shouldn't be so great as to make a physically strong female impossible. Hell, in the real world women aren't just somewhat weaker than men, very few women even manage to get to the level of strength of the average man, much less push past that into the territory of serious strength, sufficient to wear armor and swing heavy metal weapons around effectively. But I'm really not looking for something that would be such huge hurdle for the player who wants a physically strong woman. I just want a small but not insignificant difference in strength - which in Skyrim means Stamina, weapons skills and armor skills.

There's still room for a player to choose to run counter to type, just as it's entirely possible to play an orcish mage or a Bosmer warrior in heavy armor, but you don't really see people insisting that it's "racist" to have racial differences in the game.

I appreciate Skyrims streamlined and somewhat open-ended nature, but I miss the depth of Morrowinds attributes. I can't help but feel that by defining your class upfront you really set the tone for how you play. It puts you more in a true RP mindset. "This is what I'm good at, and this is what I have focus on" as opposed to "This is what I plan on doing, but really I'm not better at it than anything else upfront".

Why do you need a little text box that says CLASS: WARRIOR to help you play? Why not just pick up a sword and go kill monsters if you wanna be a warrior?

I think it is good that they did something to fix the broken system in Oblivion, though I wouldn't be against having attributes done in a better way(something akin to Fallout could have worked).

I'm quite fond of the standard RPG system, where you have specific attribute points when rolling a new character. I was dissapointed that they ditched it.

Are you kidding me. The average man in the US is an overweight couch potato. I'll agree to your dumb strength penalty on female characters if male characters get a Doritos penalty on stamina.

Armor and weapons were not the super-heavy behemoths that a lot of people picture them to be. Actual armor, as opposed to dress armor, was made for movement and vigorous exercise, and even in ancient and medieval warfare, women did engage in it.

My advice- don't roll a female character if it breaks your reality, or intentionally gimp her if that's what you think is correct.

I agree with that. Attributes don't imply Classes though. I find Classes and Major/Minor Skills artificial, but Attributes are both natural and useful.

I've been giving this some thought. While individual preferences are varied as always, the theme I'm getting from these threads is the need for something... "else".. Something that is missing... Something we had before, but don't have now.

Attributes is the obvious villain, or their absence is at any rate. But I don't think they fulfil the hole that people are trying to fill. I think it is the sum of all parts and not the parts in themselves.

If you think about how you create a new character in Morrowind (I'm sticking with that game as that seems to be the game that the majority think got it right on character development, even though a lot was lost from Daggerfall), You choose a race. Right away your character is slightly liked by some races and slightly disliked by others. Then you choose your class. This has the immediate effect of filling out your spell book with some basic spells, or makes you a bit handy with a sword or hammer. Then you choose your birth sign which you can't change on a whim and might grant you a bonus, but then also a weakness.

In Skyrim, you choose your race. The end.

It's not hard to see why some are having a problem with this. But I don't think attributes have as much effect on your character as some of you think. Notice I didn't mention them before? I didn't because they were not that important to developing your initial character. In fact I think the modifiers you got from skills actually hurt character development in Morrowind. To get +5 modifiers, you had to hit things (if you could) with a spear to get maximum health, avoid using illusion so you didn't level your personality too much, or whatever it was that you did.

In short, you couldn't really experiment or just go out on a groovy wander. Well you could, but then when you levelled up, you had the charm of a cad and the health of a slug before too long. Azura forbid that you spend the first few levels of the game playing peaceful. Your first fight would have you missing with your sword 99% of the time and dying with one hit from a blighted rat because your health was so low.

In Skyrim, I can roleplay a blacksmith. On each level up, I can select maximum health. I could be level 30 easily just by using non combative skills. though my fighting would still svck, I would have a health pool large enough for my to have a fighting chance (pun intended) of getting away and hiring a bodyguard. So in that example, from a ropeplay perspective (which is what a lot of folks in these threads are trying to do), Skyrim wins.

What we have lost is the ability to define our characters at level one, but we have gained the ability to play in the style of our choosing and not have to rage quit because of a diseased rodent. In the long term, Skyrim offers us a better roleplaying experience, but you don't notice it until your character is defined. In Morrowind we had that definition a lot sooner.


What I would suggest is to bring back some level of class, but have it only apply to our starting character. Level 1, you are a fighter, a monk, a mage, a blacksmith. Your initial skills are raised in the areas you choose and maybe a bonus to their levelling speed. Then, as an added system, we have a character background (like we do in paper and pen RPG's) which you select your past. Depending on what you choose, some people will have a liking or a disliking to you (Mount and Blade has a system in place where you can select if you have a noble background or not), see further skill improvement and perhaps governs how agile you are (though I think that could be better handled with a perk tree).

This essentially, gives us what we had in Morrowind, without trying to figure out how to make attributes viable again.

sigh... the system wasn't broken in Oblivion. Was it perfect? No, no one here is making that case. Brokeness implies that it was impossible to use, which is complete and total bull. If you want to talk in hyperbole that is your choice, but coming at this discussion from that angle gets us nowhere.

If you stack the attribute/skill system next to the skill/perk system, I believe you will find that both are perfectly functional. The old system had some annoyances, but it did a better job at translating your character into the world and it was a richer system overall. The system in SKyrim is functional, and that is about the best thing you can say about it. The problem with the perk system is many-fold. First, perks are extremely dry and boring, being primarily relagated to increasing damage output, mitigation, or skill cost. These are all things that used to be incorporated into skills innately, but have been ripped out to fill out skill trees. Second, this new system does not provide any shred of flexibility that used to be in the game, primarily because skills are worthless if you haven't invested perks into them heavily. Additionally, the removal of attributes has affected many facets of gameplay that perks cannot adequately cover. Examples would be translating melee power between weapon groups, translating magical power between different schools, etc.

Essentially, perks should feel like additions to skills that further distinguish your character, however the opposite is true in Skyrim's case, where your character feels incomplete without perks. I agree with you that a system like the one in Fallout 3 wouldn't have been a bad idea, I think there are a lot of things they could have done to improve on the system that was present in Oblivion. Primarily, making attributes increasable in manner similar to skills (slower and more deliberate however) and possibly tweaking some attributes if they prove to be conflictory with some current things (my main concern is having speed as an attribute if character speed is fixed, because I would hate to introduce something that screws up the smooth new animations they have introduced into the gameplay) would have been a good starting point. I dislike the idea of having your attributes be static or extremely limited in growth. Attributes make sense to increase with time investment (for instance, growing stronger or more intelligent).

Overall, most of what I have said mirrors a huge post I made in the original thread, http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1394238-why-i-wish-attributes-werent-removed/page__st__156. Obviously, I am all for bringing back attributes, and I would be grateful to everyone if they could read that post and let me know what they think!

Any women that were able to compete with men on the battlefield were insanely rare exceptions to the rule. I'm not sure if you think strength is not really all that important or if you think the strength difference between men and women is fairly small, but both are mistaken.

Ugh, I hate classes. People actually want to pigeonhole their characters as soon as CC? This whole thread goes against my happy-go-lucky grain.

Beth isn't going to bring back the penalty on female characters, so there's no point in discussing it. So, like Vignar... "I was done talkin' anyway."

It's not pigeon-holing. Your character is free to choose whatever path he wants. My idea is purely for starting bonuses, nothing more.

In Oblivion you started out weak, slow, frail and stupid and ended up strong, fast, healthy and brilliant. I hated that. I modified Oblivion to make a character more developed on creation with less ability to add to attributes later on. Then it seemed like creating a character really mattered. That turned out to be very similar to the SPECIAL system in Fallout - your characters core attributes could only be changed a bit.

To me attributes are innate characteristics while skills are highly changeable. You are only potentially so strong/fast/intelligent.

In Skyrim it doesn't matter at all. Everybody is the same speed, same strength, equally intelligent ... and I do not think that health/stamina/magicka compensates for that.

Well that would be ok. It's sort of what the racials represent.

This whole discussion is reminding me that I actually really don't like the older CC. I took forever in Morrowind, restarting again and again, because I couldn't decide what to choose as major and minor skills, and when I finally started actually playing I regretted leaving one weapon out that ended up cooler than I thought it would be. In Oblivion some people got duped into taking default classes rather than building their own and got gimped as a result.

So yeah, these threads have convinced me that I'm not really neutral to the idea of attributes and starting classes- I'm against them. Skyrim's system is much better.

I never liked any of the classes in previous games. I always used a custom one. I'm glad they dropped them as they were. But every time I play Skyrim, I've a flame spell, and perhaps a fury spell (if I pick Altmer), but what if I don't want to use magicka? What if I'm an Orc Chef? (That's not a misspelling, I like to cook) Picking a class (Maybe not even as specific as Mage/Sorcerer/SpellSword - maybe just mage/warrior/rogue), gives me an element of customisation that I had in previous games, but not in this one.

Or doing the same by picking an optional background like I do in paper and pen, (or in the fully restored "Vampire - The Masquerade"). That way, it helps flesh out your starting character and gives me initial skills better suited to the character I want to play.

In Fallout 3, you have the G.O.A.T. Something like that would be nice. It doesn't define the whole game, it just makes starting easier for the game you want to play.

I'd rather Beth just gave us a pool of points to assign however we want to attributes, skills, whatever else. If I want to start with 23 strength and 66 agility, let me, even if I'm playing as an Orc. One problem with prior attribute implementations was that even though there were differences, they were so minor and everyone was so boringly average across the board. It was like playing Fallout with just fives running straight down your special sheet.

Celan you have your opinions and the rest have theirs. You enjoy a streamlined game where everything starts out the same. I think that flies in the face of what an RPG should be personally. Women aren't as strong as men. Women are also overweight, so your little comment about Dorito's and US men, beyond being offensive, especially if you aren't from the US, is fairly silly. In addition, saying "Beth isn't going to bring back the penalty on female characters, so there's no point in discussing it." they may not, but you saying it doesn't make it fact. They could very well reverse course if enough people spoke up.