Pretty much ^this^. Although tighter spreads are actually less likely to be fatal since you're not taking out multiple organs and such. I remember reading that weapons skill will affect the spread and steadiness of the weapon, but nothing was said about damage itself. I'm kind of hoping it does affect damage since it gives me incentive to put points in my skills. Maxing out your damage is important when DT can greatly reduce the damage dealt.

Not if it starts at max damage.

Yeah, all the people saying that the damage progression lets you use your favorite weapon longer (like the hunting rifle or what have you) are being a bit silly. The gun would be doing its max damage, the damage of Fallout 3 with 100 in the skill, not the beginning damage when your skill is like 20.

I would prefer skill to affect accuracy (i.e. gun sway and spread), reload times, chances of jamming, and the rate of degradation.

That said, I doubt Obsidian would make the skills this way. Mainstream people don't like missing when they have the cursor dead on their target.

Because if i remember right,when you free aimed or aimed manually in fallout 3 your skill still effected that.....for instance....say you have an hunting rifle & your gun skill is 55,and you aim the curser on the target you have a chance of missing still....or your curser was aimed at the head,it may hit the arm or body....but if your gun skill was 100....you are more likely to hit exactly where you aim on the body....also different weapons had different spread too....hope that makes sense....& thats how i found it worked anyway.

And that would be a valid argument, if we didn't do the aiming ourselves.

In a game where you press "Shoot that!" and the character does as you say, it works, because you're not aiming, the character is.

But in a game where you are doing the aiming, the skill should logically only affect the chance of the shot landing where you aim, because it would be silly otherwise.

So, by your logic, if I aim at someone's arm, the higher my skill the smaller the chance of me hitting his arm would be. How does that make sense?! If I aim at something non-vital, that's what I aim at, the character isn't supposed to override my decision and go "Screw you, I'm shooting for the head!".

A shot between the eyes will always do the same amount of damage, regardless of who is the shooter and how skilled he is. The odds of it happening may vary, but when it lands somewhere, it'll do the damage irrespective of the shooter's skill.

I posted about this back when it was announced that the big and small gun skills were going to become one guns skill. I understand both sides of this discussion. On one hand, it is an RPG, not a realistic FPS, but a little realism never hurts IMO.

I'd liked to see the weapon + ammo type always do the same amount of damage depending on it's condition, regardless of skill. Keep skills separate (small guns, big guns, energy weapons), and as you level up, you become more accurate with those weapon classes. In addition to accuracy, your skill with that weapon class combined with your repair skill determines how your able to maintain your weapon. For example, a character with a high small gun skill will be able to better maintain weapons in the small guns class, so they will degrade slower and require repairs less often. When it is time to repair your weapon, your weapon skill averaged with your repair skill will determine the max condition you are able to restore the weapon too. The higher the weapon condition, the higher its damage will be, so the end result is almost the same (higher skill = higher damage) except in a more realistic way. Higher weapon skill would also allow you to reload faster and more reliable.

If you gun skill is low, your weapon will degrade faster and need repairs more often. Even with a high repair skill, since you are not skilled with that weapon, you're not going to be able to repair it to a high condition. A low skill will make you reload slower and have a greater chance of fumbling during reloading.

A completely different way of doing it would be to implement a leveling system like in Oblivion. I never played Oblivion before Fallout 3. I just bought it a few weeks ago during the Steam sale. I've only played it for a few hours, but I like how it works. Rather than getting XP for killing things and completing quests, and after reaching a set number of XP you level up and assign skill points to skills, in Oblivion your skill level increases as you use that skill. You can also pay for training to increase your skills too. I think a system like that would work well with Fallout.

The skilleffect on accuracy in realtime shooting wasn't really all that big. One was fine even when never investing on a gunskill, which effectively made the a gunskill a mere buff instead of something necessery for combatitive characters. Even when just considering the damage, putting your skill at 50 was very sufficient to not warrant a need to raise it any higher. That's how I percieved it anyway.

Ha. I haven't posted here in awhile. Things are too crazy lately. That said, it's hilarious to see that this is still a point of discussion. I'm sure it's long buried by now, but http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1078427-thoughts-on-how-the-real-time-aiming-could-be-improved/page__p__15699831&#entry15699831 with a lot of great feedback & tweaks from intelligent posters (such as UnDeCafIndeed).

It ended up being quite a lengthy thread, but it clearly illustrates which side of the coin I agree with. Maybe the OP will find some value in it.