After reading another of the daily threads about "the speech skill is basically useless/no it's not, just not required", I got to thinking. We have a Mage College. We have the Companions, the Dark Brotherhood, Thieves Guild, etc. But all of those are basically story/quest-lines which allow you to put your battle skills to use (or theiving/sneaking).

We have speech and crafting skills, but Skyrim treats them as essentially supplemental to battle skills. gamesas - if you're going to have non-combat skills, try to add in some story and quest lines which have very little combat, and which are based upon those skills. You could have a merchants guild, a smith's guild, etc. You could have stories where you basically must have high levels of speech/persuasion to complete those quests, high levels of smithing, or enchanting, or alchemy.

Morrowind kind of sort of did this - the Imperial Cult quests certainly had some combat, but many of them were about learning to craft, and crafting items to, e.g. heal sick people, or using a healing spell to cure someone of a disease. Don't know why we can't have some quests like that in Skyrim?

Well, it's probably too late to make any suggestions that would be incorporated in DLC, because I'm sure they're already working on those and have been since even before the release of the game, but, perhaps if it's not too late, maybe you could do such things in some of the DLC?

Bards College.

Not much of a guild.

Merchant related quests could be real easy to add to the game. These guys needs stuff to sell, go find it for them. They also have to have people that owe them money. And, people who owe them goods or someone who stole from them. When asking a Merchant for any Work, these quests could be given out. The reward could be one level of Training in Speech for some or all of the quests instead of money or goods. Or, the merchant could offer you a discount.

Because that lets you take advantage of crafting and Speech. It does it sometime after you
And the times when you


Oh wait... No it doesn't.

Yeah, I did some of the Bard's College stuff, but I was totally disappointed. At first, I thought Skyrim might have a new music-based magical system (like some of the Final Fantasy games, Dark Age of Camelot, and others have had), where you could play instruments to achieve certain effects. I also thought it would be non-combat, lore related quests.

It did add some Lore, but mostly it was about running off to tombs and engaging in combat. Yeah, that just didn't sit well with me. And then,

There's work you can do for the east empire trading company, or just plain killing pirates.

a merchant guild. do I hear "time to make a mod"?

seriously would be a sweet mod to add

I was just about to post this very thing, so I'll simply second this!