You have to take things into your own hands. You can't just sit back and hope for a stroke of luck.

Here's a slightly insane hypothesis for why Alchemy was put as a Stealth skill, rather than a Magic skill.

Now, I agree with those saying that what Todd clearly meant was that it really doesn't matter whether Alchemy is Stealth or Magic, since you are what you play.

Nevertheless, if it doesn't matter, why have these classifications of Warrior, Mage, and Thief, at all? Notice that this classification actually occurs in the game (it's not just a way Todd uses to describe the game):

(from the GI update on the UI)

Again, why classify the skills in this way? Now, one answer might be: just for UI convenience.

But another answer - and here's the crazy hypothesis - is that this has to do with birthsigns. Recall that Daggerfall only had three constellations (they weren't even birthsigns, then) - Warrior, Mage, Thief. So perhaps at character creation you get to choose one of these birthsigns, which confers a slight bonus upon the skills underneath? In which case it would have been unfair/unbalanced if choosing the Mage birthsign got you a bonus to seven skills, whereas choosing the Thief birthsign got you a bonus to only five skills..... Maybe?

Worth a look as background: http://www.imperial-library.info/content/history-and-depictions-constellations-0

I read a series of books once by Robin Hobbs (a woman) that was one of the best fantasy series I ever read. (Assassin's Apprentice, Royal Assassin, Assassin's Quest) ... and in those books the main character learns Alchemy for the purposes of assassination. It's very detailed, thorough, and was used to great benefit throughout the story, such that I (once having wondered how Alchemy ties to Thievery) saw all of the benefits to it. In fact, I think Bethesda should assign one of their game developers who is working on Alchemy to READ THOSE BOOKS for ideas. She pretty much masters the entire concept and as such I think those books would be the GO-TO books on the subject.

If Bethesda doesn't catch all the uses for Alchemy from those books, then perhaps a Modder could do it and add it in later....

Here are some uses I can think of:

Potions for changing shape or form
1) become smoke, seep through the cracks in the wall to gain access to a place that is locked too tightly for any lockpicking.
2) become someone else, roleplay that you are that person, try to fool the mark, and then gain access to the place you're trying to get into to steal something... now you need to engage the Impersonation skill in the Thief skillset.

Potions for death or capture
1) poisons, obviously, but just not any poison. Create a new kind of sensor in the game's design that alert the guards if the poison is obvious like some amatuer would create. If you kill someone like this, it can be traced back to you via some kind of magical trackers (guards who can sense magic), but if you create a potion at the higher levels of skill, its untraceable. Or because you're a master, you can create a potion without any magic use, with just raw ingredients, that can't be discovered by any known means. Then you get away with it. You could also add in another feature: fear of poison leading to new NPC behavior such as wine testing. If you poisoned someone's food, the Captain's jester (ye olde wine taster, ehem, TESTER) may take the hit FOR them, and now everyone will be out looking for an assassin and it could all lead them back to you.

2) sleep potion ... to make others pass out when you kiss them. Add a kiss ability into the Mod so when a dialogue box comes up, you may try to kiss anyone, or they may try to kiss you. If a girl tries to kiss you, you can resist, or accept, accept if you've been "charmed" by yet another spell, where you have no choice but to kiss her ... and if she used a sleep potion, when you kiss her, it activates on YOU, and she captures you. There would have to be some kind of mini-game at this point where you wake up inside a covered wagon being hauled along, and you find a way to break out, kill your captors and get your loot back from behind their seat in the chest.

Buffs and enchantments are obvious uses of potions and don't need to be spelled out here.

I have a theory about the classifying of skills. Now that we choose perks, to prevent people to choose a perk for some random skill they haven't even used. At every level up, you can only choose a perk for a skill of the skill class the contributed most to your level up. It's a very flawed system, but it's a possibility.

Yeah, it's no longer a learn_by_doing system If you can choose a destruction magic perk even if you have only rised your sneak skill. If Beth is going to fit this new perk system to the old system they must do something like that.

I like these. If they could leverage the game engine to provide more interesting interactions and/or effects possible in alchemy, not merely limited the poison/potion dichotomy, then i think it would make the skill still useful even if the more power potion/poison effects have been nerfed.
The alchemy system in oblivion was deeper than any i've seen in any other game, but issues in addition to its high level balance problems made the system awkward and annoying at times. For example, the potion naming system was tedious, even if the basic name input is unchanged, i hope a new system would be more intelligent about organization and imeplentation to keep the entering of text to a minimum (perhaps a player-customized recipe book to easily recreate previous concoctions). I hope i can resonably expect to see good improvements to the alchemy sub-menu interface al well.

Here are some of my ideas for interesting aspects of alchemy, not seen in the vanilla games so far (i could not personally say if the same can be said for mods):

~Perhaps the Mages guild (or other magical organizations/shops) could offer amongst their services some sort of amchemy station or stationary alchemy equipment where you could make more powerful or perhaps more numerous potions than you could otherwise.

~Alchemy could be used in conjunction with the armorer/smithing skill to add enchantments or other improvements to armor or weapons that are not limited to the one-time-use poisons of Oblivion.

~Potions could be blessed at altars to gods (aedric or daedric) to improve their effectiveness or create unique effects (these could then be used as above with armors and the like to create your own legendary artifacts). you'd probably have to make significant offerings or perform some related side or unmarked quest to create these things. For example, the recipe for Daedric Lava Whiskey could be purchased from a follower of a daedric god and following a lengthy and complicated brewing process you could return to the diety's shrine to have it blessed and converted into its final state with amazing potency. It would be a great repeatable quest.

~Vendors or quest givers would make available potions with truly unique effects (think: conjuration or the scripted spell effects in Oblivion) that could be used in exaordinary circumstances or for very specific objectives (For example: a levitation potion, otherwise unheardof in Skyrim, is smuggled from Morrowind and is given to the player to complete an otherwise impossible thive's guild mission)

~Alchemy in Oblivion became very personalized once you were skilled in it, you built up a repitoire of often used effects and ingredients. Perhaps professional alchemists in Skyrim could be similar. You could even hear mention of such things in NPC conversations, "Felen Relas is truly a master at creating healing potions, the potions he sells are considerably better than anyone else's plus they cure you of disease and rid your body of poison." Ok, so it wouldn't be as canned as that dialogue (hopefully), but you get the idea. most merchants would have the standard selection of potions, but some would have ones that are more powerful or carry additional benefits/effects. The special versions would be more expensive and could be named after their creator so you'd know where to get more, "Felen Relas' panacea."

~Finally, as a simple matter of implementation, I'd like to see multi-step alchemy where ingredients must be mixed separately before being combined to create more powerful potions, recipes for such items could be occasionally found to help the player figure out the rules of the system before creating their own. Going further, perhaps recipes could call for parts of the concoction to be stewed over fire for a time before becoming viable. Such a mechanic would make the common fireplace or camp fire much more useful. Such things could be implemented as, or be part of, perks. like a master of alchemy can stew a single ingredient creating a single ingreditent potion which provides an interesting twist on the master perk from Oblivion.

I dont use Alchemy so it doesn't matter to me if its in the game or not.

Alchemy is not magic it is a science. I think it fits perfect in the rouge/utilitarian category.

if he means alchemy ain't OP anymore then its a very good thing.

potions were wayyy too over powered to be honest.

If you are going to have Alchemy in the game, why can't you also create the proper MOOD for it? I hated carrying around the funny-sounding tools like the Alembic what-stem-bibulator thingie and various other huge tools you're supposed to be carrying in your backpack like they are all so small, then stand there brewing potions in the middle of the street like a wierdo. This was so stupid in my opinion. Why not have large Middle-Ages-looking witche's labratory with attached greenhouse filled with wonderous plants of all kinds growing there and a series of huge steel pots suspended from chains over flaming fires? You could even buy some of the ingredients there, but most are set aside for business applications or for use by the higher-up mages with priority over you. So you still have to adventure to find the stuff, but when you craft it, it should be in a cool environment that makes sense. Every city could have such a location, but you can't craft new potions in the wild of any real quality.

You could still craft some easy, minor, enchantments to cure some diseases or help you in combat by poisoning your blade and whatnot, but the truly awesome potions should be brewed in the brewing location with the proper tools, and taking a certain amount of time to prepare (cook) them. There could even be lab accidents where there is an explosion and a huge ball of smoke fills the room and when the smoke clears, all the items in the game could be painted over using Skyrim's snow engine except modded to be black in color so it looks like soot has fallen over everything in the room. The snow engine could be used (accelerated) and masked by the huge smokeball explosion so that in the time before the smoke clears, the room could be fully dusted with black snow (which would hopefully appropriate soot) .... could be a lot of fun to "experience" the full alchemy of say, Harry Potter, or something even cooler like that envisioned by TSR.

Combined with idea mentioned above of then having to take certain potions to magical locations in the world to "seal" them or "complete" them in some way (such as by dipping the potion in a certain spring of water in only one place in the whole world), some potions take on quest-like relationship to the character. Like what if you had to do all of this just to create a potion to help you change shape into your target's brother so you could fool him into giving you something he would only give his brother because it's been deemed an impossible item to steal. I mean half the adventure of doing the theft would be just creating this potion so you could pull it off. Be awesome!

I liked the way potions were handled in The Witcher, you still had to gather ingredients but things were much better organized something similar would be nice....

Video in 6 parts showing what alchemy was *really* about, really good stuff, I highly recommend sitting it through:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ8TNCYtTV4

So for the spiritual and philosophical aspect of it, I'm agreeing that original alchemy feels misplaced in Thief. However, other than a reference to orienting with the stars (which is btw not important in the game, thankfully I have to say), it never felt "that deep" and we were creating mere medical potions based on herb lore instead, which *does* seem to fit more neatly within Thief (or Social/Lore as I prefer to refer it as).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbalism
What do we have in the game, alchemy or herbalism? If we rename alchemy to herbalism maybe it'll make more sense to have it as a Thief (or as I'll explain below, a social/lore based) class. We have apparatuses for 4 of the 7 alchemy steps, but the last step in alchemy would disallow the result to be used as a potion.

If we call it Alchemy, the effects should be broadened to include more of the magical effects, but we get an all round potion system that is less powerful than magic.
If we call it Herbalism, the effects should be narrowed down to include mostly restorative effects, probably more powerful than restorative magic itself.

There have already been requests for bigger separation, incl myself.



Instead of locking into this concept of "stealth/thief", try to consider it as social/lore umbrella skill, where thievery is just a subset of it. That way all the other skills in this category makes more sense. A thief is someone who needs to "know his targets" and may have to deal with social manipulation to achieve his goals. Consider it all remaining lore that does not fit into combat or magic. "Thief/Stealth" makes it extremely narrow and hard to make skills from, when forced to divide everything into three categories like this. If you call it social/lore, alchemy as herbalism makes a perfect fit, as does all the rest of the skills. Outside of magic/combat, it deals with interactions with others, and pure science.

How do you feel about mages casting spells that pick locks, or hide themselves, or produce weapons, armor, bows, arrows, or that knock enemies over, or that artificially boost one's strength?

On Nirn Magic is not the same thing as it is in our world. On Earth things that are unexplained or unknown are often refered to as magic, but on Nirn Magic is real, known, quantifiable, studied, and practiced. There aren't charlatans using illusions and new technological innovations passed off as magic to entertain people, there are real magicians doing real magic. That also means the whole "any sufficiantly advanced technology is magic" quote (or any variations) is also not applicable to Nirn, if it doesn't use whatever forces generate magic on Nirn then it's not magic.

That means we have to redefine what magicians are on Nirn. They are people who cast magic, period. Alchemy does not require one to cast magic. Just knowing enough mundane and magical qualities of certain ingredients doesn't make you a mage, it makes you an alchemist. And stop bringing up real world alchemy definitions also, they don't apply either.

Alchemy simply doesn't belong in the mage skills. It doesn't necessarily belong in the stealth skills either, but that has always been a miscellaneous catch all category anyway.

To elaborate... Doesn't a mage still know how to wield a sword? Perhaps not as well as a fighter, but he still knows, right? And can create one. Though such things are not his specialty, he's not oblivious to them either.

Why is the inverse true then?

How has this gone on for 7 pages when the OP was wrong? Plenty of people have explained it, but I'll quote him again, with the following sentence that people don't pay much attention to:


"It" is not "alchemy". "It" is "being in our stealth category".

It could be rearranged to say: "We do have smithing, enchanting is back as a skill, and then alchemy we're sort of treating as being in our stealth category now, but it doesn't matter that much anymore. We have a blended skill list, so alchemy is sort of the most magical of the stealth skills."

He chose to rearrange it to forewarn listeners of something that may be a confusing change to some, so as to maybe alleviate the blow. He obviously didn't count on people without listening comprehension.

That still makes it a stealth skill (:bonk:)

What does thieving have to do with magical (or even just chemical) formulation design?

Put another way... What does burglary have to do with designing heart medication?
(:lol: other than stealing research from competitors)

Think of alchemy as herbalism, making it a strictly scientific method. Then think of "Thief" as an umbrella category covering social/lore, and science fits lore very well. "Thieving" is just *part* of the social branch of it.

Why not think of 'Herbalism' as herbalism? Surely they have holistic healers that use plants to brew remedies; and are not versed in the magical concocting of chameleon potions; or using daedra parts (surely the common citizen doesn't have folk recipes that use Daedra parts :shocking:).

Why would they? Alchemy does the same thing in the same manner. Why wouldn't herbalists skilled in brewing remedies from common ingredients be able to concoct chameleon or water breathing potions when they become more skilled?


To put it more simply, you don't have to be that great at alchemy to use alchemy. Just because some backwoods healer can't make a potion of reflect magic doesn't mean he isn't doing alchemy when he makes his home remedies.

How about this... Its a bit out there, but its an attempt at a parallel...

Say a townsperson knows that mixing five plants and some part of a mole creates a neat potion (of some effect that they find useful). They know this because their parents knew this, and its a family recipe; everyone they know knows it. Nobody knows why it works.

An Alchemist would know why it works even if he(or she) had never heard of it before. So long as they know the properties of the ingredients, they would understand why it worked (might even kick themselves for not thinking of it before).

The point is this... The alchemist can devise the recipe, because he knows why it should work. I can't fathom the notion that stealth/thief training teaches anything of formula design; though I can see a thief guild selling stolen recipes; That's not Alchemy training; That's a cook book.

**Funny thing years ago (real world news that wasn't actually funny). A college student wound up paralyzed and nobody knew why. It turned out that a few friends were trying to mix up a drug. They gave their 'recipe' to the authorities, and a chemist tried to duplicate the substance to figure out what they had made ~and they couldn't do it. What they figured out later was that their work habits prevented them from making the mistakes that the kids had made. When they purposely mixed it up sloppy and careless, they found what the kid had taken.

Ok, what about it?

The townsperson IS doing alchemy. He's very low level at it obviously. He could learn more about it if he studied, and he would have to have absolutely zero magical talent to do so.

I don't know what to say; I did update my post though.

As far as I'm concerned (and it is a personal opinion)... In the fiction I've read, Alchemy and 'cook book following' are not the same thing. For an AAA game, I suppose it doesn't matter much; but it still irritates that Alchemy would be lumped into the Stealth category.

Just like there is a difference between a guy who can make a passable spaghetti and meatballs recipie and a master chef, there's a difference between a guy who just follows a well known family recipe with common ingredients and a master alchemist who knows hundreds of ingredients inside and out and can create new potions with virtually any effect imaginable.

Despite these major differences in skill, the former two are both cooking, and the latter two are both doing alchemy.

And like I've said before, "Stealth" is mostly just skills lumped in from elsewhere. Mercantile doesn't fit in Stealth either, and Archery fits more in combat than stealth.

This.

It's funny this thread has got to 8 pages when even the OP has given up.