Ah - that's an aspect I hadn't considered. I tend to forget about solutions that rely on game-world data, rather than game-mechanical changes. However, I'd say that this still kind of svcks - if you exclude master trainers and natural gains, each character would end up with the same values in misc skills, i.e. those imposed by the limits of the trainers they find. In that case, a character's misc skills aren't any reflection of the character's origins or actions; they're not even a reflection of the player's strategic choices. They're simply a consequence of the skill level of whatever trainers are available. Again, that might be reasonable for balance, but it's not too satisfying.


While there was a 1.08 patch, it wasn't at all important - the only changes it made were cosmetic. Specifically, it contained a hack to automatically restore the HUD when it disappears on level-up due to the initial hack to get the level change to show up on the character screen. However, given that the HUD-restoration hack involved the use of an invisible NPC and forcegreeting, there's more to go wrong. It's also out of my modding comfort-zone (i.e. scripting, scripting and scripting), so I'm less familiar with the sorts of things which might go wrong. I've had one or two reports of GCD supposedly making sneak-attacks impossible - as well as some dialogue weirdness. Maybe they were mistaken/unrelated-to-GCD, but it could be that something has gone a little wrong with the whole invisible-NPC hack.

While it was nice to finally find a way to fix the disappearing HUD issue, there's some evidence that the fix might sometimes cause trouble - there's certainly more to go wrong. Personally, I probably wouldn't use it. The temporarily-disappearing-HUD might be a little odd, but it's not going to cause any real problem. 1.08 is a cosmetic fix that may potentially cause real problems (even if it's pretty unlikely, and it shouldn't in theory). Unless disappearing HUDs annoy you immensely, you're probably better off without it.


I'm looking at this at the moment. It's certainly possible. The only question is how to do it in such a way that it's balanced, satisfying, adjustable and doesn't throw up a load more bugs/incompatibilities. If I get it working, I'd also take the opportunity to adjust/fix/improve some of the more annoying aspects of GCD [e.g. birthsign attribute bonuses not being long-term advantages; health for fighters being too low; mages having a large-yet-annoying incentive to grind endurance-based skills; too many scripts running constantly, or starting repeatedly...]. Don't hold your breath just yet though.



It'd be nice if there were a way to weight mercantile gains according to the importance of the trade. E.g. you'd compare the value of the item being bought/sold with the PC's total wealth, and base mercantile gains on that. So a trade over a 100g item would be a significant means of mercantile increase for a PC with a total wealth in items/gold of 1000g, but for a PC with 50,000g, the 100g trade would be judged insignificant, and not worthy of any mercantile increase. Another way to approach this would be to have NPCs refuse to haggle over low-value items with rich PCs - i.e. once you've got 50,000, the NPC selling a 100g item would no longer allow you to pay less than 100g, so the mercantile increase wouldn't be possible anyway.
Of course neither of these would work in Morrowind, even if they could be scripted, since there's no reliable way to determine the PC's wealth. If all the calculations were based on what the PC were carrying, he could simply stash his valuable items somewhere temporarily, so as to appear poor, and allow easy mercantile gains. Although I suppose one way to address this would be to base things on NPC perception, and give NPCs some memory/assumed-communication. I.e. once the PC is known in some region as being wealthy (e.g. after having traded some high-value items with local sellers), NPCs would refuse to haggle over low-value items.

Anyway, I guess such a fix is unlikely. I do think it'd be the right way to go about things though. I don't think the problem with mercantile is with the ability to increase it easily for PC's who have it as a misc skill. Rather it's the ability to increase it easily for any character, regardless of the insignificance of the context. For some skills it might be quite hard to get things to adapt to context, but for mercantile it's pretty simple in theory - you only allow gains where the trade is over a significant amount to the PC.

In general, most skills would be less 'abusable' in this way with some time pressure. If the world didn't wait around for you to be ready before taking on any quest, and instead changed dynamically in spite of your inaction, then there'd be a price for most pointless-but-time-consuming skill grinding activity. As it is, there's no time pressure, so achieving balance will always be near impossible. Consider the reason grinding misc skills feels "stilted and awkward" - it's because in any reasonable world, such a character would never act in this way. Why would he never act in this way? Because he'd have more urgent stuff to do. However, if you remove the time-pressure from such a world, there's suddenly nothing that's urgent - in such a world, it makes perfect sense for a character to grind away at misc skills.
The balance of game worlds without any time pressure is always going to svck to some extent - largely because a world without time-pressure is a horribly flawed model of any remotely coherent world. A player's common-sense expectations will naturally clash with the absurdity of such a world. Balance can be improved a little here and there, but ultimately it's an exercise that's doomed to failure.

ok,nice of you


yes,you nailed my reasoning there,sounds very good,will certainly try it out :goodjob:

I agree. But your roleplay "skill" may prevent you from doing things that deviate from your character mind profile.
For example (I usually play righteous chars), while I will "take my time to bargain for one extra septim" with Arrille (legal), I will not empty Fargoth's ring (bad thing!). For quests, I may also stop doing missions from a specific NPC if they don't match with my roleplay, even if there would not be any penalty on my char.


Yes it is awkward. But I think if you want to do it, you have to be able, even if it takes 10x more time.
It is *your* time you spend. If it is hard enough to make misc skills reach high levels, then players will content themselves with medium proficiencies in these skills, and that'd be good that way I feel.

With GCD mod, this is exactly what happens with my chars: when I don't select mercantile as a major or minor skill, I work "hard" to boost it to level 40-50, then I just stop because it is too boring to get it to higher values. I may give up at 40 or at 60 depending on my motivation: on my choices. I like it that way.


True. That's why it has to be hard "enough" to raise misc skills. Having caps will do the job, but I don't like the drawbacks that come along with that solution.


Sure, but I hate making decisions about in which order I should use specific skills before I reach the next level up.
They -are- decisions, but they considerably alter the way you play in an unnatural and boring way, IMO.

That's why I felt a great joy when I found and tried GCD mod.
That's why I would really appreciate if you consider keeping the compatibility between BTBGI and GCD for the next versions

I don't remember being forced to find any ingredients in the wilderness.
Even with the "service requirement" mod, I'm almost always able to find a merchant that sells what I need within a shorter time than if I'd have to collect them by hand.


With an alchemy of ~30-40 and using 4,000 ingredients, I can get (maybe) 50 levels in Alchemy.
If I spend the equivalent gold value in trainers, I may get 5-10 levels max.
I guarantee you the purchase of these ingredients is worth the benefit.


Sorry I'm no expert in modding/compatibility :-/ but I get your point.


I can easily infer the meaning of it
And I'm glad you agree.


I'm ok with large selection (we could even increase the default quantities), but not with the self-refiling thing.


Only 2 "compatible" cheap ingredients are sufficient to get Alchemy and Intelligence maxed in a very short time.



I only try to say these potion are overpowered because you can get them early in the game really using these refiling ingredients.
Such potions are fine for high level chars.

I'm not sure I understand the enchanting changes. If I have an enchanting skill of 5, a petty soulgem full of scrib, and an enchanted ring that needs to be charged, can I use the soulgem to fill it myself? When I try, I lose the soulgem but the ring's charge doesn't change.

Edit: never mind, I see now that self-recharging is disabled along with self-enchanting.

Um... no, it isn't.

As for the rest of the replies, they'll have to wait until I'm off work.

Wow...how have i missed this one. This mod addresses most of my issues with Morrowind. It's my second favorite game (sorry, still a svcker for X-com). I'm definately in favor of the the Hard stop of very very very slow increase of misc skills. Ideally, I think it would really make the different races and classes stand out more (and probably make Chargen time double as you agonize over which skills to take as Major and Minor).

Questions about Better Clothes

Hey BTB!

I've been running BTB v4.1 and today copied over the 4.2 ESPs to my data files folder to replace the existing ones. Loaded my save game, and there were no problems.


Then I read about the Better Clothes alternate ESP which I realised I would also need. In my Data Files folder i had at that point got three "Better Clothes" ESPs, namely Better Clothes (BTB Edit).esp , Better Clothes v1.1.esp and Better Clothes Patch.esp

I removed Better Clothes (BTB edit).esp from the Data Files folder and replaced the Better Clothes v1.1.esp with the new bundled BTB v4.2 "Better Clothes v1.1 (BTB edit).esp" and was greeted with a ream upon ream of errors upon loading my save game, seemingly most scripts failing to load, firemoth meshes not being found etc etc

When i put the "Better Clothes (BTB edit).esp" back in the data files folder, the game loaded without any errors, so hopefully that solved my issues. My only real questions are..

1/ Should I have started a new game?
2/ Do I still need the Better Clothes patch.esp
3/ How come I need both of the BTB edited ESPs?


Hope this doesn't cause you to tear your hair out at user incompetence, I'm appealing to the pedant in you to help me out here!

To an extent, yes, the availability of trainers (barring master trainers and attribute requirements) is going to put a limit of your skill levels. But there's enough variables at play here that it shouldn't feel like a "hard" limit:

1) Trainers can only train up to their own skill level, which varies from trainer to trainer. Even if you know which non-master trainers are the best for each skill (unlikely), there's still the issue of whether or not they'll even deal with you (assuming a mod like Service Requirements, and/or if you're just the type of player who goes around indiscriminately murdering people).

2) The attribute requirement will make it easier to level skills for which you have major/minor skills sharing the same governing attribute, but more difficult for skills whose governing attribute isn't linked to any of your major/minor skills, since you would essentially have to pay for any kind of a multiplier for those stats. This actually could be a whole new avenue of discussion in its own right, which will undoubetly careen head-first down the same path this one is on.

3) It's very unlikely that anyone will spend the amount of money it would require to raise all of their misc skills to even the maximum levels offered by non-master trainers (assuming trade-balancing mods like BTBGI and HotFusion's Economy Adjuster that increase the cost of training and the mercantile & speechcraft skills of NPCs who offer training, respectively), meaning that prioritizing which skills one wants to raise would certainly qualify their misc skill levels (in my opinion, of course) as a reflection of strategic decision. This goes especially if master training is taken into consideration.



It would be nice. But, like you said, I doubt very much it would be possible.

However, bear in mind that a combination of my mod and the MCP does add a significant level of difficulty to bartering, since my mod removes the disposition bonus for successful bargains and the MCP makes the disposition penalties for failed ones permanent. So, at this point, even haggling over a single septim carries some inherent risks - at least far more than it did before.



I think this statement very closely sums up the major point that we are both in agreement about - there's no deterrent in the game for grinding your misc skills. In fact, it actually works backwards, since the only "time-pressure" is that the game levels with you as your major/minor skills increase, and this can be avoided altogether by focusing solely on your misc skills. Any way you slice this, I'm sure that we're also both in agreement here that this is just broken as all hell.

Yeah, cutting off all natural growth for misc skills is harsh, but I firmly believe that it's going to take action that's just as harsh as the game is broken in this regard in order to balance it. The only real question is going to be how this decision will fare in the realm of "balance vs. realism vs. gameplay", which unfortunately is going to vary from player to player. I personally see the decision of which misc skills to invest my hard-earned cash on raising as a mere extension - if not an evolution - of a level system where you have some degree of control of how your character grows at each level-up. Whether a player agrees with me in this respect, or with you in that it merely turns "grind for experience" into "grind for cash" goes back to that "chicken-or-the-egg" thing I brought up earlier.



I'll drink to that.

Hell, who am I kidding? I'll drink to Tuesday.



If I may wax philosophical here, for a moment...

Typically, in a video game, 99.9% of players are going to act purely out of their own best interests. Any consideration they show for the feelings of any other characters in the game will be only because they think that they will ultimately stand to benefit from it somehow (the NPC is quest-vital, I may get a worse ending, etc.) This is because most players are at least intelligent enough to separate fantasy from reality, and are thus able to understand that being a violent sociopath in a video game does not carry with it the same conseqeunces as it would in real life.

It could be argued that people are of very much the same mindset even in real life. The only reason that many of us don't do things that are horrible and illegal is that there are serious enough risks and consequences to make at least some of us think twice about doing so. But even those of us that are truly "good" on the inside (not that I believe such people even exist), will not necessarily feel compelled to extend that goodness to video game characters that aren't actually real people. They can't think, they can't feel, and they can't truly appreciate any real consideration you show towards them (or hold a grudge against you if you don't) beyond the meager restrictions of their programming.

Most players, regardless of inherent personality type, will approach a video game in very much the same manner as Spock would approach real life: by identifying whichever course of action will result in the most desirable outcome for themselves and then taking it. Thus, the only true deterrent for any type of immoral behavior in a video game is going to be the same sort of deterrent that's used in real life: the threat of having the city guard hunt you down and shove a nightstick up your ass.

(Cont.)

See, you're thinking about players who have lives, and thus don't feel like wasting hours of it for miniscule skill gains. I'm thinking - very specifically - of players who don't.

Guess which category I fall under?



The problem here is that there's not a whole lot of options for balancing misc skills as a whole. Yes, they need to be made more difficult to raise in order to comensate for the obvious advantage that raising them does not make the game harder, whereas leveling major/minor skills does. And just so we're clear:

Time-consuming =/= harder

Period. Exclamation mark, even. This one factoid alone is essentially the entire thesis of my proposed changes. Misc skills must have some drawback to balance them other than the fact that they're a bigger waste of time than majors and minors, otherwise Morrowind boils down to nothing more than a big waste of time. And I'm sure that's not what any of us want.

And yes, before you say it, I'm well aware that a great deal of skills in this game, even at their most legitimate, will be subject to a certain degree of grinding at some point. Sort of like Galsiah alluded to above, grinding is something that you're never going to get rid of, particularly in a game like Morrowind. But you can do your best to minimize it wherever you can. And, to me, nuking the growth of misc skills altogether just seems like the best solution, and the idea grows on me more and more as I continue to discuss it here and I'm challenged to explore and defend its merits.

Again, consider everything I've done in my mod to remove the concept of cash grinding from the game entirely. Now weigh the "grinding" for cash you would then engage in (for the sake of this argument, let's also assume you're using Economy Adjuster, so you don't end up swimming in cash even with BTB's Game Improvements) to pay for misc skill training versus the "grinding" you would otherwise engage in to raise those misc skills the "natural" way - and that's not even counting if you're using a mod that slows down the growth of misc skills. Which honestly feels like more of a grind to you?



I agree with this statement, actually. Many times, when I actually find the time to play Morrowind, I find myself avoiding using certain skills because I want to save them for another level up. But again, I find that your frustration in that vein actually supports my idea for stopping natural misc skill growth more than anything.

Consider this: it takes ten major/minor skill gains to level up. Even if all ten levels were gained towards a single governing attribute, none of them would actually go to waste. Now, consider your that misc skillset exists - perhaps solely - to supplement the natural growth of your major and minor skills, as opposed to the other way around, how I imagine that it's more often than not treated. Because you would actually have to pay to raise your misc skills at your own convenience, you would then assume full control over how they influence the skills that you should be raising naturally and - most importantly - without worry over how they would affect your attribute gains.

I mean, honestly, that seems like a much better setup to me than having to micro-manage how and when I use 27 different skills - all of which level through use, but only 10 of which decide when I gain the level that all 27 of them are contributing to.



Two things.

One, you're absolutely right. It's far easier to simply raise the skill the "easy" way than to pay for training - except in this case the "easy" way is, quite technically, the appropriate method. I personally feel thaty this revised statement applies to most of the skills in the game in their own right (swimming into a post for a few hours to raise athletics, lock/pick spam to raise security, etc.), which makes paying for training rather pointless in a lot of cases. This makes an excellent argument for how my proposed edit to misc skill growth to stop its natural growth actually lends purpose to the idea of paying for training in most skills, because it stops being a question at that point of which is cheaper and/or more "convenient".

Two, moving away from plugging my own ideas, you're again right that it's far too easy to raise your alchemy skill in this game (a fact I've agreed with you about already). I've revisited this idea when going back through my mod and felt it a good idea to slow down the experience gain of the alchemy skill a bit more than I already have. Yeah, this *technically* doesn't do much about the apparent worldwide stockpile of cheap ingredients from vendors, but it does give you less incentive to do so.

Though, on further reflection, I suppose a good deterrent for the sort of behavior you're describing would be to marginally raise the prices of the cheapest alchemy ingredients available (1 gold to 2, 2 to 4, 5 to 6, etc.) Assuming use of HotFusion's Economy Adjuster (or something similar), this will actually raise the cost of purchasing ingredients, and it also shouldn't be imbalancing with regards to the money you get from selling them, since you have to be good with your mercantile/speechcraft skills (again assuming the use of something like HotFusion's Economy Adjuster) to get more than a single septim out of anything worth 5 gold or less, give or take.



This is true.

But, again, it makes a good argument for stopping the natural growth of misc skills, since this douchebaggery would not be possible unless you had Alchemy as a major or minor skill. And assuming you did, spamming its growth will force level-ups, which is self-balancing if you pay no attention to your other skills.



Hmm... what is it, exactly, that controls how often restocking vendors, well, restock?



Take heart, child, as there is and shall never be compatibility issues between my work and the fine work of Galsiah. Because GCD and (presumably) the atrophy mod he's working on will rebuild the level-up system from scratch, nothing I do to it in its vanilla state is going to affect what he does with it in the least.

Granted, this statement is true about my mod as-is (i.e., before I start jacking around with the major/minor/misc skill growth rates). I'm fairly certain that they will also have no impact on GCD... can I get some confirmation in this, Galsiah?



Er... weird. Especially considering that I didn't actually update that plugin (aside from apparently renaming it) in the 4.2 update.

You don't need both plugins, and in fact using them both together is probably what's causing this mess if you are. One is an "alternate" plugin from the original Better Clothes mod that gets rid of lizard [censored] or some [censored].

I have no clue what the Better Clothes Patch is. Never heard of it. Where'd you get it?

Moving on to one last entirely separate note, now...

One last thing that I will address in the next update of my mod - but only if somebody can help me do it - is the sneak attack damage bonus. If there is some way to script it so that it varies depending on the type of weapon used, I'll raise it back up to 4x - or possibly even higher - for short blades ONLY.

BTB.. i'm a fool. I had just copied over the new esp and had not activated them in the launcher. User error, as i suspected.

Anyway, i'm now just running the v1.1 BTB edit, and all seems ok.

I have got rid of the Better Clothes Patch.. i don't remember where I got it from.

this is the readme :

"Patch for Better Clothes
Mod for Morrowind, Author Keazen

This patch correct the slots for all shoes and remove from the Warnings.txt all "Not able to find Foot part in BC_shoes...".

Must be loaded after BetterClothes (PsychodogStudios)."

Um... I'm actually not clear on where you stand, based on what you posted.

BTB, I really appreciate you take the time to give detailed and well-argued answers to all of our comments, thx.


Please, don't say that... what a disenchantment ó_ò


I'm sure you're right.


I wonder: are we forced to preserve the base rule of gaining a level per 10 major/minor skills?
I mean, we could change it to something that considers *all* skills like:
player's level = ( (gain in all maj. skills)*3 + (gain in all min. skills)*2 + (gain in all misc skills)*1 ) / 30
Maybe with a better tuning of coeffs. to prevent players to get too high levels.
This way the char. progression would be more coherent and the game would get harder even when you increase misc skills.


Sounds a good game mechanics.
You made your points for the misc skill caps, and now I think I agree it could improve the game balance and the replayability of Morrowind.


I like the idea of increasing prices, however slowing down the experience gain will also make harder the increase of this skill for those who try to do it with collected ingredients. I guess people will just wait to get enough gold to do it with merchants, again.

Or... I wonder if setting ingredients as non-restockable could be handled with an "option" of the Morrowind Code Patch. This way it would not cause compatibilities issues (I hope). However, other stockable items (arrows, repair tools, lock-picks...) may be harder to find in the wilderness and thus should remain stockable.

'eh, it's not like I have anything better to do at work, anyway >.>

BTB said:



Haha, sorry.

Well, here's a better way to put it: the restrictions of a video game are less noticeable the less you try to push their boundaries. After all, an invisible wall is only a wall if you press up against it. And a lot of the changes I make in my mod are designed to make the player less apt to push those boundaries in the first place than they otherwise would.

I know I'm speaking in rather broad terms, here, but I can't think of a good concrete example at the moment. I haven't had my coffee yet.



The number doesn't have to be 10, but that's really the only thing you can change without resorting to scripting far beyond my capabilities. For that, we turn to Galsiah.

With regards to preventing players from reaching ungodly levels, I would assume that having to resort to jail tricks will eventually get old, not to mention what I said above about the difficulty and expense associated with maxing out all of your attributes and misc skills. I dare say - and I'm aware of how lofty this claim sounds - that a player will run out of things to do in this game long before they'd ever come close to maxing out every skill and attribute with my proposed setup.



Awesome. This makes a grand total of one person who seems to agree with me thus far



Well, yes, it will make it harder to level the skill. But Alchemy is by far the easiest skill to level in this game, even with the initial skill progression reduction I make in my mod.

In BTB's Game Improvements, I reduce the skill gain for potion creation from 2.00 to 1.00 - the same gain per use as an unmodded long blade strike. And I can stockpile so many shrooms without even leaving a quarter-mile radius of Seyda Neen that I have Foryn Gilnith's naked corpse stuffed so full of them that even his great-grandchildren will be tripping balls for years to come.

(Sorry, I seem to have lost myself in an anology. I do that sometimes.)

Point is, it's not hard to stockpile alchemy ingredients in this game, either by buying them or finding them in the wild. If you intend to use them for the sole purpose of making potions to raise your skill, you shouldn't have any difficulty at all finding compatible ingredients, especially considering my reworking of ingredient effects to streamline the negative ones.

Thus, my aim is slightly different from what you seem to imply it should be. From what I gather, you're suggesting that I find a way to make collecting ingredients for the purpose of making potions to increase your Alchemy skill preferable to buying a whole bunch of ingredients to spam potions to increase your Alchemy skill. What I seek to do, rather, is make players not want to spam their Alchemy skill in the first place.

As I said before, assuming no misc skill growth, it's not going to make any sense to spam your alchemy skill unless you have it as a major or minor. And if you do have it as a major or minor, spamming it to the exclusion of your other skills will result in level gains which will make the game more difficult if you're not also putting effort into your other skills. You're only going to raise your other skills by heading out into the wild and busting some heads (because at least one of your other skills has got to be a weapon of some sort), at which point you might as well grab any alchemy ingredients you find while you're out there. And since ingredients are so easy to find, you'll probably stumble across enough to make at least enough potions to gain a level or two in Alchemy, thus making spending your hard-earned gold on ingredients to spam the skill unnecessary unless you're pushing for a 5x int. multiplier or something. Even then, you'd probably be more inclined to spend your money on training, perhaps in another intelligence-governed skill like Enchant

(Ok, rambling again. Sorry.)

The only real question here is what is an appropriate ratio of skill gain for raw ingredient consumption to potion creation? I'm currently using 1:2, which is equally favorable towards the two activities unless you make a potion with more than two ingredients, in which case consuming the raw ingredient is more favorable for experience gain. The tradeoff is that it's less favorable towards getting any actual use out of the ingredient, which seems a bit bass ackward to me. Still, it's the ration I'm probably going to stick with... and I'll probably lower the values to 0.80 (for potion creation) and 0.40 (for ingredient consumption).



Nope. Setting an item as "restockable" in a merchant's inventory is just a simple matter of setting the item quantity to a negative number in the editor. There's no easy way to edit them en masse', but I do think that the near-immediate restocking times can be slowed down a tad bit, if nothing more than for realism's sake.

Anyway...

I just started a new game recently, which I think serves as a pretty good exaple of how all of the changes in my mod - particularly the news ones I'm suggesting - work in practice. My character build is as follows:

Race: Nord
Birthsign: The Warrior

Specialty: Combat
Favored Attributes: Speed & Endurance

Major Skills:
Axe
Block
Athletics
Acrobatics
Marksman

Minor Skills:
Medium Armor
Unarmored
Alchemy
Mysticism
Illusion

This setup is, albeit somewhat inadvertently, extremely balanced. I have at least one skill for each governing attribute and, given the distribution of my skills, should have absolutely no problem rising to the top of any of the game's factions. A more balanced approached to selecting skills will actually be necessary to a degree, mind you, due to the fact that you'll actually have to rely on them (relying on your major/minor skill set? No wai! It's almost like you're actually roleplaying!) until you're able to put the effort into raising your misc skillset.

The first thing that a lot of people may notice is that I possess both Acrobatics and Athletics - often derided as the "lazy man's skills" due to how easy they are to increase - both set as majors. Before, these were the two skills that you were pretty much guaranteed to max out, regardless of whether you had them set as major, minor, or misc. Thus, there was no reason to select them as major or minor unless you just wanted the cheap level-ups. In my case, however, I've selected them because I genuinely want a fast and acrobatic character, and it's now actually prohibitively difficult to get them as high as I'd like them as misc skills.

But even if I *did* leave them as misc skills, I'd buy a few levels in training - particularly as I'm playing the slowest race in the game (note my selection of speed as a favored attribute). And be honest, when's the last time any of you actually *paid* for levels in athletics or acrobatics?

I've also selected Alchemy - another skill I've pegged as being way too easy to raise - as a minor skill. And, again, this isn't necessary because of that fact, but rather that Alchemy is perhaps my favorite skill in the entire game due to just how entertaining I find the system as a whole. I know that the way I play will lead to me using the skill a lot, and I want all that time I spend using my Alchemy skill to actually have some effect.

And this brings us to perhaps the main argument *against* my changes: people want the things that they do in this game to actually have some sort of benefit beyond the obvious. They want to gain experience from what they do. And the game's design is obviously intended to support this notion - it simply just doesn't pull it off very well. Your selection of major and minor skills is supposed to be a reflection of how you intend to play the game, and thus the skills you use the most will be the ones that level you up. And the more I reflect on it, the more I truly believe that the fatal flaw in the game's original design is that every skill gains experience through use, thus completely undermining the intended application of major and minor skills.

Morrowind was clearly designed so that your growth is a reflection of the way you play it. But instead, it's ended up working in the exact opposite manner - players tailor their playing styles so as to best manipulate the system. Previously, for example, I was always very careful about which skills I raised for my first level up. This is because my first level was always guaranteed a 5x multiplier for speed and personality due to athletics and mercantile (both misc skills) gaining ten levels on me before I could so much as breathe. I'd hit a mercantile level of 15 almost instantly and then would be careful not to advance *it* any farther until I hit level 2, so as to not waste precious attribute multipliers. As mym has pointed out, this is definitely no fun way to play Morrowind.

Now, on the other hand, I simply play. There's no possible way for any of my skills to run out of control on me since the only ones that will advance on their own are my majors and minors. I no longer end up with massive early multipliers in attributes that, as far as I'm concerned, go against the type of character I'm playing (i.e. violent sociopath). It just feels a lot more natural to me. More importantly, it feels a lot more like how the game was intended to be played in the first place.

My apologies for the wall o' text, but the more I talk about this, the more strongly I feel about it.

I'm now 100% convinced the hard cap on Misc skills is the way to go. This mod may makes me eager to start a new game (if I can find the time).

Thanks for your hard work, and standing your ground on the game play aspects!

I really must thank everyone who's taken the time to reply to this thread and discuss my latest idea with me. Being challenged to defend its merits in debate has given me the confidence that I've made the right call, and I couldn't have done it without you guys (particularly mym and Galsiah).

Anyways, I went back over some of the bigger points I've made and organized them into a streamlined argument that is will be presented in the main readme file in my mod's next update:

They won't have no impact, but they'll work just as well with GCD (or Madd leveler, Balor's, [insert-levelling-mod-here]) as without. All of these levelling mods change the way skill increases are reacted to, but they don't change the speed/mechanics of skill increases themselves - so there shouldn't be any genuine conflict. A mod that slows down skill increases by changing the settings in TESCS will slow down those increases regardless of any levelling mod. That said, GCD does make it progressively harder to increase misc skills already (through scripting), so I guess GCD users wouldn't want/need misc skill increase rates to drop to zero. Having misc skill increase rates reduced significantly (but not zeroed) certainly isn't a real conflict with GCD - just something not everyone would want. There's really little cause for concern here, since the gameplay implications aren't so problematic in most cases: player's using GCD won't want/need to grind-misc-skills-for-multipliers, so there's no issue of incentivizing hugely dull grind.
As with any combination of mods, players would need to make sure that the combination of effects was something they wanted. It's certainly not a conflict though.

If/when I get the atrophy-based version running (and I'm not even slightly close yet), there might be more of a reason for players to consider avoiding significant changes to major/minor/misc increase rates. As it stands at the moment, I'm planning to base skill/attribute/atrophy calculations on a character's starting skill values (and attribute values), rather than whether skills are major/minor/misc. This is what GCD already does, and it's for the same reasons. First it's much simpler to script. Second, there's more variety between characters, since the impact of specialism/racial-bonus on skill values is taken into account. E.g. a character who starts with a misc skill with a +10 racial bonus and a +5 specialism bonus, is actually pretty good with that skill. Basing calculations on the fact that it's a misc skill puts it in the same category as skills starting at 5; basing calculations on its starting value better reflects the inherent advantages of the character's race/specialism.
With atrophy in the mix, it'll make sense for skills to be dropping and/or becoming much harder to increase, at pretty low values. With a GCD-like approach to this, the difficulty to increase/maintain a misc skill can be based on its starting value, rather than just its status as a misc skill - so a character might do reasonably well with a misc skill that starts at 15 due to racial/specialism bonus, but find it much harder to increase/maintain a skill that starts at 5. If this approach were already being used, then an extra adjustment to misc/minor/major skill rates might be redundant, and a little counter-intuitive (e.g. misc skill at 20 might be much harder to increase than minor skill at 15). Of course there'd still be no real conflict - it just might seem more natural to some users not to maintain significant major/minor/misc rate differences (I guess I wouldn't).

Anyway, the short answer remains that there's no conflict, and should be no conflict in the future. It'll just be necessary for players to understand the gist of what each mod is doing if they're to get a setup they're happy with. I.e. in this area: Slowdown + More_Slowdown = Lots_Of_Slowdown.

Makes sense to me.


I'm sure there are more following your ideas. In such a forum, people here mostly post to discuss only about their opinion divergences.


I guess it means a *lot* of mushrooms.
Personally, I was never able to get as many ingredients as when I buy them.
Maybe you're more of an herbalist than me.


Looks like a better way to handle the Alchemy abuse than mine.


Makes sense.


Don't know. The few times I tried to eat an ingredient, the game told me something like I missed my mouth...
Maybe it depends on your alchemy skill and at that time mine was low.


Yeah I know how it works, and it is exactly for the reason "There's no easy way to edit them en masse'" that I suggested to change the internal game interpretation of the negative values. Though it doesn't seem to be a sufficient reason for such a change.


MW scripting allow that? Anyway, if it would ever enable that, players would just have to instantly wait hours until they are restocked, like we all do for gold...


Looks like it works fine.
I wonder however if players will not just postpone the quest for x5 multipliers to a near future where they have enough money.
Of course you (and hotfusion) try to prevent the massive gain of gold, so players should have to take decisions on how they spend their few gold.

This make me think of something I would like to know when I look for Morrowind mods.
You mod list page is a fantastic resource to know which mods one should install to get a coherent and interesting game and gameplay, but you do not mention which mods one should try to avoid and for what reasons.
I'm sure you tried a lot of mods and made your decisions on good bases, but it would be wonderful if you'd consider sharing some of it with us.

Some mods, even if they get high ratings, may not fit well with the coherence you try to preserve.
I think about examples like:
- "Assassin Armory" which offers a great variety of weapons/blocking-weapons, but some of them are overpriced or overpowered (damage higher than long blades, enchantment value higher than any other weapon).
- "Pearls Enhanced" adds pearls (in kollops) which may cost up to 900 gold!
- "Unique Jewelry and Accessories" adds a merchant in Vivec selling enchanted items with all the spells one may need in his adventures, including constant effects like the "shoes of blinding speeds"...

Actually, my dream would be to have a single big package for Morrowind, with the stamp of someone like you on it


You're welcome
I'm glad to be involved in such interesting gameplay discussions.

Did you mean to increase the value of slave bracers from 5 to 100? It stuck me as weird.

Yeah. I mean, consider how easy the other skills technically are to raise. Hell, all my Nord needs to do to raise her unarmored skill is strip naked and let slaughterfish nibble on her feet for awhile.



It does depend on your Alchemy skill.

I settled for 0.40 experience per ingredient consumption (down from 0.50) and 0.60 per potion (down from 2.00). this way, eating ingredients is technically more efficient, but also slower and a bigger waste of ingredients.



That's the same thing I thought, and then ultimately decided that it wouldn't be worth it.



Obsession is an ugly thing >.>

But like you said, I try to stop people from getting too much gold in the first place.



Well, I've tried my best to avoid making enemies in the Morrowind community, and attacking mods I don't like seems like it would be a good way to start if I ever wanted to. I figure with as mean and critical I am of the mods I that actually LIKE, my readers would take the subtle implication that I'd suggest staying away from just about anything that isn't on my list.



I get asked this every once in awhile by that rare soul who actually likes every single mod on my list, but for the most part it would be a pointless venture since even my biggest fans disagree with at least a few of my choices. Thus, my mod list itself is the closest you're ever going to come to "one big download".

That being said, BTB's Game Improvements has grown over time to encompass quite a few different rule mods and sets of changes that previously used to be relegated to different mods/downloads.



Yeah. I got sick of rescuing slaves for nothing more than their empty thanks and crappy enchanted shackles that were worth less than they weigh.

Anyway, version 5.0 is up now. Enjoy!

(also, I'm starting to consider turning this thread into a poll about which modules from my mod players use and why >.>)

I don't see that as an attack: one can transform MW in so many different games using mods/patches... You chosed to gather mods and settings following your own vision of MW as a RPG and so you could suggest *your* ideal configuration of the game according to *your* vision. Mods that don't match are not bad mods, they just don't match and are intended for other kind of players/game.
I mean, it so easy to ruin the experience you (BTB) try to provide: you just have to include one single different mod.
Even when I read the hole readme of a mod and all comments from PES, and even if I try it for a short time, I may miss the parts that will kill my current game, for example by adding overpowered/priced items. The 3 examples I gave you did that.



I agree most MW addicts already now most mods they want or don't want. But think about all other players, who want to play MW without having to spend *HOURS* of readings, trying mods, configuring the game... If they could have a single package they could install right after the game and then play, without having to deeply consider the game mechanics and other (spoiling) informations.
I say that because I realize I've spent more time playing "the game of installing MW" rather than actually playing it.

Of course the UESP would not be enough for those players as a lot of mod's readmes are required to understand such a customized game.

I just saw BTB 5 is out, great news
I didn't see any increase of ingredient values as you http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1117777-relz-btbs-game-improvements-40/page__view__findpost__p__16488947 though.

BTW, no new thread for BTB 5? (I feel the changes may need a new place to fight discuss)

Version 5 is already out? :blink: Damn you're fast. I didn't even have time to try your version 4 yet. Reading the change log on PES, the alchemy component seem unchanged, so I guess I don't have to update this time.

By the way, all this discussion on the misc skills is making me reconsider the way I want them to work in my Morrowind. I'm still torn apart between a slow down of their progression and a total stop.

Firstly, I love you. You seem to have hit upon something quite brilliant here. Secondly, given that that the impetus of your changes seems to be the desire to remove the incentive to grind misc skills for attribute gain, have you considered / is it possible to remove the bonus to the attribute modifier at level up received when that misc. skill has been raised, even when done so by paying a trainer to increase that skill?

This would, I feel, fully cement misc. skills into the background of your character, as it would remove the desire to time misc. skill purchases with the 'real' increases you have made with your major attribute gains in order to max out the level up bonuses. It would completely remove them from consideration in the levelling process altogether.

Alternatively, wouldn't doing this alone (making misc. skills not affect attribute growth bonuses at level up) achieve much the same thing as your're attempting to do here, but without removing the 'natural' misc. skill increase through usage a number of people are used to and expect (although, personally, I'm a great fan of restricting it to trainers, as as you pointed out it greatly increases the importance of the choices made selecting major/minor skills at the start of the game, makes levelling and your characters personal narrative far more focused, while adding far greater depth and meaning to the trainer mechanics for those players who (optionally) wish to engage in it. As they might as a viable new and useful cash sink. Of course, a balance between these could be found).

I'm not sure if this is a possible/ completely crap/ broken and utterly useless suggestion, but I thought I'd just throw it out there, for what it's worth.

Edit: Although, now that I think about it, this might be too restrictive, as paying for these misc. skills might be one of the few opportunities certain characters have to increase an attribute that their major/minor set does not naturally cater for well. Ach well.

Well, yeah, but I have a way of being mean when I write about things I don't recommend using.

I guess what it comes down to is a lesson about the importance of good documentation. My mod list itself is collectively my entire vision of the game, along with extensive discussion about why I think that. It's sort of up to the reader past that point if they want to add anything to it to really look at what they want to add to see how well it fits with everything else.

Again, if you want my personal recommendation, it begins and ends with the mods on my list



I try my best to avoid spoiling anything or getting into any unncessary detail on my mod list proper, and the main readme for my mod outright tells the reader after the first few paragraphs to stop reading unless they want to read my laundry list of reasons for doing what I do in it (which, as I've been told, amounts to what is the biggest exploitation guide to Vanilla Morrowind in existence).

Granted, anyone who would be trusting enough of my opinion could simply just download everything from my list without reading what I have to say about it all, but I'm sure that would be a very small percentage of my readers.



Oh, believe me, I know. My mod list was written with exactly what you're talking about in mind - I wanted to provide a resource for people who honestly didn't want to waste weeks of their lives trawling through PES and TES NExus looking for mods and then testing them all out to see if they work together.

And if you think you have it bad, I've owned this game for over 5 years now and have yet to play more than an hour into it



The only thing on my mod list that I don't say enough about in my commentary to understand all you really need to know about it is MGE, and even there I think I come pretty close.



Like I said, I ultimately decided against it. Yeah, it's easy to cheese lots of easy levels in Alchemy - just as it is a lot of other skills (see my sixy naked unarmored Nord with slaughterfish nibbling at her feet). IMO, problems like that need to be dealt with directly at the source, which in this case was me removing the natural experience growth for misc skills so that the only way you CAN cheese easy levels in Alchemy is if you have it as a major/minor skill, in which case you'll be gaining levels.



4.0 is still the biggest recent release... 5.0 just makes one major change, which the majority of the discussion in this thread has revolved around, anyway.

I'd still like to throw together a poll, though.



That's what she said >.>

Which, I suppose would explain why I am currently divorced.



The only thing that's been changed from 4.1 on is the "Settings" plugin. 4.0 to 4.1 included a quick fix for the "Equipment" plugin, but aside from that, nothing has changed from 4.0 to 5.0.



Wow, I seriously wasn't expecting my arguments to resonate with anyone here. I figured that what I was suggesting was so radical that nobody would agree with me no matter how much of a good idea I made it out to be.