Character development and you
Let’s decide what is the best character development method for a TES game.

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Character Development.

Character development and the options to give each character a unique personality with unique characteristics, giving the players the range of choices to develop their character as they like:

This topic is always one of the most important aspects of an RPG game, so it better be a solid and versatile implementation with a lot of options for us to develop unique characters, but these aspects have different importance for different people, so I decided to make a poll to see what is the most popular notion for a solid character development system.

I will try to make a complete poll to encompass all the different tastes, but in some cases I will write about the system that I think is the best method of developing out unique characters.

And please post your point of views, if you think that I have erred in any aspect of it, or if you think additional clarification is needed, and please let me know if I have missed a choice in the polls.

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Character Level.

In most of current RPG games, the very core of character development is the character level.

In current TES games, it defines the scale of the challenges that you encounter and the scale of the items that you find, and your total health and the like.

I do not say that they are the best choice for the effect of a character level, but I'm saying that they are some effects that are currently implemented.

So you gain levels by accumulating some factors and then you have a choice to change your character a bit more, and also it has additional passive effects on the character's experience in the game environment.

So we have three different subjects about player character level:

• How you gain a level?
  
• How you can advance your character while in level-up session?
  
• How your current level, passively affects your character's experience with the game environment?

In Arena, Fallout series and most of mainstream RPGs you gain levels by gaining experience points, and experience is gained by killing monsters, completing quests, and reaching defined milestones.

In current TES games, you gain levels by raising your character's skills, but only a portion of your character's skills affect your character's level, which was not a good choice, as it encourage power-gaming to raise the skills that do not affect your character's level to become more powerful in lower levels, especially as your character's level affects the scale of the challenges that your character encounters.

OK, I will list the choices here and give some information and maybe my opinion of them after that.

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How you gain a level?

You gain levels by gaining experience points. Like in fallout series.

OK, this is a choice, but the implementation is a bit harder than TES method, as you have to give the players experience points as they kill monsters, or complete quests and so on...

And it should be balanced, so that an acquired amount of experience points, after killing a monster or completing a quest, do not feel out of place.

And IMO this does not belong to a TES game.

You gain levels by advancing your primary skills.

This is the current method in the TES game series, and IMHO this is not the best choice.

As you advance your skills by usage, some of them (your primary skills), are counted toward your character level, and after some skill advancement, you gain a level.

This method lets the players to use only their non-primary skills as a way of power-gaming so that they gain maximum attribute gain factors at level-up sessions, which is not the best way of behaving in a role playing game.

You gain levels by advancing any of your skills. (Equally or Weighted)

This is a better method of leveling, as all your skills result in gaining levels, so this type of power-gaming is out. Your Primary skills can affect your character development in another way, i.e. they advance quicker than the other skills.

Skill advancement can have a weighted effect on character level, so Primary skills affect the character level a bit more than other skills. For instance they count as 1.2 regular skill advancement.

You gain levels by a completely different method. (Please Specify)

For instance you might say that we gain levels by a combination of both advancing in skills and gaining experience as well. Or you might want to suggest a completely different method.

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How you can advance your character while in level-up session?

In level-up sessions, you have a choice to advance some of your skills.

Like in Fallout games, you gain level by other methods and in level-up sessions, you advance your skills. Not a TES game IMHO.

In level-up sessions, you have a choice to raise some of your attributes, depending on your previous skill usages.

The current TES game method, and it would force the players to power-game before level-up sessions to have the best attribute gain factors. Not a good choice.

In level-up sessions, you have a choice to raise some of your attributes, as a small bonus.

For instance, you cannot freely raise your attribute much, or you raise them dynamically in the game as you advance your skills, but in the level up sessions, you can raise one, or a few of your attributes by a fixed amount, for instance one point.

In a scenario, your character can not advance it's attributes that much, and those semi-fixed attributes shape your character's abilities, as they affect your skill advancement speeds and limits, or your ability to use weapons, armors and other items, and so on...

Then, at level-up sessions, you have a choice of raising just one(or two) attributes by one point, and that can be a free choice, or a choice depending on your skill advancement beforehand, i.e. if you have used mainly your physical skills beforehand, you can raise one of your physical attributes by one point, and so on...

This can be a plus point for gaining levels, as this is the only way to raise an attribute, if only by one point, and it would not result in power gaming, because you cannot raise your attributes more than one point.

The fact that you cannot raise your attributes that much has a side effect that the items that raise your attributes become more valuable and a perfect choice for a quest reward.

In level-up sessions, your attributes are recalculated depending on your current skill levels.

This is another method to prevent power-gaming. You gain a level and your attributes are recalculated from your current skills, without your interference.

In level-up sessions, you have a choice of perks to pick up from. (This can happen in every few levels)

Like the current method of Fallout games, every few levels, you have a choice to add a perk that affects an aspect of your character a bit, but we can expand on the notion, so:

Those perks can have some inter-dependency as well as some other requirements like character level or skill levels and so on...

The original birth sign effect can also be counted as a perk or trait that you select at the start of the games, and can gradually advance on some of its aspects as you gain level, or you can select other perks as they become available as you gain level or advance in skills and then you can advance those perks to their higher level versions as they become available as well.

So IMHO a proper way to gain perks except for initial character traits and birth signs are from expert teachers, but you could replace your perks with their more advanced versions in level-up sessions if their requirements are met.

In level-up sessions, your character automatically gains some other actor values, like health, magicka, fatigue...

Like current TES games for health gain.

In level-up sessions, you have a chance to add some damage resistance bonus to your character.

Every few levels your character can gain a little bit of resistance to a negative effect, like this list:

• Physical damage.
  
• Poison damage.
  
• Fire damage.
  
• Cold damage.
  
• Lightening damage.
  
• Magic damage.
  
• Mind Control.
  
• Disease.

In level-up sessions, you have a chance to advance your character in a totally different way. (Please specify)

I don't know, maybe adjust your fame a bit, or regain lost attributes, or something else...

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How your current level, passively affects your character's experience with the game environment?

Your current level fully affects the scale of the items that you find in the shops.

The current TES games choice, and not a good one IMHO.

Your level decides what items you find in shops to buy.

Your current level partially affects the scale of the items that you find in the shops.

By this partially I mean a few different things that I will describe here:

I think that the best choice for level scaling the world around the player would be position based, not character based, so an area can be defined as a newbie area, so the monsters/loots/shops are scaled to be suitable for newbie characters, (not affecting the manually designed stuff), and some places are marked suitable for mid-level characters, so the monsters/loots/shops are scaled to be suitable for a mid-level character and so on...

So in a newbie area, shops generally supply stuffs that are suitable for newbie characters, but depending on character level, some items have a small chance to be a few levels above the general level of the area, and a few items have a minimal chance to be way beyond the level of the area, and this chance can be affected by the difference of the character level with the area level.

If a low level character can reach a place that is designed for higher level character, and find a merchant/shop there, then he can find items for sale that are above his level, but the price tag on the items would be above his normal income of selling low level loots, and the higher level merchants would haggle harder than the merchants found in the lower level areas.

Maybe he can sell all his current loot and pay all his savings to acquire an item that is way beyond the loots that he finds in his normal tours.

Your current level fully affects the scale of the monsters that you encounter.

Current Oblivion method that is generally acknowledged as one of its most glaring flaws, (if not The Most).

Your current level partially affects the scale of the monsters that you encounter.

Again like the shop example above, monsters can be level scaled to the area, not the player level, so in a newbie area, you encounter low level monsters, and in a dangerous place you encounter higher level monsters.

In a place that is tagged as mid-level difficulty, you would generally encounter monsters that are suitable for mid-level players, but a spawn point has a chance of spawning higher or lower level monsters, depending on the player character level.

So if a low level character enters a mid-level place, some monster spawn points have a chance of spawning monsters that are a bit lower than what the area level suggests, and this affects their loot as well. The chance of spawning lower level monsters can depend on the level difference of the player and the area as well as the difficulty slider.

On the other hand when a player enters an area that is marked as below his current level, he would generally encounter monsters that are leveled below his current level, but still there is a chance of encountering higher level monsters, depending on his level's difference with the difficulty level of the area.

Your current level fully affects the scale of the loots that you find on monsters and containers.

Again the current method of TES games, which IMO is not a good idea.

Your current level partially affects the scale of the loots that you find on monsters and containers.

A much better method, is that the loot that you find on monsters, should be fully scaled to their level not player level and not even the area level, so in any place if a character of any level kills a monster, the loot found on that monster should only be scaled to the monster level, (not considering manually added stuff).

Your character level might partially affect the level of the monsters that you encounter, and that would affect their loot, but that's an indirect effect.

The loot found on containers should be generally scaled to the difficulty level of the area, but just like the shop example, the level of the player can partially affect the loot found on the containers, and that is really how it affects the items found on the shops for sale.

Your current level should affect some dialog options.

Well this is a good idea:

Guard to player: Don't go there you would not survive for long.
Or: Do not test my patience, I have crushed bugs with more class than you.
Or: You seem adequately experienced for this task, but beware of the...
Or: Well for a person of your dignity, this village has nothing of importance, except maybe...

Your current level should affect monster/enemy behavior toward you.

Your level compared to your opponent's level, should have some effect on the enemy AI, so when a lone wolf sees a newbie player it might decide to try its chance against the player, but as soon as a high level player enters an area, the wolf pack would scatter away, as if he has a reputation of wolf killer.

Your current level would affect your game-play in another way. (Please specify)

For instance, some events trigger only for higher level characters, and so on...

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Character Skills.

Skills and their developments are one of the more important aspects of the character development in the current RPG games, so it has to be implemented in a way that would satisfy the average gamers, without confusing them.

The players have to sense their progression without having to look at the numbers, and those skills have to be chosen and developed for characters because they are needed for the character, or give the players more satisfaction to have them, and not because of some problematic system that forces the players to choose them for their characters.

For instance in Oblivion you chose a character class with primary skills that you do *not* want to use to avoid gaining level, because gaining level actually makes the game harder for the players.

But if gaining levels was a sought event like in Fallout series, and enough advancement in any of the skills would result in a level gain, and character class and its primary skills would help shape the final character in a more definite way, then it would result in a more straightforward game-play and more enjoyable game altogether.

I have a lot to say about skills and the best method of their implementation in an RPG game, but it would need a separate thread of its own, so I stop here and do not even make a poll about them, because some of the poll choice items would need detailed info which I want to avoid here.

I just want to talk about their progression rate and their limits now:

IMHO you should always be able to raise your skill levels as you practice them without any hard limits over their cap, but there should be a soft cap over your skill advancement.

So you start a skill at level 5 for instance and you are called "Novice" in that skill, you can advance your skill by practice, but in order to be called "Apprentice" in that skill, you have to find at least a journeyman teacher of that skill and prove to him that you are a worthy apprentice for him so that he would accept you as his apprentice, and teach you the initial tricks of apprenticeship on the skill.

So when you are a novice in a skill, you would have a soft cap of 25 over your skill advancement, so until that cap level, you can freely improve your skills as you like, but of course the progression of that skill will slow down a bit as you raise your skill level, but as you reach the level that is the current soft cap over that skill, your skill progression rate starts to drop significantly more as you start to advance in that skill, so for the next few levels, the progression rate is still manageable, but soon you would find out that you need to attend to that skill master and become his apprentice in order to be able to improve that skill in any acceptable rate.

After you are officially acknowledged as an "Apprentice" in a skill, the soft level cap over your skill progression raises to "Journeyman" level which is probably 50, and your skill progression rate reverts to the normal uncapped level, but as before it starts to drop a bit as you raise your skill level, and after the new cap you have to seek a higher level master, or current master if he can manage that (at least an expert in that skill), to become a "Journeyman" in the skill, and raise the cap to the "Expert" level, and so on...

So an "Apprentice" level teacher can teach your novice level character about a skill, but you need to find a "Journeyman" level teacher to be able to get acknowledged as an "Apprentice", and also those masters might ask for a fee for this task and might even send you for a quest of their own before they graduate you to the next level of mastery in that skill.

When you are at "Expert" level of a skill, in order to be called a "Master" of that skill, you have to find the unique grand master of that skill, and become graduated as a master of that skill, that would be at level 100 or a few level above that, and after that you would not have a solid cap over your skill progression, but the rate of your skill progression would start to drop as you advance your skill until the time that it would practically take weeks before you can raise your skill level from 145 to 146 and so on...

In each advancement in the skill mastery, the road for you to gain some new skill perks would open, so some perks require you to be actually acknowledged as an "Apprentice" of a skill, and some perks need you to be an "Expert" in that skill, but unlike Oblivion, I suggest that those perks need to be learned from their appropriate teachers not automatically gained as you reach the required skill level.

I will write more about perks in their own section.

I think that each graduation to a higher skill mastery level requires a minimal level for the attribute governing that skill, so if you need to become a journeyman of Marksmanship, you need to have at least 40 agility, and to become an expert one in that skill you need at least 60 agility and so on...

If we play a game that does not let us raise our attribute much in the course of the game than those requirements should be a bit lower.

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Character Attribute.

As for attributes, I think that we have to be more realistic about them, and that is, as we are playing characters that do not change shape, or grow older in the few weeks that pass in the game time, then their attributes should not change a lot in the course of the game, so if your orc is muscular and heavy built, you should not be able to morph that into a really agile being as you develop your skills that depend on agility, and you have to be more apt with developing skills that require strength compared to the skills that require agility for instance.

I think that we can borrow a bit from Fallout 3 here, thus after the character generation phase those attributes should not change a lot, except for the spells and enchantments that affect them, so a ring that increases the strength would become an important object, or better clothing can increase personality, so you should keep some with you if you want to impress people.

On the other hand some quest rewards can add a bit to one of our character's attributes and that would be a perfect gift, and at each level-up screen you can be gifted with the choice to add one attribute(or two) by just one point, and you could choose the attribute(s) from the three attributes that their respective skills has been used more in the last level.

Although a mod can alter some GMST values in a way that would change the choice of one attribute to three and change the amount from one point to the method that was used in Morrowind and Oblivion.

In this case, the heavy armors that affect agility negatively are important matters to speculate about, but those should be naturally implemented, so that with a glance, or with a bit of experience, an average player can sense that wearing that heavy suite of armor would affect his ability to sneak past guards, so those negative effects can be shown in clumsy animation for sneaking efforts, while those heavy joints noisily creak away.

In the current games, Items and spells that affect the attributes are not so important compared to other spells like the ones that directly damage the opponent or heal a character, but if we cannot increase our attributes that much in the course of the game, then those items or spells become important.

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In the character development phase we should have some options to tweak our attributes as we like, but in a way that would satisfy both experienced players and the new ones, so for instance:

Each combination of race and six can have a set of default values for each attribute as well as the minimum and maximum values for those attributes, so when you select a race and a six, you will start with the default attribute values for that combination.

After that, you can change your character's attribute within the ranges that are defined for them and also you have a limited attribute pool, so if you want to increase an attribute to its highest limit, then you should reduce some other attributes within their defined limits.

And those limits are different for each combination of race and six, so for instance even if you can increase a female nord's personality to 70, your maximum personality limit for a male orc would be 40.

After the selection of race and six, a window opens and shows the default template for that combination; a character with the default body and head, but you could focus on each part and personalize that part, so for instance you could select the head (face) and try to change its features, or you can click on the attributes button and change the attributes that belong to this part of the body, i.e.: personality, will power, intelligence and sight maybe.

Or you can select the body and personalize that part, so for instance you can tweak the body color tone within the race's limits and select the skin texture and tattoos, and so on, and by skin textures I mean its bump-map and shininess, and so on..., and after that you can tweak endurance, strength, speed and agility:

Changing the endurance attribute would visually affect the bulk of your body and torso.
Changing the strength attribute would visually affect the muscle tones on arms and shoulders.
Changing the speed attribute would visually affect the muscle tones on the legs, but might also negatively affect the bulk of the torso.
Changing the agility attribute would visually affect the shape of hand and also negatively affect the bulk and muscle tone of the torso, arms and legs.

Those sliders do not need to show any number, but when you change an attribute you change the remaining pool positively or negatively, and finally when you are finished with adjusting your character's attributes, your attribute pool should be again at zero, and you would not be able to proceed unless it is at zero.

Those sliders can be marked with some distinct icons to show their purpose, so for instance the icon for each attribute can be like this:

Endurance: a bulky torso carrying a bag.
Strength: an arm wielding battle axe.
Speed: a pair of running legs in boots.
Agility: a posed knife in a hand.
Sight: a watchful eye.
Intelligence: an exposed brain.
Will power: two confronting faces.
Personality: a talking and smiling pair of lips.

As for luck, I think that attribute can finally retire gracefully from the character development, and give its place to a more useful and visibly effective attribute like character sight or insight.

You can easily remove luck from the equations and replace their effect with the character's skills and other attribute that affect the subject, and maybe some other elements like the effect of the environment or perks and so on...

After completing the selection phase for race and six and facial and body features, we can go on to the phases that we select our character's class, birth sign and even more customizations like background or traits and so on... And those phases can affect our attributes as well and increase or decrease them.

And all of those phases can be more enriched by the help of those perks that I have described in detail in the other thread.

After the character generation phase is finally complete and you start the actual game, you would have some very limited opportunities to alter your character's attributes, and those attributes can define the outline of the type of character that you like to role-play, although you can still tweak that out-line a bit in the course of the game.

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Character Perks and Traits.

First of all perks are great addition to the attribute/skill developments but they have not been implemented quite that well in the TES and Fallout game series, although Fallout's perks were a bit better than Oblivion's.

I have made a http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1107940-perks-they-can-make-each-play-through-a-unique-experience/ about them that is a good read.

Perks are great addition to the subject of character development because they can be easily understood and can be very visual and specific in what they do, and can have lasting and apparent effect on characters, and can be implemented in a way that would not fade away as the character grows.

When a character is created at the start of the game, you have a choice of adding some initial "Traits" to him, for instance a background story that adds its own unique perk to the character, or a birth sign that likewise adds its own perk to the player.

Perks can be inter dependent and might require some minimum levels for the character and/or some of his skill masteries and/or attributes, so all the perks might not be acquirable at the start of the game, and need you to reach a milestone before you can gain them.

And each perk can have some upgraded versions of them that have higher requirements, that when achieved you could replace the lower version with the higher one.

At each level-up session you can have an opportunity to upgrade just one of your perks, if its requirements are met, or some perks are free to be gained at start-up sessions, and do not require the players to learn them from a teacher, like acquiring a little bit of protection from a type of damage, and so on...

The character background perk and the birth sign perks can also have higher level versions that could be acquired at level-up sessions, as their requirements are met, so you start with a basic ability of being able to fade away briefly with the initial perk given by the "Shadow" birth sign but you could gradually acquire its higher level versions as you gain levels, so the birth sign would not lose its usefulness at higher levels.

So practically each perk that you acquire during the course of the game can have higher level versions that would have higher levels of requirements for you in order to be able to acquire them, and when you meet those requirements, if they are not marked as "Requires a teacher to learn", then you can replace the lower version of the perk with the higher level one in a level-up session.

Skill perks and the perks that indicate your mastery level in a skill, do require you to learn them from an expert teacher of the skill, but as long as you learned a skill perk of the skill, the perk might have a higher level version that you might be able to acquire as you meet the upgraded requirement for the next version of the perk, in a level-up session.

So for instance you could learn the perk "dual wield" from a teacher, because you were an acknowledged apprentice in a melee skill and had 40 agility and so on...

The next version of dual wield can have the requirement that you are at least a "journeyman" of a melee skill and have 50 agility, so as soon as you meet the requirement, in the next level-up session you can upgrade your "dual wield" perk to the higher level version and get more accuracy or damage out of your dual wielding weapons at the opponents.

But you could also find the teacher that can teach you the improved level of "dual wield" and pay him and maybe attend to the probable quest for him, so that he teaches you the upgraded perk, thus you can upgrade another perk at the next start-up session, or upgrade your "physical damage resistance" for instance for the next level.

And also "Dual weapon parry" perk might need you to be have "dual wield, mark two" as requirement, and the teacher would tell you that you need to know more about "dual wielding" weapons before you can lean the trick, so come back when you are ready.

As an evolutionary move, we can also have spells as perks for their respective skills that players have to learn from their skill masters, so we can have scenarios like this:

You learn a spell from a teacher, but like any other perk, it might have some requirement, like having at least a level of the related magic skill mastery, or a minimum amount of intelligence, being able to cast another spell and so on...

So you increase your destruction magic skill until a destruction magic teacher tells you that now you are ready to learn how to cast frost magic, and he teaches you the "Frost Magic" perk, after that you can learn frost based spells (perks), and as you already have the requirements for the "Frost Bolt" spell, you learn that spell from him, and start to cast frost magic spells.

As your destruction skill advances, you reach the stage that you meet the requirement for "Frost Ball" and as it is an upgrade for "Frost Bolt", then you can get that in the next level-up session, unless the designers had marked that perk with "Requires a teacher to acquire", which would prevent you from learning that in level-up sessions.

The expert teachers of the skills, can have a menu that would list all their available skill perks that you do not have already, and high-light the ones that you can acquire because you meet the requirements.

So you can browse their available perks, and each perk that is selected shows its requirements, and description, and some requirements can be the amount of gold that you have to pay to the teacher.

But after you have selected the perk(or spell), there is still another step, either the teacher ask you that are you sure that you want to learn this trick or skill, or spell and the like? Or he would informs you that he would not teach this trick to just any-body, but if you could prove your worth to him, then he might teach you the trick, and would start to inform you about the quest that he wants you to attend before he teaches you the new perk.

Some of the perks, would affect the players passively, but some others like spells, would add an action to the pool of perk actions available for the players, so that you could select from and perform by a key that could be called "Alternate action" which is different from "Main Attack", "Main Defense", "Activate" and "Foot Action".

So if you have learned "Shield Bash" perk, or "Lightning Fury" spell, you could select that from your available perk actions and perform them as you like.

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OK, that's all folks for now, please give us your opinion of what you think is the best system for character development, and why?

In my opinion, raise skills by using them (like TES), but raise level by gaining XP (by killing, questing, whatever).

I would say keep Oblivion's perk system, as in when you raise a skill, you gain a perk for it. Maybe implement a level up system for perks, and a choice list, so that when you reach a skill level that lets you attain a perk, you can choose what you want for that perk. Example: I reach, say, 50 in Acrobatics, and I can now choose a perk that lets me jump faster, or one that makes me jump farther.

Very well written topic, I might add. Must have taken a while, huh?

I like the perk system of Fallout, but I think it fits the less-serious tone of Fallout rather than Elder Scrolls. You really wrote a ton, good job.

Well written and although I have to admit a tldr for now, I'll get around to it later and just want to throw in a few of my ideas. I skimmed over your post and just got a few things that bother me about the TES leveling system.

There's a couple of things horribly broken about the TES leveling system. The major 3 issues I have are the following:

Attributes multiplier - The multiplier forces players that really try to min/max their character to plan each level with mathematical precision. It makes it a huge drag to try and get the best character you can because each level you have to keep track of what you've done so far. The solution is simple - Just give the player a fixed number of attribute points to spend each level. I'd say somewhere between 5 and 10 points, depending on how much they change attributes.

Active and passive skills - Armor would be by far the best example for a passive skill. Skills like these should have an entirely different leveling system, since standing around and getting pummeled by mudcrabs is not a type of gameplay you want to promote. The same goes, although not as extreme, for skills like Block but even large parts of some magic schools. Buff spells, like Shield for example, should not level you if you chain cast them on yourself. An easy solution for this would be diminishing returns. This would promote using several skills and would prevent chaincasting the same spell to get skill levels. It's not the ideal solution though, the ideal solution would be taking the buff skills out of the active magic school entirely and moving it to a passive school. I think it'd be good to make these available through training and/or a point system where you can assign one point to a passive skill each level or something similar.

Leveling on low-level enemies - Leveling your skills by using a really low damage weapons or spells on easy enemies is too overpowered. I'd rather see the enemy level influence the amount your skill is raised with each hit. So killing mudcrabs at level 20 with low level fireballs or dagger won't level your skills at all. You'd need to find a challenging enemy to level your skills.

EDIT:
Forgot to comment on one thing. The level scaling of enemies. In my opinion level scaling can be useful in some very rare occassions but should be avoided 95% of all cases. No level scaling makes leveling that much more rewarding and keeps the world more interesting for a longer time.

Thanks, I have thought about these matters for years now, but compiling this thread has taken several hours out of my last 48 hours.


Thanks for the praise, but in this thread I have upgraded the fallout perk system to a system that I feel more appropriate for TES games.


Yes, those has bothered me as well, and I am compiling my ideas about character skills into a whole system that I hope has none of these flaws, but your suggestions that the opponent's level affect our skill gain is a brilliant one and would force players to go where that they are actually challenged and do not remain in newbie areas.

So if you are a skillful sword man then you would not gain much experience is you kill a mouse with your rusty iron dagger, but a newbie character would get a good boost of sword-play skill with those dummies at the fighter guild.

So we can say the opponent's level compared to our level affects the amount of experience we get from our skill usage against them. :goodjob:

I'd prefer if there wasn't any leveling at all. You get better at skills, you can do more things based on those skills. That way, it won't matter if you've been playing the game for a year or for a day, if your strength is 10, and that weapon skill is 10 you'll do the same damage.

I think skills should have leveling, just not characters. Every 15-or-so skill levels have us get an option to increase an attribute. Or maybe that's all leveling should do, just let us increase attributes, and choose from perks (if there are any).

On the topic of Perks, I think that some should be race-specific. Wood Elves could have an optional "Kyne's Grace" or something like that to make creatures not attack them, Redguards could have a specific perk that adds a unique Yokudan battle-stance, and Khajiit could have an option to roar or something and scare away enemies within a radius for a short amount of time.

But 90% of the stuff should be available for anybody, the racial specifics would have to be things that make sense. So there shouldn't be a unique "People's Person" perk that makes it so Imperials get specific dialogue options and stuff, it should be for everybody in that case.

Very nice thread, by the way. Covered thought of.

I like this, leveling is OLD we need a new system and SKILL LEVELING is the greatest idea ever, it gives the player complete control on the kind of character he wishes to make, fallout new vegas has some really great perk ideas:

perks you get from fighting and killing (like bug killer thingy when you kill rad scorps and roaches and such)

I would love to see magic books this time around, because SPELLS ARE NOT INVENTORY ITEMS, we learn them then as we use them they become stronger and have added effects (maybe perks can give even more effects)
NO MORE spell buying its lame.

give us magic trees of sorts for magic, give us more effects AOE spells, CC spells.

we want traps, and better stealth system, we want back stabs, we want climbing...etc

so I voted the plz specify options mostly

I love the skill-based system used in Morrowind and Oblivion. I would eliminate adding points to attributes at level up (in fact I would get rid of leveling-up sessions entirely). I would have the player "level" instantaneously, invisibly, without the need for entering a menu. I would raise a percentage of several attributes each time a skill is raised.

Basically, in other words, I would have TES V adopt the systems used by nGCD or Realistic Leveling.

that would be great as well, leveling in OB and morrowind was a pain.

I don't know the examples you mentioned, but I would very much like to get rid of overall leveling in favor of attributes raising because of skills raising.

Agree that it might be better to automatically adjust attributes based on skills, example let a major skill increase the attribute 0.5-0.4 and a minor 0.4-0.25 this values need adjusting, depending on numbers of skills related to attribute and perhaps other factors.

Personaly i love leveling up theres just some kinda thrill i get from seeing myself get stronger and better and seeing that lv up and feeling a small sense of acomplishment, that isn't as easy to relize or achieve IRL. I know thats kinda corney but thats one of the reasons i love the Elder Scolls and its one of the few games I play anymore. It would be a horrible shame to me if there was no more leveling. My only grief is the muliplier system they have in place right now, I'd rather be able to place points into my attributes the way i want, and skills should continue the way they are.

Very good discussion, and I agree with lot of it, dynamic attributes, perks from trainers then your skill is good enough. You might have to do a quest or other requirements like master trainers in Oblivion.

The idea that wolfs and highwaymen avoid high level players is genial, remember how tragic it was then the smugglers in the caves in Morrowind continued to attacked your level 30 player with rusty daggers after you killed three of them with one spell and a bored expression.
However bring back the skill requirements for guild level from Morrowind where it's fitting.
Thief guild would not have formal level requirements. the mage guild would, for fun make it a formal test as this would enables you to cheat.

Does not agree with the idea of high end shops with the exception of some merchants who need to be unlocked by guild level/ quests like the fences, their main features would be lots of money and good access to consumables items like magical arrows. not that they sell glass armor at level 1.
Main drawback is that it's pretty easy to get money, easier to kill or steal from the merchant. Go to ghostgate and get glass armor, you only need one set.

Enemy level, hard areas yes, I want areas where you save often at level 30. However it's easy to run into the gostgate problem again. Remember the Dren plantation, one mid level guy with a daeric twohands sword, yes he is pretty hard to kill but you don't care if you has to drink 20 potions and lots of scrolls to kill him as the reward is the best sword in the game. How low level does people kill Umbra at?

Fallout might show us a very sneaky solution here, so sneaky I'm not sure how it work, however item quality changes, might be level or area scaled but it work. A bandit with a steel sword in 90% condition is many times more dangerous than one with a sword in 10% condition.
Yes you can repair it however even fully repaired it's not worth a lot of money, it's mainly a way to nerf low level NPC enemies, this changes level scaling totally, at level 25 you might find mirtril armor on ordinary bandits if lucky, it would be default equipment on bosses with a small chance of getting elven or glass but you have to fight you way trough lots of bandits with high quality steel to get to them.

I would go as far as agreeing with a lot of you that levels are not a neccessity, but I still think they represent an important aspect of RPGs and specifically TES. In the end, we all like to get a feeling of accomplishment in a game, and leveling does just that. It shows you you have accomplished something and have invested in your character enough to get a reward. Removing it entirely really removes a very rewarding part of the game.

The problem, however, is that leveling in TES has always been a drag and not really rewarding in it's own way. That has to be adressed but I personally don't think removing levels altogether is the way to go. A lot of suggestions done in this thread would really improve leveling and make it a rewarding experience, instead of a near endless grind.

Well, in the world in my imagination, if you can kill the guy that has the best sword in the game then you are surely extremely high level yourself and you have persisted through a lot of extremely dangerous areas, and got really lucky, because in the normal course of the game no player would get enough high level and well equipped to survive those high danger areas.

I mean in a complete game world, there should be newbie areas, mid level areas, high level areas, and extremely high level areas that in normal play troughs no player gets strong enough to survive in them.

Those areas are there to keep the challenge for the players that want to conquer anything in the games, so they would gradually develop their character to be able to gradually conquer those areas bit by bit, and get better loot at each stage, so they could return to the forums and inform the others that they have finally passed through "The Nether Gates" and have reached to the brink of the "Armageddon Abyss".

But of course they would be informed that the still have to pass through that abyss to be able to kill the guardian of the "Forbidden Citadel" and conquer its different areas until the throne room and so on...

Which could seem an impossible task for even the extremely high level player characters.


Yes, I would not replace that sense of accomplishment with anything else, especially as in level-up sessions you could do a lot of things, like upgrading your perks, and so on...

I think that would be a completely seperate discussion than the way your character grows. After all, with high level and low level areas you run into the problem of limited content. If there are areas that would only be survivable for a fraction of the players, it's pretty much wasted content in the developer's book. If different level areas are introduced, we need some sort of level scaling slider. Basically, give every area a natural level, and have a slider which goes between 0% and 100% level scaling. That way, those areas aren't wasted on casual players who prefer action over roleplaying while people who prefer a better roleplaying aspect still feels like those areas are special.

Also I think the current leveling system isn't really far off from being good, so let's not take a hammer to this problem. If there's a leveling system, it's implied that different level 10 characters aren't too far off each other in terms of what they can/can't kill or achieve. So when increasing your attributes in the level up screen, there should be a set number of level ups possible. Let's say 10 attribute level ups per level. Also in terms of multipliers, add a multiplier level for every major skill you increase for that attribute. That way, you level up when you get 10 skill level ups which you can use with those 10 multipliers. For minor skills the multiplier would still increase roughly by 1 every 2 skillups. That way, if you focus on major skill you actually have an optimal amount of growth.

Y don't gain levels, you just get better attributes as skills raise. The level up screen and multipliers is what ruins the TES levelling system. On the other hand you can keep the levels without the level up screen or multipliers, but then the levels would be completely pointless and can just as well be removed.
Edit: Noticed this has been said already

I enjoyed Oblivion and its leveling system, but I think it can be more fun with non-level progress. It would be like Oblivion, but without leveling; your skill/attribute will grow by doing the related tasks, your HP will slowly improve by getting hurt, and your magicka/fatigue will grow by using them.

On top of that, I would like to see special trainers that teach perks/spells instead of skill points; on various spots of the world, many different masters could teach the player useful skills for money/quest.
For example, you get pick pocketed by a bosmer kid. If you manage to catch the kid, he'll tell you that his mommy is sick and needs a rare medicine. It would be something that only spawns in a rare potion drop or sold by a specific unknown vendor. Getting the medicine would unlock a new better sneaking maneuver that will allow you to run while sneak without penalty. If the player has good restoration skill and appropriate spells, he could directly cure his mom and unlock it otherwise.
Once we establish the notion of the special trainers, we can also build on it and make a faction quest out of it. Another example would be, two local mercenary guilds in conflict; one group favor blade weapons, and another favor blunt weapons. You can join only one of two, and they teach you better techniques/maneuver/power attacks which would be faster, hits harder, has better hit angle, and/or have special effects as you progress within the guild.
To add the flavor, we can have a sword/blunt master middle of nowhere that will teach you at huge money cost only if your weapon skill is high enough and you haven't learned from another blade/blunt trainer yet. Most players, after finishing with the local guild quest, will cry out "WHY?!" and start over a new game so they can learn the "ultimate" maneuver. :rofl:

This may be in part addressing some issues related to a 'Character development' topic: I do find the system of having some major skills determining your character's ability to deal with several types of situations, and having the other minor ones as some sort of *limited* support. Specifically, if you wanna be able to have a skill > 50, then it must be a major skill, otherwise it is a minor and as such can never go beyond 'average' (50%) rank. It makes no sense at all to me to call a skill a minor and have it ranked 80, while most of your major skills are 50-60...

That's exactly my point, the level system as it is, is not rewarding. That needs to be adressed, but taking it out altogether is, in my opinion, a cheap solution, and is not the ideal way to go. Generally, people like leveling, which is why it's been introduced to a lot of other genres besides RPGs (RTS and FPS to name just a few). It also gives you an indication of the strength of your character and a general idea if you might be ready for a certain area at a certain point of your character progression; assuming they don't screw it up as horribly as with Oblivion's level scaling.

So I'm all for keeping levels in, but they'll have to make gaining them a more rewarding experience. That can be achieved in a lot of ways. A lot have been mentioned in this thread: perks, passive skills, talents, etc.

One more thing I'd like to add is that there should be more defining choices in character creation and development. As it is in TES at the moment, the only real choices are your race (racial attributes, because the attribute and skill differences are quickly mitigated after a few levels) and birthsigns. The birthsign mechanic is the only one with real influence on gameplay, the best example being the Atronach. I'd really like to see more choices like this, as in choices that actually influence your character (other than increasing numbers of damage, spells, hp and mana) but are mutually exclusive. Perks don't really fill that gap because they are generally more gimicky. Instead, I'd like to see something similar to birthsigns but that you can keep investing in with each level. I don't really have a fleshed out idea for it yet, but something in that direction would really improve the game and especially it's replayability.

One issue I found while playing fallout 3 and I realized had been true since Daggerfall is player health. In all rpg you gain health levelling up, then you reach high levels you have loads of it making you extremely hard to kill.
How often were you killed by enemies in Daggerfall, Morrowind or Oblivion past level 25? Very rarely, Daggerfall and Morrowind lacked high level enemies, Oblivion scaled bosses don’t help as they don’t do more damage they only take longer to kill so unless you run into groups you would survive.
Obvious solution would be tougher enemies, broken steel had decent enemies but they where again to hard to kill, would prefer that they was more lethal but easier to kill.

One solution on top of tougher monsters might be a hp cap, after a level or perhaps a multiplier of starting health you don’t gain much more, this way you stay killable from boss enemies and you avoid the 5 minutes fight you could have in Oblivion or the harmless enemies in Morrowind.

Strongly against level caps or skill caps but this might help the game continue to be challenging.

Yes, I want to feel more accomplished when leveling-up and more rewarded.


Yes, and as I have described in http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1107940-perks-they-can-make-each-play-through-a-unique-experience/ thread, perks can make the choices of races, classes, birthsigns, back-grounds, and the like unique, lasting and rewarding.

Especially if like what I have suggest in this thread, those perks could be upgraded in later stages of the game.

Edit:


Another way to make the game challenging is to expand the scale of the different aspects of the game a lot more, so the difference of the damage potential between "Rusty Iron dagger" and "Iron Dagger" should be noticeable, the difference between a level 1 "Cave Rat" and a level 2 "Cave Rat" should be noticeable, unlike what you said, the difference between their health points should be noticeable.

On the other hand, the difference of damage potential between the weapons are scaled to a higher degree, so you might find killing a level 1 rat needs 3 hits with a rust iron dagger, but it could be killed by 2 hits with an iron dagger, and just one hit with a steel dagger, but a level 2 rat needs two hits with a steel dagger but just one hit with a silver dagger and so on...

The same immense sense of improvement should be achieved by advancing in skills, so when you advance your dagger skill, you should see that you can deal quite a bit more damage, even with the rusty iron dagger, and so on...

But as higher level monsters get big boosts in health, and damage potential, in each bite or strike, you also get big boost in health as you level-up, and deal more damage with better weapons and by advancing your weapon skills.

So the end result is that higher level monsters, are really hard to kill, equally leveled monsters are challenging but manageable, and lower level monsters are really easy to kill, and on the other hand, you are easy foes for higher level monsters, and challenging for equally leveled monsters, and really fearsome foe for lower level monsters.

This way, the difference of health and damage potential of different leveled monsters are high and the difference of damage potential of different weapons are high and advance in skills really show their effect, so if you can deal 5 damage with a dagger at skill level 10, then you can deal 40 damage at skill level 50, with the same dagger, then you would not say that the fights are long.

Because with higher level monsters, you would not last for long, and your lower level foes would not last long in front of you.

As for equally leveled foes, the fight would last longer but not much and the result would be a really scarred winner and a dead foe, which is either the player or its opponent.

This way venturing into the areas that are marked as high level areas, are really dangerous, but if you last long enough to be able to loot a container or by chance, kill a lone opponent and loot it, then it would be real rewarding accomplishment, because the higher level loots are really a level of magnitude better than your currently lower level equipment.

This way, in each victory you sense a huge sense of accomplishment, and the world seem real huge, because at first you can not go far before getting killed or forced to retreat, but as you level up, you gain a lot of health, and as you advance your skills, or as you get better weapons, you can deal a lot more damage, and as you get better armors, you can last longer, and you can go into the areas that have monster that are a few levels above your character, and the get better loots there and gain more experience there, because you are dealing with higher level monsters, and so on...

And there are always areas that feel like a vacation for your current characters, and there are areas that are your target battle ground, and there are areas that are off limits for your current character.

So I say, lets give a noticeable boost in health, magicka, and fatigue, at each level, to player characters, NPCs, and monsters, but each advancement in attack skills should add a noticeable amount to damage potential, and if you replace your weapon to the one that is the next step in weapon list, you should sense a noticeable change in the damage that you deal.

The sense of achievement in such an environment would be immense.

The big problem is that this really clashes with the idea of an open world RPG. What's the point of having this huge world to explore if players are restricted to 20% of it most of the time? This would add way too much linearity to a TES game. For example, you can't choose that one city is your favourite city, and you're going to do most quests/adventuring there. After all, there isn't nearly enough content of your level to keep you busy. What you'd end up doing is traveling through all the areas of your level before you can go to the next level. Every playthrough you'd be taking the same route through the world. Also, it doesn't solve the problem of a lack of high level content unless you make every other leveled area even smaller.

Having such a big disparity between levels works fine in linear RPG's like Fable, Diablo etc., but it destroys the freedom of open world RPG's like TES games.

That doesn't mean the game requires level scaling. Areas within the game can definately be more or less challenging, and there isn't really a problem with only half the map being off bounds at the start. But if level scaling is to be reduced, then the disparity between levels should also be reduced. So while you'd notice you'd get stronger because of the reduced level scaling, a level 2 character should at least be able to mount a challenge to a level 8 monster. It's going to be very difficult, and you'll probably need to use expensive items/greater powers, but it should be possible.

By all means I like the feeling of getting stronger and more easily beating opponents, but that should be done by reducing level scaling. In Oblivion it's telling that your character can get gimped by wasting a few levels of attribute modifiers and worthless skills. That means there's already enough difference between weak and strong enemies. It's just that it's not noticable because you only get enemies of your own strength.

No it does not need to keep the players to %20 of the surface area most of the time, and it does not need to be the same in every play through.

Once I was making a mod for Oblivion called "Dynamic Danger Zones" that used the power of OBSE and created different zones all around the Cyrodiil surface areas that could have been controlled via scripts whenever a modder liked to change those areas, but alas real life time restrictions and my loss of interest in Oblivion stopped the progress of this mod.

But let's say that the next TES games have this idea incorporated into the game engine, thus we can have a scenario like this:

You would start a game in a newbie island and went through character generation phase through-out the island, and after that you could port to the main land via different methods, and depending on the method that you chose, and your character's background and class, you could land somewhere in the main land that might differ from other choices.

The engine would mark the landing place as a newbie area, so all the monster around that area would be are low level and befitting a newbie player character, then depending on the character background and class, the engine would mark a nearby town or settling as the newbie town and gives that place a low level suitable for low level characters, and mark the route in between the player's starting area and the newbie town a low danger tag, so that any low level player could find his way to a shelter at the start of the game.

This starting place could vary between characters, and the town and route selection can have a randomized parameter that could change in each play through even for similar characters, and a guide NPC could be placed near the starting point of the player that could lead him/her tto the correct route to the safety of the newbie town/settlement.

The danger level of the other areas of the game can then be calculated/defines as he lands in the starting area, like a plasma fractal picture the designers can mark the places that need to be high level danger in the danger level height map of the whole surface areas, and mark the points that need to be extremely hard and mark the areas that need to be low level areas, then give the engine a random seed and it fills the non marked areas with a semi-random but continuous danger level that fulfills the requirement of the specific areas.

So each play through we would have some small areas that are exactly as dangerous as other play-throughs, but other places would vary greatly in each game especially as characters could start the game in different places, and the newbie towns could vary each time, but the change of danger level would be gradual, as the fractal formulas would normally prevent rapid change of danger level unless the designers force it to do so.

And those formulas can be designed in a way that would rapidly make a lot of possible places reachable as the character advances in levels, skills, and equipment, so after a few levels you are free to go to 30% of the game and after a few level later 50% of the game and so on... But in a normal play-through the manageable surface area could be at 90% and the last 10% would be for the ones that want real challenge.

The only real change I want to make is that when reaching a certain skill level I shouldn't be instantly rewarded with a perk, I should have to go to the correct trainer with the correct level for the perk. This would make trainer more useful then just level up machines. I also want no level scaling because then leveling up doesn't fell rewarding.