Your ultimate task is to save the...

*rolls dice*

...sweetrolls of skyrim from the evil clutches of...

*rolls dice*

...the Adoring Fan!

Yeah, that could work.

Exactly. Hence the Unarmored skill. In Oblivion it's a perk-thing for Acrobatics, for the player's direct manipulation.

I'd like to see all hits and misses rendered in animations.

Role playing games are a really old genre, even before computer RPG were created, people sat around tables and played them, as table top RPG games, which consisted a rule set that defined the rules and probably a dungeon map made of cardboard pieces, and player and enemy avatars made of metal pieces, wood, plastic, or even drawn on card board pieces.

They also used dices used in the rule set formulas, so for instance they had 4, 6, 20... sided dices and made rules on rolling those dices as a chance factor combined with some character, equipment, spell, and trap values.

So for instance if you had a sword capable of sealing 2d6+3 damage, it meant you had to roll a six-sided dice twice and add the resulting numbers and add three to the sum to get the final sum of the total damage dealt.

So a 6 sided dice gives the result between 1-6, and two rolls means 2-12, and add to it 3, which would result to 5-15, so the sword would deal any damage between 5-15.

On the other hand, the sum of the opponent's armor rating was reduced from the damage dealt and the final value was actual damage dealt to the opponent, so if the AR of the opponent is 10, it is reduced from any damage dealt, so for the sword example of the above, if you get values between 5-10, then the armor absorbs it all, and only for the values above 10, you deal 1-5 damage.

This was a very simplified part of a rule set for dealing physical damage via weapons through armors, but it shows the mechanism.

Edit: by the way, I have not played any table-top RPG, but got interested in them while playing games like MM7, and read about them via internet.

Anyone who is attempting to swing a sword at a mudcrab in Morrowind and failing to hit simply has not developed their blade skill sufficiently to successfully connect. This is the core of a role playing game, and Oblivion removed it in favor of "action." Same with magic casting, potion making, or any activity at all. If you want your character to be successful attempting to do something, then you must develop the related skill, at least if you want to succeed all the time, or even most of the time. Swinging a sword at a mudcrab and hitting every time with a blade skill of 5 (or even 30) is not role playing, and completely breaks the connection with the character's abilities.

I don't like dice rolls for hit/miss. Hit/miss should be player's skill based [Yeah, I said it. Player's Skill Based!] If you want dice rolls, make the damage % after connecting a hit a function of dice rolls. It sort of works the same without hurting gameplay so badly.

Missing mudcrabs in Morrowind didn't make sense. That doesn't have anything to do with dice rolling, but with how the system works.

Edit: Greatsquare, why would miss/hit dice rolls hurt game play? You just think that because it often was ridiculous in Morrowind and also didn't look like missing.

that is something that annoyed me about people who complained about that aspect of morrowind
if you can't hit a mudcrab after 100 swings, that means YOU are doing something wrong, not that there's a problem with the game
they wouldn't make a game where it's impossible to kill the lowliest creature at the first level
if you don't have the patience to learn how to play the game, at least contain your complaints

Dice rolls add a lot of suspense and excitement to the games, but they were badly implemented in Morrowind.

If the missing part was shown as if the opponent has dodged the attack or parried your sword then it would not look ridiculous and would result in even more exciting game play than the Oblivion's constant blocking actions.

Morrowind simply overdid it with the character skill involvement in combat, while Oblivion was lacking. It should be in the middle. Link damage dealt to strength, link block chance and speed of the weapon to the weapon skill and agility, and hitting... That should just always work unless the enemy blocked/evaded the attack. Give me a weapon, any weapon, and someone standing in front of me without defending himself. I will hit, every time. The skill lies in the series of blocks, counters, parries, etc. That's where character skill should come in. I repeat myself, but Mount & Blade (and Warband) prove that it works. It's mostly player skill, really, but you'll instantly notice the difference between swinging the same sword with a low-level character and a high-level character. Even though in both situations you'll always HIT an enemy, your reaction time for blocking will be reduced due to the lack of speed, the attacks will be slower, giving the enemy more time to react, and overall you'll perform worse. It won't be like in Morrowind, where a high-level character always succeeds with their attacks while a low-level character can't even hit a mud crab right in front of him (which really would be an easy target). It's more subtle, but it's there. That's the way it should be, imo - with the difficulty settings having an option for how much player skill and how much character skill should be involved (from manual blocking by the player, including the correct block direction, over manual blocking by the player without regard to the kind of attack, to morrowind-shield-style blocks that will be done fully-automatically by the game). That way you have something for people who want their own skills to matter mostly, to people who can't be bothered learning to fight just so the character can.

I think hit and miss can't be entirely dependent on player skill. Does it make sense for a mage character with a blunt skill of 5, to pick up a 70lb war-hammer and be able to consistently hit his opponent? Of course not.
A real life example, imagine a firewood sized log, stood on end with a line marked down the middle. Take and axe and try to split the piece down the middle. Now you'll probably hit the wood, but likely not the centre mark, and if you take enough swings you'll probably hit the side of the wood, or miss an hit the cutting block. But you were looking right at the pencil mark, just like aiming the recticle on your foe in game, but you don't always hit.

A great example of where dice rolls were deadened in Oblivion was the lock picking game, good player skill could overcome zero character skill and pick the hardest locks, now I assume you don't want the entire game based on player skill. But I don't think any use of the skills should be entirely based on player skill.

:rofl:

I wouldn't mind it being pure dice rolling but they would need to get the righrt ratios done for it to be used.

But I do enjoy picking those locks by myself.

Before adequate level : nearly impossible

At level: 50-50 might -might not

progression after this level will slowly have the locks move slower and such but it is quite easy.

Full 100% security - 99% success.

i like my action, in my RPG thank you.

1-If your mage is carrying around a 70lb war hammer, you are breaking immersion as much if not worse.
2-Think of that log in your anology as the enemy NPC. It is a moving target. As such, you are going to have glancing blows and misses. I have decent player skills, but I do completely miss from time to time.
3-If a hit is a matter of collision detection and damage is a function of dice-rolls then you can have both satisfying gameplay and skill based results.

That's most of it and I think my solution makes sense. I didn't get rid of dice rolls, I just moved it's function to a particular step in the process. Remember that the magic skills often involved player skill, a fireball didn't count towards your Destruction skill unless you hit the target. I think my approach provides for a balance as it is a function of both player skill and the character's stats/dice roll method.

Most people think about this when you mention dice rolls here. Dice rolls in general are unavoidable, but for the examples given above, they were horrible, and that's what most people are referring to when they say that they don't want dice rolls in Skyrim.

I think that Spec's post is on the right track. Something in between the two games' systems is needed.

There should be a chance to miss a target, if that target is moving, blocking, and dodging, but very little likelihood of missing a target that's just standing there, like a Mudcrab. Morrowind was off the mark in one direction, where the odds of hitting at low skill level were far too poor against an "easy" target. Oblivion was off in the opposite direction, where you could ALWAYS hit your target, no matter how difficult the target made it, and regardless of your skill with the weapon, or total lack thereof. In the first, skills dominated the mechanics, but the animations didn't really "explain" the result, only that you hit or missed. In the second, the heavy dependency on player skills made character skills almost meaningless, aside from "nerfing" damage at low skill level.

Adjusting the speed and timing of your swing, the actual point it hits versus the point you aim for, and the recovery time afterwards, and giving a RANGE of potential damage which could be influenced to the high or low side by skill, could all be used to give skills meaning, without resorting to the extreme "hit or miss" mechanics in MW. A variation in the resulting damage based on MARGIN of success or failure could also be implemented, so a novice that hits a nimble or skilled opponent would be more likely to do "partial" hits, whereas a master attacker would tend to do full or "bonus' damage, especiallly against a slow or unskilled opponent. The dice would still be there making skill checks in the background, but the effects should be a lot more subtle and "visually plausible".

Other "die rolls" (single = die, plural = dice) need to have some sort of control over the levels of risk and reward. If you're willing to live with some risk, there should be a way to "push" the possibilities, at the price of a chance of failure (as in MW spellcasting). If you want to "play it safe" and not have any failures (OB style), the option should be there, so you only do what's clearly within the range of your abilities. Alchemy could work the same way, where you would make "basic" potions reliably using Novice apparatus, but both the quality of the potions and the chance of failure would increase if you attempted to use more precise and complicated equipment. As your skills improved, you would eventually find yourself able to use the next "grade" of equipment without risk, or a yet higher grade with some chance to fail. As a bonus, tying the quality of the resulting potions to the quality of the apparatus used, and using Skill mainly to influence the chance of success, would allow those potions to stack in inventory, rather than having minor incremental differences as happened in both MW and OB.

If you missed a mudcrab "hundreds" of times in MW, then you obviously made a non-combat character with no weapon skills, because the only way I could manage that kind of "feat" would be to use a weapon for which the character had a skill of 5, be heavily fatigued upon entering combat, and also have mediocre Agility. I've played a MW character with "standard" starting Agility and Luck of 40, and still managed to hit basic wildlife about 5-10% of the time, using a weapon that the character only had the basic bottom-of-the-barrel skill level of 5 with. That's like complaining that your OB character couldn't do more than a point of damage. If you make a character who can't fight, then don't complain when they don't exactly punt posterior.