After trying Oblivion XP for a while, i've concluded that I actually do prefer the default levelling system that comes with the vanilla oblivion. While it is very difficult at times to level, I do overall find it more rewarding than Oblivion XP. You get rewarded more for things that don't involve combat. I realise that I could have configured Oblivion XP to how I wanted it, but it still didn't seem very rewarding. For killing something like a goblin, I got like 5 XP, while for reading a book, I got 30? That didn't seem right, although I do realise that I could have changed it. Plus, for skills that aren't so combat orientated, you can't level them up by like improving them if you get what I mean. Like, the speechcraft skill. I got no XP for improving the NPC's disposition, and no XP for trading goods and haggling, yet in the default levelling system, im rewarded.

Any other views on this, or am I the only one?

There's more alternatives to the vanilla system than just Oblivion XP. Personally I think what the game uses by default svcks, though I like the overall idea of advancing through use. I prefer Kobu's system rather than the one provided by Bethesda.

I'd really like to see the next Elder Scroll installment move back towards a more Morrowind approach.

I tried and really despised Oblivion XP. I'm not a fan of Oblivion's default leveling, but even it was better. Now I use nGCD, which is how I feel leveling should be done.

I'm not really a fan of Oblivion XP, but not of the default system either. I'm using GCD for Morrowind, which I can't play without anymore, and nGCD for Oblivion.

I haven't tried OblivionXP but it sounds like I wouldn't want to either. For games like Final Fantasy where you get stronger by killing enemies is okay for FF, but not for TES, IMO. It's okay for FF only because that's what we've come to expect from FF games (although if they implemented Vagrant's Story's system, wouldn't be bad either) I have always like Bethesda's philosophy that you don't become a better thief simply by killing enemies. The skill leveling system is a staple of TES and I hope it stays that way.

That being said: I do have a couple of problems with Oblivion's level scaling.

Baddies leveling with you keeps a challenge, but goblin warlords perpetually gaining health as you level up to the highest levels is nothing but annoying. Would be nice if all enemies had an eventual cap even if some of them could run quite high.

Also being stuck with leveled loot that you acquired at lower levels is frustrating. If it's a very powerful item, then they should have very powerful enemies guarding it so you can't acquire it until you're strong enough. Or doing missions of similar caliber/ difficulty. Although I didn't mind some of the random loot you could get at higher levels. At least you weren't stuck with a one time deal like rewards. You still have a chance of getting stronger enchanted loot. As for powerful rewards, the difficulty in acquiring them should be matched with the strength of the reward.

Some skills leveling far easier/ faster than others was also quite imbalanced. Raising skills should all be done at the same rate, where restoration and alchemy can be just as easy or just as hard to increase.

In a sense, they already are. Your proposed change would basically force you to wait until X level to do Y quest, whereas now waiting is an option rather than a requirement and your reward's power is relative both to your level and to the difficulty of the quest.


Wouldn't that be equally broken? Imagine if blade and armourer leveled at the same rate. Either blade would level uncontrollably quickly or armourer would level so slowly as to be unusable.

Any levelling system is going to have the same issues. The assignment of experience to advancement in skills and attributes has to be done by counting something, and people are always going to disagree on what should count the most, and what experience should increase which skill or attribute. The better systems leave those choices to the player, so you only have yourself to blame if you set them up wrong, but that sort of approach can only work for users who've played through a few times and know the relative values of everything.

I think Bethesda did a reasonable job of defining a default system that is workable when you start to play. The predefined classes didn't fit it too well, so you rapidly restart with a custom one, but then it works well enough.

I felt that the problem with the Elder Scrolls character leveling system was that Bethesda did not have what my mother would call the 'courage of their convictions.' I've always felt that Bethesda would have preferred to offer a game with a more innovative skill-based leveling system but felt they needed to offer players who were used to old-time D+D leveling a compromise. The result is a confusing hybrid system composed of skill-based advancement with an unspectacular, unsatisfactory bonus-point system tacked on as an afterthought. I believe that if they had focused exclusively on either system they would have ended up with a game that was more coherent, character leveling-wise.

I prefer a classless, skill-based system. The concept of 'class' in roleplaying needs to go. It's purely a meta-game mechanic, it has nothing to do with roleplaying. Adventurers in real life (pioneers and trappers on the American frontier, as an example) are darn well going to be jacks-of-all-trades. Their lives depended on being able to do everything. A real person adventuring on their own would never dream forsaking magic because they were a 'Rogue,' or would go without armor because they were a 'Mage'. Hell, no: they'd do anything they could, learn any skill they could learn, to stay alive. The idea that a group of four or six people would arrange themselves into a tiny bureaucracy in which only one of them could pick locks, only one could fling a fireball, only one could wield a two-handed sword, etc, etc, etc, could only be thought up by glasses-wearing geeks in a comfortable middle-class basemant, far away from the real world.

For this reason I tend not to use nGCD. nGCD promotes a class-based style of play, penalizing jack-of-all-trade characters and characters that change over the course of a game. I prefer Realistic Leveling (combined with Progress) because that mod adjusts on-the-fly to every decision made by the player and does not penalize playstyles that do not conform to its approach.

That said, both mods are excellently crafted works and are also highly configurable.

Hear hear!



What about its Got No Class esp where you only have minor skills?

EDIT: You have, however, made me curious about Realistic Leveling. I think I'll have to try it for my next character.

To my experience, armorer and blade do relatively increase at the same rate already. I'm talking more about something like alteration or conjuration vs. restoration. I never understood why restoration took so much longer than the other two; and why alteration and conjuration increased so fast. Maybe a happy medium could be found between them.
Then again maybe blade does already level somewhat faster than armorer.

I hope that if there is another TES game, that it uses something like nGCD for leveling.



What? Morrowind and Oblivion leveling are almost exactly the same. :huh:

I guess it depends on the character. My melee-heavy guys see their blade skill rocket up while I've found armorer to slowly plod along. Maybe I need to get hit more.

As for things like conjuration leveling up so quickly, I think they tried to balance increases per cast with number of casts. You'll cast far more destruction spells than conjuration spells over the course of your average fight.

You bring up some very good points. As for blade and armorer, my current character is at level 9 with 47 blade and 41 armorer by just using the skills as I need them. I didn't do any manual training (other than paying trainers), so those numbers are strictly that way from me actually needing to use the skills. So that being said, it does seem that blade levels somewhat faster. As for increasing armor a little more frequently, you can try what Acadian does and take all weapons & armor from your dead enemies and repair them. Then throw back the stuff you don't want to keep. I've tried it before and works rather well.

That is good stuff Pseron laid down about the class system of D&D. Actually in the newest editions of D&D like 3.0 3.5 etc... It is veering away from the old strict Class systems by giving the PC the option to take the experience they got fighting as a first level 'Fighter' then trading that experience to take the next 'level' as a Mage and get only the hit point bonus, perks, of a mage, but also the spell or two. Then the next level they could take could be under Thief/Rogue. So now you can make that "Jack of All Trades Characters' Apparently the game is now being written by dudes who played Football in HS and also took college level algebra and were a little less 'geeky' maybe....

My history with leveling mods has been pretty much to install them, create a character (or bring out a saved character, if the mod will seamlessly work with one), look at their stats, think something like, "What the heck is that? Why does my pure melee fighter have less strength and more intelligence? How did I spontaneously gain three levels?" and disable the mod and go back to vanilla leveling.

I'm not overly fond of the vanilla leveling system, but after a couple of years and dozens of characters, I have a clear enough understanding of how it works that I can almost always work around its problems.

I use OblivionXP instead of the default vanilla levelling system. It lets me have fun fighting enemies instead of having to level "efficiently"...

Well, I think Pseron Wyrd said exactly what I think on the matter, particularly regarding the inherent absurdity of "pure" classes, but I'll pitch in with what I use for my leveling needs: a combination of Progress (yay for configuring Restoration to level at a pace I can actually detect with my naked eyes), S.P.A.M for making attribute gains completely configurable, and a custom tweak that uncaps training sessions per level, because I loathe nerfs of all kinds in single player games, and would rather decide for myself what exactly constitutes too much training. Uncapped training is also a great money sink for me, since I never buy every single house in the game.


Anyway, I definitely liked the ideas behind the vanilla OB leveling system, but in practice they didn't quite work for me, especially coming from Morrowind, which, while not perfect, never made me feel nannied nor slapped my wrists for playing unconventional characters.

I use Wyre Leveling nowadays. Pay gold to level up. Not saying it's perfect, but I find that I am a lot less annoyed at the leveling system now.

1The current levelling system is so bad I switched to PC just because of OOO!

I like the default OBL level system

A lot of the particulars are as annoting as hell, but the final result is I dont end up creating the Gods of the Wastes or Lords of the Islands like I do with FO 3 or MW

I have never understood what the problem is with the leveling system. Within most threads on the subject one person will say it makes the upper levels too hard while the next says it makes them too easy. I have only played vanilla Oblivion because I like it, but the descriptions of the alternative leveling systems didn't sound any better; merely different.

For me, it really comes down to roleplaying and what you want out of your character. Surviving in the game has very little to do with level IMHO. I have had extremely gimped characters sail through quests and dungeons with impunity (I play on default difficulty.) Rewards on the other hand are very level dependent and the best ones are reserved for those willing to enter the upper regions of the level hierarchy. Roleplaying may not involve getting lots of high priced (or high powered) loot but you definitely won't be buying all the houses in Cyrodill while mucking about at level-1. Seems fair enough to me.

Hi I'm very new to Oblivion, been playing it for about a week, but I think bobg has missed the point the problem is not the stage of the game you're at or the level you are it's how "efficiently" you've levelled to get tehre. The game mishandles levelling up so that it's too easy to do by accident and punishes you for doing so by increasing the levels of the monsters at a quicker rate you you're improvement from levelling up for all but the most efficient levelling up +3 to +5 for 2 or 3 stats. So if you're a beginner like me and you play the game in innocence and it tells you "you have gained experience and should sleep on what you've learned" you think "sweet I should sleep now" not "right under no circumstances should I sleep. What stats have I not been using? I need to spend an hour training those to get them up then I might be able to sleep."

I'm experimenting with Realistic Levelling at the moment in combination with Francescos leveled creatures items mod. Will see how it goes.

Once you see the message that you need to sleep to level up, it's too late to add bonus points to your next level. I should add that I am talking about vanilla Oblivion. Any skill increases will be added to the the bonuses for the level AFTER the next one (and if that one hits a new level bonuses apply to the one after that.)

The reason I mentioned my 'gimped' characters is to point out that efficient leveling isn't everything. Some attributes don't even effect the skills they supposedly control. Intelligence does not effect potion making for instance. My mages typically have low endurance and strength even at very high levels but with the powerful restoration potions they can brew, it doesn't matter.

There is one instance where it seriously matters. That's when your melee character simply stands toe to toe with the enemy and trades blows. I wouldn't want to count on all +5's to decide the outcome. Versatility is typically more important than 'stats'.

Not nearly so much experience as Gpstr, but this is pretty much where I stand too. I only tried Realistic Levelling briefly, might have installed one other one very briefly. I keep playing with Vanilla Levelling.

The system has its flaws, but I've come to the conclusion that it is actually less random and poorly thought-out than is sometimes argued. From my perspective, I think the main problems with the vanilla leveling are as follows:

1) The game rewards me for tedious repetitive actions that some how just don't make sense. Sure, doing math problems all day might increase might math ability, but could I just do that to become a Master Mathmetician? Likewise, it just doesn't make total sense that I can effectively become a Master Illusionist or Restorationist or Alterationist simply by casing Starlight, Heal, or Protect repeatedly for days on end. This to me is the most egregious problem in the system in that it breaks immersion and makes it the expeience feel "gamey" instead of fascinating. True, if a player feels this way, he could just not do it, but then where is the boundary? If I cast Heal one extra time after a battle is that overstepping it? What about if my character starts his day by casting a nice refreshing Fortify Fatigue spell, does that constitute an action somewhere in the grey area between gameyness/clever strategy/roleplaying? It behooves the designer to anticipate precisely these patterns of player behavior and to include simple game mechanics that prevent the breakdown of immersion, not by requiring a player to voluntarily avoid 'cheating' but simply making it costly, impractical, or unappealing from a story standpoint. Not knowing the engine, I have no idea if it would've been simple to do, but ideas that come to me for how this could've been implemented: the background maths keep track of how often you use a skill within a given span of time, and simply award you diminishing experience as you do it more and more repetitively in a short span of time. Ideally, the engine would calculate if casting a particular spell were being done "under fire" and award full XP in those instances, but diminishing XP when it is being overused in practice sessions. Granted, most of the solutions start to seem pretty complex, let alone considering how complicated it might be to code them, but that is my take on that point.

2. Super-powered Goblins are as already said, annoying.

3. I never play with the standard classes, and do find that having an "area" (Combat, Magic, Stealth) of focus as well as the attribute specs makes pretty good sense from the standpoint of a more-or-less "classless" rpg system. I agree that a less-class-rigid system is the way to go, but I don't find the restrictions of the "class" system to be that annoying as long as I use custom classes.

4. Levelling up too fast as a result of actually USING your Majors, and thus be prevented from being a generalist. Given the game portrays the protagonist as a lone adventurer, this to me is a somewhat incongruous structure, though I can understand if they made it this way to make it approachable for the general consumer public. The resulting consequence for those who want to play a genealist with vanilla = Playing a Magic user with Majors like "Blunt, Heavy Armor, Armorer, Marksman, etc." is certainly workable but again, breaks immersion and the roleplay aura.

Other than that I think Vanilla leveling works fine.