Bah, trainers are awesome. You don't have to go wale on things aimlessly when you just need a couple skill ups. Also Conjuration. 3/100s of a skill point for every summon, really?

In a way yes it's like Skyrim but mostly it's not. Attributes are still set, classes are still defined and imo most important of all birthsigns are still highly relevant. This is to me the heart of TES games

Yes. That, and if you play TES3 with GCD there is no level-up interface... at all! In other words, your PC levels silently, with no messages, attributes to pick, multipliers, or anything. You literally can play and never know your level without explicitly looking at it in your stats. Skyrim definitely has a level-up interface, and choices you must make, with perks you can optionally choose to take. Big difference... pretty much not the same thing at all.

Alright, yeah. Yeah I can see this now. I might have to try it at some point. I kinda forget about Skyrim not only removing attributes, but everything related to them stats wise and removing classes. Fatigue, Magicka, and Health aren't worth picking from for a measly 10 point bonus at a time.

Perhaps after a couple more playthroughs I'll try it out. I don't know.

You should give it a try sometime if it sounds interesting to you. Be sure to check the forums for the latest info... It's not really in development anymore (at least I don't think so), but various fixes/updates come along from time to time. From what I understand, GCD has had issues with instability, and these newer versions attempt to deal with that (again, to the best of my knowledge... there's certainly more to it). But yeah, it's quite different playing with GCD, and there's a lot of good things that can be said about it. It's not for everyone, but certainly worth a try!

Here's a good thread with a lot of info:
http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1031661-galsiahs-character-development-gcd-bug-report/page__hl__azumite

Not at all. The point of using levelling mods is to remove the visible signs of Attributes, especially the temptation and distraction of tracking "multipliers" for those Attributes, without losing the important effects of those Attributes. The character can simply "grow" in the direction that they are heading, depending on how you play them. In Skyrim, the effects of those Attributes are gone, but the need to pick Perks to do at least some of the same things still retains most of the distraction and annoyance factor.

I don't mind a "hybrid" system, where the majority of the character's growth is dependent on the skills used, but a small amount is reserved for "voluntary" change (such as what you did in your "spare time"). Making it almost entirely dependent on player choice (whether you're picking Skill points, Attributes, or Perks) removes the "character" from the character, and then you've just got an "avatar".

It's actually not about which is better, but rather my attitude towards modding in general: that I pretty much only use mods for aesthetic changes. I guess it's a question of how much you want to change the game without losing the original charm, and where is the balance in between. And only applying aesthetic change is my simple rule to maintain that balance. It's worked fine for me so I'll stick to that for the most part.

Personally I prefer Vanilla leveling - it's not perfect, but it works, and I like that glorious feeling of going to bed knowing you're going to level up. But my boyfriend swears by Galsiah's and won't play without it. Personal preference, I suppose.

As with all games of this sort, two schools of thought reign. Role-players want to relax as their character in an amazing world and not think about improving stats. Unfortunately, if someone asks an RPer what to do when a dozen werewolves attack you at once, then they would probably advise you to load an earlier save or turn the difficulty down. So mods were created to make RP characters more viable...period. The other school of thought is to power game. Know what to do to get a character that is worth spending hundreds of hours playing and then do exactly that to get a strong character. No need for a mod here, since vanilla leveling does this quite well. Curiously, neither term applies to a single player game. This is not an MMO, so with whom are you role-playing? Who has their fun spoiled by my very strong character?

What is best? I create a very strong character and then role-play for hundreds of hours. I don't worry about the attribute multiplier that much. With 70 levels to work with, I don't have to 5-5-1 or 5-5-5 every level up. Sometimes I may just 2-0-0. I max out my Major/Minor skills and get three Miscellaneous skills over 35. That's the only skills I need to improve. This combination allows me to join any faction or Great House I choose with this character and max out my attributes as well. I don't use trainers, or console anything and I don't use exploits. I play max difficulty, dead is dead and I have never had a god-like character. I can tell you that for a fact. It's really not a headache doing things this way and vanilla leveling is worth it in the long run.

I would argue that leveling mods were created simply because many players thought the vanilla token system was crap.

I can tell you have put a lot of thought into this, and have found what works for you. And that's awesome. But if I may, I would like to address a couple of things very quickly.

First, RP games have been around a lot longer than MMOs. I don't understand why you are making a connection between the two genres. You absolutely do not need other people around to play a great RP game. Did I misunderstand something?

More importantly though, I think you're making some over-generalizations, and seeing things as a little too black-and-white. I think there are many more avenues a player can take than the two schools of thought you outlined above. I don't think there is such a thing as the definitive "RPer" who would respond with such canned answers. Everything doesn't come down to "it's either this, or that." In fact, most things are some strange cocktail of lots of different things all mixed together in a way that only makes sense to each person individually.

Forgive me if I'm being unnecessarily critical; I just take issue when people seem to be trying to define the experience for the rest of us, especially when they try to boil it down to overly simplistic terms.

The only reason why I just can't get myself to play a long game without GCD is the level cap. For some reason I immediantly abandon every RPG as soon as a major stat is maxed out.

I never cared for the multiplier in all those years as MW is not about "power leveling" nor roleplaying for me - its all about atmosphere, story and seing my character develop as I play. So one of my most anticipated mods for OpenMW would be a simple level-cap-extender for the vanilla leveling system.

I haven't read the whole thread but I suggest you have a look into customizing GCD: I have disabled it's health bonuses, starting stat changes, magica system (thats the main stability problem if I am correct) and skill spread. The result is pretty stable and good to play with the only huge downsides of missing level-up screen/sound, no need to sleep to level up and that I seem to need to reload the game in order for my level indicator to work correctly.

Yes, I'm glad you brought that up. GCD is very easy to customize with its included, well documented, customize script. I did something similar in my last game and it's pretty close to an automated vanilla feel in level progression. Of course there is no level-up screen but to me that's a bonus. In addition, you get a cap remover and a slow leveling effect from Misc skills.

I don't know at what exact level I am now - it's in the late 20's. I don't really care that much. But not knowing when my character levels up, would probably make me want to check his level all the time. /ahhh.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':ahhh:' /> /ahhh.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':ahhh:' /> /ahhh.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':ahhh:' /> ... I think it would make me nervous.

Also, I'm a roleplayer, not a powergamer. But I like to be in control, and I like to see the stats.

GCD does keep track of your level for leveled list purposes so you can see it whenever you go into your character window, which is pretty often for me.

If you don't care what level you have in anything, then how do you progress in a faction? You have to have three of that faction's favored skills up to a certain level before you can advance.

"In anything?" Who here said that?

You're confusing two entirely different things. There is skill level and there is character level. I usually care very much about skill level. When I and other people say we don't care what level our character is, we are speaking about character level.

You can still see the stats if you look in the menus. The point is that it doesn't toss them in your face every time you gain a level, and that you don't need to concern yourself with them if you don't want to. If you're playing a faction with requirements, it doesn't take a lot to figure out that you need to use their favored skills more to boost the appropriate Attributes, even if you don't look at your stats to see how close you are to meeting them.

Incidentally, I altered GCD to tone down the rate of magicka regen to something like 1/4 of its default value, to keep my "magic dabbler" from being able to spam spells at every turn, and boosted the Endurance gain by about 20% to account for the much lower hitpoint gain versus "vanilla". Other than those two details, which tend to make it less suited to hybrid-class characters, the mod is an awesome improvement to the game.

Thanks. I'm sticking with vanilla.

Lower hitpoint gain in GCD? Is that a fact?
As I remember playing my mages with unedited GCD, they got above 100hp rather quickly. Maybe you are talking about warrior classes?
I feel like GCD with its changed starting stats, magica system and health boni makes mages way to easy to play - I really had to re-think strategys when I ripped this stuff out of GCD.

vanilla levelling works fine especially if you don't have OCD for perfection.

Going in something of a tangential direction, the recent re-emergence of "level awareness" in this thread has reminded me of something I'd like to toss into the mix...

I'm sure this has been discussed by a lot of other people in countless discussions, but I have always found the concept of "level" to be a little strange. I understand why it's needed; so many of the game mechanics we have grown up on/with rely on the concept of "levels", and in particular the player character level. It's hard to imagine these games without the concept, to be sure.

But what does the PC level equate to in our lives? Sure, you can draw comparisons to one system or another that attempts to arrange people in a hierarchical order, but there really isn't anything about me that says in any explicit way that, as a person, I am at some arbitrarily numbered level. I have achieved rankings in this group or that, but as a person, a character in the game of life, I have no "level", at least none that I can discern.

So, I guess I always felt that the PC "level" in the game was an unfortunate but necessary construct of video games. We need them to take care of so much of what we depend on in order to experience our games the way we do, yet at the same time, they force us to deal with a concept that has no actual "real life" counterpart. To this end, I think the PC level itself is something of a RP-breaking concept, and the more abstract you can make it, the better.

Sorry for the tangent, but it seemed the right place to include this. Hope you're all having a great day!

That's interesting... I sort of agree with you.

In a game like Morrowind, that doesn't have much level-scaling when it comes to loot and enemies, there's the fact that knowing your level helps to know what you can defeat and what will defeat you. So levels measure how strong you are compared to the rest of the game world. This makes player level mean something more than it does in games where the world levels with you.

This is the good thing about GCD, it lets you ignore character leveling and focus on skill leveling if you want to.