I posted this in another thread, but I put a lot of thought into the post, so I wanted to post it here and see what you thought. Would this be a good realistic skill system? If you are of the group that thinks skills should be as simple and almost-nonexistant as possible, you're obviously not going to like this so no real need to respond.

I think the best way to do the skill system would be to have skills with subskills beneath them. Like, for example, the one-handed tree (which I think makes more sense as a seperation than blade and blunt) would have blunt and blade (or something like that) as subsets, and have some perks in those subsets. The total blade and blunt level average is equal to your one-handed average. Levelling up is done by having a certain number of points go to the subskill you're using, and a smaller number of points going to the other subskill(s), so this way, practicing with a sword makes you still improve your ability to use a mace, but if you use a mace more often, you're ability to use a mace will improve more than your ability to use a sword. Some skills may have more subskills than others, but it doesn't matter as your skill revolves around the average. Additionally, a revamped attribute system would serve as another umbrella, like with strength, so this way, improving your skill with mace or sword also improves your ability with hand-to-hand or greatsword or warhammer. This is for the simple fact that stronger people hit harder with EVERYTHING, not just a particular weapon they've done the most training in. Other skill subsets could include light and heavy armour, speechcraft and mercantile etc.

Perks COULD be a good thing, but not the way they were implemented in Skyrim. Instead of saying "Lets make it lyk a cool constellation, lolz" let's say "Let's organise the perks in a logical manner". Perks need not be in visual trees within skills. Perks can have prerequisite perks, and prerequisite skills, but they need not have only one of these, and it should just be done to make sense. For example, if you want a perk that does higher sneak damage with a dagger, you should have a certain prerequisite level of both sneak and that weapon. Skills are the main focus, attributes are for generalisation, subskills and possibly perks are for specialistion.

I've heard a few people say that simplifying the skill system so there's less numbers makes more sense, but that is complete rubbish. People don't have 18 skills. People have complex forms of abilities and simplifying them just makes them seem like awkward robots with lapses in evolutionary logic. Someone who's good at sneaking stealthily will be better at stealing than someone who isn't. Someone who does one kind of magic has more magical knowledge and experience than someone who hasn't, even if their experience is needed to be applied to a different magical field. Yes, we know the numbers are not realistic, because you don't see numbers in real life. They are a representation of the detail we can't see, but which is subtly working it's effect. After all, a game's representation of reality is limited, if you want to do a complex skill system, you need numbers. Visual aids are good too, but not so much obvious ones that it seems artificial.

Here is my ideal skill list, I think. I think the 18 skills system of Skyrim would have worked fine, if it were not that they were intrinsically seperate with the perks failing to offer logical specialisation. In case you're wondering, I did not include athletics as I thought it would be too much grinding. Rather, I think speed should be goverened by your stamina, or possibly an attribute.

One-handed
Two-handed
Defense (Includes all armour and block)
Marksman
Hand-to-hand (utilised to include fist weapons like katars, claws, brass knuckles etc. as well as things like kicking and special moves)
Smithing (Includes repairing)

Sneak
Security (Includes lockpicking and stting up traps and other similar things)
Guile (Includes speech and mercantile)
Alchemy
Acrobatics (Includes parkour moves and dodging in battle)
Theivery (Pickpocketing, which can also be done by distracting people while you walk past them, and how easily people are alerted when you take something)

Destruction
Alteration
Restoration
Illusion
Conjuration
Enchanting

Here's the list again with my current thoughts for subskills liste, soilered to save space.

I think the more complex the better. I know a lot of people who were put off Oblivion because they found it too complicated. Personally, I'd much rather have a more complex system where it took time to learn all of it. As long as it is within reason. I dont want to have to cast a restoration spell 3000 times just to increase it one level.

The more the different types of skills/perks the better I say. More to master and adds longevity to the game. I'd like to see knife throwing/dual knife throwing added as a weapon or the ability to sneak up on someone and kill them with a special stranglehold move. You have some good ideas, I like them

With attributes back in, a skill system like that would be great.

I'd even go a step further and make weapons and armour more complex as well... so instead of simply having Weight, Defence Rating, and Cost for a piece of armour, i'd have:

Weight - (has an impact on how fast you can walk/run)
Movement - (has an impact on agility/dexterity in battle, for instance, a chainmail vest might weigh roughly the same as a some light plate armour... but you're going to be able to move a lot more freely in the chainmail)
Durability - (obviously determines how quickly the armour degrades)
Defence against piercing blows - (arrows, spears, spiked traps, daggers, etc)
Defence against crushing blows - (hammers, clubs, and other heavy blunt weapons)
Defence against hacks and slashes - (blades)
Resistance against Fire
Resistance against Frost
Resistance against Shock
etc.

Yes, while not part of the skill system, I think this could be great for armour to have complex stats like this (but we can make it so that it doesn't show by default, you have to look in details or something, so as not to bother inexperienced players too much). And they should have armour not simply in a heirachial progression, but with different inherent advantages and disadvantages, like, for a simple example, silver weapons (which could be steel infused with silver) could be an expensive weapon that is actually weaker than steel by a little but has the advantage of being able to kill non-corporeal monsters like ghosts. This sort of thing would add a lot to the RPG elements of the game and not make it just a "move on to the next most powerful thing" deal.

Your subskills idea sounds like it would work exactly the same way the perks work now in Skyrim.

I'd agree that if armor is even a skill that it should be one skill. Dodge should definitely replace the armor skill.

Yes, the subskills are similar to perks, which is why I'm not sure perks would be necessary if subskills existed, but they could still serve to keep things interesting. I think for general purposes, subskills would work better than perks, providing gradual increase as you raise your skills, as opposed to sudden incremental increases when you increase a level, or whenever you like. It would be a more natural system. But perks might still work with the system for the purpose of specific special abilities like the bleeding perk for axes and that sort of thing.

I like it. The idea of subskills makes more sense to me. I hated how Bethesda kept saying perks and what it seemed they really wanted was skill trees. In Skyrim they sort of touched on this with things like "Bypasses armour using a mace" and so on, but not to the degree that truly seperated them into skill trees. Seems like what you want is a sort of variant of Galsiah's Character Development. Perhaps it's getting a tad too complicated here, but to me it seems logical to have attributes, skills and the aforementioned subskills. Sort of like how Morrowind ties them together, but more complex. Like you'd have a One handed skill tree seperating into say how Morrowind had them and you'd end up with something like this:

One handed:

• Mace
  
• Short Blade
  
• Axe
  
• Long blade

And you'd train strength and agility by using them (on top of the weapon skills and subskills too, obviously), but different weapons will have different ratios. Using Skyrim's system, you'd say that short blade would train agility the fastest and strength the slowest, and mace would train strength the fastest and agility the slowest, with strength determining how hard you hit and agility determining how fast your characters movements in combat like dodging, bringing up your shield and simply swinging are.

The same concept applies to armour. I can see your point in the differences between light, heavy (and medium?) being redundant. Standard weight would affect how fast you can move, and wearing heavy armour would penalize your speed and agility while lighter armour would obviously provide less protection. This is why I think the seperation between light and heavy is important because without the use of perks to define them, the player would feel as though no progression would have been made from the beginning in terms of heavy armour. Someone who has used heavy armour for 50 levels should feel nowhere near as clunky as someone who has not.

To throw it even more mumbo jumbo, it'd work something like this:
Every 3 short blade levels, and your skill in One handed would go up.
Every 5 levels and your agility level goes up
Every 8 or 10 and your strength goes up.

On Mace, it would work like this:
Every three Mace levels, your skill in one handed would go up
Every 5 levels and your strength goes up
Every 8 or 10 and your agilty goes up

The idea is to create complexity, but mask it behind a simple interface so it's easy to use, but with options if you are willing to look. DF and MW were rich and comlplex, but more difficult to understand how the game mechanics worked (it was a LOOOONG time before I really understood how to use Enchanting and Alchemy to any significant degree, but they're insanely powerful if you work at it); Oblivion and Skyrim were considerably simpler and easier to use, but really didn't do a whole lot.

What's really needed is a complicated web of interactions between perks, skills, and attributes, where most of them affect several others, but an easy to understand way of presenting it to the player. That way you can either pretty much just set it and forget it if you like and the game will handle all of the details in the background, or else go into those more cryptic sub-menus and micromanage to your heart's content.

In terms of documentation, TES has always failed, imo. Which is why the whole streamlining and simplification thing doesn't make much sense to me. The system can be as complex as a slice of cerebellum twisted in 5-dimensional space, as long as the documentation of what does what is good and easy to understand. Skyrim is terrible at that. Nowhere does it say what your skill level does exactly, bonuses sometimes come in obscure descriptions like "You are harder to detect", and so on. It's really terrible, and has always been as far as I can remember.

That said, I really like the idea. It's what perks should have been. It makes you wonder why you'd still need the skills though, and not just use all the subskills as "skills" instead. I guess it's nice to have 6 skills vor every archetype, but that's about the only reason I can think of. Actually, I think we could lose perks alltogether with subskill, or rather, lose perks that you have to chose. Instead you should gain perks automatically as your subskill reaches a certain level, like in Oblivion. There is not any choice involved once you decide what you want to use anyway - every dedicated swordsman will have exactly the same perks in Skyrim.

To give different armors and materials specific stats and don't generalize all light and heavy armor makes a lot of sense, too. If you want to play a swift and agile character, you pick armors that don't hinder movement that much. If you want to be a heavy armored warrior, you just pick the one with best defense. To keep this simple and clean in the UI, you could only show the best two stats of that specific armor - for example, Dwarven Armor shows with 50 Defense and 75 Durability, whereas Fur shows 80 Movement and 3 Weight. This way you can easily see if that specific armor benefits your playstyle or not, and if you want to know all the specs, you could bring it up with the push of a button.
Different benefits of different weapon materials would have made smithing infinitely better. I'd love to forge Silver Dwarven Swords against vampires/ghosts/wolves/etc, or Glass Orcish Warhammer for less weight. They really wasted a lot of potential here.

About attributes, I'm not sure how to handle it. I might actually prefer to let people pick those themselves instead of leveling them automatically - but certain levels of attributes might require a certain skillevel first.
Let's say if you had 80 Strength and not more than 80 in any strength-governing skill, you couldn't raise Strength further. And there should be a total limit of attribute points like there is a total limit of perk points now, so you keep people from being "masters of everything" via attributes instead of perks (which makes a lot more sense anyway, imo). Also, this way you actually get to make more of a choice than you currently do with perks. If I want to make a heavy-hitting swordsman, I go for strength, if I want to make one that hits fast, I go for agility, if I want to crit a lot, I get luck, and so on.

In my opinion, Attributes rose too quickly and easily in the games. Attributes should be about who and what you are, not so much about what you learn. Maybe limit increases to 1 or 2 points total per level.

Armor should include a host of factors: protection, durability, weight, repairability, cost, and flexibility. Each armor type should be a compromise between those, and a style that's more durable and protective should be heavy and difficult to repair, or something.

I had threads on this. Maybe i inspired you, maybe not. Either way you put forth your idea better.


Suggestions

Enchanting- Constant effect/ on use / on hit OR weapon/apparel / item
alteration- warding (armour spells) /utility (water breathing/feather)
restoration- Healing / fortifying
Illusion- self / others

also- i wouldnt know where to put spears! Because i think they should be usable with magic and shields but not with other weapons. plus they arent realy like the other two handed weapons!



Id realy like perks/new things that are learnt from trainers or books. (Armour and materials for smithing , moves for weapons and hand to hand, languages etc )

I'd like an intuitive skill system: While this looks decent on paper... how the heck would you handle level-scaling, and what skills would actually prove viable?

We're getting into another topic here, but level scaling should be put in the game scarcely at best. Level scaling itself isn't that much of a problem, but the way it's handled in Oblivion and Skyrim is obnoxious. Every dungeon ends up feeling the same, filled with nameless NPCs and the same boring chests filled with the same boring "Potion of Stamina, 53 gold". All NPCs should be named except for obvious things like wolves and daedra and so on. It's okay to have a few instances of levelled loot, but when you fight through a whole dungeon just to get to yet more levelled loot? That's irritating. Level scaling if handled at all should be handled via levelled lists. You'll have an NPC that's level 15 no matter what, and when the player hits level 15 that NPC and the player level simultaneously until a certain point like say...20, where the NPC stops level scaling. But that's if it should be put in at all.

Making skills viable is another matter all together. This seems to be Bethesda's weakest point. If they can't make a skill viable, or it's too overpowered, they scrap it. I wouldn't be complaining so much if it meant that the skills ended up balanced in the first place, but they're not. With the removal of waterwalk, slowfall, jump, levitate, mark, recall and the interventions they effectively made both mysticism and alteration useless, and we all know how that turned out. Making skills viable is about making them all equally useful depending on what playthrough you're doing. Same goes for acrobatics/atheletics. Now everything is defined by what armour your character is wearing, as if that even begins to make sense. Rolling and dodging was quite a nice addition to Oblivion, and now it's just gone. I have no idea why, but it is.

You make a good point, perhaps I haven't thought it out entirely thoroughly. I think the main reason I wanted to include skills with subskills was, apart from the having equal number of skills per archetype (Which probably isn't THAT important if you have enough skills to choose from) is simply for organisation and to explain how things work to the player. It would be hard, I think, to keep track of what skills were affecting what other skills and to what degree if you just had one long list of skills, and the system might appear a little messy and daunting to a new player. I think organising them into subskills is just an easy way to show the player that that group of skills is linked. Still, the system would probably still work with them just having seperate skills.

The skill/subskill separaten makes indeed sense when you use it to organize skills and make their functions easier accessible. I hadn't thought of that. It's one of the good ways to streamline, and I think it's a perfectly valid reason to keep 6 mainskills for every archetype.
The mistake Bethesda made with the same approach is that they cut the complexity for the sake of accessibility, which is absolutely unnecessary. Accessibility shouldn't even touch the actual mechanics, it just has to deal with the UI and organization.

Does anyone have any good idea of what a good attribute organisation would be for these skills?