I would HATE artificial, DnD-style limits where each class has a given skillset and cannot use the skills of the other classes. Basically because TES typically is a mysterious world that your character gets thrown into ("straight outta jail"). Your character has to make sense of this new world and align himself with it.

So, lets say I'm playing a 'pure mage' straight off the boat in Morrowind, but end up getting mixed up in House Redoran's quest line and find my character to be most aligned with their world-view. I can play through the Redoran quest line as a mage if I want, but as their society highly respects the warrior class, my character may decide that he wants to learn to wield a sword. There should be no artificial mechanism in place to stop him from putting in the effort and learning sword skills to the highest level.

On the other hand, I think there should be very strong 'soft' mechanisms in place that make it an advantage to focus on a few skills. Here are three suggestions that might work well together:

1) Make it difficult to use skills that are very low level!

A pure mage will start the game with a very low blade skill. This should have lethal consequences if he goes toe-to-toe with anything bore dangerous than mudcrabs. A glancing blow could throw the sword out of his hand, the enemy should 'read' his moves and therefore block/dodge more effectively, and hits should have a big 'random' aspect to them at low blade levels, i.e. not always swinging the sword in the direction that tha mouse is pointed.

2) Make it very advantageous to have a high level in a skill, so it makes less sense (for a given level) to have spread your skill points out over many skills.

I.e. a blade skill of 60 should be MORE THAN twice as effective as a blade skill of 30. The special moves in Oblivion were a good start here, but need expanding, and high-level spells in Oblivion just didn't feel very epic. A high-level mage should be able to do crazy stuff, and should be a priority for bad guys to knockdown/silence/drain mana otherwise they WILL be magicked to death. A high-level rogue/thief should have a deadly critical strike from stealth, and also have some way of making critical strikes in melee.

I think that in Oblivion it actually felt like a disadvantage to have specialized in something (apart from a Thieves' Guild player perhaps - but in this case you would still be eaten quite often travelling from city to city), as the game forced you into similar situations in most of the quest lines, and because magic and combat had too much synergy (no real disadvantage to spellcasting from holding a sword / heavy armour).

3) If you have a guild based around a particular skillset, for the love of all that is holy please ensure that the quests for that guild make use of this skillset. This will automatically focus the player on a few specific skills. For stuff like the Mages' Guild in Oblivion (which worked a lot like a university) have some combat quests that (due to layout, large numbers of weak enemies, whatever) are easier for a mage to survive... but why not also include some quests based around magical research (use spellmaking to achieve a particular new spell type, and demonstarte it to the satisfaction of your peers), get an object that is very difficult to access without water walking / levitation, etc. Morrowind had hard skill requirements to advance in the guilds and houses, which was better than Oblivion's completely open system, but clever quest design can do a lot better than either options.

Instead of telling us what a mage shouldnt do with a sword or whatever, i would really prefer if you could tell any ideas on how the magic system the gameplay the spells and the combos of a mage should be improved, so to make a mage a really attractive character

Honestly, I think we should have a system that makes it very difficult to master everything, and I think your race and favored attributes and combat/magic/stealth specialization should affect what your maxes are. I think some of the maxes should be lower than or higher than 100. There's no point in different races if they don't play differently. I also think that the devs should put a lot of thought into how your race actually affects your interactions.

On the other hand, I think we should also never lock out certain skills and abilities. It's not so uncommon for people to have wide-ranging odd skills in real life. Just because I'm an art student doesn't mean I can't do math. My mom was a math teacher but now she's a librarian. People pick up a lot of skills that we don't "commonly" think of as going together, and TES should never just say "You're a Mage. YOU CAN NEVER LEARN TO WEAR ARMOR OR USE AN AXE."

And you guys know what? The saying goes: "jack of all trades, master of NONE, still better than a master of one." (Fun historical fact: "Jack" here is a slang term for a person, as it's a nickname for John, a very common name. It has nothing to do with cards as far as I know.)

A mage is already a very attractive character - I play them almost excessively. And being a pure mage is possible, I'm more interested in ways to make let's say a warrior being able to get through the game with no restoration. alchemy, lockpicking and other side skills...

Its not life, its an rpg game, you know what it means right? role playing game, not generic first person game with some elements of role playing game

isnt the saying "Jack of all trades, master of none" not master of all?
EDIT: sorry didnt see above post

Agreed, but they should improve magic a lot anyway

A good point. I would although like to remind people that Morrowind and Oblivion are similar, yet different - in Morrowind the sheer amount of skills left you with things to learn even after 200 hours of gameplay. Most of the secondary skills started with value of 5 and where practically useless, you had to get some serious training in to get them of the rock bottom, so you needed to really on your class skills to get by until you have spare cash and patience (with lvl 5 in sword killing even a rat was one hell of a task ) And I think leveling was slower. At last it felt slower So if they just add the skills back and rise th difficulty of leveling them it will be more than enough incentive to focus on your main ones.

This x 1,000,000.

The Telvanni towers in MW were perfect for this. They're a mage faction and you have to levitate to get anywhere. Great! Both the Thieves Guild and Mages Guild were essentially just renamed Fighters Guild in Oblivion.

I'd just make it so that unused skills and attributes, once they are over 50, will slowly drop lower (down to 50). So while it'd be easy to maintain an average level in all skills, getting many skills higher than that requires regular use and training of those skills, and it'd be wise to stick to a smaller number of core skills which are taken better care of than others. Even heroes get rusty after all. This would also not be an immersion breaking limit such as "Hey, you are a mage, you can't have a sword". It's rather "Hey, you're a mage, you can have a sword, though you'll be a slightly worse mage than the other guy then".

Exactly - it's not an action game, and it's not an adventure game, not even a quest. RPG in it's purest form is a "game about live in a different world" it is why the current approach makes so much sense - rigid leveling is for more or less linear games with strict plot, a free roaming game deserves a free leveling system as well

Alright, then we should put a life limit to the character too, because a life in another world doesnt stop to be a life, its takes three lifes for someone to be a perfect mage, figher, assasin and a thief isnt that right?

Well said. Very well indeed.

@Jimis Why are you being so hostile towards everyone who has a different opinion than you?

Sure, that's the other half of the equation... can't just have everybody svcking at everything This is going a bit off topic, but...

I would enjoy it if mages generally focused on keeping enemies at range, and had heat-seeking-missile (damages enemies) and 'circle damage' (damages everyone closeby) effects. It should be very important for them to lay magical traps / use paralysis spells / etc. to avoid coming into close combat. High-level mages could have an earthquake spell (knocks down all npcs within a given radius of where the spell hits).

High-level conjurers should be able to conjure a small army of monsters - but the npc enemies will be AWARE of this and direct their attacs towards the mage. High-level mages could maybe be able to teleport short distances (just by aiming the cursor at a piece of ground and casting the spell), confusing the enemies and getting to a safe distance.

Specializing in illusion should allow high-level mages to use fear spells to avoid most combat entirely.

I also think it would be interesting to have 'spell failiure' chance if the mage is under attack, making it more important to fire the first shot and keep at a distance. I think there was something like this in Dragon Age.

I would like to see very high-damage spells that need preparing before battle in some way (constantly draining magicka) or perhaps powering up in battle (leaving the mage motionless).

I have no ideas for specific combos, other than frost spells could freeze (making vulnerable to shatter) and fire spells have a chance to set on fire (making a lot more vulnerable to fear spell).

Mage vs. mage should involve a lot of silence spells and spell shields, as each mage has the ability to do a lot of damage in one blow / combo.

Just a few ideas, I think the main thing is to make the 'mage' style of play UNIQUE and making the swordsman-mage combo less viable (or at least more difficult to pull off) at lower levels.

and we should also add that the when you neglect an attribute it should lose points

You talk about hostility, i m just talking

I really hope that's sarcasm. Nobody wants a "Oh no your muscle is deteriorating! Better hit the gym!" Like in GTA San Andreas. That just got really annoying.
Unless you have a better idea in mind on how to implement that?

Edit* Maybe your posts just "seem" hostile to me :shrug: I apologize if that's just me misinterpreting it.

Are you truing to tell me that you have character that are more than 1000 days old? Lets say we start the game when we are 25, the aging woun't even be apparent until you are at lat 35, so it gives you 3600 days roughly until your first wrinkle, and I'm not even counting how long until you die of old age... And if you are an elf... TES is not The Sims either, we have a normal lifespan, and normal aging
Oh, and you can master a lot of skills in a year, just count how much subjects a school or a collage teaches, and than multiply it on the fact that your very live depends on you learning them, and you'll get either a steep learning curve or a dead adventurer... Veterinarian students learn to preform a complex surgery in 6 to 9 month for example, learning to poke something with the knife won't take that long if you really put your mind to it

Its cool!!
I have my ideas about the game, its not my purpose to say everything that i have in mind about that here, what i try to say is that in some aspects the game fails really bad, stealth, fighting and magic should be huge aspects in the game and i really mean it, just huge, the dragons, the location of the game, the music or even the graphics doesnt matter so much as these three aspects

i didnt have in mind the anology, i just wanted to say that it seems unrealistic to me to play a game that is rpg and be able to do everything, i really dont like prototype, lol!!! i dont want it on elder scrolls

Freedom is one of the things that makes this series great. I dislike forced pigeonholing.

I did not vote...
Here's my Idea;

Have specialization like there has always been, but restrict growth in non dominant areas. So, if you start out as a mage, you would not be able to progress as far in the blade skill, as say, a warrior. But, you would still be able to train it, it would just be more difficult, and limited.

The same should be done with races. sure in OB and MW they got specialized bonuses, which were really just passive spells. An Altmer should be able to go much farther with magic than an Orc.

I don't know what this has to do with anything, but I will answer anyway.
TES, being an open world RPG gives you all those options, which ones should be viable?
Option 1 is another way of saying "I'm getting back when I'm more powerful", that's the most common measure you will use in TES if there's something you can't do.
Option 2 is pointless, all you need to do is unlock that one lock. If there's an other way, there's no reason to do that. If your mage happens to be skilled at lockpicking or alteration, and is really close to being skilled enough, OK. Option 2 is also an other way of saying what option 1 says, if further progress will make your character able to open locks better.
Option 3 is the best short time solution. If the only thing you need to do is get past that door, and you can do it, I can't see a reason why you should choose any of the other options.

Now, what's your point?

if you are not able to comprehend why you choose mage from the first place, then forget it, its cool, but the discussion has no point

Well prototype is as fare form RPG as it gets actually... It's an action game, not even the same boat.
When TES system is properly balance you potentially can do everything, but practically, you don't get the chance. For example - you use sword as a primary weapon, you level your character with it to level 20, and go to the good dungeons. You have the ability to switch to magic, but that skill is at level 5... Not only that, but you need intelligence and willpower, that you did not develop in the last 20 levels, because you did no use them and had no bonuses for them... In TES you can theoretically get to the proper level of magic for your 20 lvl dungeons if you put a really good amount of practice (and not the fun battle type, but cast the spells on the wall type) and can pay for trainers (which are very expensive at the high level), and you still need to level so you have to develop the primary skills while not taking any attribute bonuses for them, but putting them in to INT and WIL, so you'll be barely dissent at magic by level 40 at best... It will be much easier just to continue leveling the attributes your initially choose and use the occasional misc skill.
Of course whey you have seen everything and done everything, have top attributes for your primary class, and have tones of money, you can decide to learn something else in addition, and try the game form the different perspective, but that is just an "end game bonus" quite often you'll run out of quests (if you don't use mods) by that time and it's a good point to start a new game. In which you can try the different approach
I will repeat that Oblivion was not balanced properly - the system was cut down in scope and made fare to easy - it practically cheated itself. If they simply correct that all will be fine