When you become a lich you become an evil demon and lose all free will, and you certainly wouldn't be able to live in normal society. To be a lich you also have to be dead, when you die in TES you have reload a save. Why would you want that?

Yes to becoming a Lich, no to your type of Lich. Here are my ideas.

Necromancer's Guild
Not only should there be a guild of Necromancy, but you must beat their quest chain to even begin the massive quest to become a Lich. In this quest you should be forced to find the relics of Mannimarco (Bloodworm Helm, Necromancer's Amulet and Staff of Worms), create a phylactery and perform some ritual. It should be hard as hell. You should at very least have to have a reasonable level in Alteration, Enchanting and Conjuration.

Lichdom: On Phylacteries
Phylacteries are the source of a Lich's "immortality." They don't make Liches unkillable, but as long as they exist death is a far more temporary. For the sake of NPC Phylacteries this revival takes only a few minutes, but most phylacteries are kept in a Chamber (Liches resurrect at their Phylacteries) in each dungeon. Not all NPC Liches have phylacteries, those that do should look different.

Your Phylactery
You have two options with your Phylactery, keep it on you or leave it somewhere secure. The Phylactery is the biggest upside to being a Lich, but its powers are still 'attuning' to you and you have set it up so it doesn't take too much of a toll on your body, so it takes a lot longer than most phylacteries and has a cooldown. The cooldown is at least a week (perhaps more). If you keep your phylactery on you, it will revive you at part health, blow all your greater power cooldowns and leave you silenced for 10 seconds. If you leave it somewhere secure you will be revived a week later with only very basic gear and have to retrieve your gear off of your corpse (an activator, not a container so you cannot be looted by anyone else). Though it also burns your cooldown there is a spell that allows you to teleport (gear and all) to your Phylactery.

However if you revive in Combat or someone sees you loot your old body there is a chance people will begin hunting your Phylactery. If you keep it on you they will come after you, if you leave it somewhere secure they will hunt it down. You will be warned when your Phylactery is in peril (if those who are hunting it are near-ish) and if you don't act quickly they are able to destroy it. Leaving it a dungeon is generally a good idea, though the Necromancer's Guild works too (but they would be able to kill named NPCs in there). Note that if you are fighting bandits somewhere remote this is less likely to happen than if you do this in the middle of Windhelm while you fight Guards. Also, killing all of the hunters will end the hunt on your Phylactery, but the event can happen more than once.

Your Undeath
As a Lich you are Undead. This means spells that do more against undead, hurt you like they would an undead. {Sorry didn't realize I didn't finish this section, added it last}
As a Lich your strength seems to come from an ethereal source, so while your arms may swing a sword much the same your decaying bones cannot hold the same weight as before. Alongside your reduced ability to carry items your body is less effected by feather spells and far more effected by burdening spells. Also of importance is that not all undead are on the same side. Many liches and necromancers may still attack you, as will their servants. Vampires will despise you as well and one cannot be a Vampire and a Lich at the same time.

Lichdom: Spellcasting
Liches have always been very powerful spellcasters and through embracing undeath gain a number of spells even necromancers would never be able to grasp. Moreover by accepting the chill of the grave Liches gain a bonus to frost damage (spells and enchantments).

Your Spellcasting
As a Lich you gain access to a few spells that the living would never imagine. One is the ability to convert undead, both conjured and static, to your cause for a time (though other Liches will counter-cast this and there is a limit on how many converted undead you have). Not all undead will answer to this, extremely strong creatures ie Dragon Shouting Undead will always resist this. More powerful paralytic spells are Lich specific as well as a somewhat negligible, but long lasting, DoT that has the ability to spread to other nearby enemies, applying its full duration to them. The final spell is a sustained combat hover

Society and Lichdom
You are, by any metric, considerably more undead and abominable than a Vampire and with considerably less six appeal. If Society notices you, they won't be prone to niceties. Technically it is not illegal to be a Lich and as such won't attack you on sight, but only the strangest, greediest and most eccentric people will so much as let you shop with them if you're a Lich. Using spells that are Lich exclusive in front of people is a good way to have people notice what you are. Also, the longer your Phylactery is being hunted the more likely they are to out you. Finally members of the Mages' Guild (both or whichever one isn't the necromancer's guild) will know what you are immediately and will out you. As such you will be able to detect members of that Mages' Guild from a distance.

Reversing your Lichdom
You do not wander into Lichdom and you do not leave it easily. You inducted undeath into yourself, the means for reversing it is hardly more honourable. Your Phylactery has to be destroyed and it can't be by you. The person who teaches you how to reverse it will be able to tell you who destroyed your phylactery or you can convince a priest to do it for you (if you haven't been outed). At that point you use a scroll to imprison them and warp them back to the person who can reverse it. You then have to absorb that person into you, using their living soul to expunge the undeath. As it takes a Phylactery to turn someone into a Lich, and you could only make one using Mannimarco's Relics you can't re-enter Lichdom.

What we are lacking is some negatives though. A progressive drain to strength (leaving it at almost 0) but countering that with either a feather effect, or just having a set amount of encumberance. Being assaulted on sight by almost all forms of life. Weakness to fire. Also remember, necromancers and vampires do NOT like Liches. Restrictions to armor...

Yah sorry about that, The Hangover came on and I didn't realize I hadn't finished the undead section which holds most of the negatives. I don't want to impose armour restrictions because while it should be based in magic there ought to be some reason for all archetypes to play a Lich. However I didn't want to make all Necromancers hate you, under my quest you take to Lichdom to sort of assume the mantle of Mannimarco as the immortal leader of a necromantic guild.

To me, this whole discussion falls into the category of:

Possible in the TES universe, but not possible for a TES game.

Just like many things that can be done in lore, novels, and by enemy NPC's, there are things that just can't and shouldn't be done by the PC.

The lore surrounding lichdom in TES is great, but it unfortunately doesn't fit gameplay to be a lich any more than being the Emperor does. Neither of those would make sense, nor would they be a viable option for a PC. Even when Bethesda tried to stretch it by making you a "god" in SI, it still came off weak and irrelevant. They couldn't actually give you all the power of a god, and yet still tried to make it fit the lore well. Did that work? Sort of. But only because it was so carefully restricted and defined as a placeholder status.

I'm sorry to those that want to be a lich, but it probably can't happen for obvious gameplay and lore-breaking reasons.

I dunno, I rather like spell casters and evil characters and nothing merges these two together quite like the idea of a lich. From a roleplay standpoint, the idea of casting off your mortal coil and sacrificing everything you've worked for up until this for a even greater power is a cool idea, and from a gameplay perspective, I think it wouldn't be that hard to implement. We may have something like

Bonus to magic skills
Penalty to physical skills (weapon skills, blocking, etc)
Increased Magicka pool
Decreased health (maybe by 50% to 75%)
Armor and weapons you use constantly deteriorate


This way, the only real way to survive as a lich is to be a skilled caster who can both kill and protect themselves with magic. You wont have any weapons to swing around nor armor to keep you protected. Your lessened health reflects your rotting bodies fragility, however your increased magicka pool reflects your increased magical ability. From a gameplay standpoint, we cant make a player lich an outcast in society without giving them away to overcome it or else the game would become unplayable afterwards, so some kind method to hide your lichdom would need to be included.

Now, I'm not versed in TES lich lore, however it doesn't seem that they use a phylactary to keep themselves from dying, so the inability to die shouldn't be a problem, however since they lack physical strength, they could get a power that drains magicka but prevents death. When they turn it on, it would sap a large amount of magicka every few seconds, but keep them from going below 1 health. This way liches have a method for withstanding swarms of enemies surrounding them. If they keep it on too long, they will run out of magicka and wont be able to do much of anything, so its a double edged sword. Without this kind of ability, there is a good chance that a lich would be unplayable against any quest that involved closed spaces or a larger number of enemies.

This kind of build would offer upsides and downsides to a character, both with diminishing returns (ie: as you level up, the boosts to your magical skills become negligable and the penalties to your physical skills wont matter since they will already be too low to do anything with) and all you are really left with is an inability to use equipment very well and some slight shifts in health and magicka

there was absolutely no risk in joining the DB.

Why shouldn't we have the OPTION?

All a lich is: An undead mage. To become a lich, you already have to drip power, it's not a product of the ritual.

What is wrong with constantly gaining health? There was nothing overpowered about Fallout:New Vegas' "Rad Child" perk Becoming an outcast wouuld be a decent downside, like vampires

The word you are thinking of is "invincibility".

This is like wanting to be a zombie. Who would want that?

How bout this.
If you become a Lich being outside at any time from sun up to sun down means instant death and becoming ones ends the Main Quest line for the character

RFG Crazy Horse has a point. Becoming a Lich is not the same as being infected with Porphyric Hemophilia or Sanies Lupinus where you can hide your condidtion. Assuming that becoming a Lich drastically changes one's appearence to dead, there has to be a way to hide it or no one will speak to you and you will be unable to complete quest. This however will be irrelevant if the world's view of Lich's and necromancy has changed in the last 200 years but even so, given the Nords general distrust of magic there is bound to be backlash, quest or no.

>game unfair
>single player

wut?

There is no such thing as unfair in a single player game, injustice involves two people

Like others have said, Liches are just as likely as werewolves and vampires.

Generally in most lore liches are powerful in destructive magics, have a lot of magical wardningsbut tend to be weak to fire.

It would be kind of cool if you could slowly turn into a linch instead of a presto change-o-viola-I'm-lich. Like having to secure a bunch of different ingredients and performing a whole set of rituals that bings you closer and closer to undeath. Maybe the first rank is simply underwater breathing and a small bonus to magic resist and a small weakness to fire.

There is such a thing as a single player game being unfair. Balance is important in any game, along with dificulty. Without balance, there can be no difficulty. Without difficulty there can be no balance. While I think it should be possible for one to become a lich, there should be drawbacks to such a thing, inherant weaknesses, and it should be very hard to accomplish becoming a lich. If there's something that unballances a game, its unfair to the developer that the player abuses such a thing, and its unfair to the player for the developer to ship something assuming the player will not abuse whatever it is.

How is it unfair to the developer? They are 100% unaffected by the way in which someone plays their game. The only way a game could be "unfair" is if it is unnaturally difficult since that would effect the player. A person can't PLAY a single player game unfairly

You seriously think Skyrim is ging to be "balanaced"? Please. Players should be the sole arbiter of what is otrisnt' overpowered for themselves. Not you. Have you ever even played any of the TES series? None of them have much balance at all.

wait.. havent I seen this EXACT thread before? o0

Which is a bad thing, trust me. In OB, the only things they would have needed to do is remove 100& chameleon, 100% reflects/absorbs/resistances of anything, (Max 75%?) and spell combos. If there are exploits in a single-player game, it ruins the fun for everyone. I sure hope Skyrim is balanced and a certain way to play isn't going to be too powerful.

The weapon enchanting and spell making is full of ridiculously overpowered things. Far beyond what you have suggest. But those are also some of the best parts. Designing your gear/spells to compliment your character is probably the best, most rewarding aspect of OB. Baby/bath water.

Are you saying that they don't try to balance the games? The player has never been able to say what is overpowering or not without mods, which I don't have with a 360. The developers make the game, and we get to choose how to play within the range they choose to give us. Most of the overpowered aspects are being removed in favor of more game friendly replacements, and the ai which we could run circles around is becoming smarter which lessens the ammount of ways we can outsmart them. Game abuses which allow the player to be unfairly stronger than npc characters/monsters is being lessened.

Also, please don't assume that I'm an idiot who's on here for kicks and has never played a TES game in my life. It's rather insulting, and I'd kindly like to ask you to stop.



A game developer makes a game with one thing in mind. They want the players to have fun. They want the player to struggle, to feel emotions when playing the game, and to enjoy it at the end of the day. Its unfair to a developer for a player to work around all the hard work the developer put into the game and to abuse it in such a way that it blatently shouldn't be happening that way. Its unfair for the developer to leave over powered things in a game, because they are then dangling the worm infront of the fish. The choice of playing by the rules of the world shouldn't be by choice. Sitting on a rock shouldn't make you immortal, the npc's should be smart enough to use a range weapon or find a way to attack the player instead of just running around like a chicken with its head cut off.

Yes, you can cheat in a single player game. Cheating by deffinition is to deprive of something expected. The developer expects the player not to jump on the rock and abuse the less than perfect npcs, and the player expects the developer to make a game that is believable and fun.

Customizing your character is fun, sure, but without balance it means that if you are a warrior, you can't kill anyone and if you are a mage you can't be killed. That is a bad thing through and through. Compliment your character? I don't quite understand that part. There can be customization options and balance, but sadly OB didn't have it. Why not enter the god mode straight away if you like to be over powered? It's the same thing in the end. :/

They should try to balance things, sure, but not as a priority, and some things are intended to be overpowered, Do you seriusly think firing an arrow should be comparable to hurling a lightning bolt?

And maybe you were unaware, but the TES series is a PC gaming series ported over to consoles. We PC gamers have always had the ability to, with a few keystrokes, turn our characters in to unbeatable supermen. This console mentality is bothersome. It's like people can't control themselves or something. If there is a chea/exploit/ advanatge they just gotta do it. No choice in the matter. It simply must be done.


Sorry. No.

If the game is too hard for you, turn the difficulty down; if it's too easy turn it up. You have been given the tools to balance the game yourself. Stop trying to tell other people to or not to play their game.