» Tue Feb 01, 2011 3:47 am A little problem i sometimes read is "If X you shouldn't be bale to do Y", like "When you're a mage you shouldn't be able to become a warrior" or "If you wear heavy armor you shouldn't be able to swim".
My suggestions is to NOT outright block you from some things, like when going into water wearing heavy armor you suddenly can't swim at all and sink, I'd rather make it that the situations make it HARD to do something. Your fatigue should be more heavily tied into what you can do as well. For a few examples:
As a mage or whatever you should STILL be able to become something else. What's the difference? You're simply not good at first and re-learning something new will take a while. You will have to go through a lot of training before you can really be a warrior.
I suggested the "true mastery at 150%" thing before which would help not being a master at everything but VERY well skilled at a lot of fields.
Another example would be climbing, while carrying a heavy load your fatigue would run out a lot faster since you carry a lot of stuff, when it runs out you can at best hold on to whatever you climb but trying to climb higher can make you slip, you should be able to catch yourself again from slipping, no instant SPLAT on the ground, but you lose hight every time you slip so climbing up is not easy. Plus there is a chance you lose grip completely.
Same with Swimming in heavy gear, it should be HARDER but not impossible. When swimming without gear you can hold yourself on the surface with relatively little fatigue loss (swimming should ALWAYS cost a bit of fatigue even just drifting), with heavy gear you just use up way more to stay on the surface. Get exhausted and you start to sink more often, less time to catch your breath in between meaning at some point you'd drown.
Maybe a little more "controversial" throw in but how about we come up with more alternatives to sudden skill failure. Skill Failure wasn't in as much in Oblivion as it was in Morrowind but some skills still had it like pickpocketing, and honestly making that so random made save spamming almost necessary for pickpocketing.
Remember this does NOT have to be a "YES OR NO" thing, there should be degrees of outcomes. Like for pickpocketing, even if it failed the person you tried to steal from would not instantly notice it and just look around knowing something was wrong, but that could still give you time to get away. Similarly the other way around pickpocketing could succeed but the guy you steal from notices a few seconds later that something is missing and yells for the guards. One is a failure but successful escape, the other is a success but possibly still fail at escaping because the guy noticed delayed. Also pickpocketing should depend more on how aware and alert the target is too, someone asleep should be far easier to pickpocket from than someone wide awake.
Or for alchemy, instead of just "failed" or "succeeded" you could have more or less successful potions, like the potion you aimed for but only with diminished effect or it has a minor side effect.
