I think a great way to make hand to hand powerful, and yet and the same time realistic when fighting creatures such as Dragons, is to allow you to hit with magical force through your hands and feet. These magic enhanced blows will add elemental damage and force into your hand to hand strikes, and provide realism when fighting unarmed against mighty foes.


Realistically, if you can throw a fireball.. why not be able to blast a foe with fire through your fist?


Since Skyrim will allready require players to equip spells to a specific hand, we can simply add a hand to hand "spell" that enhances your unarmed attacks. This way hand to hand can be enhanced through the magic system, and perhaps we can see some "unarmed focused" mage NPCs (in Oblivion almost no NPCs used unarmed).

That is a really good idea!

Touch spells?

put a touch spell in each hand

Touch spells should be like fire punches and such.

Yes i hope you can still attack with a hand thats dedicated to magic, and that the magic will have an effect on the punch. It's be a good way to make hand-to-hand useful.

I don't know how'd they make it work with the xbox controller though, only so many buttons.

It would basically work the same way they are implementing magic now, where you equip a specific spell to a specific hand. Essentially you would be equipping two touch spells... but why "touch" when you can punch and kick the spell out with even greater effect!

With the uncertainty of how exactly the combat styles will work in practice for most.
I'm going to just say I'd be happy if..

The switch out and draw speed between spells and weapons is quicker if you've got nothing in your hands.
I:E Bare hands for hand to hand, press hot key ( or other function ) to equip a touch spell, and a self one, and back to H2H.. very quick anim.
Dual wield or both hands in use, switching to the same spell combo would use a slower anim.

So the better you get with hand to hand, the more touch spells you could use and the stronger they would get? I'm game.

I'd prefer punching my enemies with touch spells tho.

Maybe H2H weapons so you can have enchanted ones (either through custom enchanting or random drops). That way you can have something that is similar to this.

Assuming they're still in the game. I'm thinking those might have been cut in favor of the flamethrower effect.

Like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LLGoyUMX2I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTOynB6Z-Rw
Duke Patricks Combat Magic II
http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=37358

Yes, in fact I am using that mod and helped Beta test it for Duke. =)

I preffer hand to hand to be a emergency way of fighting when you are unarmed, or a way to fight in a non letal and less ilegal way. Of course I think it could be more effective, but I preffer armed combat to be way more effective (you can only brag about killing a bear with your fists if this is actually easier to do it with a weapon ).

Flaming hands! I like this idea.