I was wondering if there is/if it would be possible to revamp the magicka system to work with fatigue/health instead of magicka? More similar to the Magic system of eragon.

Basic premise would be something like this:

Say you have a spell, with a cost of 200. If you had 200 fatigue, the spell would drop you to zero, and knock you down. If you had 150 fatigue, it would knock you down and take 50 pts of health.

Also, though, I would think that intelligence should still play a role, so would it maybe be possible to implement a system to limit your possible magicka school mastery levels by your intelligence? Like you couldn't be come an apprentice with less than 25 int. Journeyman with less than 50 int, etc?

I wouldn't be surprised if most of this is hardcoded, and therefore impossible, but with the OBGE, OBME, and OBSE functions out there, i'd like to know if this is possible.
I'd experiment with making it myself, but my modding skills are limited to adding items places and making BASIC spell scripts.




Basically, my thought behind this is that it should take as much energy (fatigue) to set someone on fire, or grab something 200 feet away, as it does to do those things normally. I'm thinking the current costs of the spells wouldn't need to be changed, just the attribute they affect.
And then also, if you cast a spell that costs to much energy, it should have the potential to severely injure or kill you.

Any responses would be appreciated, and anyone who would be willing to work on doing this would be awesome.

You know, I THINK this could be done more or less quite easily, except for one or two little bits...

Limiting Advancement based on Intelligence is easily done with a Script that checks for the the level below advancement, and then stops Skill Progression.

I suspect even the Magicka/Fatigue/Health issue would be possible without too-much trouble. You'd still need enough Magicka to cast the Spell, but you could easily simulate the effects by restoring Magicka instantly, and taking it out of Fatigue/Health afterwards.

The question, then, is what about Willpower?

I might give this a go, just as a fun experiment-- so I can't promise you'll get anythin useable, but who knows.

Edit:
Yep, definitely do-able
I've put a rough version together, so it's not perfect, but the whole drain Health/Fatigue effect works perfectly, so far as I can tell-- the only issue is, getting zero fatigue, due to recovery causes an odd instance of suddenly getting straight back up; but that can be solved with a simple "bonus Drain" that keeps you down briefly

I like this idea a lot! Seems similar to something I tried suggesting and doing a while back, when I first got to these forums. I wanted to create a new system of spells that were more like monk abilities and disciplines and other types of mind and body magic for psionic types. Didn't really know how to script at all, but I tried making a bunch of no cost, nonverbal (unable to be silenced) spells which included a drain fatigue effect that I made with Oblivion Magic Extender. Most were high fatigue cost, which would force you to use a meditate spell to fortify fatigue before you start fighting with them or risk falling unconscious in the middle of battle. Never got to integrate intelligence into the equation, but the fatigue was based on endurance and the spells were all of the mysticism school. Unfortunately though, I don't think I made it in a clean enough way to make it playable because I had plenty of crashes on the character with these abilities. I hope this works out, always have thought this would be a good idea.

This is a good idea I remember playing Arcanum and in it you only had health and fatigue so using magic used fatigue
This sounds very realistic and I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks so

Hey CDM_ :hugs:

Yes it is quite doable however the health and fatigue system would have to be completely rebalanced.
But It would make the game much simpler!

Not only is this possible, but mods like Sorcery's Toll and Audacious Magery already implement much of this functionality -- you could probably create the mod you're discussing just by tweaking the .ini files of one of those mods. (Sorcery's Toll is mine, but it's a bit outdated -- Audacious Magery does pretty much everything ST does and more).

If you wanted to implement this from scratch, I'd suggest something like this:

1. Give everyone a huge Magicka bonus (e.g. 1000 points)
2. Monitor for spellcasting with a script
3. When a spell is cast, deduct the Magicka cost from Fatigue/Health and replace the lost Magicka.

The thing you'd want to watch out for in your mod as proposed is the problem of Fatigue and Health being more important to mages than Intelligence and Willpower (so an Orc would make a better mage than an Altmer). You'd want to account for this: say, by reducing Fatigue/Health costs of all spells based on some combination of Intelligence, Willpower, and racial/birthsign Magicka bonuses. Of course, if you used Intelligence to limit magical skill advancement, that might be good enough to take Intelligence out of the equation for reducing costs.

Thanks for the replies everyone. And CDM, if you could make a functioning version of this, that would be epic.

Well, I have a working version-- there's a few issues I can't seem to resolve, but the basics work; if you want to PM me your E-mail address, I'll send you the file directly, rather than release it as a general Mod.