After trying many other leveling mods, I've been using a combination of SPAM, Progress, and Elys's Uncapper for many months now, and am very happy with it. It just fits best with what I want from my Oblivion game.

Voted nGCD. I used to use KCAS, that was my first mod, and then I decided to try out nGCD when I started out again, and it hasn't left my load order since then. I'm not that aware of levelling differences, since I don't play the game enough, but I do notice if a mod pops up a messagebox on character creation, with KCAS did and nGCD doesn't, so that was a plus.

I'm just getting back into the game, and I'm hoping that I can spend a decent amount of time playing this next year. Maybe I'll notice something and switch again during that time?

IIRC AF was the backbone and inspiration for the Natural grow mods both which RL and nGCD are part of. Those mods though I think are more advanced and take into consideration things like auto fixing the stats and skills if things like immersion mods or vampire mods mess with the character.

So they are more resilient.

Leveling mods outlined http://www.gamesas.com/?showtopic=790175&hl.

And I sure thought there would be a lot more RL votes - that seems the most recommended mod.

These are the same reason I use a semi manual leveling...
In fact remounting time, I used this system back in 2006 when I was with my first steps with oblivion...
After that I tried to follow the mod begining 2008 but whar I was never convinced by the system of these skill based leveling systems.

i'm surprised people still use KCAS, on the nexus page it says it's not supported anymore, and may not even be compatible with obl 1.2..

also, does anyone else feel that oxp's default of 36 skill points per level is way not enough? i had to raise that quite a bit to my liking, of course thats what the ini is for, just wondering if anyone prefers the default 36 skill points or even less per level.

I use the 36 skill points per level setting. I think it's absolutely enough. Like I mentioned above what I like about Oblivion XP is that you have to choose. Of course 36 points (for non XP users - raising one skill point costs 2-4 Oblivion XP skill points depending on major/minor skills and specialization, so it's not +36 'real' skill points per level) aren't enough if you want to have all your skills at 100 when you reach your max level.

My current character is level 27 and has most combat related skills at 100 or 75, he has a good sneak and restoration skill and I also spent some points on security (use a slightly harder version of MW lockpicking so it matters). Other magic and stealth related skills are at 5 (or slightly above) though. He is a powerful warrior who is able to cast a heal spell and go undetected if needed. Of course in vanilla Oblivion he would be a powerful warrior, mighty archmage and masterful thief at the same time at that level.

I even decreased the attribute per level setting from 13 to 7 since I felt it was too much. With that setting (not counting enchantments) my char has strength 100, agility ~85, endurance ~85, speed ~50, willpower ~40, intelligence and personality ~30.

nGCD, because it gives a very realistic feel to leveling.

To clear up the history there...

Balor's Leveling Mod for Morrowind was the original. It was a simple smooth-advancement system; IIRC it was set up so that every 3 skill advances gave you 1 point in the related attribute. There may have been some variance because some attributes had more or less associated skills. Leveling was basically vanilla other than that, I don't believe it even had a retroactive health system.

Galsiah's Character Development (GCD) took the basic idea of Balor's, and greatly extended it to create a completely new scheme for advancement. It included retroactive health; alternate magicka calculation (and optional, very slow real-time magicka regeneration, which Morrowind and previous TES games didn't have); attributes over 100, a global slow-down system where at high levels, it was harder to raise low-ranked skills; and each skill had an effect on more than one attribute, plus might increase your magicka and/or health independent of increases to Intelligence and Endurance.

Galsiah knew long before Oblivion was released that he would not be moving on to this game. I really couldn't bear to play the vanilla system after GCD, so I took up the task; nGCD is "not Galsiah's Character Development," named after his mod. As this happened before release, I believe nGCD was the very first leveling mod proposed for Oblivion, though it wasn't the first to reach a playable state. (Early versions were rather terrible, and not just because I had made several invalid assumptions based on Morrowind mechanics.)

I believe the first released and fully-functional Oblivion leveling mod was actually a direct port of Balor's. Beyond that, Kobu started work on his mod shortly after the game came out. (At one point he asked me to make my mod an alternate-defaults version of his, but I wanted to bring in some GCD features that Kobu's framework simply didn't support.) AF's mod was also started somewhere in that time frame; I'm pretty sure Kobu's was released first, but it might have been AF. nGCD was in active development this whole time, and actually playable around the same time as Kobu's.

Really, IMO the reason Kobu's became the most popular was simply that he cared about marketing it! nGCD was always mainly written for myself, and I didn't mind some roughness in the UI and documentation; Kobu put extra effort into polish, accessibility, and a good user's manual. nGCD has grown more refined over time, of course.

Realistic Leveling showed up at some point during one of my vacations from the Oblivion scene. I actually asked ABO about it, and he said he wasn't even aware of nGCD when he made it! So the fact that they are similar in many ways is actually kind of neat.

I enjoy Wrye Leveling.

1. After so many years of gameplay, leveling holds NO interest to me. Now I just get some gold, level-up to 30+ with skills/atts to my liking, then head out into the province.
2. Using Wrye with MMM +Fran's, I'll see diverse enemies from the start. Some can smash me whilst others run.

I want to play the game, not micromanage and calculate.

Well, it's been a while for me and KCAS. Um, history...

I made a leveling mod for Morrowind just a bit after it was released. It was very simple solution and nothing like what would come after, but it did clear up the problem of scrounging for the +5 bonuses. I think it's still out there available for download. I never played with Galsiah's mod and didn't know of it's existence until I was approached to work on its concepts. I honestly don't remember a playable version of nGCD being out while working on KCAS but my recollection could be faulty there. I'd be interested in seeing how it shaped up if I ever get back to playing Oblivion.

Work on what would become KCAS started in concept around the mid-point before Oblivion came out. It grew into a monster after Oblivion was released thanks in most part to forum-goer input.

Frankly, AF was an annoyance for me. It was basically my scripts and concepts, reworked by someone who didn't really know what he was doing, and who was oblivious to the concept of giving credit. I felt it was a poor rip-off of my mod. However, I was inspired to work harder on KCAS when I felt him nipping at my toes and earning praise for the work I had already done.

The actual programmer who took over the AF project (I'd have to look up his name) was a decent enough chap and I enjoyed chatting with him. He did come up with a solution I had been struggling with in the interface and I was grateful for that.

I don't know if I'll ever come back to working on KCAS. I dropped the hosting service that held the web documentation without realizing that it was still up there, and all my original documentation was lost in a series of hardware malfunctions. I'm sure with work I can suss out what my scripts did, but they were horribly complex and stitched together poorly thanks to the limits in the scripting engine.

It would be a good challenge to rework the scripts and build KCAS to the level I was originally aiming for, but for now I'm finishing up LAICEPS for FO3 and am still rather absorbed in playing that instead.

I use nGCD because it's so fabulously configurable.Which is also configurable! The default settings cause generalists some slowdown, but that can be altered/negated as well, so generalists can get along just fine with nGCD. The ability to create/weight your own skill-attribute wheel is a major plus point for nGCD.

Vac

Using Realistic Leveling.

I enjoy the fact that it essentially provides the benefits of powerleveling without any of the fuss. Also, the 'attribute wheel' concept used (raising one attribute also slightly raises related attributes) feels right to me, and saves me from having a lvl 20 thief character with 25 strength.

You may already know this, but this also applies to nGCD. When using nGCD a skill may influence as many as six Attributes.

The problem with it is that it was made in the days before OBSE so it uses a lot of kludges to work. Uninstalling it is ... pretty painful, as you have to calculate stuff by hand then manually edit the ESP in the construction set.

It's also completely clueless when it comes to skill increasing artifacts. If you had Blade as a major and then picked up the sword from KoTN then boom! instant level. (Imagine having Security as a major and getting the Skeleton Key :wacko:) There's a beta version that would de-level you when you unequipped the item.

I tried Realistic Leveling but that forced me into spamming skills to train them, and I hated doing that. It really svcks for skills like Destruction and Restoration once pass 90, they never ever level. I switched to Oblivion XP.

Every game system (including the mods that alter them) encourages certain behaviors. Realistic Leveling does it and Oblivion XP is no different. Where Realistic Leveling encourages in some people the spamming of skills, Oblivion XP encourages in some people the spamming of activities like book reading or 'farming' Renown. It all comes down to which form of encouragement one feels most comfortable with.

But the critically important word here is encourage. Encourage is not the same thing as force. A supporter of Oblivion XP might tell us, "But I don't have to travel from bookshop to bookshop reading every book in the entire game or to obsessively visit every POI on the map," and this is true. It is also true of Realistic Leveling that you are not, as you say, forced to spam skills. It is a player's choice, both to spam skills when using Realistic Leveling or to spam pickpocketing or the gathering of Nirnroots when using Oblivion XP. To deny that is to imply that the player is unable to think for himself.

A player is perfectly entitled to say they didn't care for the way Realistic Leveling handled leveling. What a player cannot say (unless they've been brainwashed by an ABO-worshipping pseudo-religious cult) is that Realistic Leveling "forced" them to do anything.

i guess another thing about these mods is that it really depends on what a player wants to play, how much they want to role-play, because if using the default OXP settings it's impossible to survive using a jack-of-all-trades char. A lot of it the strength i think goes to the fact that if you want to be a mage you won't be having very high skill levels in say, blade or blunt, whereas in vanilla that was the major problem, it encourages too much majors as minors.

edit: anyone who hasn't voted, please do a few more would separate nGCD and oblivion xp i'd think, unless RL catches up.......

S.P.A.M. I say I use, because it's simple and allows for me to play a semi jack-of-all-trades character without being massively weakened. Plus, it lets me set what I want my luck gain to be, which is good because I use luck, but don't want to have to wait fifty levels to get it to one hundred.

If I could find another mod that allowed the luck gain to be configurable, then I'd consider trying another one. But for now, SPAM is on my list to stay.

I have book reading/nirnroot/etc set to non-scaling XP, so while it might help at very low levels, past a certain point doing that returns too little of a reward to remain a valid way of leveling.



When I said "forced" I meant that certain skills advance so slowly that I wouldn't advance a single level after clearing three dungeons even if I spent the entire time doing nothing but using the skill in question. Other skills (like Alchemy) advance so quickly that using them as a major is dangerous.

The rate of advancement is adjustable, but I had a hard time getting it right, and in the end the result would have been similar to Oblivion XP anyway, which is why I went that route.

something like OXP can easily level up luck, you have attribute points you can set through the ini, and each level you can pick any attribute you want to level, so you can easily level luck to 100 from 50 in 10 levels (based on the original config of OXP).

The difference between Oblivion XP and vanilla style leveling only matters to those who care about their stats. If you just want to play a role and don't even consider spamming to increase your skills then you don't need Oblivion XP. In that case the vanilla style leveling is much better since you will naturally increase your skills as you use them. With some of the leveling mods you don't ever need to distribute any points and you can just play your character. That is great of course if you like to play that way.

On the other hand if you do care about your stats and see it as a main goal of the game to become better (and if you feel that reaching the next level/increasing your character's skills is one of the main motivations to play the game) then the difference between XP and vanilla style leveling is quite obvious. In Oblivion XP spamming is almost impossible and getting better (earning xp) is a challenge. You mention the books, but on one hand you can turn that off in the ini (or decrease the amount of xp gained like I did), on the other hand there is only a limited amount of books in the game (and you only get a very small amount of xp for reading books even at default settings). In the end with Oblivion XP you need to fight tough enemies (as fighting a mud crab at level 10 is completely worthless) or solve quests to increase your level. That is a challenge and it's fun. And you are rewarded properly for completing a large quest line or defeating a super powerful enemy while you don't get anything for running against a wall or fighting a mud crab with a rusty iron dagger.

With a vanilla style leveling system the best and fastest way to become better is spamming. Casting heal spells over and over even if you don't need them, casting open very easy lock spells at a chest, running against walls etc. If you want to become a tough guy as fast as possible this is the best way to do it. No challenge, no fun. Just spamming. But no one forces you to do that, right? Well, but then you lose a very important part of the game if you do care about your stats. It's either spamming or not caring about leveling up and your stats. Both at the same time is simply not possible.

Personally I do care about stats and leveling up. It's fun and it's rewarding when I gain a new level. I like to play the quests and I like to play a role as well, but getting better and being able to defeat more dangerous enemies is one of the main motivations to play the game for me. Thanks to Oblivion XP I can now try to get better as fast as possible and still have fun while I'm playing the game.

i disagree about the books with OXP, some of OXP's settings are just way too high. At the beginning levelling up is so easy, you read a few books and you level. I went from IC to Chorrol to Bruma and i was already level 5. the only quests i've done are the city quests, imagine that. i've made things like reading books and gathering nirnroots now to be almost worthless and had to increase the default xp needed per level to 3 times the amount. now i actually feel oxp is levelling at a resonable rate.

and the best thing about oxp is that you can tweak the ini to make it so that you gain the same amount of skills like vanilla if you power level, and still be able to play the game, i haven't really tried out hte others, but nGCD certainly sounds good.

edit: i remember one thing that might be a downside to OXP...increasing the skills doesn't show you the perks, so if a player doesn't know them he would have no idea what extra perks they get going from apprentice to journeyman say.