I got so pissed off in Oblivion when I made a marksman character, spent 10+ hours on it, and found out that the marksman trainer died in a nearby bandit camp. If Master quests are implemented I think the NPCs should either be unkillable or have many replacement masters.

But if master quests aren't implemented then it has to be possible to get to 100 in a skill without training because it was IMPOSSIBLE to get master of marksman just by killing stuff.

What do u think?

Your sig is kinda... big? Anyways I agree with you, if there is master trainers they should either be ungodly powerful or essential. If they don't do trainers, then leveling should be hard on the higher levels (70-100) but pretty easy or moderate from there down. I will agree though, some things just didn't make sense, like how slow marksman took to level, destruction too. I mean yeah you could just whip weak explosion spells everywhere but still. I think combat XP should be based on how much the attack hurt the enemy or cost you.

First: It was tedious, but not impossible to master marksman without training.

Second: I agree about the skill leveling, since combat, magic, and all other related skills should be based on not only how much you do them, but also somewhat on how strong the effect of your combat is. However, I also don't understand why in OB you would see characters practicing with, swords, axes, and shooting bows at targets.....to no apparent effect. Since we could not "practice" to raise a skill, I found this silly. It's also very silly that because you can only raise combat and magic by doing "real damage". This leads to people doing silly things like burning themselves to raise Destruction magic skill. (I think that will be solved by the removal of spellmaking, hopefully)

http://uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Increasing_Skills
scroll down to markman, yes it is impossible to get to master unless you played 25 hours a day shooting essential people with iron arrows

Again....tedious, not impossible. Why you decided to post that, I don't understand. And I assure you there are plenty of fans who have played enough hours to master this skill hundreds of times.

Yep
It was very tedious, but I enjoyed not using any of the trainers in the game.
Marksman probably should have been a little easier to level up, though I think there were far more instances of skills needing to be more difficult to level up.

gasp, is spellmaking being removed altogether?

Yes, there should be master training quests.
They were done well in Oblivion if you ask me.

And yes, master trainers should be able to get killed, but without an alternative trainer.
Still, they should be put in safe locations where it's really unlikely that they will get killed.

Whenever you make a statement like that you should explain your reasoning...

Well, for starters, having more than one master trainer of certain skill kinda kills that special feeling of him being some uber wise/strong master who can teach you techniques you are searching for in order to perfect yourself.
Also, since we don't wish to lose them, they should be in safe locations so they don't get killed like Destruction mistress was killed by some random Deadra since her camp was very close to her.
That way, there also won't be need for an alternative master trainer.
Overall, master trainer can remain to be an unique, special and epic character who can give you knowledge you want for a price while not having to fear that he will die in some stupid way.
Still, he should be able to get killed in case he gets on your nerves and you decide to kill him after you are done with him or something like that.

Perhaps with radiant storytelling, if a master is killed s/he could have an apprentice that takes the role? That seems feasible to me. If that's not the case, then yes just put them in places where they aren't going to get killed and leave you in a predicament at higher levels!

Also make it so that you can train targeted skills using a training dummy or archery target, although I'm not in favour of grinding in my own game, it makes sense that if you make it possible to grind for skill increases in illusion and restoration, you should also be able to do so with swords and archery, if that's what you want to do.

Edit: Forgot to say that yes, I liked the master training quests in OB (although would have liked them to be a bit more complex) and would certainly be happy to see something of that nature return in Skyrim - the more quests the better IMO! And it makes sense that you would have to prove yourself to show the master that they weren't wasting their time by training you.

i maxed it out without a trainer but it took me a while.... anyways yes i agree

That poor, poor sheep in Weynon Priory, I sliced, bashed, and shot it tens of millions of time. It was begging me to let it die the entire time. Thanks to the lack of attributes in Skyrim I'll probably ignore training altogether unless there's an absurdly obnoxious or slow-leveling skill.

isn't the better question "why do these characters die so easily?" Oblivion had serious issues with creature balance and level scaling, otherwise a master marksman shouldn't just die out in the wild. IMO one fact Bethesda needs to confront is that sure, its cool that crazy things can happen to NPC's, but if you don't witness it in anyway other than finding a corpse, it isn't so cool.

This would be good, but you should progress slower while training on training dummy or archery target.

Have trainers even been confirmed yet? If however training is in, I wouldn't want us to be able to level up a skill from 0 to 100 with only trainers as we could in OB and MW. There needs to be some sort of maximal amount of "learnable tricks" for each skill. And this maximal level should never, ever be limited by how many times you did it every level. I always found myself training 5 times before leveling in OB, just to get the maximal amount of skill boost as fast as possible.

This. If there's ten replacement masters or their family are all masters of a skill I'm not really going to feel compelled to hunt down these characters.

Well, the other alternate scenario would be to not have trainers be in situations where they can die by bandit-attack (or insert-creature-here attack). They should be in isolated environments, scripted so they don't run the risk of getting ground up by the RAI gearworks.

That said, they should indeed be killable. And with the above protection, that would mean they are virtually only killable by player. So if the PC goes running into some high tower that just happens to be the home of the secret master of block, and the PC kills that master, 1) that master is dead, and 2) no one should be there to replace that master.

I'm particularly partial to the 2nd consequence, namely no one replacing dead masters, because let's think about it: Secret masters are rare in these games for an obvious reason. It takes extreme dedication and special character to excel in one of these skills. To have another master simply take the place of a dead one would cheapen the experience.