You guys completely missed my point entirely, The post was about increasing your stats. Not about gaining experience. And I do like TES's way of increasing your skills but I dont like how the stats are added. Or calculated.

But then again, everyone loves Fallout3's level system, and that was exactly what your saying you dont want. It gives experience from killling things and you choose what skills you learn when you level up. And I was fine with that. Allthough my characters did come out quite weak. And even at higher levels you were just as weak as you were before, you just have better aim or can pick harder locks. So you dont end up being a god towards the end of the game.

Meh. In retrospection, I should have known that its pointless to start this thread at this time. Only hardcoe fans are still reading this forum, therefore its pages and pages of praising and giving really stupid tips like "its metagaming if you think about what you're doing, just play the game blabla". Its not like I didnt have tried that, but it simply doesnt work at all. If you dont powergame, you will get stupidly weak in no time in Oblivion.

Guess I can go saftely back to playing Dragon Age. Now thats a much better rulesystem. For you actually get variance and while theres certainly still balance problems, at least the system is build around the idea that there should be balance at all.

IMHO, unless Bethesda thinks their rulesystem over, one can saftely skip over future TES titles.

You know, I find it strange that so many people complain about the leveling system because I have never really paid attention to what skills are increasing and whatnot and I don't see a problem. I guess if you are determined to make your character have the maximum possible power at each level, you would have to watch it, but I would think it would be that viewpoint that kills the fun, not the leveling system itself.

Yeah, but scaling in Oblivion was very disappointing. I am partial to the way they did in Morrowind.

Tenser, it's not that you get "stupidly weak" if you don't powergame your attribute multipliers in Oblivion, it's that the rest of the world levels and scales at a fixed rate according to your character's level, and you need to get the same increases just to break even. The excessive levelling and scaling is the real issue. Morrowind used the same basic skill and attribute system, and while I really don't like the "multiplier" concept, you could safely ignore it in that game because the world wasn't so heavily levelled and was not scaled.

The skill and attribute system that Bethesda came up with is one of the best out there, but the multiplier concept is inherently flawed and poorly implemented on top of that, with a heavy non-linear bias toward the "high end" that punishes you for "so-so" use of a skill. Various mods such as GCD, nGCD, MADD, and Kobu replace the multiplier system with something more fluid, but still entirely based on skill usage. MADD even gives you the traditional level-up screen with a couple of "discretionary" points to assign as you see fit, to represent what you did in your "free time".

Junking the TES skill and attribute system in favor of another stupid D&D "XP" system that makes a mockery of "practice makes perfect" would be a huge leap in the wrong direction.

I'm not overly fond of the way that Perks were the main focus in character development in FO3 instead of the relatively decent SPECIAL system, but OB handed out perks automatically to every character who reached a certain skill "threshold". That GUARANTEED a lack of character diversity. Perks, if used at all, should be a rare thing, hard to get, and mutually exclusive, so you can have A or B, but NOT both. In OB, you automatially got both as time went on, whether you wanted them or not.

Alright, here's my take on the whole thing. TES has one of the best systems out there, but it still has a ways to go. I posted, a few dozen suggestion threads ago, a way to bring it a few more steps in the right direction, and I guess it's high time I brought it up again.

Now, currently you raise your major skills to level up, but raising any skill gets you a multiplier on its governing attribute. Okay. we can start from there. So as it stands, you level Long Blade and Alchemy from your major skills, but also raise athletics and speechcraft from your minor skills. Therefore, you skip out on a multiplier. So here's a way to improve it.

You first remove a magic bar. The three bars would become Health, Short-term fatigue and long-term fatigue. Short-term fatigue functions like Morrowind fatigue. Long-term fatigue goes down at a very slow rate, so that if you do nothing to slow the decrease it will empty out in 24 game hours at low levels. When it gets low, short-term fatigue lowers faster, you do less damage/ take more damage, etc. eating, sleeping, potions, waiting, sitting and standing still increase short-term fatigue, like Morrowind, but only sleeping, potions and eating restore long-term fatigue. Also, magic takes out of short-term fatigue, then if that empties long-term fatigue, and if that empties, health. This is intrinsically linked to my new magic system which will be stated later.

You next go back to Daggerfall, three primary, five major and ten minor skills, with the rest miscellaneous. As you level any of those skills, the attributes get a little closer to leveling up, each going up more or less based on the ranking of the skill, generally like so:

Primary: 1/3rd Attribute increase
Major: 1/5th '' increase
Minor: 1/10th '' increase
Miscellaneous: '' 0 increase

(I'm not sure how the numbers actually add up, but you get the idea)

Then, upon leveling up you pick a bonus to health, short-term fatigue or long-term fatigue. This also helps to prevent and/or balance jack-of-all-trades-ing because unless you specialize in, say, combat skills almost exclusively you will not max out the governing attributes. Of course, some quests may help to increase skills and attributes, as well as, part 3, perks.

Perks will work very differently from Oblivion, but still recognizable. each perk tree has five types, and each type has five levels. Again going with long blade, instead of maxing it out and getting every perk, you can max it out and have four basic perks, up to level four of a single perk, or some combination. Of course, some quest rewards for certain characters will be skill perks. So, if you specialize in a paralyzing stab (the forward power attack perk in Oblivion for blades), the level 1 perk would be maybe a 10% chance of paralyzing, then 25, then 50, then 75. If you tank that perk and then do a quest with a bonus of a long blade perk reward, then you can get the max level of that perk, giving you a 90% chance of paralyzing an opponent when you successfully land the attack. This adds replayability and further customizability to the characters.

Did I forget anything?

rank and skill has no real feeling of power i just want to be able to reach a certain level where i could levitate an enemy and destroy him with a blast of a very power spell which i developed myself, i know that mods allow pc gamers to be able to enhance there powers and develop different things, im a console gamer and i want more

This is what I beleive. It never made sense to be good at magic when all you ever do is hack at stuff with your sword.

That said, I liked how DA:O did their levels as well, though more for their customization (Without having to learn spreadsheets to be able to pick the powers you want at level 30)




Its not the best system out there... but again why are you playing a game when all you want to do is talk and sneak around?

Its also stupidly easy to level magic up without doing anything but clicking a button. Make a spell that does like 1 level of draining for 1 second on self. You just spam that and your destruction will go up. Same with all the magic. Its actually better not to choose magics as your main skills for powergaming because you can easily get X5 multipliers for spamming easy magics.

I've never been one to shy away from the level as you practice skill system. With that being said though, I believe that skills should have more of a larger physical effect than a statistical one. Skills should greatly improve one's performance. Skills should also atrophy when idle. However, only to a certain extent. Though you may be out of practice, certain skills are "like riding a bike; you never forget".

I think the rule system of TES is one of the most logical systems in use by RPGs, but there is still room for improvement. I agree with the gripe against the attribute multipliers. I wouldn't say that they really force anyone to play a certain way, but they certainly encourage it. This is particularly so with Oblivion because, due to level scaling, you can get in over your head at higher levels if you don't level efficiently, especially if you don't use melee combat as your primary offensive and/or defensive strategy. I like the idea of a more fluid leveling system. I'd like to see a system where you simply use your skills and they level up naturally and seemlessly, without any thought about point distribution upon level-up or stat multipliers. Additionally, I, too, would like to see them do away with level caps. I think level caps are one thing that makes people max out all their other stats and contribute to the 'jack of all trades' problem. It is a natural tendency of many players to want to see their character progress, and the only way to do that once your major skills cap off at 100 is to start focusing your attention on other skills.