Do you feel the magic system is a little too open and would benefit from some cost/benefit planning?

Additional descriptions for the poll options...

A. For example, Intelligence 60 = you are able to max one school. Int: 70 = 2 schools. Int: 80 = 3 schools. Int: 90 = 4 schools. Int: 100 = all 6 schools. Any school that you cannot max cannot exceed 75. (A maxed school = 100)

B. At character creation, we are given some fixed training points and we can decide which skills we will unlock to skill up. A melee skill or a magical school counts as expending a training point.

C. Any other skill that you have not used a "mastery point' on will max at 75.

D. This will tempt you to restrict the classes of magic you take in order to gain some measure of magic resistance in return.

E. Self-explanatory.

I like the skill system largely as is. The magic system just needs its risk vs. reward system back.

Agree. On the safe side, lets remove that pesky "perk" system that flows with the magic system that make us not able to use certain magic just because we did not reach an arbitrary level of 25s.

I think, instead of level caps for the skills, there should be negative effects to them, or to magicka depending on how many non-magic skills you choose.

I definitely would like to see a risk system put in place. Say you're level 5 and you find a scroll that allows you to cast a fire ball that does 150 damage in a 100ft area that lasts for 10 seconds. You try using this spell and BOOM a big chunk of health is gone due to the spell backfiring on you.

I know in Daggerfall spells with an area effect also hurt the user if the area spell was used it too close. Affected PC and NPC alike, so some people would let liches accidentally kill themselves.

The first three options are rather radical and in my opinion do not really agree with the TES tradition. BTW, why did you choose intelligence in the first case? More magic schools are dependent on willpower. I think that possibility D would be possible. Some kind of background choice during the CharGen, but I would be happy if they kept magic as it was in Morrowind, just spiced with magicka regeneration and possibly armed casting.

The possibilities B and C sort remind me of some people′s suggestions that you should only be able to max your major skills. I resent this, because in my opinion, that would heavily damage the freedom TES is so well known for. Complete removal or at or skill caps, or at least making a system where the skill caps are really hard to reach would be much desirable.

If I put a limit, I would limit the number of spells per school based on governing attribute. Having millions of spells is not a good look. It would add some strategic planning.

Other things are already scaling on their own. I also agree with #2 and #3.

Agreed on all of these.

I voted to leave the system as is, but I would like to see skill and stat requirements like the ones Morrowind had for promotion in the Mages Guild. It would also make sense to me to have a Personality requirement as well as the necessary Illusion skill to cast higher level spells.


I'd also like to see resistances be governed by Willpower again, so that Atronach characters still need to level it and for Enchanting to be reinstated as a separate skill. I think it could be tuned effectively so long as the game limited training per level. Morrowind really pushed you to train because low level skills were so hard to increase, but in Oblivion I've been able to increase every skill through use.

I kinda like the idea of D.

I'm fine with as is, but bring back spell failures (making "on cast" enchantments necessary again).

I think they just need to make raising skills in general harder (and of course, bring back failure). Playing Morrowind and even more so Oblivion, reaching 100 in everything feels like something that's inevitable. Reaching 100 in a constantly-used major skill can happen within a couple in-game weeks. 100, as presented in TES, is the maximum possible ability in that skill. When does that happen, ever? Nobody looks at the greatest masters of human history and says "they couldn't have possibly improved". Slow down increases, and then make skills get slower as they get higher (instead of 99 to 100 taking as long to raise as 5 to 6). Minor skills increase substantially slower than Major, and Miscellaneous even more substantially than that. Personally I'd go farther than that; something I suggested in the past was for training to not auto-increase a skill, but instead, raising one would require a combination of practice and training. With all of the above, mastering all the magic skills would mean needing to take them all as majors and minors instead of it being totally easy for any character, and *then* you have to work for it.

If you really want to push things into specializations, you can implement a counter that adds up total skill levels of all combined skills, and then slows the learning rate based on that, so it gets harder the more you master. No need for hard caps.

Lol, sometimes that wasn't even the case. A lot of the times it was "I hear a Lich" "Oh [censored], I'm dead."
Lich were easily suicidal carbombing lemmings of the RPG days.

Daggerfall you really had to consider magic and element resistances/immunities. I too would like to see the return of Area around caster and area of affect hitting everything spell use. Maybe not as straightforward and primitive a backfire system like in Morrowind, but something that either exponentially increases the magicka cost, or has an increased chance of fizzling uselessly, casting far weaker than a spell you could manage normally, or exploding in your face (at reduced effect).

Bethesda has a good magic system going; I find it highly unlikely that they will change it.

I'm happy with the system as is but I could go with a system where majors had a higher max than minors. That way a pure mage would have some advantage in magic over a hybrid like a battlemage or nightblade. There are other ways of achieving the same end though.

Intelligence, willpower...any would have served the purpose of the example, there was no particular need for it to be intelligence. That particular attribute, one that would be less likely to be maxed by melees going strength heavy, would be the consequence of going heavy melee.

I also agree with your point being that the first 2-3 options are relatively radical wrt TES tradition. The purpose for offering the options was to gauge the community's level of comfort for introducing some absolute decision making when creating and developing their characters.

Personally, I am all for some kind of system where there are some penalties and opportunity costs for deciding what will be in our skill set.

Call me a masochist. :hubbahubba:

Yes and this is my major gripe. If you played the game enough, getting 100 in all the skills was very doable...and ultimately...wouldn't all outcomes be essentially the same? Wouldn't we all end up with generally the same type of character? Except, of course, we just would have made different choices on what gear to use, which spells to use, which approach to combat to use.





There's an idea. Certainly better that the approach taken in Oblivion, but still does not satisfy me as constituting a 'true' limitation.

I voted for option E, but I mostly agree with Hellmouth that the magic system needs a bit more risk vs. reward.

Very much don't like the idea of spell or scroll backfires. All it would take is for it to happen one time in an already tough situation and I'd never want to do it again. Blowing myself up in front of a goblin warlord? No thank you.

I can be patient with the idea of a chance of spell failure, because I still have some kind of control over my own fate, knowing I just need to work on my skill. You'd still run the risk of complaints, though, similar to ones about "missing all the time".

Wouldn't mind making your own spells deadly to you too, meaning you can get caught in your own fireball if you're not careful. That way I'd have only myself to blame and not some random numbers. That would make spellcasting feel like something powerful and dangerous, since we're not just putting the splat on the motor-mouthing enemies. Would mean having more reason to exparament with spellmaking too, since you obviously can't just toss a fireball in a small room.

That, and add a few more spell effects.

Agreed. Needs TESIII's chance of failure back, and the dynamic spell costs (lower skill -> spell A costs a lot; higher your skill -> spell A costs less).

From a Lore perspective, the magic "schools" in TES are arbitrary - as in, they are thought constructions devised by the Mage's Guild. Well, okay, technically it is for gameplay, but you know what I mean. Magic is magic. There are different spell effects, but the magic is still the same. Categorizing things into schools is just useful for grouping spell effects for gameplay mechanics. There's no "evil vs holy" or "fire vs water" or whatever schools (like in some RPG games).

The magic system is not broke, don't fix it! It's the best magic system, all in (spell creation), than anything else I've played. I wouldn't want to see any of its flexibility removed.

If we're talking minor enhancements, I can go for that. Adding wind, for instance, or new bigger (and smaller) effects. At its heart the system rewards you for all your work without arbitarily limiting you.

I like the idea of forsaking certain schools in exchange for resistance against them, or some other perk. All in all, Daggerfall's advantages/disadvantages system should return. That was golden.

Otherwise, I don't think the key to improving Magicka in TES is placing restrictions on it, as that's not what TES is about. Using magicka should be fun and intuitive - not intimidating to new players.

They honestly need to bring back Morrowind's magic (Except the switching from combat to magic, of course)

Having a cast-on-chance made learning magic feel more real. They also need to make spells travel much faster, since it's way too easy to dodge ranged enemy spells.