I came up with a new mod for consoles today.
As always, your lack of willpower will break it.

You need to carry a set of clothes with you.
1. You cannot repair gear unless safe.
2. If you find that armor or a weapon has broken, you must unequip it. (Where the clothes come in, or, in your travels, loot you.... umm.... loot.)
3. After unequipping said gear, you cannot repair it when you are safe, UNLESS you are a Master Armorer.
4. If you are not a Master Armorer, you must have it repaired before you can re-equip your gear. If you are a master armorer, you can repair it from the zero state, only if you are safe.

Couple things:

Keeps you on your toes about repairing gear, however, after a battle, I often find that armor has broken. I either unequip it to have fixed later, or toss it.
Sometimes I go off on a quest, in full heavy armor regalia, only to come home dressed in rags, and various bits of armor and weapons in different stages of disrepair. Once I came home wearing sack clothes.... no shoes, and dwarven gauntlets was all I had left.
Good times to be had by all.
Good luck!

ha sounds fun, and immersive, might try it

It's better to call something like this a "challenge" or "playstyle" or something, discussion console "mods" makes the moderators twitchy.

I've tweaked your subject line, if you'd like it changed to something else report the thread and I can put your preferred term in.

No problem, after I wrote the post, I realized that it would probably get looked at. My bad.

PS3 playa here. So this thread applies to me


Depending on my character, this would be impossible. Some of them need extra space in their invisible packs to carry loot as they go dungeoneering. Instead, what I usually do is have my characters just store clothes in whatever home or hotel room they are nearby, if they happen to use that location a lot. If it's a hotel room, clothes must be placed on bed (or floor for messier chars.) because they'll get stolen (respawn) if placed in a cupboard.


Yup. I never repair gear (or eat, or read a book..etc) unless my character can actually wait safely.


Yup. Agreed.


I don't do this one, but I get it. A broken weapon/armor piece should take more time & resources than a damaged one. Here's how I do it: Some of my characters who are trained in the ways of repairing (Dyan phor a'Cauz, for instance) will just repair their stuff, as long as they're safe to do so. Others (Lady Saga, for instance) will not repair their own stuff at any time, because they're not trained. Instead, they'll take their stuff to a certified repair place.


Cool. It's rare that a weapon or armor piece will actually break in any of my games, but usually such a moment usually guarantees a trip to a certified expert, anyways, especially if that piece happens to be enchanted. Sometimes, if it's just regular armor (leather curiass, for instance, with no enchantments) my character may just ditch that item, and try to get a new one from a dungeon he/she is in.

I thought long and hard on gear repair at one point not too terribly long ago. Came up with an far more elaborate 'perk' system that vanilla's. Sadly, I neglected to write it down. My mind being what it is these days....

I do recall that much of it could be 'roleplayed' by consolers and mod-shy computer folk. Some stuff couldn't be implemented sans mod since it involved allowing the avatar to do more than is currently possible at certain perk levels.

As I recall, one of my concepts was that there would be a hard cap to what one's gear could be repaired to "in the field". (I should point out that my thoughts focused on metal weapon and armor, since that's what my avatar uses.) A novice armorer, say, could only repair his gear to 25% in the field. He could travel to one of Cyrodiil's legitimate blacksmiths and under their watchful eye repair his gear to 50%. An apprentice could repair to 50% in the field, and 75% with a blacksmith's assistance, and so on. These are not hard numbers but provided to give you an idea what I was thinking at the time.

Another concept (which again applies more to metal wearers than leather/fur wearers) is repair kits. Let's say the above scenario is based on an avatar repairing his gear with a vanilla hammer. That would now become a simple kit, allowing a novice to repair to 25% in the field. There would also be deluxe (not a good term for it) repair kit, allowing that same novice to repair his gear to 50% in the field. This kit would be far heavier than the simple kit, forcing the avatar to lose much loot-carrying capacity should he opt for the deluxe kit and its extra 25% repair.

It gets more complex. We haven't discussed enchanted gear. How would that be handled? I was thinking of yet a third repair kit, this one possibly weighing as much as the deluxe kit but being terribly expensive. With that kit, however, pretty much anyone at any level can repair enchanted gear, though a novice would be confined to a VERY low percent...something along the lines of 10%....just enough to see him through an important encounter or two.

You can poke holes through all this. Even back when I was seriously thinking on it my ideas never progressed beyond the concept stage. Had they, much of the above would no doubt have been revised if not outright rejected.

For what it's worth, my avatar has long practiced the policy of not repairing gear within earshot of suspected enemies.

-Decrepit-

^That's a lot of remember, Decrepit, but it could possibly work for somebody who's more immersed into gear-repair than I am. Like I said, with my characters, they'll either repair their stuff in the field (if they're trained to do so), take it to a repair person in town, or toss their gear (if it's inexpensive, especially) and try to get new stuff on the road.

...and I also want to say "thank you" to you Decrepit. Thank you for not being a PC elitist, and instead talking to us console players as humans. I'm a little sore ATM, as I recently got into a flame-discussion with an elitist.

I'll second that thank you!
The way I do it, well it's nothing fancy, Clothing is always worn underneath the armor, I was thinking of having chain mail armor underneath it, but I don't think it will fit! Seeing as Jericho uses the Imperial armor, which I suspect is padded on the inside.
Anyway, I just noticed, I never repaired armor in the dungeon, even if I had repair hammers, always wait till I'm in the city, but I never took the armor off when it broke, the weapon however, Jericho's main weapon is the Silver Sword, when it breaks I switch to the silver dagger, I was thinking of using the short sword, but the dagger seems easier to carry along with the longsword and the bow.

I thank you both! , I always like the fact that people take the time to make "mods" for us console players. ^^

This might be a good time and place to link to Renee's http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1327345-pretend-mods-for-vanilla-games/page__fromsearch__1 thread.

lol thanx. you're awesome, Wyrd!

I might try this out before I mod my pc version, otherwise I'll never go back xD

I shall add my "mod" to your thread Renee. I had forgotten it, thanks Pseron.

It just became so easy to repair stuff all the time. When you can repair things so easily.... then couple that with fast-travel, in my opinion that is an instant game-breaker for me. No wonder we all become so rich so fast. (I have no problem with fast travel btw, some characters use it, others do not.)

I also "mod" my Fallout 3 game.

Decrepit, I like the idea of 25%, 50%.... and up. You can get rough estimates in the field when repairing in the window. I'm not sure about the other though.... I earned the right to fix enchanted gear.....
Idk, for me, after a battle with say, a hammer wielding foe, I often find that my light armor pieces are broken down to zero. (My character wears a mix of Heavy and Light armor, it's about style baby. )
And Renee, you are right; it seems wrong that I can repair armor back to 100 from zero, and not even be a Master.

So this feels like a reasonable compromise. Trust me, I found an enchanted claymore for Shock Damage 5, and had to toss it when it broke. Kinda svcked. Then I had to fight my way out with an iron dagger, and no magicka (Atronach.) I am not yet a Journeyman of Block, so my weapon gets damaged when blocking still.
There's so many darn weapons and armor in the game.... why not play a game where you cannot be married to something... you try and try to keep it safe, but sometimes it breaks. My dwarven gauntlets had a level of 2, last night, and I took them off and went bare knuckles so I wouldn't have to throw them away.

for those of us who gamed tabletops back in the day, sticking to invisible rules that are 'outside the vanilla box' is a lot easier, I think.

One of my rules (kinda on-topic) is an encumberance rule. When I first started gaming in October 2008, I had this uber-Goddess character (Renee Gade I) who was not only jack-of-all-trades, but I didn't think much about limiting what she carried. So she had like 3 or 4 weapons, several armor suits, endless potions, scrolls, books, you name it. Her game leveled out of control, and pretty soon all the glass-wearing bandits started to show up.

*Immersion broken!*

One day, I realized all of this is silly. Why not apply some of my tabletop rules from the old books I had in high school? Would this make for a more immersive game?

Yes, it does. Big time. So Renee Gade II (April 2009 thru @ summer of 2010) could only carry a certain amount of logical things. She could only repair as stated above in first post. Vanilla does a pretty good start at this in my opinion, by the way. A Novice or Apprentice Armorer can't just repair an enchanted item, for instance. But the rules you've stated in the OP (as well as rules others have stated) add plenty to fill the missing bits.

That's it I think. I played D&D and other tabletop games until I was about a sophomore in college. We had a particularly sadistic DM in college, who had us take into account all our gear, at all times. He was fair nonetheless, and we were able to find awesome loot and have a good time getting it, humor involved, but if you weren't prepared, you often paid a high price for your folly.
Just like in FO3, you get to a point where you say to yourself, "Self, these are awesome games, but I always get too powerful, and then it gets boring. How can I limit myself, and reward myself with greater gameplay, but not make it too punishing along the way?"

Lol: sadistic DM!

We never had an official DM. Sometimes, I would game solo, matter of fact. But if the entire group showed up (my brother and a couple of possible friends) we would usually take turns reading whatever installment were were up to at that time. I would read for an evening ("you come to a fork in the road, do you go east or west?") and then someone else would read the next evening. I remember we even sometimes even wrote our own installments, since the actual D&D ones were too silly/too farfetched at times.

But I think if I were a young gamer today (like my nephew, who is 16) I would probably be the type who's immersion doesn't get broken by carrying too much stuff. Or reparing whenever I feel like it. Or running for hours in full armor. Or swimming in heavy armor...

etc...

I can't swim in heavy armor, I mean I can, but I have Jericho's armor, weapons and a pair of regular cloth pants hotkeyed, before heading into the water, I just quickly press the hotkeys, which leaves Jericho shirtless, weaponless but wearing some pants, then we go swimming!

It's like...back then I would just run around, heavy armor pick everything that I could carry, but now, without thinking, in every single game I play, I no longer run around, only pick as many items as I believe my character could carry, ect ect.