One of the ways people learn where their barriers are and what they can and cannot do is by trying and failing. Anyone remember trying really hard to cast that super fireball spell in Morrowind and feeling great when you finally could cast it reliably? Anyone remember the nice feeling of knowing that your spell would definitely work and not leave you stranded in Oblivion? It would be great if the way the difficulty system worked in Skyrim was such that you are encouraged to do things "at your level" or "in your class" by making things not "at your level" not rewarding (or just harder to do).

There are two ways for this: what I call "soft" barriers and diminishing returns.

"Soft" barriers are when the game gradually increases the difficulty of some task, action, or thing to try to immersively warn you that you can't do something.

Diminishing Returns is when doing something over and over gets you less and less.

Together, soft barriers and diminishing returns encourage exploration of the landscape and your abilities, and reduce the feasibility of level grinding.



Allow me to use the magic system as an example. (Remember: "easy" and "hard" or "simple" or "difficult" should ALWAYS be relative to your level. That restore-1-hp spell is only hard if you've never done magic before!)

Put in soft barriers around what spells you can cast. Combine what you did in OB and MW: have a system that lets you cast more reliably, but lets you try your hand at really hard spells. Simple spells should always work, no matter how tired you are. You should be able to cast most spells "at your level" extremely easily, unless you are very tired. Relatively hard spells should have a chance of not working. The harder the spell, the more it should be 'sensitive' to how wounded/fatigued you are. And spells that are, relatively, super difficult, have a high chance of failure, but also have a small chance of backfiring.

The effect: You try to cast spells mainly "at your level," though simple spells are nifty if you're tired and still useful if you only want a small effect. Hard spells are rewarding to try: sometimes they work! But they're risky in that if that spell really needs to work right now, you might fail it and be eaten by that scamp. Very very hard spells have a higher payoff (they're very effective) but carry some danger. This creates a "comfort zone" where people don't have to worry about spell failure, while allowing people to move above or below that zone with different rewards.

Put diminishing returns in to prevent level grinding and encourage people to try, occasionally, things above their "comfort zone" of where stuff reliably works. On the one end of the scale, small, simple cheap spells should do very little for gaining experience. If you cast a spell that takes 4 magicka, and your "comfort zone" of spells is around 20 magicka, that 4 point spell should do almost nothing. In the middle of the scale, with that same comfort zone, if you cast a 20 pt spell, you gain some experience-- you've done it before, okay, but you might still learn something. Moving further up the scale, a 30 pt spell should gain you experience even more, because it's new. The harder the spell, the more experience you should gain from having successfully cast it.

The effect: You stop casting that simple spell 800 times to grind up your level. In fact, it's more efficient to cast your normal skills to level up, and even better to try spells where you have some chance of failure, because you learn more from "trying harder." And even though you gain a lot of experience from super-difficult spells, the fact that you're unlikely to cast it right and that you might actually damage yourself with them makes them not so good for grinding.

In total, this system would give each kind of spell a new usefulness.

1) Super simple spells are easy to cast and are 100% reliable, no matter how tired you are. Good part: no chance of failure, ever! Bad part: Not very effective spells, and utterly worthless to leveling.
2) Spells which are "right in your comfort zone" are 99% reliable, and you only need to worry if you're very tired or very wounded. Good part: Solid, comfortable, and reliable. Very little chance of failure, though maybe every now and then. You can actually gain modest experience with these spells. Bad part: While these spells are effective, they're not the best way to gain experience.
3) Hard spells have some rewards now. While you need to worry about if you can actually cast them, they're not so difficult you need to worry about them "going wrong." And you learn a lot from casting them! Good part: Good experience and they're very effective spells when they work. Bad part: You do need to worry if they will work especially if you're tired or wounded. Maybe pick a simpler spell for those time-critical moments in combat.
4) Super-difficult spells have some rewards too. Mainly, these things can do fantastic stuff if you get them to work... if you can get them to work. You need to be very well rested and ready to swig a restore health or dispel potion if it goes wrong. Good part: Can do crazy things and you learn a lot when you succeed. Bad part: you might singe your eyebrows off... or worse if these go wrong. They're super finicky when it comes to how tired you are, too.

So, in all: This system lets all levels of spell difficulty have its own use, encourages light experimentation outside of the comfort zone, but discourages people from doing crazy stuff because they're likely to get hurt.



But you gotta keep in mind: THIS ISN'T LIMITED TO SPELLS!

So, what else can we use this system for? Well: combat moves, exploring the landscape, making potions, running, stealth... this applies to the entire game. Just substitute in the right words.

Basically, easy stuff should be totally reliable, 100%, no matter how tired/dead you are, but should not give you experience. Stuff in your "comfort zone" should be 99% reliable, only "failing" or whatever when you're very tired or nearly dead, say under 1/3 health or fatigue. It should give you a modest experience bonus, enough to keep you leveling up, but slowly. Stuff just above your comfort zone, the "hard" activities, should be the "best" stuff for leveling up, in that it gives you decent experience, but, it has some chance of "not working," especially if you're below, say, 90% hp/fatigue. Very hard stuff should give you lots of experience but not actually be useful for leveling, because of the high likelihood of failure and chance that you hurt yourself somehow. It should be much more likely to fail if you're below 98% of health/fatigue.

Keep in mind, now, that this will require fun fun nonlinear equations to get the right balance of experience vs not so much experience, reliable vs unreliable, "effective" vs "non-effective." I could speculate here on exactly what type of equations you'd use, but I suspect you guys don't have that much interest in multivariate equations. A complex equation is more likely to be smoother and better if it takes more variable into account. It may or may not require array variables, but, guys, shame on you if you don't have array variables at this point.

As an example, though, to determine these things, this is what ought to go into the equation for spells:

Intelligence (higher = gains more xp per spell overall + more likely to succeed, if at 100% health/fatigue)
Willpower (higher = more likely to succeed if not at 100% fatigue)
Endurance (higher = less likely to be damaged by very difficult spells, more likely to succeed if not at 100% health)
Luck (higher = more likely for everything to be peachy)
How high your particular magic skill is (higher = more likely to succeed, less likely to have hard spells go wrong, etc)
How high your other magic skills are (higher = more likely to have harder spells not go wrong, slightly more likely to succeed)
Health and Fatigue (lower = more likely to fail and more likely to have harder spells go wrong)

Anyway, I hope you all read that wall of text. And I hope you can make the leap to extend this idea to other "systems" in-game, like combat and fighting leveled creatures and exploring new land and so on. I can write out examples for all of these but you should be able to fill in in the blanks yourselves.

So, what do you think? I think the math behind this would be a bit snarly to implement, but since it's all reading the current state of affairs and then crunching it all into one output-probability (does it work, if no, does it go wrong?), It should be actually feasible.

:)

EDIT: New thought. I forgot to mention, if you want mages to stay pure mages, then make them have some sort of increasing penalty (costs more magicka or spells less effective) for wearing heavy armor or trying to cast with a weapon in hand or something like that. This is how soft barriers applies to keeping people "in their class." At the same time, maybe you can get more xp from trying to cast with armor/weapon, because it's "harder" to do? So make it the easiest thing to be is a pure mage, but, you can do the battlemage thing, so long as you try harder.

SECOND EDIT: New thought. If you want to see if this system is applicable, then you just need to see if the thing you want to apply it to has "easier" parts and "harder" parts, or "things we do want you to do" and "things we don't want you to do" parts. I actually can't think of a decent way to apply this to combat, that doesn't quite fit in. Oh well, more to think about!

if i want to grind i should be able do it effectively

Because theoretical math can be learned by doing your times tables 1000000000x a day.

I really like this idea in practice with magic, and think it could go well with lockpicking, too. I'm not entirely sure how it could be applied well with weapon skills without implementing a dice-roll system like morrowind had, but I highly doubt that's gonna happen. Perhaps only with performing special attacks, if they are implemented. However, I think it would be really great to implement with magic, alchemy and lockpicking.

Overall, great idea.

Win.

LOL!

personaly I like the idea, in Oblivion I use a mod that lets me cast higher level spells at a risk.

Oh god thank you for that. overall great idea, I hope something similar exists in the game when it is released.

I really like everything you wrote, I think it would make for great gameplay.

The only concern I have is that care should be taken not to make levelling up too difficult. If actually getting xp would be difficult and training is restricted, then levelling could happen too randomly. That would seriously hamper character building.
I know that on Daggerfall, Morrowind and oblivion I have erased hours of play to revert to an earlier save, only because random or careless levelling gave me something like a +2, +3, +1.

Maybe a Morrowind style training system where you can train as much as you like, provided you have the gold and access to the trainer can prevent all that.

*hug*



That's true about the combat mechanics, but you know, I wouldn't mind so much if there was a small chance you could miss. I mean, really, like I'm gonna hit 100% of the time with my sword? The problem Morrowind had with the dice-system is that there was nothing you could do about it except click the button really fast. Combat requires a bit more thought, actually... *ponders*

Hmm... That one's a bit more complex, because I'm not certain how I'd define what's "easier" and "harder" except normal moves vs special moves. I can say, though, that the first 100 hits with the short sword should do more xp for you than the next 100, but at the same time, here it should count "how much xp" as related to "how long since you last did this exact thing" instead of whatever I said before.

With alchemy, there should DEFINITELY be diminishing returns for making 800 carrot-and-potato restore fatigue potions. I mean, how much more will you learn from potion # 768 than you already had gotten form potion # 30? So that should totally time how long it's been since you made that potion combo last and dock xp gain if you just made that kind of potion.

(Math example: if the first potion you make gives you one hundred arbitrary xp points towards level-up of alchemy, then if we reduce it to 95% of previous potion points, you get a bonus of each potion like this: #1: 100pts, #2 95pts, #3 90pts, 86, 81, 77, 74... At 15 potions you get 49 points, at at 32 you get 20 pts, at 60 you get 5 pts, and so on. This will eventually hit 1 and then a while after that will round down to 0. This ratio can be modified. It takes 80 potions to go down to 20% of original xp bonus if you multiply it by .98 each time. For .95, it takes 32. For .90, it takes 16. So you can easily modify this formula to change how "rewarding" in xp it is to keep making potions in a row.)



Leveling up shouldn't be too difficult, that's true. The exact equations for xp and such would have to be carefully play-tested to see if it's too easy or too hard. Or, alternately, attach it to a difficulty slider and let the player pick how easy he wants it to be. Also, training should not be restricted arbitrarily, but diminishing returns should be applied to it so training gets less effective the higher your level or the more you've done it or something something.

On the other hand, I'd propose eliminating that darn +5 level-up screen. I hated that, I hated having to "calculate" my character instead of letting it build on its own as a consequence of my actions. In a magical world where gamesas read this post and decided to use it, they'd also have a leveling system where 3 or 4 levelups of a skill with a governing attribute would bump that attribute up one (Or even a more complex system in which each skill contributes to more than one attribute-- but that's too fancy to get into right now). And then the level-up screen would either be cosmetic or let you pick 3 attributes to +1 to. Most of those "seamless" leveling system mods we had for Morrowind (GCD and Madd Leveller) or Oblivion (Whatever those were, can't remember names... Kobu's, maybe?) used that idea with their own tweaks here and there.

This is a really good idea.

It allows people to use spells differently. Maybe some characters will only use risky spells, because thats their character.
It balances it fairly well. And finally it rewards you for casting harder spells, which was obnoxious.

I like it, hope to see a mod that fixes this.

Great idea!

It would be awesome if (if there's a skill level cap) there would be spells in the 'super-difficult' category, even at skill level 100. Special spells like Finger of the Mountain or something. Even the best Mages can't fully master some very powerful secret spells. Searching for those spells (a spellbook, scroll or hidden trainer to learn the spell to you) in the most dangerous and hard to find places as a high level mage character would be very awesome, especially if the spells had there own animations and (visual) effects. A bit like how Daedric Armor was incredibly rare in Morrowind.

This, combined with a leveling system like GCD would make leveling much more smooth and enjoyable, just play your character like you want it and it's skills and attributes raise accordingly.

I always thought there should be some reward to trying to do crazy-awesome things. Both Morrowind and Oblivion had trouble with a proper risk/incentive curve.





That would be great. There should always be something too hard for you, I think. I mean, imagine a quest where you had to successfully cast a very difficult spell to summon something. Wouldn't that be great if you weren't sure you could do it and you had to rest up and prepare beforehand?

If your proposing bringing back the spell success chance back, then no.

I personally found that it gave a bit of a challenge to the magic system, rather than being born with a fireball and healing spell without any experience like in Oblivion.

I like the soft barriers idea a lot, hopefully the devs will do just what you are proposing. It can be slightly odd when a difference of one skill point separates a tier of spells from another, smooth constant change is much better IMO.