This is about NOT WEARING ARMOR and not about not having a weapon.

A rogue as in a thief may decide to not wear armor but rely on agility and acrobatics in combat.

It would open up a whole new avenue of game style and encourage some characters to wear clothing outfits instead of armor.

Thoughts?

I loved the Unarmored skill in Morrowind. And I was was devastated when I discovered it had stripped out of Oblivion. I'd love to see it come back in TES VI.

It was great playing robed monks in Morrowind. Unarmored characters have such class.

i think if there was general perks instead of skill trees it would work better. As a skill line it seems kinda bland imo. Personally i think most thief type characters would be better off without armor, especially the end game flashy light armor. Maybe the ability to move faster or implement a dodge mechanic. For mages it would be simple as adding in perks to increase regeneration of magicka when not wearing armor (a passive instead of the enchantment most robes in skyrim had).

unarmoured was a completely worthless skill in morrowind, it held literally NO advantages to any of the other ones. Light, medium, and heavy armor were all superior in every way. not even the "it is much lighter" thing is any excuse at all, because it really was not that much lighter than light armor, and you would likely be bogged down anyway by loot you picked up eventually. Another issue was that it actually made it HARDER for mages to enchant stuff because there were several, now empty, item slots that you could not touch. It also had far and away less defense than anyhting else in morrowind, it is one thing to have less defense (it IS supposed to be only cloth), but it was so bad compared to light armor.

This rant also extends to oblivion and skyrim somewhat as well, from a mechanics point of view, robes are worthless in all of them.

What they need to do is try and make robes actualy worth wearing over armor. 3rd edition D&D and Pathfinder made it so that you had a higher and higher chance of completely failing to cast arcane spells, problem with this is stuff like battlemages and

PErsonally i like the way ESO actually did it (same with kingdom of Amalur), Robes would increase magical damage, or decrease costs, and ONLY they could do that. only robes and cloth armor could help mages. If they made each armor only be able to be enchanted with stuff that would help certain playstyles (cloth = mage and MAYBE helping magical resistance, light = DPS and sneaking, heavy = taking damage and physical resistances), it would help IMMENSLEY in making Cloth actually worth something, while also making a major difference between the armors, even with smithing. Smithing should also be made to only reach a specific limit (like maybe each upgraded rank is a percentage increase for example, and then there is someway to make armor with the stats of another)

Like a lot of things in Morrowind, things become a lot better when you apply some mods. I got a dodge mod for Morrowind that applied a sancutary effect according to your unarmoured skill, weighted against how much actual armour you are wearing. It was pretty accurate in simulating the sorts of dexterity and agility that a unarmoured swordsman would have to have in order to survive any sort of real combat.

That sort of skill is translated into player skill in the newer TES's, and well, you need to be really good at TES combat to get the same results. I can do the dodging thing pretty well on my own, and I find it hard not to abuse the sort of footwork you can do in every Bethesda game with melee weapons to get through melee fights unharmed most of the time. Its great fun to do all this stuff, but I fear that so much of it comes from learning how the AI works in the engine, and people who havent spent the last 5 years of their life inside it most of the time will not have the greatest success.

Im not exactly sure how to solve this problem though, if it even is a problem. Maybe there could be some perks in the block tree that have a dodging theme, and in practice make you able to avoid a entire blow by doing a special form of block. I'd also like to see some sort of way to do some crazy swordsmanship stuff like deflecting arrows or what not.