So, I'm thinking of jumping into modding Morrowind, and have been lurking through forums and sites over the last couple of weeks to get the lay of the land so to speak. In general I get that I should start small, test, test, test, and work my way up.

Which is all good advice I plan to follow, but for one of my ideas, I just want to know if it's even possible from anyone who has experience with the systems of Morrowind and modding them before I even begin, since I think it might enter into the area of "core game components beyond the scope of mod capabilities".

So . . . basically, I want to address the annoying missing with weapons combat, WITHOUT making every hit a "hit".

From what I've seen from the number of mods out there that try to address the miss chance of Morrowind, the general solution is to give players an attack buff of varying size so that there is a lessened miss rate, with some mods (depth perception) also adding some buffs to enemies to allow for weapon skill to still matter on the hit rate. Others just up the attack rate to 1000 so there's no missing whatsoever.

The problem I'm having with this is that it strays too far from what makes Morrowind Morrowind in my opinion. I mean, I understand wanting to get rid of the annoyance of "I'm swinging my axe/shooting my arrow at a target right in front of me, how in the hell is that a MISS?!", but due to the nature of the combat system being heavily derived from tabletop games, the rest of the systems of the game are designed to work with the miss rate, and invariably, if you up the attack rate to essentially make missing impossible, you have to alter other balance parameters - give enemies more HP or Armor, up their damage, etc - unless you just want an unbalanced game (which some people do I realize).

But a compromise solution presents itself in my mind (and this is what I want to know about the potential possiblity of doing this).

Before I came back to Morrowind, I was playing Pillars of Eternity. In fact, I was half-way through that game when I decided I needed to kill some time fo the expansion to come out, so it's actually why I turned back to MW (also because I never actually BEAT MW back in the day, and I felt it was time to rectify that). PoE is ALSO a game based heavily on tabletop rules (as I'm sure others are aware), and they had an interesting idea that basically made misses VERY rare that I think would work well in Morrowind as a compromise solution that doesn't need to alter many other balance lists and such: grazes.

Basically, what I want to do is alter the formula calculated on attacks made so that whenever the player or NPC would miss and do no damage, instead, they still hit (assuming they are within weapon range and still aiming properly) but graze the opponent instead. This would mean the attack does something like Minimum Weapon damage/2, and possibly double damage to the weapon's HP, with no chance to stagger or stun the enemy. The idea of course being that you still connected with the foe, but just didn't do it very well - the angle of the strike was wrong, or they positioned themselves properly so their armor took the brunt of the blow et cetera - so you do a little damage, but nowhere near what a proper hit could have done. This is also fairly accurate to how medieval weapons combat worked historically, as I understand it.

This would eliminate the "how in the hell is that a MISS?" problem while still keeping weapon skill valid in an unchanged vanilla manner, and would mean very little rebalancing would be necessary in my mind (fights would certainly do a bit more damage to the player overall, but would also be over slightly faster too, which I think would counteract each other pretty well).

Now, I can think of other stuff such a mod would need to truly be feature complete - new SFX for grazes mostly, and probably a script to run weaker damage decals on grazes as a sort of opposite mod to "blood and gore" - but my question is on the main parameter change: is that even possible to alter in the Contruction set in a direct way? I mean, it seems like it would need to fundamentally change a core rule of what the game calculates and create a new state, and I'm not a great programmer (a much better artist than programmer) so I don't know if I'd be able to hack it in well enough if it isn't possible throught the Construction tools.

So yeah, possible? Not possible? Good idea? Bad idea? I'm eager to hear thoughts.

Interesting idea.

One potential implementation: According to the Wiki combat damage formula [ http://wiki.openmw.org/index.php?title=Research:Combat#Damage ] weapon damage can be reduced to 1/2x by increasing the maximum condition of the weapon 2x. With MWSE functions you should be able to identify the player's equipped weapon id, obtain a reference to a placed copy and modify its maximum condition that will affect all instances of the reference (in my testing, at least). Then, with 100% hit chance buff(s) in place, I believe it should be possible to gather all the necessary inputs to re-calculate the hit chance formula [ http://wiki.openmw.org/index.php?title=Research:Combat#Hit_Chance ] and apply the normal maximum condition to get normal damage for a calculated 'hit' or increased maximum condition to get reduced damage for a 'miss', also returning to normal maximum condition in menumode. This method shouldn't cause any big FPS hit considering it need only run through once every player attack attempt. Using a method similar to this, [Edit - using Merzasphor's recently added MWSE functionality] I've been able to implement enchanted item use chance of failure for the project I'm working on, so I'm fairly confident about the feasibility.