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Fortify Strength

Fortify Personality

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POWER: Calm Humanoid/Beast

Fortify Endurance

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POWER: Restore Health

Fortify Speed + Feather

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POWER: Restore Fatigue

Fortify Agility + Luck

POWER: Absorb Strength/Willpower

POWER: Command Humanoid

POWER: Chameleon

POWER: Sanctuary

Reflect (25)

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POWER: Open

Fortify Intelligence

Fortify Willpower

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POWER: Fortify *all* spell skills

Spell Absorption (25)

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POWER: Spell Absorption

POWER: Restore Magicka

POWER: Resist (everything)

Fortify Health/Magicka/Fatigue

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POWER: Poison + Paralyze

Probably one of the biggest realizations that I had looking back on BTB's Game Improvements after working on Brave New World was just how hard I dropped the ball in dealing with Morrowind's spellcasting system. Nowhere was the notion that I focused entirely on exploit prevention rather than making a fun game more apparent than it was here, and so I set out to rectify that.

Perhaps the biggest failing of Morrowind's spellcasting system is that even the most powerful mages only ever had enough magicka to cast their best spells once or twice before they were completely tapped out, and more often than not had a pretty significant chance of failing them altogether. Spell costs in the original game were simply too high for the magicka pools of anyone who didn't choose the one race and/or birthsign that provided any worthwhile boost whatsoever, as well as the fact that success probability is lowered by higher costs - and it's really not all that great to start off with. One of the overarching themes of this mod is the minimization of "pass/fail" dice-rolls, which tends to invite save-scumming in high-stakes cases... such as casting a spell that costs half your maximum magicka and has a failure rate to match. As such, magicka expended on failed spellcasts is now rebated over time (Willpower determines the speed). As for the lowered cost of spells, that will be discussed further in just a bit.

The other big problem with spells was the prevailing - and unchallenged - notion that just because every effect in the game is classified as a "magic effect" in the code, then every effect must therefore be a spell. This decision had the far-reaching effect of trivializing things like racial/birthsign powers and the enchantments on rare items since their effects were so easily duplicated via the game's spellmaking and enchanting systems. The list of available spells is now greatly streamlined, cutting out the useless crap along with the effects that are too overpowered to allow customization (for consistency's sake, all effects that are still available as spells are also available for enchanting - more on that later).

The list of available effects for spells/enchanting are as follows:

Burden

Feather

Fire Shield

Frost Shield

Lightning Shield

Shield

Slowfall

Swift Swim

Water Breathing

Water Walking

Bound Armor --- (Boots/Helm/Gloves/Shield/Cuirass)

Bound Weapon --- (Dagger/Mace/Longsword/Longbow/Spear/Battleaxe)

Summon Creature --- (Scamp/Clannfear/Hunger/Dremora/[Flame/Frost/Storm] Atronach)

Damage Fatigue

Damage Health

Damage Magicka

Disintegrate Armor

Disintegrate Weapon

Fire

Frost

Shock

Blind

Demoralize Creature

Demoralize Humanoid

Invisibility

Light

Night-Eye

Rally Creature

Rally Huamnoid

Sanctuary

Sound

Absorb Fatigue

Absorb Health

Absorb Magicka

Detect Life

Detect Enchantment

Dispel

Mark

Recall

Reflect

Soultrap

Bless (Fortify Attack)

Cure Blight

Cure Disease

Cure Poison

Resist Fire

Resist Frost

Resist Shock

Resist Magicka

Restore Fatigue

Restore Health

Regarding spellmaking, I attribute its necessity in the original game to Bethesda's failure to meet the player's needs with thes pre-made spells, a challenge that I was all too happy to accept. Every spell is now useful and a lot of them are very cheap. Every school has at least one (most two or three) spell(s) with a cost of one for ease of training (in addition to being useful in their own right). Spells with variable magnitudes are used sparingly and typically only on combat-based spells to downplay the game's save-scummy nature (I'm looking at you, "Open" spells).

But with all that said, still: why get rid of spellmaking? It seems somewhat gratuitous from an outside perspective, but the truth is that it serves three very important purposes. One, it differentiates the

Enchant skill from spellcasting since it's now the only way to obtain custom effects. Two, it allows me to balance magic effect costs exclusively around enchanting and, more importantly, alchemy - the latter of which does not play nicely at all with spellmaking if you try to balance the same effect for both, especially when you're trying to make spells cheaper than a ten-cent [censored]. Third - and this is the big one - it allows me to enforce a minimum skill level requirement for spells based on their cost.

Remember how I said earlier that this mod tries to cut down on pass/fail dice-roll mechanics as much as possible? Well, it'll still let you *buy* a spell that's way beyond your means to use, it just won't let

let you *cast* it until your skill is high enough. Ironically, the whole dice-roll thing wasn't even my primary motivation here, but rather the fact that I (along with the original developers, I've no doubt)

initially attempted to use high spell costs as a gating method. This, of course, is incredibly [censored] and leads to the exact problems we discussed earlier about over-inflated spell costs and insane players who look at a 3% success rate and see only 97 reloads in their immediate future.

Rounding out the above-mentioned overhaul, the spell list of every NPC who sells them has been edited. Arrille is of particular note here, since he now sells a wide variety of starter spells for every school (also, you no longer start out with any freebies for major skills). The low cost and genuine usefulness of entry-level spells gives every player at least something helpful to do with their magicka, not just those geared towards magic. However, even though your magicka dollar will now stretch magnitudes further than before, it's still a tough sell to run a pure mage without one of the two skills that helps restore your magicka: Alchemy or Mysticism. Think of it less as pigeon-holing certain character types into these skills and more like how [censored] it would be to run a fighter without any weapons or armor.

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Enchanting, contrary to spellmaking, really doesn't change much here from its incarnation in BTBGI. Thus, I'll just hit the important bullet points and move on:

? Magic items no longer recharge on their own over time

? So as not to handcuff Mysticism to Enchant, you can now buy filled soul gems and Amulets of Gem-Feeding

? Self-enchanting is disallowed; the cost of enchanting services is reduced to 1/10

? The cost of "cast once" enchantments is very cheap; also raised the enchant capacity for paper

? Constant effect enchantments are disabled

? The various enchanting-related fixes/features of the Morrowind Code Patch are required/recommended

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Alchemy, finally, was a fun beast to tackle. As broken as the enchanting system was, Alchemy somehow managed to one-up it and be even *more* broken thanks to the ability to stack effects (with fortify intelligence weighing in as very possibly the single greatest exploit in the game) and complete lack of anything stopping you from pounding back ten potions in a row like a fraternity pledge on haze week. Enchanted items at the very least required you to machine-gun the "use" button in real time - potions work with the game *paused*. The "stacking" issue is partially resolved (fortify intelligence, namely) by hard-capping stats, fortified or not, at 255, while both issues as a whole are put to rest by limiting potion consumption to one at a time.

So, ok, I guess I should explain that last one, since it's been attempted before but never actually successfully. My intention is to have a script listen for the sound of a potion being consumed and, when it hears you drink a potion, it adds ($SPELL EFFECT) to your character. If you drink another potion while this effect is active, you collapse (maybe), vomit, and are stripped of all spell effects. How long it takes for you to be able to drink another potion is determined by your endurance and/or agility (I haven't worked this part out yet, in case you can't tell).

If I want to, I could probably also set up a NoM sort of thing where you need to eat, like, every eight hours or so. Could probably tie it to sleeping so that you can't restore your health if you're hungry. Probably nothing too complex, but enough so that people won't [censored] about the conflict issues with NoM that will invariably arise from the potion limitation.

Beyond that, the alchemy changes are, again, pretty much the same as in BTBGI, where the effects of all of the ingredients have been overhauled to make sense and for the negative ones to actually be prominent. The only two important footnotes are that the effect costs will be much more balanced thanks to the removal of spellmaking and the fact that fortify intelligence potions are once again allowed since the attribute cap takes care of abuse problems. The latter is particularly important with the new stat development system, given that A) misc skills can only be developed through paid training, and you cannot train a skill beyond the value of its governing attribute.

So, now we're starting to get to the parts of my old mod where the fact that I've never played Morrowind before started to get *really* noticeable. The main focus of BTBGI was "fixing" the economy by un-inflating the values of items, except that I really didn't go far enough, nor did I sufficiently address any of the other causes of my primary complaint that Morrowind lacked a real sense of equipment "progression" from one type to the next since the best stuff is so easy to find/steal.

This time around, I will be focusing much more on differentiating the different types of weapons and armor, as well as the different styles. I don't have too much to say on this yet since a lot of this hasn't gotten very far beyond the concept stage, but that's what we'll be looking at.

This was a short section.

Similar to how I was too scared to dig deep into balancing equipment in my older mod, so too was I afraid to do any sort of re-balancing of creatures. Again, that will be happening, and again I really don't have much else to say since this part is still in the concept phase.

Also tying in with the above is theft. So much of my old mod was about finding ways to clamp down on this mechanic, and I ultimately ended up racking up a lot of collateral damage by nuking it out of orbit. Once again, I addressed only the symptoms of the problem rather than its root, which was that theft was simply way too lucrative due to the overabundance of *really* good [censored] that was quite easy to steal. I sort of attempted to address that by placing new guards in key areas with expensive stuff lying right out in the open, but it really just makes more sense to not have folks leaving their valuables out in the open like that. This brings us to the subject of locks.

Astute readers may have noticed the "Open" effect missing from the list of Alteration spells above, making Security and/or The Tower birthsign the only reliable way to open locked things. For mage-type characters, I will likely have items with "open" enchantments available as quest rewards, whereas fighters will mostly rely on finding keys. And yes, this means I'm going to pore over pretty much every locked door and chest in the game, see which of them have keys, and figure out if I need to add any.

I am nothing if thorough.

Finally, beds and camping. I touched on this earlier when I mentioned that you need to sleep in a bed in order to gain stats through skill use. Further to it is that camping will now only restore your health; you can only regain your magicka by sleeping in a bed. This change will include an overhaul of how inns function along with the game's piss-poor detection of when you're trying to sleep in someone else's bed so that there is now actually some purpose to paying to stay at an inn (I was actually working on this right before I disappeared five years ago).

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That's about it for all of the important changes, at least for now. As you can probably guess, this is very much a work and progress and quite a bit of it is subject to change. Let me know what you think, and remember that nothing says "welcome back, BTB" like the contact information and turn-ons of an attractive redhead in or near the Houston area.

(Some things never change)