Well, it seems that more and more people want to be able to use anything any time, but with little effect for the unqualified, and jack of all trades and master of all of skills is not as popular as specialized characters, for now.

I'm glad that I started this poll, and hopefully this would be as a hint for the ones that their decisions will affect the next game. :whistling:

Even though the direct effect of attributes on the result of actions is popular. I hope their effect as a requirement for Perks and their effect on item effectiveness would still be considered.

And there can be three modes of play, Casual, Normal, and Hard Core.

Casual: Easier bargains and fees, Oblivion-like fast travel, more hand holding in quests, easier encounters, No penalty for unqualified item usage, can become a master of most skills, and so on...

Normal: Normal Bargains and fees, Fast travel only from cities to cities, less hand holding in quests, normal encounters, normal penalty for unqualified item usage, can not become a master of all, but no specialization is required, and initial race and class do not have long effect on character, and so on...

Hard Core: Harder Bargains and steep fees, No fast travel, no hand holding in quests, harder encounters, higher penalty for unqualified item usage, minimum attributes required for item usage, skill advancement and perks, limited usable initial items, but as character grows, he can use more and more items, initial race and class define the initial direction of character growth, but one can change the direction by dedication, earlier in the game, and so on...

In fact these parameters can be all in a game play tweaking page in the options, with those three predefined templates to chose from, or one can decide to tweak those parameters independently.

As for when we choose to go without fast travel, there can be a system like Morrowind available, maybe combined with something like the system in the game called "Two Worlds", or their equivalent in oblivion mods called: "The Ayleid Steps".

There can be some ancient monuments scattered throughout the continent that one could find and activate, so after that when one enters any of them, a map of Tamriel would show with the mark in the place of all the previously found monuments to select from and "Fast Travel" to.

So you have some select places for fast travel, not every bloody place that is marked on your map, and you have to be at one of those select places to be able to jump to another one.

This is a system like the one implemented in the "Two Worlds" game and I think it is a very more balanced way of implementing fast travels, "Two Worlds" had a few additional stones that you could carry with yourself to use as a portable fast travel marker, so you would drop one on the ground and use it to fast travel to a place, and do your required task and then return to the place and pick that stone up again and continue.

But if a similar system was implemented, then in Hard Core mode those portable fast travel markers could be reduced to one or even zero. :frog:

OK, as always I just gave to the urge to pour out the ideas as they flowed though the mind. so that's it.

For me, here is what I'd like
For one, skills in major, minor, and misc need to mean something, other than being able to train faster and level up (only in MW and OB). As such, I'd like it so only major skills can get to 100 or higher as a mastery. Minor up to 80ish or 75. Misc skills are to take a hit and get up to 50 or 60 at most. This not only makes the created class a person made more unique, but also gives more meaning to major, minor, and misc skills.

Now, there needs to be some unique abilities to the races. As far as I am concerned, any race can learn any skill to mastery when given enough effort, though starting stats help accomplish this faster in the beginning. However, to make races unique, each race should be able to select more unique specific skills, abilities, what have you as the character grows, or something of the sort.

As for items, any race should be able to wear gear. The only restrictions an item should have is being able to wear enough and not collapse (encumbered) because they're too weak to wear a complete suit of ebony. Depending on how beast races are done, they should be able to wear boots, but it's turned into leggings as not to screw them over. As for helms, closed helms should conform to their shape. If that can't be done, then beast races should have the ability to wear..TAIL ARMOR!

Personally I dislike artificially limiting a character down, I wrote a http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1094886-the-levelling-system/page__view__findpost__p__16038576 that may illustrate how I'd like to see the system set up.
To summarize shortly, you can become "well capable" in all fields but mastery of them demands dedication. Well capable is more or less "quite well skilled for a average human", mastery means "only what top athletes, specially gifted or the really tough can achieve".

I've read somewhere that it takes 10000 hours of practice to master a skill (in real life). Since in MW and OB 1 game hour takes 2 minutes of real time, 10000 game hours would take 20000 real minutes or 333 real hours.

So 300 hours of practice to take a skill from 5 to 100 would be realistic and I'd like to see how that plays out. It would make increases possible, but they'd take a long time. This of course couldn't simply be aplied to the Oblivion leveling system because it would just make players stuck at low levels with crappy skills. However, it could work very well with a sort of point buy system where the player is given a number of skill points at character creation that can be used to buy a certain proficiency in various skills.

For example if there are 21 skills in TES V (the same number as in Oblivion) players could be given 21 points. All skills start at Novice rank (5), but higher ranks can be bought for points. Apprentice rank would cost 1 point, Journeyman rank would cost 3 points (1+2), Expert Rank would cost 7 points (1+2+4), and Master rank would cost 15 points (1+2+4+8). This would allow for a wide variety of competent starting characters from the ulimate jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none (21 Apprentice skills) and the trained professional (7 Journeyman skills) to the specialist (3 Expert skills) and super specialist (1 Master skill and 2 Journeyman skills) and everything inbetween (such as 1 Expert skill, 3 Journeyman skills, and 5 Apprentice skills).

There would be no classes in this system and no distinction between major and minor skills. Instead of classes you'd have starting templates that you could pick during character creation (like for example the Mage template starts you out as a Journeyman in all the magic skills), but they would have no further effect on your character.

Edit: Of course training would also have to be reworked. The simplest solution would be if instead of increasing your skill directly training gave you skill exp. So if you buy training 2 hours of game time pass instantly and your skills increases as much as it would have if you spent 4 minutes constantly using it. It would then take 7500 training sessions to bring a skill from 5 to 100. So perhaps you should be able to select for how many hours you will train and the price would adjust accordingly. Speaking of the price, cost of the training session should also be fixed and depend on the skill of the trainer rather than on your skill.

Sorry, but I find this to be a very bad idea. TES magic system is not ideal, but the fact that you have a large variety of spell effects and you can make any spell of these effects at your will. Combine them, change them and so on is one of the best things I have ever seen in any RPG. Getting rid of this and making spells be just perks would do a great damage to TES magic system.

And as far as the OP goes, I think that the world of TES should remain as open as it is if not more. I love the fact that in the CharGen, there are only very few things I'm being forced into. Having fixed presets, limiation as to waht race can do what or achieve what would just destroy the freedom of TES. And as far as the skill/race/attribute requirements for items go, I think it is a very weird idea, I never understood much in other games. I like it that my scrawny weak altmer mage can pick up the daedric warhammer, so that I can take a good look at it. The fact that he is weak does not mean that he cannot lift it. The problem with those requiremnts is that to make the game ballanced, they would have to be on everything. While I can at least phantom a logic behind "you are not strong enough to use this", you would have to be able to make similar restriction based on other attributes. Imagne this:"You are not intelligen enough to equip this robe." What does that mean? Are to buttons so complex, you need to be genius to find them? And what abou willpower, is the clothing so ugly and uncomfortable that you need a high willpower to wear it? And so on.
For weapon effectiveness, it should depend both, on your skill and attributes. But I think we need more attributes to play into the equation. It is just silly if it is only strength that influences comabt damage. While fighting with a sword, your strength, endurance, agility, speed and to some degree even intelligence or rather cunning influence the effect. Why to choose just one?
And lastly, for the character development. I love how in TES I start with a concept of my character in mind. I make the class and start playing and after some 20 levels i realise that my character is turning out in a completely different way. I would be very annoyed if I could not continue in the way I want to jsut because I chose other skills then the ones I end up using. Of course, your choice should have an effect on you. Just not a gamebreaking one.

I'm going to write about my idea of game-play and the whole emphasis on Perks (or Feats if you like), that would integrate all actions into a consistent system, (even the spells), and would be open enough to allow any type of application of skills possible, and would encourage and beautify choice and specialization even with spell casting, and I hope that your suggested problem would not be there, as it would allow creation of new magic combos in a better way than then previous games.

And as this is a universal solutions, alchemy can follow the same rules, or you could even have combined actions based on non-magical skills, which could have a combined cost of fatigue instead of magicka, i.e. you could make combined actions and use them in fights under a single named hotkey.

This whole Perk driven system what at the back of my mind when I was suggesting of reducing the effect of attributes to just requirements for skills and perks and for the guide-line for specialization of characters.

And you don't like losing freedom for specialization, then look at my next comment.


I think my suggestion for providing game-play options for "Casual", "Normal" and "Hard-Core" gamers would satisfy all types of tastes, so if you want total freedom in anything you can have it.

And implementing those options would not be that hard, like providing fast travel or not, or applying minimum requirements or not, or providing quest target pointer or not, and so on...