thank you for helping to set me straight, cuz in my mind, i was thinking of leveling overall, that the higher level you got, the world would level with you, so i misunderstood. and im glad you understood the comparison i was making with the raidars in power armor/bandits in daedric armor phrase. what you said makes alot of sense though, but i havent played oblivion for the PC (only xbox) so i dont have access to mods like you mentioend to fix the world leveling issue.

Oblivion's levelup system is one of those "good in theory, bad in practice" ideas. Levelling up by practice just like real life sounds great, until you realize that it's basically just weighting your "cast magic" button with a bunch of quarters and then making a sandwich. Or weighting the "run forward" button in a safe place and doing the same.

That it why i said purely in the terms of leveling it was more balanced. When adding in the other factors like skillbooks, vault boy statues, and such yes you became godlike.

And Honestly i'd never want to spend almost 100 hours leveling my skills. That is not a "foreign concept" It's a boring concept. I'd rather leveling up be something that im rewarded with for exploring and doing quests rather than just something i have to do anyway.

Oblivions level system was still much easier to abuse than fallouts is.

As far as Elder Scrolls' system is concerned, I think there's some primary conceits you have to accept for it to "work" properly - that being nothing more than the concept that you get better at the skills you practice. In that vein, even weighting down your "sneak" button, hiding off in a corner somewhere, and going to bed isn't necessarily an "exploit" in the general usage of the term. Your character is still simply practicing that skill. The primary conceit hangs upon you specifically not approaching the concept as you would a more traditional "gain a level, spend some skill points" system.

Still, I think Elder Scrolls does just fine being Elder Scrolls, and we don't need to worry about extending that system into something like Fallout. As far as the "how does my character get better at hacking computers by killing monsters" question goes - that is another primary conceit that must be made before the system can "work," as well. In much the same way as the Elder Scrolls system, it's dependent on the degree to which the player "plays by the rules." Personally, if that's important to someone, there's no reason that they can't just make sure they're spending skill points on skills that they've actually used. (I have a feeling that's how it works most of the time for pretty much everyone, anyway - if you have a character who's gaining XP through picking locks and killing enemies with Small Guns, those are probably the skills you're primarily concerned with raising in the first place.)

There are RPG rulesets which operate on similar principles while giving more lip service to the more... "realistic" concept of gaining skill in areas you use. Many feature optional rules wherein you keep track of which skills you've used during a play session, and can only spend points on those skills (with potentially extra skill points being awarded for "training" that might take place between adventures.) One system I thought had a really elegant method of dealing with this situation was Call of Cthulhu. Skills worked on a percentile system - you placed a mark next to each skill you made a roll for (successful or not) and then at the end of the session you rolled a percentile die - rolling over the current score gave you a couple of points in that skill (meaning the more skilled you were, the harder you had to work to improve and refine your skill.)

Of course, how that would work in a videogame RPG is another question entirely.

IMO in F1-F2 were FAR easier to be a Jack of all Trades. I was at between 80-100 in all skills save Big Guns and Unarmed, my least used skill, so I dont see where you complain yhat F3 is worse on this?

The skills go to 200 in fallout 1 and 300 in fallout 2.
You can max all skills in fallout 2 but you will have to do a lot of grinding.
And fallout 1, I have a 9 INT character, I'm at lvl 9 (cap is 20) and the skills that are high are Small Guns, Speech and Science, Science and Speech at 200 and Small Guns at 120.
I have 11 levels left with 21 skill points given to me after each of them, that means 231 more skill points.
I can use skill books to raise my first aid, outdoorsman and repair up to 100.
Point is, no. You can't max out your character or become jack of all trades because SPECIAL is far more important and you aren't given enough skill points for it.
(or maybe I'm wrong)

So Fallout 3 is worse with this, you can get 23-25 skill books for every single skill in the game, each can give +2 sp with the Educated perk and with 10 INT you're given 20 skill points each level for 20 levels. (Excluding the perk)
Charisma and Perception are both worthless so you can easily aboid those skills and put a full spec on INT.
Fallout 3's system is far more broke than fallout 1 and 2's.

But both of those games had problems themselves.
Science for example is useful for a few quest related things and perhaps a couple of dialogues.
But it's really not as important as say any combat skill.
Doctor was also useless.

The basic system was more balanced in the older games.
Not truly balanced but at least more balanced than fallout 3's.