Was doing some thinking the other night, and since I'm a complete deficient in actually making mods, although I've been a long time connoiseur of many of the fine works from here and TESNexus, I thought I'd ask you guys a question.

How feasible (and legal, since it's an existing gamesas game) would it be to put FO3's leveling system into ESIV? Don't get me wrong, there are several great xp/progression mods for Oblivion out there, but while each of them are good in their own right, I've drawn the conclusion that the best possible character progression system for Oblivion would be FO3's system.

Is this even in the realm of possibility?

Certainly possible, but I doubt anyone will make it. Oblivion XP is the only mod that adds xp based leveling and it's quite a large and complicated mod. What exactly is wrong with Oblivion XP for you? I personally think that the only interesting thing about the FO3 system are the perks. The rest is pretty simple (only five different XP values for five different level ranges of creatures - Oblivion XP does a much better job) or broken unless modded (intelligence is by far the best attribute, most of the others are so useless it's ridiculous).

Ok, comparatively, how similar is OXP to FO3's leveling system? I remember trying it out a while back, but that was way before FO3 consumed my life for several months. I remember the general concept of it, but the actual leveling up part escapes me.

On a side note, in your opinion, what are the top 3 alternate progression mods out there for ESIV? Been fiddling around with it the past couple days, and there's just no way I can jump in one spot for hours on end to level acro or sneak into a wall next to sleeping bums to beef up sneak anymore. Mainly trying to find a general consensus on what the most popular/effective alt. leveling system is.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

I don't think you will ever find a general consensus about mods here. I personally say Oblivion XP and only Oblivion XP. I hate the vanilla system with a passion and all other leveling mods are only slightly improved versions of that same system. It is broken, no matter what you do. For me at least.

Progressing skills by using the skills sounds like a great idea at first. But it simply doesn't work. The problem is that the quality of an action doesn't matter, it's the quantity and only the quantity that counts. It is annoying when I increase my skills much, much faster if I use exploits. There is one for every skill. Sneaking against walls while the adoring fan is nearby, standing next to a mudcrab to increase your heavy armor skill, casting restoration spells even though your health is at 100%, killing your summons etc etc.

Some people are true immersionists and simply wouldn't do things like that. I play games because I want a challenge. Leveling is an important part of RPGs to me, it's a reward for doing all these heroic things (and not for doing useless things like in vanilla). I don't cheat, but I use everything the games offers me to 'win' the game.

What do I get for killing a Minotaur at level 2 in vanilla Oblivion? A minotaur horn, lots of wasted health potions and less armor/weapon skill increase than I would get for standing next to a mudcrab for two minutes or beating a few of my summons to death. What do I get in Oblivion XP? Lots of XP, maybe enough to directly level up to level 3. In vanilla I always avoided dungeons that contained undead or monsters because for leveling it was pointless to fight them and they didn't even have any interesting loot. With Oblivion XP it makes much more sense to fight them.

Oblivion XP works pretty straightforward and there is a huge amount of things you can adjust in the ini. How much XP you gain for various things, how much XP are needed to level up etc. It also makes it easier to increase your major and/or specialized skills compared to minor skills. Which in turn makes the class you choose more important since if blade is only a minor skill it will take a long time and cost you a lot of skill points before you reach 100.

Sounds like a plan, I'll have to give it another test run and see what I think, from your description, sounds like you have many of the same frustrations that I (and I'm certain a majority of the longtime players) have. I appreciate the input, although I would love to see the FO3 progress system ported over to ESIV, I might even attempt to undertake it myself if I had the slightest inkling of how to start it... but modding for these games simply eludes me, aside from the basic alter enchantments/armor type stuff. Beyond that, it might as well be in Aramaic for as well as I understand it.

Oblivion XP is very very cool, and almost exactly what I was looking for, however, I seem to be having a problem with it that wasn't there previously, and I've narrowed it down to just OXP that's causing it. Every time I have it enabled, within at most an hour playing time, my rig goes into slideshow mode no matter where I am or what I'm doing. I'm not running a dinosaur here either, PhenomX4 9750 @ 2.3ghz (2.44 OC), 8gb pc6400 ddr2, BFG 275GTX 896mb, rocketfish 5.1 sound card, 1TB Hitachi 7800rpm HD, running it on a sharp aquos 32" 1080p HDTV, and have been running it at max settings across the board until I started using OXP. Now it doesn't matter how low I turn down the settings/resolution/etc., if it's playing for an hour, it's a freezeframefest.

(Oh, and Win7 64bit, left that part out)

Anybody got any tips?

Please?

Not sure, I actually never play the game for an hour or more. Only help I can give is that you should definitely change the performance settings in the ini. Mine are set to this (my setting; original setting):

Set ObXPSettings.cellScanDelay to 5.0 ; 5.0
Set ObXPSettings.scriptDelay to 0.3 ; 0.05
Set ObXPSettings.scriptKillingDelay to 0.3 ; 0.1
Set ObXPSettings.scriptMiscDelay to 0.3 ; 0.1
Set ObXPSettings.scriptQuestDelay to 1.5 ; 1.5
Set ObXPSettings.scriptUIDelay to 0.2 ; 0.05

That's more than enough and the script will run far less often per second. Sounds like something 'wrong' is building up slowly, so maybe if one of the fast running scripts causes the issue it will start to happen after a much longer time. Did you look at the comments section of the mod? Did someone else report this yet? If nothing helps you may need to save and reload (or if that doesn't help, save, quit, restart and reload). Wouldn't be the perfect solution, but I think after one hour it is not that much of a problem.

EDIT: Browsed through the comments and there are some people who have used the mod for a long time and didn't report that problem. So I guess it is some kind of strange mod interaction. Are you sure that it only happens with Oblivion XP? Did you try to play without Oblivion XP after installing it the first time for more than an hour?

Yea, that was one of the first things I checked, when it's on, it'll only go an hour if it's lucky, if it's off, I can run it all night. One thing that did cross my mind though (admittedly I have no idea how these scripts function) is whether it has anything to do with the fact that I'm using the OMOD version? Based on past experience, OMODs generally run a lot cleaner and smoother than manual installs, but again, I don't know what I'm talking about on stuff like this.

Another thing I did notice though is after I deactivate OXP, when I gain a level normally, it still brings up the OXP screen, and you can jack all the numbers up as high as you want, but they won't carry over. So basically, when it's off, I get robbed out of whatever multiplier I would've gotten on level, which isn't actually that big of a deal since I never was a big min/maxer on single player games (with the possible exception of FFX)

Eh, I'll figure it out eventually I'm sure, or go back to using the first xp mod I started out with, the name of which escapes me at this moment, but there's like 12-14 templates you can pick from to use as your leveling model, and you can set all the percentages on a per-skill basis, etc., I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, I'm just too lazy this early in the morning to go look it up...

Anyway, thanks for all your help, much appreciated.