Since I′m actually playing the game now (those of you that worry: don′t, finally I′m *actually* play-testing DR), you will potentially see many of these little mods from me - but since the idea for this one came very at night, and I′m not sure how to make, nor if this is just a personal mod I would appreciate your input.



What troubles me in game right now is that I don′t gain practically anything for doing quests. I′m using OOO 5x slower levelling, and with SPAM I actually like the levelling I have. For now, I actually feel weak, and want to get better - so I get my hands dirty.

And then that stupid cat asks me to fetch back her potatoes. I have to ask myself - why? Why should I do that? She looks poor, wont most likely pay anything (well I know she wont), and the "experience" is neglible, cause there′s no real experience points in Ob.


Now I know what you think - use OblivionXP. And I have absolutely nothing against that mod, I′m simply paranoid about finding myself in the middle of the game with an uber characer, just because I spent too much time fighting meaningless creatures, I had this problem with FO even with mods. Really there′s no real reason not to use it, it′s just in my head, but I also like SPAM so I need an alternative.



SO, the idea I had today was that I could give myself a small bonus in my primary skills (not only levelling, that would make me WEAKER, not stronger) for every quest I accomplish. That way I could use any levelling mod I use, and still get a bonus from quests.

The more detailed idea would be to give some certain bonus to all primary skills, but more to those that have advanced since last level. This would simulate using the skills to complete the quest, as I cannot tell what skills you used specifially making that quest - many quests may be "open" for many levels. So giving a small overall bonus but favoring those that advanced since last level seems like a well enough distribution method.


Any thoughts? This mod wont get any more complicated than this - I′m planning a single script that checks for the player level and primary skills, and active quests, and makes some small adjustements when a quest gets tagged accomplished.

To be clear, the whole idea would be to give some levelling bonus for making quests - in the form of actual skill progress, favoring skills the same way your naturall progress has favored, and at the same time keeping things compatible with any actual levelling mod.

Viable? Should release?

If you release this, you might just lure me back from Oblivion XP. Seriously.

I used nGCD and Progress for a while there, and I had the same experience you describe. Where's my motivation to do quests? They svck. Dungeons, that's where the action and the improvement come from.

Now, here's a caveat: Some quests, notably the collect me 20 varla stones type quests, do, in fact, involve leveling and improving activities. If I come back from collecting 20 varla stones and I've improved my abilities along the way, and then I get an improvement reward for completing the quest... well, I don't know exactly how to balance that.

Here's an alternative approach: Use Enhanced Economy to make quest rewards worth some gold. At the same time, use Enhanced Economy to make looting a lot less monetarily rewarding. That way, you dungeon-crawl for the ability improvement and the occassional enchanted item, while you do quests to earn cash!

But, yes, please release.

gothemasticator

This is an interesting idea, but it could have consequences for people trying to do with efficient levelling. I think it would work with Oblivion XP, btw, if I understand you correctly. With some updates I plan to make to Ob XP, it shouldn't unbalance things too much anyway. I'm only mentioning Ob XP because that's the only levelling mod I know I used to do efficient levelling, but I've never played another levelling mod.

Oblivion XP is fully configurable so that you aren't uber powerful either. I've played about 400 hrs in my current game and am only level 32. I know a lot of Ob XP players never get above level 20. Anyway, that's just some extra info.

I think this is a good idea. It would be nice to have more rewards for stuff other than monetary or food I like the quests where you get a skill book as a reward. My only caution is that you don't overdo it - as I said it could have consequences for people trying to control their levelling. Also, I think it's important to document the rewards so players can decide which quests they want to do.

Quite viable, IMHO, and it would give a great deal more incentive to complete quests in the game. Here's my thoughts:

Skill ups should probably tie into the quest activities to help with the immersion factor. For example, completing the quest Unhealthy Competition would give the player his usual reward of the Weatherward Circlet and leveled gold, but would also grant him one additional rank in the skills of Sneak and Mercantile. Similarly, completing the Chorrol Recommendation quest would grant the player one point one rank in Speechcraft (not Conjuration like one would think, because you don't actually do any spellcasting in that quest), and the Skingrad Recommendation quest would grant the player a rank in Destruction. Deciding which skill(s) is most appropriate to increase and then scripting the skill to be ranked up at the end of the quest might actually be simpler than the approach you describe, but I'm not one to tell you how to mod, it's your idea, so you know what's best for it. :whistling:

Some quests (albeit very few) already give skill ups as rewards, so you don't need to tweak the Fighters Guild quest A Rat Problem, for example.

Finally, you say that the script would work its magic each time a quest gets tagged completed, but I already see a small problem there: what if the quest was tagged completed because it was failed? Would you still want to reward the player for screwing up so bad the quest is no longer possible to accomplish? Probably not, because then what's the point of actually playing the quest if you can just be rewarded for chopping the head off the snake, instead?

Integration would sometimes give skill ups if you succeeded in certain dialogue options, but that's hardly viable in the vanilla quests seeing as how most dialogue options are simple yes/no stuff.

I can't help but wonder what the bonus would be when people finally get around to delivering the amulet to Jauffre after playing for 200+ hours. I can think of four possibilities.

1: A SPAM type thing where you get small bonuses to your primary specialization skills, and teeny tiny bonuses to your secondary specialization skills, and practically nothing for the third (Combat/Stealth/Magic and maybe like 1% more to the next skill up for #1, .5% for #2, and .1% for all other skills.

2: A dialogue box at the start of every quest asking you which skills you think you're going to use in this quest (basically asking you which ones you want the bonus for when the quest completes.)... A bit unimmersive though, and it would be pretty annoying at the start of a new game the way a number of quest mods give you the quest right away.

3: Base the skill ups on the quest itself. Fetch quest= athletics, acrobatics, speechcraft. Fighters Guild quests = Fighter skills. MG= Mage skills, TG= Thief skills, etc. and for the misc quests just place the bonus depending on what the quest primarily involves.... Wouldn't work for quest mods though.

4: Base the bonus on the three skills increased the most since you received the quest. There could be some bleed over into related skills like: if you Acrobatics, hand to hand, and restoration were the ones with the highest increase then Athletics, block, alchemy, and such would also get a small bonus.

I really like Thomas Kaira's suggestion, having a skill point increase as reward for quests. As long as the skills that are upgraded are relevant to the quest (Sneak / Mercantile raised for Thieves Guild quests, Heavy Armor / Blunt for Fighter's Guild et al.). This sounds like a great idea, I would love to see it implemented.

Ah, thanks for the input guys!

I also see that I didn′t put the idea very clearly.

I′ll try to clear some misundertandings through quote+reply.




On the contrary - IMO. My idea is that you get, say (totally fictional) 10p of skill points to your primary skills when you complete a quest. Now, if you used skill "A" more than skill "B", so you get more of THOSE points to skill "A".

This TRIES to actually repsent the skills you needed to complete the quest, but for simplicity, the values used for WEIGHTING the distribution of the skill bonuses are always compared to the values you had when you last levelled up. The overall bonus for a quest is STATIC, to make ANY quest appealling, so ANY quest brings you equally closer to levelling. Of course, at lower levels you have the luxury of easy quests (with FCOM, I don′t even know if this true), while at later levels they are all hard - but hey - you actually get more skill practice doing them as well, like you said.



Thanks for the extra info, and don′t get me wrong - I actually think ObXP is the levelling mod that makes THE MOST sense to me. I really cannot explain why still clutch the normal system, ehanced with traditional levelling mods. :turtle:

But as it is, I need a system to keep quests interesting. The system itself would probably be compatible with ObXP, but then again totally adding ON TOP of what ObXP does?




No no, I guess I already wrote this in this post but the "reward" is strictly computational, and general.

Not quest specific, in the way you describe, nor anything else than skill "uses". The motivation is that for example I′m personally in my game trying to get stronger, to experience the more dangerouns areas of FCOM and some quests. In this context - doing most of the Vanilla quests is waste of time. So IMO there should be SOME small reward for the activity even though you didn′t jump 100 times in place or casted 100 5% shield spells, if you know what I mean.



Good input, while some of the stuff I wrote in this posts holds your post made me think that it would be interesting to always give a small bonus to MINOR skills as well.

More over - maybe this WHOLE system would be for developing MINOR skills?

I know it′s artificial - but what about if quests where the key to get those minor skill up at least some?

That makes sense to me.

This actually sounds like an excellent idea, and as I think it about it, it seems akin to how a lot of quests in Runescape are done. Most if not all quests, at their end, give XP in the the main skills you would have employed during that quest. So if you were fighting more you would get XP in your Defense/attack/strength etc. If you were using magic more, then you would get magic xp, etc etc. Though there were a lot of other reasons in Runescape to do quests, the XP was the main reward.

And if this was done in a similar way in Oblivion, then the experience would be pretty good, imo. It is just a matter of making those rewards important enough to actually be important (or indeed, if you want to go that far, even vital to the character's development) and putting in enough quests so that there isn't so little to gain regardless. Quest lines should have stacked experience rewards (yet not too uber. It would probably require a difficulty and general leveling overhaul, but I'm sure you'd include something like those anyway) and singular quests should be worth more then single quests in quest lines if the difficulty is the same.

But here is the thing, how do you compensate for multiple pathways to complete quests? Perhaps you use magic to pick the lock rather than your lockpick? That is something that should be accounted for in caculating the rewards. (though you can also just make it fixed regardless, but that isn't that great of a system once you start to see that certain quests are pointless for a certain class to partake in)

These are just my thoughts.

I don't think there would be any issues with Ob XP at all. It has no problem with skill books or doing the few existing quests that give skill or attribute bonuses. I was mainly talking about people who still use vanilla levelling. If you start giving bonuses for skills that are major skills, it will affect a player's levelling - especially if they are using efficient levelling.

I only suggest that you document the bonuses that each quest will give so players can decide which quests they want to do if they are concerned about getting skill increases. I've seen lots of comments in the UESP wiki warning about skill increases for the few quests that have them now. They even have instructions on how to remove the bonuses! Not sure why someone would want to, but there you go.

So, don't worry about Ob XP. It won't have a problem with this. I only mentioned it because some players (namely Phitt ) have found Ob XP too easy and have asked me to implement some changes that would alter the way skills are increased. But even with those changes, I don't think your mod would be a problem as long as the skill point rewards were kept in check. If you are going to hand out rewards that increase skills by 10 points or more, then I know there are going to be people who won't like that. Mind you, they can just choose not to run your mod

If you'd like a better understanding of how Ob XP works, just send me a pm.

I'm generally on the other side of the fence with regards to CRPG leveling systems, but I completely agree about this problem. Quests are rarely worth doing, especially after your first play-through; switching to an XP system fixes this for obvious reasons, but a solution for those of us who prefer "practice makes perfect" mechanics would really be nice.

One of the biggest issues is that good stuff (cash or items) is entirely too easy to get in the first place, and quests don't give enough to make them competitive with a good killing spree; I definitely think that also needs to be addressed (EE covers a lot of this). But this is a pretty solid idea that will work with or without an economy-based fix... since quests are a limited resource anyway, I don't think it even needs to be balanced against any assumption of how valuable the other rewards are. Thumbs up!

I really like this idea!

I think it would be great if you got this "special reward" only after doing a certain number of quests (or rather, side quests). You could let the player set this number, probably... personally, I think something like 5 is good, so that after every fifth quest you do, you get a small boost. That makes it so much more exciting, you start looking forward to completing your fifth quest and getting that reward.

Also, if it isn't something that gives you a bonus for simply completing one quest, it allows you to be more liberal with the reward. It would be a reward for "being a quester", not for "having gone to that dungeon and slaughtered some enemies". "Being a quester" can mean all sorts of things, and the rewards could be implemented in a more interesting way. For example, after completing your fifth quest, you go to sleep and a message box appears, asking you how you completed the last quests. Choices could include "My combat experience helped me", "My natural reflexes and my wits kept me alive", "My arcane knowledge rocks" and "I used all my abilities equally" (which would mean, "just distribute the reward randomly and equally"). Things like that. There could even be several choice systems that focus on different skill clusters - one where you get the default choice between Mage, Fighter, Thief, one where you get to choose between "sneaky wizard", "arcane warrior" and "close-combat rogue", etc.

Also, every third time, or at a random chance, or whatever, it could be your attributes that get a boost instead of your skills. Just to make it more diverse.

Could not agree more with this statement...among other things, Oblivion...particularly modded Oblivion...is simply awash in magic items. After about level 10, I often walk away from minor enchanted loot...it is just not wort the trobule of collecting and selling...(and, as a packrat by nature, I use the Storage Sacks mod so weight is rarely a real issue).

In any event, back on topic...I really like the idea here and will definitely try it out should you release such a mod. :foodndrink:

Regards,

Hem

Since I don′t have much time to work on this, at least not yet, I′m going to make a simple version first.

It will allow you to configure whether to


1. Assign the reward to minor skills, major skills or stats (you have to select just one group out of the three)

2. How big the reward is, in points. A decimal value, so any number is possible.

3. How MANY rewards you get for a single completed quest (just any completed quest). So the total reward is the above value times the number of rewards.


If you select one reward, and reward size of 1p, you get a single boost of 5p to the selected skill/attribute. If you select 5 rewards of 0.1p, you get to the assign the reward 5 times, so you can distribute the points (0.1p each) how you like.

I′m actually done with this implementation, though I only made one "mode" so far.


Now I can assign 1p, two times, to any minor skill I like when I complete a quest. The formula used uses Obse′s skill experience modding system, and calculates the experience needed to advance exactly the amount you configured for the reward, using the related gamesettings in your game, and gives that to player, so it completely mimics normal skill training.

I really like the idea of an alternative way of advancing my minor skills. I′m using Choices & Consequences, and to be able to advance some of the guild quest lines I would need to "train" [read: spam] some skills just to be able to follow some of those quest lines. It′s just boring, while I like that mod - but the spamming feels MORE like cheating than actually EARNING some of those points through random quests.

If you're going to do an attribute bonus, make sure it's one that's compatible with nGCD/RealisitcLeveling, which assert values with SetAV and thus will overwrite any similar changes from other mods. (This is why I needed to patch the Oghma Infinium.)

Ability-type Fortify effects are the classic solution, though the spiffy new ModAVMod command can adjust the "Max" value, which is equivalent to a temporary Fortify effect and might be the best solution.

Ah, I actually didn′t even look into those yet - I thought I could use the xp setting commands for Attributes as well, but obviously they don′t advance like skills.

I′m skipping them, actually I′m wondering if I should just release a version that gives configurable bonus to the selected minor skills and move on with it. This is one of those personal mods I wanted to make, but now that it′s already serving my own purposes I′m feeling unmotivated to use more time on it.


But really, I have already other mods ready in line to be released, so I would rather just push them all out.