I think it would be cool if you could manually repair stuff. Like you have to take it to a workshop and then find the imperfections on the blade, armor, etc and then strike it from the proper angle with the appropriate amount of heat. And if you make too many mistakes it would just break. Anyone else think this is a good idea?

Add in if you break it by svcking at repairing yourself you can still pay a blacksmith to repair it. Don't want to lose unique items because I fudged up a repair.

A minigame would be cool, as long as it's interesting enough to not drive me insane after 10 hours of gameplay.

It makes more sense than just clicking on your item with the repair tool, where ever you're at.

As long as we can skip it but not get as much smithing xp. I would only use it if I was really leveling Smithing, otherwise it would svck.

The minigame to repair stuff should be unique to the kind of armor it is as well. A hammer has little to no right being able to repair fur boots.

This.

Sounds good. As long as they don't take it in the wrong direction and have it just be some monotonous crap that gets boring like in Fable.

Smithing should start from Crafting and then the perk tree should branch out into Smithing (Metal) and Sewing (cloth/fur) and Glass Smelting (?).

I wouldn't mind whet stones though to sharpen my sword when I'm out of town.

Depends... A tacking hammer repairing the soul, sure.
A ball peen, fixing a scratch in the leather, no

Finally a game where I can be a cobbler. (Dream small, kids dream small)

Yeah, exactly. I hate picking locks in Oblivion at this point. I'm so impatient and the chests never contain much in the way of useful loot, yet I always feel compelled to open any chests I encounter like I have OCD or something. It gets the point where if I'm making a character just to mess around with, I'll just use the console to get the skeleton key and then auto-attempt until it's unlocked. It was kind of cool at first but I've put hundreds and hundreds of hours into Oblivion and I don't have the patience for it anymore.

It was rubbish that every character in Oblivion could get the Skeleton Key at Level 10 and then open every lock within a minute.

Maybe they should have different mini-games for different locks: safe lock, padlock, door lock, magic lock.

Ah, I knew someone was gonna point that out. It really depends on the fur boots I guess, and how they're damaged. I got some really nice moccasins that don't use any form of fassener besides the glue that holds the cushin in place. Its all held together via a string made from the same stuff the shoe is. But they'd hardly hold up in battle, so like I said it all depends on the boots and how they're made. And if it went to the extent of having a game for every single way to repair every kind of damage delt to an item, we'd start to drowned in all the minigames.

And I'm with ya, cobbler's all the way. Finally!