I think to be guild leader you should be required to have all the applicable skills at 100, maybe even require certain perks, even after completing the quests.
I am not going to finish the last stage of those quests until I do have the skills at those levels. It just wouldn't feel right. I hope they make a mod for that.

- You are not skilled enough to have a promotion!
- Give me a minute.
*Steps to the side, spends five days casting fireballs at the conjured familiar*
- What about now?
- Here is your promotion.

Anything is better then doing 2 quests and becoming the leader of said guild

All applicable skills at 100 would be over the top. I reckon it should work on a skill pool basis. For each rank in a guild you would need the skills for that "class" to add up to a minimum total, which gets higher with each rank.

So, to join the College of Winterhold, you'd need a total of 150 skill points across Alteration, Destruction, Conjuration, Illusion, Restoration and Enchanting. This could be reached with 75 in one skill and 15 in the rest (total 150), or with 25 in all 6 (total 150).

To rank up once, you'd need your magic skills to come to a total of 200. Then to rank up again, 250. To rank up again, 300. Eventually to become Arch-mage you'd need a total magic skill pool of 500 or so, to reflect the fact that you're actually a damn fine mage.

The numbers are obviously placeholders, as some of them might be restrictively high (500 would require 83 in four magic skills and 84 in two, or 100 in 4 and 50 in 2, and so on, which might be excessive).

Just a thought.

EDIT: on second thoughts, 450 would be about right to reach Arch-mage. That would require 75 in each magic skill, or 100 in 4 and only 25 in the remaining 2, or 50 in 3 and 100 in 3 and so on... difficult to attain, but far from impossible.

Also, it might make sense for the required skills not to necessarily be the 6 for that "class." For example it doesn't necessarily follow that all Thieves Guild members should need Speech, or even Light Armour seeing as being a thief doesn't necessarily entail getting into fights. The required skills that make up the skill pool need not necessarily be the 6 "class" skills, but as long as there's a clear set of 6 or so skills needed, I think it would work nicely.

Not 100% sure which skills would be in the Dark Brotherhood's skill pool though. Maybe you'd need to kill a certain number of people to rank up - similar to how it works now - but also you'd need to have a skill pool across all damage skills (One-handed, Two-handed, Archery, Destruction) plus a couple of indirect damage skills like Conjuration/Illusion and Sneak/Alchemy.

This is probably more of a "in my wildest dreams" tangent - but I think becoming master of a guild should really be a challenge, and one that requires more then one set of successes.

Skills - yes, they must be high.

Guild specific flavor quests at the top level - each guild has its own flavor, the traits it admires and I would like to see its own politics and ways of rising to the top on display:

a.In the fighters guild I could see a duel with the current boss being a good decider
b. I like my mages to have politics (as I picture mages) - perhaps the guild council has to vote. This means winning their votes, getting their vote disposition towards you high. Some might be easier (successfully flattering some vain illusionist), some hard - proving you skill to a conjurer, having to come up with a nonlethal poison that will overcome the alchemical masters special potion of resistance, getting on the right side of a racist mage if you are non Altmer or *insert race here* etc. Some eccentric magery perhaps (a touch of Telvanni if you will). Perhaps some secret missions given to you by a mage that hates the current archmage that will let you damage his standing so votes are more likely to come your way.
c. Some sort of flamboyant skill testing for the thieves.
d. The DB seems fine as is due to the connection with mother.
e. To rise to the highest rank of the Legion you will prove your worth by leading an operation to take out the thieves guild/DB.

Or switch them up. The mages like a duel to demonstrate mastery of the arcane, the fighters want to see some flamboyant skill test (run from point a to point b with no armor and armed only an unenchanted dagger - of course there will be some lethal foes lurking), the thieves are the cloak and dagger politicians who you have to convince to vote for you.

Other ideas?

*Sigh* One can dream, can't one?

I really like all those ideas, particularly the "skill test" ones. What do you reckon about the skill pool idea I suggested above?

I don't think that their questline would allow much "requirements".

"Ancano is trying to absorb the power of the Eye and destroy humanity for the Thalmor! . . . You can kill him when your abilities are higher than 90"

I had a mod for Oblivion that made guild advancement work pretty good. It gave ranks skill and stat requirements and it had a seperate check for a reputation system (similar to WoW, LotRO etc). Doing quests gave a good chunk of experience and you could (or had to) augment it by performing tasks. For the Fighter's guild you could spar in a training room, turn in various creature items (like pelts, horns etc). The Mages' guild had the option of turning in certain ingredients, books etc.

Something like the above would work well for Skyrim too, especially with the new radiant quests.

I really like it, I think it strikes the right note - it isn't to over the top difficult, but it shows some dedication on the characters part to to the nature of the guild and the skills it represents.

Firstly, please put spoilers in spoiler tags. I haven't done the College yet, so thanks for that.

Secondly, this would be a very easy issue to circumvent, by just ensuring that you have to reach a certain rank before the quest kicks off. Or, if a highly climactic quest starts immediately after you hand in the previous one, make sure that no guild advancement is possible or necessary until after the next quest is finished.




Agreed - it seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity not to really take advantage of Radiant Story in the guilds.

Hmmm, something like that sounds remotely familiar. Like it was in some game previously that I can't recall at the moment. Now, what could that game have been....?

Was it in Morrowind then? I never played it so I wouldn't know if it was then fair enough, I don't know why they removed it. Seems like a good idea to me. Something like the following:

Guild - Skills in skill pool
Companions - One-handed, Two-handed, Archery, Heavy Armour, Block, Light Armour, Smithing
College of Winterhold - Destruction, Conjuration, Illusion, Restoration, Alteration, Enchanting, Speech
Thieves' Guild - Sneak, Lockpicking, Pickpocket, Light Armour, Illusion, Speech, One-handed
Dark Brotherhood - One-handed, Two-handed, Archery, Destruction, Alchemy, Sneak, Illusion

Rank - Skill pool required
Rank 1 (Initiate) - 150
Rank 2 (Apprentice) - 200
Rank 3 (Disciple) - 250
Rank 4 (Journeyman) - 300
Rank 5 (Captain) - 350
Rank 6 (Commander) - 400
Rank 7 (Guildmaster) - 450

I think they could also specialise it by say : companions(fighter giuld) sayng you must use said weapon for this task ( sword and shield ) this would serve 2 purposes, 1 being that you level in the skills required for said giuld and 2 that you complete quests in the manner befitting the guild you are with. Instead of joining companions( fighters) and using magic the whole way through.
Mages giuld could say the you are required to use a certain spell. the spell would get increasingly higher meaning you would have to increase your mage abilities.

The issue with this is that a mage character could just as easily switch to the sword-and-board for that one mission, or a warrior could just as easily cast one random one-off spell. This doesn't really stop people from completing guilds despite having none of the relevant skills.

they would give you a weapon for every mission and casting a spell once would not get you to the required level to use the required spell for the next mission that would be higher.

But they'd still give a mage character that same new weapon. You're still perfectly capable of using any weapon even when your One- or Two-handed skill is at 15; this wouldn't actually prevent anyone from doing that mission. It would just be an unnecessary annoyance, forcing you to use a weapon that you don't want to - even if you're a pure warrior who would get the job done a lot better with a different weapon. It would make no sense for the Guild to restrict you in that way, why would they want to hamper their members' ability to get the job done?

And the spell idea still doesn't work for me - the only requirement to cast a spell is that the magicka cost might be too high, and we know how easy it is to get around high magicka costs. You could just enchant any old rubbish piece of gear to lower the magicka cost long enough just to cast that one spell.

I don't mind at all not becoming the Master and just a high ranking member. Other members spend years in the guild and should rather be promoted than a nobody. :jammasterjay:

While those are good ideas and all, why does it stop at the top? Shouldn't you have new duties? What about others coming to you with work, perhaps sending your underlings on tasks to help them get promoted? Searching for new recruits to the guild? Huge events that require the leader to take on personally? Perhaps events that require the efforts of multiple guilds working together?

It's... so lonely at the top. I'm the leader of the guild... now what? Well, now you go do anything except act like a part of the guild, apparently...

1) Others coming to you with work - fantastic idea, you could decide to do it yourself, or...
2) ...send your underlings on tasks to help them get promoted. Would probably be quite a big thing to add into the game, but something like Assassin's Creed's training system would be awesome. Especially if you could see the lower-ranked members after...
3) ...searching for new recruits. I think this is another great idea. I'd love to see the Guild fill up with promising or already-strong mages that I'd met in my travels and hand-picked for membership.
4) Huge events that require the leader to take on personally - hell yes. Getting to Guildmaster should be half the journey, not the end point.
5) Events that require the efforts of multiple guilds working together - this is probably the best idea of the lot Although it would require a whole lot of development - imagine running into a massive battle alongside the Companions and the College... might be too big in scale to include though. A bit hardware-intensive.

Frankly I'd be quite happy with the game if it only had really well-developed guilds and no real main quest

At least its better than "Hey, go find this thing."

"Okay."

"WELCOME BACK ARCH-MAGE!"

I think the College of Winterhold should require the player to submit research.

But they went and cut out spellmaking, so I dunno how they'd do it instead.

Dude, you would love Morrowind. ^^

Can't wait for the http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pCEc7SA0rWY to come out. I will play the game so hard then.

btw: I will take a quick look when the CK comes out, if it is possible to implement something like that with my limited knowledge.

@Jara

Well we have got the Atronach Forge in the Mitten. That could be a possibility.

If you were able to, that'd be absolutely fantastic! I feel I should probably learn to mod. I generally don't like the idea of mods, but most of my complaints with the game are minor enough that they could be pretty easily fixed with just one or two little mods.

Faction questlines simply have to be longer. The entire college of winterhold questline is shorter than the process of gaining entry to the arcane university in Oblivion. :confused:

Yes to all of these + 10.

And if any of these require me to lighten my rather full coffers all the better.

It wasn't an especially long quest (relatively) and it didn't require too much player input but I enjoyed the Wizard Stronghold quest in Baldur's Gate II. The Wizard police let you keep it and dump a bunch of apprentices on you whose training you are to oversee. It mainly involves you setting them various crafting tasks of various levels of risk. When graduation eventually rolls round you may have all your mages go into the world, or only one or two. Or you might have none (it was possible, depending on how hard you pushed them, to have had them all die in magical experiments - always made me a bit sad to return from questing to learn one had blown themselves up trying to forge a magical ring or something).

Fun times.