I wouldn't even know where to start creating a rule system that would work for absolutely every build. In dice games there is a GM present to do all the scaling using his brains, common sense, and player evaluation to do the monster selection etc. No simple algorithm in the world can make such thought out decisions.

Maybe an anolytical evaluation of the progress is more sensible for the future? However, that too would be exploited to the death and called "too simple". Like, did the player just one-shot a bandit while not being affected by good role playing (using his tricks)? If so, maybe up the challenge for the next fight. This is how a game master thinks, but hard as hell to implement as a generalized system that also wants to appear fairly static to the players.

At level 45 master, although I sometimes find it a bit too easy for my current build, at least it's up there where it should be, where fights are still fast and furious (winning or loosing aside), rather than the hour long fights from Oblivion.

So far, I say well done Bethesda - much improved from last time(s). Not ultimate perfection, but I don't believe that is feasible, but feel free to prove me wrong


It was overpowered by making it look ridiculous and not taking into account other stuff (such as your current weight etc). If skill didn't matter that much and you had to sacrifice perk points to get to the really good stuff, it would limit itself to the builds that required it. For me, these sorts of skill make a lot of sense, but Oblivion just had it badly implemented since you could become master of all skill and access all benefits.

OMG...I bust out laughing at this. Even though I agree that Bethesda messed up, I also agree to limit things to your character to a point. I think the more the player adventures, they grow, and can acquire certain knowledge of other branches out side of their own, much like we do in real life.

This was refreshing after the arguing back and forth..."oh, so my gamestyle is wrong?!" and all of that nonsense. Well, have fun with this growing thread of disagreeable people. I think I'll turn my attention to one more constructive, thank you.

I'm all for roleplaying but all the roleplaying in the world wont change how smithing/enchanting changes the game. Enchanting I'd be ok with except for it seems that pure mage builds all but require strong investment in it for comparable functionality to the combat capabilities of thief/assassin/warrior style builds. It hasn't ruined the game for me but it's noticeable. Smithing wouldn't be as bad if it was harder to level. But combine it's easy leveling and the always scaling benefits combined with everything else that helps weapon builds it's a little over the top.

Certain gameplay styles are just wrong for balancing purposes, since the game is clearly balanced around certain roles it makes concise role-playing far more attractive in this game.

People aren't surprised when mixng and matching the weakest skills trees in a poor way makes the game unplayable, so why are people surprised when min-maxing the most powerful stuff makes you overpowered?

Because there's no requirement to min/max?


Again:

Once again, who are you as a player to tell the GM (Skyrim the game in this case), what the actual rate of improving a skill is? If you lived in a world where crafting 1000 daggers makes you the most awesome blacksmith ever, then sure, go for it. The failure here is on Skyrim's part. Not our part as players for choosing to (ab)use the system as it is provided to us. If the Dovakhiin is awesome, then let them be awesome.

First of all, knowledge of what the perks do is inherent to the character. It is apparently an aspect of being Dovakhiin, to benefit from the star signs associated to the skills. Observation of what the perks for the crafting skills can do is inherent knowledge to the player character. Observation of items found in game, and the simple knowledge of the mechanics of disenchanting and alchemy (i.e. that fortify smithing/enchanting/alchemy exist as magical effects in the world). It simply is not some crazy leap for a player character to make. Its not metagaming; its observing the world around you and acting accordingly.

There is a BIG difference between "working for every build" and "not broken as soon as you use it".

Its funny that with Oblivion people complained that they never felt like God while playing far into it, and now they are complaining that they do.

Oh and @imp of the perverse: 100% agree that no *sane* character would limit themselves on purpose.

One may not discover all the oddities, but damned if they wouldn't use tools in their hands.

Knowledge of what perks do is embedded in the skill menu and is a player feature; the dovakhiin is only capable of grasping what his skill level allows. The player manipulating game mechanics to work in contrast to what the world actually illustrates is fine, but it's not role-playing. The game illustrates the dovakhiin being "awesome" in his ability to learn dragon shouts intrinsically; the grey-beards failed to mention the innate ability of the dovakhiin to power-game all of his crafting abilities well beyond what any mortal is capable of.

Again, using game mechanics in interesting ways is fine; it's one of the cool things about an open game like this. It's just not role-playing and role-playing is what's actually balanced in this game.

I think I already responded to that quote of yours but I'll do it again ...

The same general thing is true of every role. Rogues can stealth/1-shot a whole room and warriors will be stepping over everything in their way. I will agree things like conjuration and sneak could use some tweaking but I don't think it's odd for a character to be very powerful once they hit the maximum mechanical limit of their abilities.

Right, so basically I, not only have to role-play, I have to role-play a character that's dumb as a doorknob, or I'll break the game, and that would be my own fault?

You're talking about what makes sense, and what wouldn't make sense for a thief/assassin other than to be best at what he does, or at least improve yourself as you go along? Really, if I wanted to role-play a thief/assassin, I would have to use;

Sneak; because that's what thieves and assassins primarily do
Lockpicking; same as above
Pickpocket; same as above
Archery; because bows are a nice compliment to daggers
Light Armour; because it's better than heavy armour in the beginning
Heavy Armour; because it's better that light armour at the end
Alchemy; to make poison for your assassin
Enchanting; to make gear to make better poisons
Blacksmithing; to make better weapons for your thief/assassin

You'd have to be a pretty stupid thief/assassin if you didn't do all the above. And really, this all stems from what makes us human; greed. A human being just doesn't stop at being so-so, she like to excel to the top, to be the best person that ever lived, it's what defines us humans and makes us different from any other being on the planet.

The truth is that this isn't a pay to play game, it went through hours upon hours of testing, and its post release. These things that you don't like aren't going to change with enough crying on the forums, this isn't WoW. Either you just need to vent, which there are plenty of topics on the same [censored] for, or you take this video game waaaay to seriously. Take it for what it is and and enjoy it or don't...or get it for PC and wait for mods..you know Oscuro and fran are already scheming.

I disagree that player characters in RP don't know what the perks and benefits are of improving their skills. That is to say, I disagree with you and do believe that player characters know what skills and abilities they can work towards. I know that I personally can't do a J-turn in a car, but by becoming a better driver in general, and the right specific training, I can do so. This does not mean that I don't know that J-turns exist at all.

Dual enchanting might be some fabled effect that the player character may know exists. To say that a character only knows things get as good as the abilities the player (using outside knowledge) selects, then why on earth would the player character attempt to improve their skills? To their knowledge, they're the best at everything. Therefore, the player character is aware of what they could achieve if they bother to even look into it.

And define what you mean by manipulating mechanics in "contrast" to the world. I specifically saying that the world, as it is abstracted in Skyrim, clearly shows that mastery of blacksmithing can be achieved within an hour, given the right amount of materials and patience. I know, you absolutely hate me for saying that, but simply put, its true in Skyrim. Its a fault of the game's design.

Also, my point about the Dovakhiin was more that you can rationalize the rate of skill improvement by saying the PC is a legendary figure. Just because the stated power of the Dovakhiin is the absorption of dragon souls and a natural affinity for shouts does not exclude them from also being capable of learning everything.

Yes, role-playing is for stupid characters because power-gaming is so much more effective. I get it, but role-playing is balanced and might prove to be more fun if you gave it a shot. The character your role-playing didn't read all the perks and pencil his build before he started playing, so if you want to actually live his life you'll have to be ignorant like he is.

Trouble is though, *too* much is OTT.

I can appreciate that restraint is always called for in these style of games, however I feel that needing to avoid so many facets of logical progression for a character in order for the top difficulty to be hard is simply off.

The points put forward by the more 'hardcoe' role players are valid on adept and to a lesser degree expert. Master...master should not need characters held back to be tough.

People are very much aware of the potential of abilities other than those they currently posses. I couldn't score 30 points in a NBA game, but I have seen people do it and I know that if that were something I wanted to do I would need to go practice playing basketball.

You fail to grasp the very concept of role-playing when you claim certain character builds are "legitimate" and others are not. You say there is no role-playing reason to be a smith, enchanter, and alchemist yet a player who with absolutely no regard for attempt to "power-game" may decide that he wants to be an awesome builder/crafter/maker and choose these skills to fit the character he imagines.

You are proposing all these highly subjective rules for what constitutes "role-playing" a character in a vain attempt to depict the difficulty scaling in Skyrim as sufficient, when a rational anolysis of the available difficulties compared to the possible character builds proves beyond any reasonable doubt that harder difficulties are needed.




QFT.

I keep seeing the term "min/maxing" thrown around. Doesn't that mean completely sacrificing a skill for the sake of overdeveloping another one, in a way that conflicts with realistic character development? Like utterly ignoring Charisma in one of the Fallouts, while still managing to recruit any follower you want? If that's the case, what skill are you sacrificing when you're a smithing/enchanting/alchemist/warrior? Speech? You can't develop those skills without also developing speech, since you'll need to buy/sell things in order to get the materials to bring those crafting skills up. Isn't restricting yourself to one combat discipline closer to that definition of "min/maxing"? Yet that seems to be what all the "roleplaying" arguments are in favor of, while at the same time accusing others of being min/maxers.

That's actually the hilarious part. Enchanting allows you to win at the whole game. It can make up for deficiencies in any given skill. Only have 15 heavy armour skill? Thats ok, with the right enchants, that can be 200+ skill, and a total armour rating that blows away the armour cap. Want stealth? Can easily get +60% fortify sneak going. Want One-Handed damage? +160% one handed damage.

Having a concept of what you can do doesn't mean you have any idea what it takes to do it. Crafting is portrayed in the game as a huge undertaking that practitioners devote their entire lives to, and the mechanics obviously aren't going to be able to reflect that to the player. At that point the player either makes a conscious effort to role-play or uses his accelerated time and mechanics to power-game to his hearts content.

I do think smithing should be more expensive and time consuming, but in the end it's still the same result. It'll never take a life-time and you'll use accelerated game mechanics to evolve beyond your role in the game. Now the game could restrict you to a role but that's never been what TES does; role-playing is entirely up to you.

So to summarize, to correctly play the game the player is expected to realize that the highest levels of smithing ability will render the game unenjoyable because no difficulty is provided which provides a challenge. They therefore should interpret those top levels as actually unattainable in the time span over which they are playing their character and ensure they do not reach them. Of course, since there is no way to disable skill gains, this will mean simply abandoning all smithing at some point to correctly "roleplay" a smith and maintain a challenge. Because after expending a vast amount of slow and methodical effort to advance your smithing ability, the rational thing any smith would do is cease all smithing entirely, lest they became "too good"...

lol...

Ever see a bandit outlaw use a sword and magic? No.

Whiterun guard using magic? No.

Clearly it isn't for the PC then, as it is mastered quite quickly. This just means that the PC in a RP sense is more inclined at being awesome. And thats OK.

Also, where exactly is it portrayed in Skyrim to actually take a lifetime to master? The Eorlund at Skyforge? That one mage that does enchanting?

I'm not seeing this "crafting takes a lifetime" deal. I'm seeing a bunch of people who don't have the power of save/load at their side, so they (sensibly) choose to make use of their skills and live a peaceful life, and not try to play the crazy adventurer.

Smithing on it's own is powerful but not broken; especially before you max it out. To role-play a warrior who's living his life in the game's time you might want to avoid power-gaming all 3 professions, and every other overpowered skill tree, just because you know how redonculous their max level perks and synergy can be.

I'd say the abundance of specialists in the game is proof enough. I mean, if they could all be 3-craft masters in a week they probably would be. I also haven't run into many healer-conjurer-archer-dualwielding-destruction illusionists in the bandit camps, and you'd think with all their free time sitting in those caves they could have power-gamed at least 2 or 3 of those up.