I voted alternative, because it's the closest to what I want, I don't view Oblivions system as always succeed, because I've missed a lot in Oblivion, only it was because the enemy was out of range, or dodged my attacks.

I want to always be able to hit, unless it is physically not possible.

I can't hit, if he's out of range, I can't hit if he's not in the direction of my attack, but if he's in range and in the direction of my attack, I should hit, however, how the hit affects him, should be determined by my stats and skills.

If I have low skill, the damage wont be impressive, If I have really low skill, maybe I'll get a critical fail and send the weapon flying out of my hand, or maybe I have high skill, and get a critical strike, and run him through.

In any case, I hit him.

I think the best combat system would be if your character actually became better. In both Morrowind and Oblivion the animation for an attack was the same at level 1 or level 100. For example at level 5 in blade your attack would be swingy, slow and very unprecise and easy to dodge. But at level 100 you attacks would be very fast and precise and it would be a small motion. The damage should be decided by the weapons stats and the strength of the character, not the skill.

If you have played Gothic 1&2 you might get the idea of what i'm having in mind.

Having different animations for different improvement steps is quite possible, i think Euphoria could do that quite well.

Also instead of the swing delay I'd rather do a longer "recovery" AFTER a swing, primarily with heavy weapons. The recovery time is how long you need after a swing to get ready for another one again, try swinging something heavy around and you'll see what i mean.
BTW. the character skill can still depend the damage as it flows into the total effectiveness of a attack like how much strength you really put into it.

I like the alternative. I find it quite sensible, no matter what others say.
Yes, there should be some dice rolling on the background, but the gameplay just doesn't allow for it to be interfered with directly any more. The random stagger and things like that are all good, but no "you missed him, even though your weapon went through him". The missing could be replaced by your circle thing.

Having a dice make your attack strength vary between certain values would be ok. A mage doesn't cast 50 identical fire balls in a row, they will be slightly stronger or weaker, some maybe even really weak, but he WON'T fail one and have a fizzle or something like that.

And it wasn't very much better either. Random fails is a cop out for when you don't have the tech to make a reliable combat system. THe combat system in Oblivion was reliable, smooth and very intuitive; unlike the clunky one in Morowind. It was weighed down, though, by poor design in other parts of the game.

edit:
Furthermore, in PnP you know for sure what goes wrong when something goes wrong. Thats because, like I mentioned before, you're holding the dice, you make the rolls and you know if its because your characters aim was off, stumbled on a rock, or if the enemy dodged the attack. In videogames such dicerolling systems don't really work that well except in MMOs where the tech isn't as good as offline games.

Why only strength? I think that while fighting with lighter weapons (daggers, short swords, probably even raiers and katanas) it is more about speed then strength. I'd also say that agility plays a great role. If the damage is dependant on strength you would put all the thieves and shadowy assassins into a great disadvantage because they would have to develop their strengthto use thier weapons effectively. That just does not fit, IMHO.

Agreed, and I never thought I would agree anything that you say
One thing I'd like to see go is critical dmg being possible only in sneak mode. That is one thing that absolutely should be random, with chances of crit dmg dependant on sneak skill.

Yea there are tons of factors that count into it including various attributes.
However on the dagger example in some cases strength DOES play a fairly big role, for example you have already beaten someone to a stagger, take hold of him and just JAM the dagger into his lower body, you do that with as much strength as you can to hammer it in doing as much damage as possible.
That's why i say skills should count into various attributes (not just one) and mostly into the one used by the current execution. Though for heavy weapons it IS primarily strenght in all fields but there are cases where speed with them is more important like when you use them for defense.


Critical hits shouldn't be "does more damage than usual" hits, a critical hit should be the maximum POSSIBLE damage with a hit instead. and i don't just mean health damage but physical damage. for example, a crittical hit with a dagger to someones upper leg would mean you not only severed so much muscle that the leg is pretty much useless you also severed main blood vessles in the process causing heavy, long term bleeding.
That would mean you can perform "critical" strikes on a low level too, if your opponent is unarmored, can NOT evade your hit at all (like passed out or a sneak attack) and you performed a precise hit.
In that respect a sneak hit would simply be most dangerous because you have time to "aim" an your opponent has no way to prevent it from happening other than dumb luck (moving the moment you attack thus making it miss it's mark). Otherwise even some armor can be ignored, your character could pull someones head back and slit his throat which would be a lethal injure.

The thing is that this would almost force stealth characters to really use stealth. In earlier games a stealth character could just jump in to battle and kill several warriors but now they would actually have to use stealth. Agility and speed should not determine damage but speed of the attack and the speed to block.

That's what I want to see, and I completely agree.

i voted for an alternative. I think tht a fail system for magic should deffinately be in, but for other combat related skills im not so sure. when i played MW the system really svcked IMO, thts why i usually played as a mage. Although the OB style was kinda dumb when the player had to slash a bloody wolf 20x. I dont however think there will be a big change to the combat system so whtever. If there is a change i just hope its to the non failing use of spells. Maybe they could use an enhanced MW system with animations tht would help you understand why youre not hitting the opponent.

So far there have been quite some voices for the "Alternative" side but what I'm still kinda missing are actual suggestions.
Now while this didn't really start out as a suggestion thread for "skill failure" alterantives it would still be nice to hear if other people had ideas how a skill could function, don't shy away from suggesting a completely new system, for example for lockpicking which was already radically different from Morrowind to Oblivion (and again in Fallout 3 suggesting they still experiment with the formula for it).

For example for magic, many have said "there should deffinetly be a chance of failure for magic" but how exactly, do you mean a failure by statistic chance like in Morrowind or a failure by certain factors and how exactly should that failure look like (complete fail to cast, only partial success, only fail under certain conditions...).
So basically instead of just saying "it should have fail/no fail" try suggesting a actual system on how the skill could work.

Actually part of this thread could transform into "alternatives for skill mechanics", espceially those that are not 100% direct like lock picking, alchemy, pick pocketing etc. (with not 100% direct i primarily mean they can play in a kind of "mini game" format like the mentioned examples).

So, are there any suggestions?


PS: While "Just keep it as it was" does technicalls count as a suggestion it doesn't contribute too much.

I already stated my suggestion. Bring back variable dmg and potency. Leave random fails out of it. Random failure completely defeats the purpose of getting better at a certain skill because don't matter how good you get you can still randomly fail cause of an arbitrary dice roll.

Magic is a good example why certain aspects of the game need a chance of failure, in my opinion. The reason is that it is very easy to cast a spell for the player - he just presses a button. However, for the character, it probably isn't that easy. Generally, when we think of casting spells, we either think of mumbling magic words, or waving your hand/staff/wand in a certain way, or both. If that goes wrong, then there are certain possibilities:
Effect 1: The spell simply doesn't work.
Effect 2: You actually cast a different spell (possibly one you didn't even know).
Effect 3: The spell backfires somehow (you do manage to summon the creature, but it is hostile towards you; you do manage to cast the fireball, but it explodes in your hand; etc. pp.)

Now, this is a failure that's on your character's part, but it's nearly impossible to create a system that makes YOU the one who screwed up. Arx Fatalis made something like that when it required you to perform the movements of the hand yourself, but at least I found that very annoying - and it only covered failure effect 1 from the three I just mentioned. With a system like that to cover effect 2, you'd need to put in thousands of spells that have very equal hand movements - increasing the annoyance of the system. I can't think of a way to implement effect 3 other than chance.
So all in all, there doesn't seem to be a good way to simulate casting a spell. Oblivion simply said "Okay the spell always succeeds, but it's weaker than it could be if you have a low skill". That's certainly a possibility, but it takes away all the dangerous fun of sorcery. Magic needs to be "unpredictable" in some sort of way, because this is how we know it - especially the very skilled wizards usually tend to create spells that are beyond their capabilities in popular fiction.

Okay, so that's why I'm all for a dice roll system for magic. And this is how it'd work:

First of all, the chance of success would calculate itself exactly like it did in Morrowind - based on Willpower, Fatigue and skill in the school of the spell in question. Now depending on success or failure, different things happen:
Success:
You are able to cast the spell. Now that you've managed the first hurdle, it will be easier for you to hold the spell, because you know now "how it feels". Now, a difference to MW as well as OB is that the duration of the spell is not fixed. You can set it to something before you cast it, or after casting it, you can use some buttons (your mousewheel, whatever) to shorten or to lengthen the time. Each second you hold the spell, a certain base magicka cost is taken from you. This will allow for a much more flexible use of spells, and makes more sense than constant recasting of the spell. The spell will naturally end as soon as you have no magicka left. However, after a certain "care-free" amount of time (dependent on how easy you managed to cast the spell), there will be dice-rolls if you can hold the spell any longer, which will at first be more lax than the one you had to win at the beginning of the spell, but with increasing time, they will become more harsh. After some time, even a wizard with unlimited magicka wouldn't be able to keep the spell going. Anyway, these dice-rolls will lead to a belated failure.
Failure:
For the failure, it doesn't matter if you failed right at the beginning of the spell, or later (only for you it will naturally be better if you were able to hold the spell for some time). All that counts is that you failed, and how severly you did so. For example: Your chance of success was 30%, and the dice-roll came to be 29. This means that you only barely didn't make it, which will increase your chance of getting a failure that is not so bad (effect 1 from the three options I mentioned earlier). If you, on the other hand, only rolled a 1, then chances are good you'll get a backlash (effect 3).
As far as I'm concerned, this can be a very easy calculation, because it only decides which punishment you get.
After that's decided, the severity of the punishment will be calculated. Since effect 1 means simply that the spell doesn't work (anymore), there is no severity, and you're lucky. Effect 2's negative side is that the spell you're casting svcks magicka out of you just like any other spell (and you can't shorten the time for this one!), but on the other hand it might be a useful one. The really severe punishments result from effect 3 - backlash. There's a mod called "Sorcery's Toll" for Oblivion, that's basically what I'm thinking about here. Magical diseases, loss of fatigue/health/magicka, damage of attributes, damage of skills, summons that turn against you... the possibilities are endless. Effect 3 is basically the "critical failure" of my system, only that because it might turn out to be not super-bad (if you're lucky), it's a little more probable than the usual critical failure. And of course, chances for really bad backlashes are higher for more difficult spells (i.e. where you try to cast a spell that's way beyond your skill).


That's my idea for a fun magic system.

I voted Alternative. I think morrownd and Oblivion are both equally bad when it comes to combat.

In Oblivion you always succeed. You always hit your target, you're a master marksman from the moment you step out of your cell.
In Morrowind, you could miss someone a thousand times even though he is standing right in front of you, not moving, and NOT blocking your attacks.

Neither are very realistic and it breaks the all important immersion.

I want to fail sometimes. One of the things I like about RPG's is watching my character become stronger. I want to have trouble with fireballs in the beginning, while later in the game I have improved and I almost always succeed in casting the spells.

When I attack an enemy I want to see him try to avoid being hit. He could block, parry or evade my attack. If I'm a good fighter then he won't succeed very often. If I'm not a good fighter he will often succeed in avoiding my attacks. Point is that my weapon isn't going straight through him, there's a REASON why he didn't get hit, it not just a random dice roll.

Of course there's also the combat system to take into perspective. Maybe it's possible to chain up attacks, so that even if you miss the first one, you have staggered him so you're guaranteed a successful hit the in the next attack, maybe he can to counter-attacks so he'll evade and then smack you.

Pretty good ideas. I would just put also the intelligence in to the calculation of the failure effect. I.e. the more intelligent you are the less likely you are to get effect 3 adn to some point even effect 2.

The fact that the system must go back to Morrowind in the way it calcutales the possibility to cast successfully where every single skill point metters is paramaunt

In Morrowind, the chance to fail was difficult to avoid; at low skill levels, you were bound to fail often. In Oblivion, the chance to fail was removed; you could never "fail", the game didn't let you try it unless it was a guaranteed success.

What's needed is a way to "manage" success and failure, by voluntarily adjusting the difficulty of the task. If I'm a poor Alchemist, am I going to try to make an "uber" potion? No, chances are I'm going to try the simplest thing in the book that works, until I'm confident enough to make something better. If I WANT to make something more difficult than my skills would normally permit, then there should be a significant chance for things to go amiss. The ability to CHOOSE to cast a more powerful version or a weaker one, or make a stronger or weaker potion, should allow you the chance to take as much or as little risk as you feel is needed.

The same could hold true for combat: do you go for a quick and easy, difficult to block "jab" for a few points of damage, or go for the "killing" shot which is likely to be blocked or dodged? Morrowind allowed you to "hold" an attack to build up to full damage, or spam the button for a bunch of "mosquito bites". Using a similar method, but allowing the enemy to react to your "build-up" would make the difficulty to hit "variable".

I like the Oblivion system better, the Morrowind one was frustrating specially at the beginning of the game where pretty much everything you do fails.

Ignore this double post (I don't know why but for some reason it has been posting my post twice today.

IN Morrowind, you had NO CHOICE but to take certain risks, because there was no other alternative. If you wanted to make a potion, the game automatically assumed that you wanted to make the strongest possible potion that you could with your level of skill. If I wanted to make a weaker potion, with little or no failure chance, that wasn't an option. If I wanted to risk an explosion or accidental poisoning by attempting to make a stronger-than-normal potion, that was also not an option. At least for Spellcasting you could pay to have a custom spell made to your specifications without having to go through the entire set of Mages Guild quests first. The problem, in my opinion, was not that failure was possible, but that it was nearly impossible to eliminate.

In Oblivion, there again was no choice. You couldn't choose to cast a spell or make a potion that was even the least bit above your skill level. Failure was removed completely. As the sayings go, "Nothing ventured, nothing gained" or "There's no reward without risk", and Oblivion took away both the risk and any chance of reward beyond the "normal" levelled lack-luster garbage. All that was left was a long and tedious grind with "more of the same".

Bethesda, PLEASE give us a game with a CONTROLLABLE element of risk. Keep the "safe" areas safe (not like the front gate at Megaton), the "dangerous" areas too dangerous for a beginning character, and give us options to either "play it safe" or "go for it" with most tasks.

THIS, except the only true "safe" areas should be inside walled towns, anywhere else should have at least some risk of attack, almost negligible in towns and on main roads, but the farther you get from civilization the scarier it gets, oh also let there be dangerous parts of town and shady towns where you have to watch against a backstab by a cutpurse. the waterfront of the imperial city should have been like this until you joined the thieves guild IMO

I'm torn. I'm not to fond of any of the options.

Morrowind could be really annoying, as you fail all the time, though it did help with roleplaying a bit. It would be nice to have the dice roll system, so you could at least try to cast a really hard spell, unlike in Oblivion.

I also hated how in Oblivion, every character started with a healing spell they could cast. I don't want my orc warrior to be able to cast any spell, or own any spell. If I don't put any point sin intelligence or willpower, and don't select any of the mage skills or birth signs, I don't think I should be able to cast a spell so easily.

So, in my eyes the Morrowind dice roll system has more advantages than Oblivion's system, but it's annoying, too. And a system akin to a tabletop RPG, with different outcomes, such as backfires and such, doesn't sound too appealing either. I can't think of a magic system that would please me. Hurm.

No, TES is too interactive for that. Skill fails are great in RPGs like the first two Fallouts in which every action was based on the avatars POV and her/his abilitys, but having them in games in which the player can already fail because of own bad luck / lack of skill have an additional fail based on the chars skills is silly.

The viewpoint of those RPG'ers out there is that the game is already "too interactive" and relies too much on the player's skills, not enough on the character's. If it's marketed as a FPS game, that's fine, but selling it as a RPG and as a sequel to a line of related RPGs really indicates to me that it SHOULD BE a RPG. In the more recent Bethesda releases (OB, FO3), the main functions of "skills" have been increasingly relegated to triggering "perks" and tweaking things such as damage dealt and carrying capacity, and not a whole lot that's meaningful beyond that.

I loaded up OB again, with OOO, MMM, and a host of other mods which attempt to give the game some "life" in spite of the awkward game mechanics. As it did the first time I played it, Oblivion impressed me with its much more fluid gameplay, smoother animations, and modern graphics. Also as before, it was only a short time before the game once again started to feel empty and purposeless, outside of the major quests. There's no reason to improve when the world around you just compensates for it, and there's no reason to practice at something you can't possibly fail at. The character is only at Level 2, and already I'm bored........

If the player can't fail or have negative consequence because of the char's skill, then what's the point in raising character skill?
Why don't we just remove skills entirely, then, and have TES just fully be a player-skill-only sword-and-magic hack 'n slash?


People really need to stop misinterpreting "chance to fail." It's present even in Oblivion, though the implementation is terrible. Whenever that NPC opponent runs backward out of the way of your swing, or snaps up their shield to catch your swing, guess what? You've randomly failed. The Combat AI packages that govern the NPC have rolled a random number based on conditions and determined that the NPC should somehow attempt to avoid the brunt of the blow. The only problem is that 1) player skill can currently override it without negative consequence, and 2) the 'chance-to-fail' system in Oblivion factors in no player or NPC skill/attribute/derived-attribute values.

Take Morrowind's system of fails, work them into the Combat AI system to give them representation via complex dynamic AI packages, and you have a chance-to-fail system that both looks and acts realistic.