Personally, for me, the more the merrier, I think it helps really customize your character, the skills need to be relevant however, not like enchant and swimming.
How many?

Morrowind had it perfect with the skill settings.

This though Ill be happy with Morrowind's amount.

I don't like too manu skills so I voted for 21-25

i think morrowind had a tad to much and oblivion had a tad not enought. i didnt like the Unarmored skill because i dont get how you can be better at not being sliced in halves by a sword dodging should be related to player reflex even if its not ''RPGish'' in my oppinion

TES games aren't traditional RPGish to begin with. Unarmored does make perfect sense, ie. karate and all the martial arts invented to combat weapons without armor OR weapons...

I voted Morrowind, but I really wanted was Daggerfall minus the useless language skills.

Do people here not realize yet that if you put the word "Morrowind" in an option for a poll that is what is going to get the most votes?

Daggerfall. Not just the skills either, Daggerfall's Class creation as well would be amazing.

I doubt we will get more skills. In OB, there are 3 skills for each attribute other than luck. I doubt that they want to lose that balance.

I guess they could add one more skill for each attribute but I still doubt it.

I was about to say Morrowind style, but I remembered how I lost my climbing and critical-striking, so I said Daggerfall

I want either 24 or 28, preferably the latter. And, to toss a wrench into TES's recent customization schemes, I'd like the specializations to expand from 3 to 4, with the current 3 (Warrior, Mage, Thief) being supplemented by a Commoner/Vagabond specialization. Therefore you'd have 4 groups of 6 or 7 skills each. Things like Speechcraft, Mercantile, Hand to Hand, Unarmored, and Alchemy - among others - are ones I would transpose into the 4th specialization, as the need may arise. There are other ways I'd fine-tune character creation, but this is not the time nor place for such detail.

I don't too many.

This is the kind of reply which I really can't understand. What do you mean you don't like too many skills? What could you possibly lose by having more options? I suppose we should reduce the skills to just 3 -> Attack, Defense, Magic.

No, we need to increase the skills to 1000 -> walk fast, walk slow, walk normal, ...., run slow.

(A large number of skills doesn't guarantee that all skills are meaningful or that they actually offer new gameplay options.)

It can have its disadvantages. Take Baldur's Gate's weapon skills:

Axes
Bastard Swords
Clubs
Daggers
Flails
Halberds
Katanas
Long Swords
Maces
Quarterstaffs
Scimitars
Short Swords
Slings
Spears
Two Handed Swords
War Hammers


All different skills. Sure, the system is completely different so you can't really compare it, but if TES had all those weapon skills and all weapons in the game would belong to one of those categories you would have a pretty small selection of weapons that are actually useful to you if you've chosen one specific weapon skill.

By combing axe with blunt Bethesda doubled the amount of weapons usable for those players. Same for long blades/short blades, but that one makes less sense because of the large difference between a dagger and a claymore...

I voted Daggerfall, I like a skill for everything.

Morrowind level. But I want skills - especially the noncombat skills - to have multiple applications. For instance, alchemy skill could not only affect potion making chance of success, but also what effects are visible (TESIII style), and even how many ingredients are extracted from sources. Speechcraft could be used in a bardic actions, the ability to successfully lie, persuade, intimidate via dialog to NPCs (the way DnD cRPGs used to handle the dialog-related skills in-dialog in-game). Mercantile could be used to counterfeit goods, sell your own wares to NPCs, etc. Stealth could be used to avoid detection (visual, audio), pickpocket, perform sleight of hand to steal while talking to someone (a la Gothic 2), and the ability to conceal stolen goods from NPCs (such as guards) who talk to your character/search your character.

I think a compromise could be made in this case.

A good list of weapon skills for example would be:
Long Blades
Short Blades
Axes
Blunt weapons (I would almost go so far as to split staffs out of this category as fighting with a staff is nothing like fighting with a mace or a hammer)
Marksman
Throwable weapons (Because throwing a weapon and shooting a bow are two very different things)

But that is just my opinion.

I voted Daggerfall, but really.. I want a combination of Daggerfall and Morrowind.


The smaller skill set of Morrowind in the structure of Daggerfall (Primary, Major, Minor).

~25 somwhere b/w OB and MW

Haha, true.

And yeah, I did vote for the Morrowind option. I liked being able to find a way more varied arrange of weaponry and armour in Morrowind, which meant customising your character was twice as good as in Oblivion.
We also need the armour to be separated more like in Morrowind, such as having to collect left and right gauntlets, pauldrons, etc. It makes it so much more fun, as I think the process of slowly upgrading your weaponry and armour is probably my favourite thing to do in TES. And if there are more components to your armour, it means the process takes much longer. I didn't like it how in Oblivion you could get full Daedric Armour within a few hours, rather than slowly accumulating different pieces of armour for your character. It was always fun ogling over that one piece of Orcish Armour (whether it be as little as a Right Gauntlet) amongst your assortment of Steel, Iron and Dwarven.

I'm not sure if I made any sense there, and I definitely strayed a bit off topic, but anyway.

I voted Morrowind. I think there is a few that can be combined (I never use axes so I didn't mind it being with hammers) but in Oblivion there was no reason to use a dagger except for role playing. I feel the "more the merrier" is a good approach as long as not having a certain skill doesn't restrict you.

This is true, having too many skills does not necessarily add to gameplay. Daggerfall's language skills were in fact useless. However the changes from Morrowind to oblivion didn't really make any sense. They were good the way they were.

Also, bring back CLIMBING!!

Morrowind or Daggerfall.