No daggerfall is more the lungs stomach and intestines of elder scrolls while ob is its colon.....

anyhooo I have played many rpgs that started out characters the same and this is one of them and im fine with that.

And thats the problem, This is suppose to be ES, not "some other RPG". We keep losing things and it soon will be "just another RPG".

That is not what a role playing game is about. In fact, "fancy designs" and RPG game mechanics is exactly what distinguishes an RPG from a normal game. What you are describing are elements of an adventure game that are completely unnecessary to an RPG.

I like to hope character creation has some kind of influence on stats, like body types affecting core stats like strength, and endurance, and being able to select intelligence levels via some dialogue choices in the beginning.

I always saw TES leveling (DF not included because you don't start in jail) as "Regaining old experience" instead of "Gaining experience" so I have no problem with it. How my character looks at, lets say, Level 40, will be how he looked before he was imprisoned.
To begin with, becoming a superhero in course of around a year was never realistic IMO (this goes for majority of RPG's). Thus, I prefer to think of Levelign as "Regaining old Experience"

The character creation system is not insignificant bro.

When did I say it was? Please quote me. I meant fussing about how all your skills are even in the beginning and it was quite obvious from my posts.

Don't turn my words around buddy.

not sure

wanna play this kind of char, hit a stone, then you're different already.

Todd only said that we don't choose a skillset. Doesn't mean that we won't be able to give some bonuses to certain skills in the beginning.

Don't worry man, the races all still have their own skill bonuses.

But I'm not expecting Races to have any real inherent Strengths and Weaknesses . . . just minor skill bonuses, and perhaps a starting spell [base on what Todd said about wanting to make sure that you will no longer be able mess up your character build, by picking the "wrong" skills].

The problem as I see it is that the TES series is steadily moving away from a game that was focused on RPG aspects to a game that is mainly focused on Action Combat. The RPG depth of earlier TES games has steadily declined DF>MW>OB ? SK, as the series has been mainstreamed. The steep learning curve has been steadily flattened out to the point that you can no longer even create a unique character build at the beginning of the game, with inherent strengths and weaknesses.

All you have control of in Skyrim is your character's appearance (Race, Gender, and FaceGen).

My Female Bosmer will ALWAYS begin the game EXACTLY the same, whether she is a Mage, a Warrior, or a Thief.

She can no longer have any past history . . . at least not one that has had any effect on her starting abilities . . . she is just a prisoner/clone. And I REALLY hate that.

Every character is going to end up as a Mage/Warrior/Thief, with a very fast skill progression rate . . . and this is the exact opposite of what I want in my RPGs.

This is my biggest concern. They always left it up to us what we were doing before we (our characters) were "imprisoned". Now we can't do that. I can't have been a Mage (or anything else) before being captured, because my character starts out with all skills at the same level. No strengths, no weaknesses, just a blank slate.

I think it's a small price to pay so that you may know how it feels to start at the lowest level of society and rise to the top. It's about building your character from the ground up to make something of their life, their new found freedom.

It's like I said earlier this thread:



Todd is trying to teach us how to take responsibility for ourselves. It's a philosophy he followed in his younger days which helped him to rise to his position in Bethesda. He took control of his life and lived purposefully. Through hard work and a deliberate march in the direction of his dreams he made it, much quicker than most people.

Now, through these games, Todd is trying to share with us the very core of the ideas which helped him achieve great happiness.

Think about The Stranger by Albert Camus. Our protagonist is thrown into prison for a crime he committed unintentionally. He floated through life without direction and let the various forces around him shape who he was. This lifestyle culminated to that very point when he murdered someone on a whim, without any planning or realization of what he was doing. After being arrested and spending time in prison he reaches a great epiphany. I won't go into much detail but he finally comes to terms with the absurdity of the universe and accepts his fate. Unfortunately, it's too late and he's executed. No lucky escape with the Emperor or rescue by the last surviving Blade.

Todd is giving us that opportunity. He is saying, 'Here, your new life is yours to create. Don't just be a leaf traveling in whatever direction the wind carries you. Be the wind itself.'

I hope my post makes some sort of sense.



Beautifully said.


p.s. I've offered a few solution if you can't embrace my idea and being a blank slate bothers you that much. Just roleplay that your character was imprisoned at the border as a baby or child or that you have entered a fugue state.

Common misconception.

People did get to 60-70-80 years or more. The low averages come from epidemics and diseases in general, but especially a very, VERY high number of stillborn babies or child deaths under 2 years old.

That, and fantasy games usually have healing magic, which would work wonders for all the things that would cause people to die early.

People shouldn't let numbers get in the way of their rping. The game world isn't going to recognize anything from your past life anyway. I've rped as an ex-blade before - but the game didn't reflect that by them barring me from rejoining the Blades.

Its the same thing, just with numbers. Don't worry about them, they take care of themselves really well. What's stopping you from rping a past? The fact that a number is the same as if you had chosen a different path? Do what I've been doing for countless years now and stop opening up the menu to look at the character sheet. I've always simply used my imagination to fill in the blanks - and I've blocked out things that I didn't want to hear, filling them instead with what I want. That's what rping is.

Computer games will never be able to truely be an rpg. The human mind can come up with an unlimited amount of ideas, but what the computer can predict and react to is a small number.

So just close the character sheet, rp that you were the best Swordsman the Rebal army had before you were caught, and start playing. Its not that hard to do, and if the fact that the One handed skill is 30 instead of 40 really makes it so that you can't rp your character - then you're beyond my range to be able to help. Just relax, dream up the person you want, and start playing.

I'm not so well informed, we start in prison again? FFS it's such a running joke at this point.

Except for the fact that physically you've almost stopped growing at 20, and however much you could deny the fact, there is a point when you stop picking up new skills as quickly as you did when you were 20. My brother is 10 years older than me, he did similarly well to me in high school and so on, and I remember as a young kid watching him picking up new things really quickly - he taught himself how to play the guitar and he is really quite good. On the other hand, nowadays I pick up and learn stuff a lot quicker than he does.

Of course, with experience comes wisdom. But you can't seriously be proposing that if me and my father both decide to teach ourselves how to speak Dutch, that we will learn it at the same rate. That if we compare our performances in sport that he gains muscle as quickly as I do.

(Ironically, yes, I am almost 20 myself )



A common misconception? It is a statistical fact that the majority of the population died sometime in their 30s. Diseases, predation and so on are important factors which affect numbers of a population. You can't discount them, because they are what governs the mortality rate, and hence the average age and umbers in the population.

Speaking from a biological standpoint, nature doesn't WANT more members of the population to be post-reproductive age. Why? Because they are taking the resources that the younger members of the population need in order to survive and reproduce themselves. In this age, it's fine to have 60% of the population post-reproduction, because as you said, we don't have the same diseases, threats of predation, threats of starvation as our ancestors did. What happens to those countries with such a statistic? The population rapidly dwindles because the mortality rate is higher than the natality rate (number of deaths is higher than number of births)

The low averages did not come from high numbers of stillborn deaths - they came about because in order for a population to survive, the number of pre-reproductive individuals has to be very big so that some of them can die before they have grown into reproducing individuals and it won't affect the survival chances of the species. Likewise, the number of post-reproductive individuals is necessarily small because otherwise they would use too much food and so on and the species will die out.

In TES, they aren't going to adhere to a modern model of population, they'll adhere to a model from a comparable time in earth's history.

I'd just like to point out that elf races in TES have a natural lifespan of 900-1000 years. As stated in the real berenziah. However few actually reach that age because of the hostile place Tamriel is.

A 20 year old elf is a mere pup.

The issue could easily be avoided if Bethesda gave the player the option to either choose a set amount of skills at the start which will start out higher than the others (Essentially similar to tag skills in Fallout 3.) or give the player a certain amount of "skill points" that can be distributed among the players' skills at the start of the game. It's true that having no classes could lead to character's becoming blank slates at the start even though that might not fit the background you have in mind for your chacter, but really, that's thde only thing that bothers me about no classes and it can be fixed by doing what I said.



Certainly by the age of 20 you'd already have some skills, you might not be as experienced as you will be at later ages, but you wouldn't be a blank slate, and this is by modern standards we're talking about, in the past the age of maturity wasn't always the same as what it's usually considered to be now, and maybe this is true in Tamriel too, so while in modern days a 20 year old might be just getting into society, maybe in Tamriel that would happen earlier. And besides, whoever said all our characters will start their journey at 20? Maybe I decide my character is 25 or 30, or even 40. Since it hasn't been mentioned that the game forces you to be a certain age like in Fallout 3, we can probably assume that you get to decide how old your character is, within reason.

Welll... Yeas.....A 20 year old elf would be a child, and hence not playable. Equivalent ages? (i.e. end of adolescence)