I think instead of chance of penetration it should set values against each other, speed of the arrow, weight of it, condition of the tip vs. material, thickness, condition and built of the armor. When the arrows values win out it can penetrate, if they don't it bounces off or gets stuck. Also penetrating would mean it expended a lot of it's energy already and won't go too deep anymore but can still be deep enough to cause problems.

It can all simply be a game of values vs. values but instead of being arbitrarily set they should be actual values. A armor that's twice as thick will need more penetration power to pierce but will also be about twice as heavy.

ya exactly, and you can never EVER EVER EVER sneak while wearing heavy/medium armor, not only because of mobility but because those things make so much noise its impossible to move in chain mail for example undetected .

and magic could be very powerful BUT if ur a "beginner" ur spells need time to cast or u may miss fire or fail altogether, magic should be the hardest to master really, because it should be the deadliest weapon.

Not quite, chainmail is actually rather quiet, especially if you wear something OVER it which would A. pad it a bit and B. swallows a lot of noise. While it may be heavy the weight is actually quite evenly distributed on your body, especially when you wear a belt and it doesn't hinder movements at all when made correctly.

even better. Lets be free of the 100hp 200mana 20% resist 1-12 damage mentality.

let a new age of flexible engaging combat/world begin , where u can impale, cut off, burn, turn to ash....ect ur enemies, where sneaking is so exciting u will be forced to go to the bath room every 5 minutes, or sweat bullets when u hide in a shadowy corner and a guard passes by and u have to knock him out.

It's come up and there are a number of reasons it would be beneficial, not the least of which is no more annoying multiplier-racing. If hitpoints and magicka are tied to direct endurance/intelligence increases, and attributes to skill use, there's no reason to hang on to the old leveling system. One thing to note, though, is that it would probably be useful to still maintain a "level" stat, even if it's invisible to the player, to make it easier for the system to deal with things like enemy spawns and threat levels. It can also be used for some of the more indirect factors like morale or resistance to command. While the "obvious" answer is to tie such things to willpower, there's not a lot of gameplay fairness or realism in a high-end warrior forcibly being a weak-minded coward simply because he doesn't raise his magic skills.


We know, people didn't like the skill trees idea. You can stop complaining about it any day now.

I think that's pushing it just a biiiiit too far. Trust me, I love my games loaded with realism, but in a fantasy game, having this much limitation would be a burden, a big fun-killing burden. Sure, I'm okay with a little limitation, being a master of 10 skills is a bit too unbelievable to me, but when you are in a fantasy game and you can only master 1 skill, I don't know... It's like saying "you can master tae kwon do but you can only be good at jiu jitsu." Sure, that applies to real life... but it's a fantasy, not a Sims game. Having that much limitation in a game can kind of kill it... realism is good, but a bit too much can be hazardous to your health, just like sugar.

So, in a nutshell, a fantasy is a game with some realism, but the bars are bent just a bit.

I guess ur right.

hmmm maybe in game the really good "thief" armors are chain mail but are really expensive cause the craftsmen had to use a lot of special techniques to make it "silent", like padding and not leaving any "dangling" links that might rattle and stuff like that.

and as for magic users I guess the "thickness" and "mobility issue" of any heavy armor would make them NOT use it, because heavy armor will interfere with the ability of the mage to "absorb" magicka from his surroundings, and hinder the sometimes delicate movements of his hands and tire him because he has low strength...etc
mage like characters should instead rely on powerful shield like magics that can block arrows/projectiles/melee hits completely but if the mage is still weak in the use of such spells he won't be able to withstand much punishment.

Also a little addition to arrows.

The built of the tip would matter a lot too, a point tip has the smallest surface are meaning it can penetrate well, but it can also be easily pulled out and the wound it makes is small. A broad arrow tip has a larger surface area so not THAT good for penetration but it can strike a larger wound. Now a point tip with hooks can be a danger to armored heroes, it penetrates and the hooks actually get stuck in the armor, meaning you can't pull the arrow out and it pretty much pinned the armor to you meaning if you try to take it off you'll rip quite a gash or take out a chunk of flesh.

Other tips could also be made like a "knock out tip" which would be more flat and elastic, maybe a small sack or something. Not that efficient but can give someone a bonk in the noggin. Or hollow tips for poisons (just pouring poison on the arrow could sometimes not be enough).
And if you'd go a similar route as "thief" maybe something like glass tips that can break on impact and release something like gas for example. Though the ones in Thief where pretty much magical arrows to begin with but I doubt that would be that much a problem in TES .



THAT they are, a well made shirt of chain mail was estimated to be as much value as a house would be nowadays.

I wouldn't go that far, though you would just gain that skill a heck of a lot slower to the point it wouldn't even be worth it. As such, a person who always uses a bow would be able to pick up a sword and gradually get better from trainers who give you a boost to allow you to use it effectively. Don't use that boost though and you might start loosing those skill over time. The boost would let you get better so you wouldn't be a total noob.

I just posted an idea the other day for a stats mod to try to make leveling work like you guys are talking about.
I am considering making it, so I'm glad I came across this discussion

My ideas are in line with what VeryEvilDudeofDarkness and Lord Umbrage are saying.
I don't agree with the flexible capping. You should not be able to train everything at once and maintain proficiency, even before level 100.
You have to compromise. Do you want to be great at a few things or do you want to be good at most things?

My thoughts were that all attribute and skill levels should fluctuate based on how much they are used, your race and your profession.
I've had this idea since I played TES3 the first time and really liked the natural skill development but it still lacked an immersive quality.
Every attribute and skill should be like a muscle. The more you use it, the more it grows, the less you use it, the more it shrinks.

Think about how the power meters in some old school games used to work.
You press the button as fast as you can and the power bar fills up but if you slow down, the powerbar starts to trickle back until it reaches the point where you are maintaining the power level.

How fast a stat deteriorates should depend on how much effort you have already put in to learning it.
The more you forget, the faster you forget.
This would also effect how easy it is to learn a new skill since the more experience you have, the less you forget.
Starting out would be a hump to overcome, just like in real life. The initial handicap would make race and profession much more important at the start.

To compensate the speed of regaining a skill after it has been neglected, you adjust the level rate by how much experience has been forgotten compared to how much you remember.
So if you have trained a long time and forgot a little bit, then you can regain that very quickly.
But if you forgot more than you remember, then regaining that experience will be much more like the first time training.

I've never been a fan of stat deterioration. It feels too much like experience loss on death, one of my most-hated videogame tropes. I'd rather it be much harder to get to those heights in the first place. Aside from dramatically slower increase of skill levels, the way I did it in my system was to have both skills and attributes require a combination of usage AND training to increase, instead of training just being purchased level-ups. There would be more ways to get/do it in exchange, such as a mage hitting the books in their personal study instead of paying a guild member. Becoming a master in something would be a dedicated effort, and unless you go out of your way to train it, lesser skills would never be "casually mastered" just because you use it now and then. Skills you don't choose to start with would vary from crippled to unusable (for example, fumble-style "missing" wouldn't happen in normal combat, but might in the 1-10 range for that weapon since you're learning how to use it at all), meaning you'd have to make an effort to even start a new skill. All that would go a long way toward preventing every character from becoming a godly jack of all trades, without removing the option for those who want to do that. Past 100 you'd no longer need training, but the increase rate would drop dramatically with every level after, so that masters don't hit an invisible wall as if they could never possibly improve.

hehe makes you wish there was a cave with bandits and trolls next to your house, why work when u can loot an 80thousand bucks worth of armor hehe

and yes the arrow type for damage is true saw an episode about them on discovery I think, how the narrow tips were good for armor and the weird shaped ones were good for wounding and stuff like that, as for thief type arrows it won't be a problem cause its ES so magic ain't an issue :wink_smile:

I just joined the forum so I don't know if this has been talked to death before... but I really hope they change the running and jumping animations. I love Elder Scrolls titles to death but the jumping animation in particular was just laughable. And when you run up stairs, the animation doesn't change at all. You're just running and rising up.

Honestly I think the best movement animations and controls I've ever seen are the Assassin's Creed games. The way Ezio runs, jumps and just moves his body are flawless for a video game. Then again the detail and graphics in that game as a whole were jaw dropping. Something similar to that would be perfect for the 3rd person view in Elder Scrolls V. See for yourself -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnQZHBodpwk

And on that note, I think free running/parkour/wall-scaling like in AC would be a cool skill that you can build up, especially for a stealth character.

Todd Howard specifically stated they've reworked the animation system, so I'm sure they'll look good.

Ya know... I just had a scary thought... They wouldn't do something crazy like... you know... leave out the Construction Set, would they? I mean... That wouldn't happen, right?

Only if they wanted to lose a MASSIVE portion of their customer base.

Are you complaining that the daedric shrines are too hard to find? Because I love the fact that they're hard to find and I'm sure tons of other people do too.




Except I think they just need a brand new stinking engine altogether. It's like their taking an oldsmobile and tweaking the fuel injector when other car companies are designing ferarris and lambourghinis. Know what I'm saying? I'm not the first to speak out against their engine so what I'm saying is kinda redundant and repetitive. What would blow me away is if they used an engine that would blow the crysis warhead engine out of the water. Was findest du auf das?

Of course I disagree about the stat deterioration, so that aside.

I agree on most everything else, except starting skills. We should start as a clean slate IMHO. One of my personal peeves with most rpg's is that I make one character and then decide that I would like to try another, but I'm already attached to it and the trinkets I have collected. I don't want to start over, I just want to change but I don't want to just reconfigure my stats either. It's not like your character ages and dies. For the same reason, there shouldn't be any level caps. It should just get harder on an exponential scale.
Especially in a freeform and moddable game like TES.

Profession should only be an initial boost. Just a game mechanic used to give the player a jump start in that profession so the game is a bit less tedious early on, nothing more. There shouldn't be any lifelong professional handicap. If you are good at one type of physical combat, you should be able to learn another type easier than someone with no combat experience. Not the other way around.

I would like to add a new type of stats called talents, which is really where you would make your character unique. A talent is an innate ability that you are naturally good at, but does not coincide with any particular skill. Talents are not perks like birthsigns, but are also preset at character creation and never change.
There could be talents like:
athletics - natural ability in all physical activities, you can learn physical skills faster, forget them slower and also have a higher maintainable threshold.
mystic - natural ability in all magical skills, similar to athletics
adaptability - can learn faster, but also forget faster
intellectual - can learn slower but forget slower, you can maintain higher skill levels all around because of your learning rate
etc.

Each talent is a slider, not an option. You would have 100% total talent to divide among all talents. So you could choose to max one or split the difference between all of them.
Some talents could be closely related to particular skills, others could be very general.

I'm not certain what you were trying to say, but it's not like you'd be unable to start building up the skills you didn't start with, it would just be harder than picking up a new weapon type and saying "now I will master this one." However, reduced jack-of-all-tradesing is only part of it. The other reason I would do that is to help make characters different from each other by starting them with limits. As it is now, every character is capable of performing ALL skills, some just start higher than others. If skill level is a measure of your ability in a skill, then presumably having the lowest rating you can possibly have in-game would be, basically, incompetence. Yet you can still cast a spell or pick a lock or create a potion from plants, things that presumably require a degree of training and experience. You just do them badly.

As far as talents, instead of needing to add a new segment to character creation, that could be easily covered by bringing back advantages/disadvantages.

It should not only be as easy as mastering a new skill, but similar skills should be linked making it easier to pick up a new, related skill. Segregating 1H and 2H for example is somewhat illogical.
Both skills share almost the exact same fundamentals.


Jack-of-all-trades is a perfectly viable and natural character type. The problem is not the ability to be proficient at all skills. The problem is the ability to be a master all skills.

indeed and maybe they can make the cities as big and as alive as AC game I mean you really felt that you were running in a city, imagine that with quests and houses to robe and stuff

but ya an assassin creedish character animation would be a HUGE improvement for ES5

As for towns it would be nice to see bigger ones having "districts", now not separated by walls like the IC but just different zones of them. Like a nobles area, low class, slums, market are and such. Of course the would need a sufficient size for that which I really hope for this time, not just catered to the player but actually to feel big and alive.

They should really be places in which missions can be set as well. If towns are really big there will be corners you never ever thought of looking into, and there some missions could take place. Like a building complex with a really extensive basemant that was walled off so nobody really knew it was there anymore, could easily house a cult or a band of thieves.

Plus just imagine the pure AWE when you make your way over the map from your starting location, climb over a hill and your view falls over a huge city spanning a entire valley and even going up a mountainside. With its different sections already kinda visible by how they buildings are constructed.
http://img230.imageshack.us/img230/2770/almalexiamournholdsf0.jpg vtastek posted before is a great example, you can even see some more "noble" homes by having large gardens and being walled off from the rest of town and the temple district being it's center.

They need to get rid of all the beds in guildhalls. It's a place of business, not a hotel. They might actually design better taverns if there weren't free beds everywhere. Also, most taverns shouldn't have individual rooms for guests.

Again, I in no way removed the option to be that character type. The idea was to make it an option, instead of the forcible class of all characters.

I'd suggest that in the beginning choosing your class is not mandatory but optional AND that your class can change in game. Actually I'd pretty much make class just a label you can give yourself, in the beginning it CAN help to set your stats though but I'd remove the who major-minor-misc system in general and replace it with a fully fluent system which would increase "playability" a bit because it doesn't require carefully planing out your char ahead but still has it possible to do.