One of the problems with current TES games is the limited meaningful required scale of development for a character, so the games do not encourage the players to develop their characters indefinitely.

In Oblivion this is totally broken because it did not matter where you went and how much you developed your character, you would be always challenged by similarly leveled foes.

In Morrowind, it meant a lot to develop a character, but it had a limited scale of 30 levels and so, after that, you were the greatest force in the universe.

This was because the scales of character developments were very small and compressed, so when you met a foe that was 8 levels above your current character level, it would become a hard battle, but one that you would not worry about if you had some healing potions or spells at hand, so the scale of 8 level difference was not much.

The 8 level differences could mean for instance 20 level differences between the main attack skills and 15 level differences between the main defense skills, and better gear as well, so in a better scaled game it should be more serious than what we see in current games.

So if we had a better scaled game in a better scaled world and better scaled damage and defense values, and better scaled character interactions, it would have more lasting appeal for character development.

1-First of all I propose removing the hardcoded cap of 100 for all attributes and skills for all the characters and set the caps differently for each character depending on their gradual specialization throughout the game and their character development and let them develop their focused attributes and skills indefinitely if they like, but with exponential skill and attribute advancement costs in the term of practice time, or other means of development, then it would limit the characters but would not set a hard cap over their head.

Or if they decide not to specialize at least make the development cap a soft cap, i.e. skill and attribute development become exponentially harder to develop, so you would gradually slow down, but never hit a hard wall.

2-Next I propose ignoring what seems to be realistic life-like behavior, and setting the scales in such a way that advancing a skill or attribute should have noticeable effect at each small advancement, and scale the weapon and armor effectiveness to the same effect, so that each small advancement in the quality of weapon or armor equipment should be clearly noticeable.

So early in the game when you fight a bandit and you are forced to retreat to a nearby village to heal and resupply, if you sell your current loot and change your low quality rusty iron dagger with a sharp iron dagger, and change the tattering leather armor with a worn leather armor, and return to the previous battle scene, then you should notice a change of tide in your favor.

But if you did not have the means to change your gears, you could find an easier place and fight some rats or other pests to practice your dagger and dodge skills a bit, and raise your dagger and dodge skills and your agility and speed attributes by a point or two and return to the previous scene to the same effect.

Each skill can have a counterpart in the opposing foes, so if you sneak around, they can have a Perception skill or attribute to oppose that, or if you attack, they can have block, evade/dodge, or armor to oppose that, it you try to force your will, they can have Willpower, and so on, and each small leap in any of these parameters should have a significant effect, to encourage the character and gear development.

It would result in big numbers and values in internal calculations, but it does not matter, the end result would be much more scaled game world and game mechanics that would result in a more satisfying routine for character development.

3-After that I propose that the game world should be made of leveled zones, and have leveled loot and opponents in those zones, so in each leveled zone you encounter the foes and find loot leveled to the zone plus/minus the defined level for the foe and loot, or a random value, and those zones should be scaled from the newbie character level, to levels above the maximum possible character development in a normal game, for instance 100.

Thus there would be always some places above your current character level, and some places below your character level and some places about equal to your current character level, and as each small advancement character level and gear, and in each zone difficulty level should be significant then it would result in a great game mechanism.

The more you develop your character and his gear, the more places open up to you, i.e. the more places you can venture into without the significant risk of getting yourself killed.

Players can start the game in newbie areas, so it would be easy to begin, but they would have to be cautious about where they go, and be ready to retreat to safer places if the scene became too hot for their health, but each new loot or each new skill level or perk could result in new areas that a character would be able to go.

Some cities can be in newbie areas, but others can be in higher level areas, and have higher level items for sale, higher level master trainers, and higher level quests, and so on..., and because of the more scaled effectiveness of higher level items, reaching those cities that sell higher level gear can be really a milestone in each character's carrier.

4-In the end I propose that the game world to be big enough, the game sky to be foggy enough, or the game landscape to have enough mountains and valleys, so that players could not see the end of the world in a glance, and this feature, added to the gradual possibility to remain alive in newer areas would result in a game that seems quite enormous, and would result in a never ending challenge.

If there were always places that no character would survive for long, with foes so powerful that would beat the crap out of any character who dared to enter their lair, there would always be a challenge for the daring characters who wanted to prove that they would not be defeated.

There can be contests like:

The first who can beat the "Eternal Guard" in the back yard of the "Azure Palace" in the "Isle of the Titans" would be the winner.
OK, so you beat that guard, let's enter the palace itself and confront the two guards at the entrance, and so on...

The elite guards of that palace or their captain, or the Eternal King himself would be unbeatable in any possible mean, unless mods made that possible.

OK, so this is what I call a greatly scaled game.

I would like a reasonable view distance and more importantly I would like see all the landmarks that should be viewable in that area without a mod even if I couldn't see everything in detail from one end to the other.

http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/6928/oblivion201004270859253.png

uGridDistantTreeRange=21 [or more]
uGridDistantCount=37 [Individual parts of mountains shouldn't dissapear]
uGridsToLoad=7 [5 doesn't cut it, not in FO3 either even if it is better]


...also, notice the missing wall by Bravil's Church. [A good part of the base of Skingrad's castle is also missing when viewed from Elswyer] Was it really too much work to complete the wall? Since mods that go outside the vanilla game world can be expected, don't skimp out on such a small thing.

My point is that being able to see from one end of the playable area to the other end would make the game world seem smaller than what it really is.

So if we can prevent that, by any means, it would make the game world seem bigger, so if we have a game that have uneven surface to block the line of sight, or a foggy sky to reduce the visible distance or really such a big world that it would be impossible to see to the end of it, then the goal is achieved.

I think that the best visible distance can be a third to a tenth of the width of the playable game world, so that you could see the distant lands, but could not see to the end of the world, and reaching each area should reveal more unseen scenery.

I wouldn't say that is really true. I can see the entire "world" of Just Cause 2 and anyway you slice it, it's huge. I think the representation of view distance in my picture of my last post is pretty good, but not excessive. I would like ES:V's world to be a little larger scale even if it spread out things [more room for mods/DLC anyway]. Not JC2 scale, but maybe 150%-200% of ES:IV's landmass. Of course Morrowind and MGE doesn't really work and I can't get it to work just a little like I'd like. For Morrowind, I would like to set MGE to see no more than one end of Vivec to the other, maybe a little less and to render objects a little beyond what can be seen through the fog.

I want to be challenged at first but I can become god incarnate after a while.

I want the challenge to remain forever and some non-critical places always remain too hard in a normal game.



I want something inbetween them. Where (as far as the main story, and most of the game is concerned), you can eventually be god-incarnate. However it would be nice if there were a couple of areas that are still damn near impossible for you even while being so powerful. It would be a nice "reality" check to all the power players.

Well, if the game world is big enough that it would not matter if you have clear sight then I do not have a concern here, because after playing Morrowind, When I played Oblivion, the game always seemed smaller than Morrowind although theoretically it had a larger land mass.


Even in a fully scaled game world where the regional challenge level is spread from level 1 to 100, what you suggest is possible if the designers were careful to place the quests where would be fully within your reach.

Let's say that for instance in a normal game a character can possibly advance to the level of mid eighties, then the final main quest battle can be placed in a region that has a danger level of mid sixties, and the quests before that can be placed in regions of danger levels from 1 to 65, and misc quests could be placed in any place from danger level 1 to 90 depending on the taste of the designer and the final reward.

So a character could reach to level 80 and crush the foes on the final stage of the main quest, but still would not dare to attend to a misc quest that is placed at a place that has the regional danger level of 90.

I want the scale to be something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Px927dhea4&feature=channel
(I have no idea which game this is.)
I want the skills go down and up so I can constantly train stuff, so game world wouldn't scale with me. Check these posts for details:
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1094886-the-levelling-system/page__view__findpost__p__16038576

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1094886-the-levelling-system/page__view__findpost__p__16038698

Any scale will end up being god but if skills and attributes that aren't trained regularly goes down, you can master a couple of them and be good at them as a mage or warrior or witch-hunter. Quests shouldn't scale and you have to train according to skills needed for the quest. Off course you don't need this but a mage quest will be difficult for a warrior character. Leveling must be an indicator of how experienced your character is. I am thinking it to add time to game world. So you can add your quests for time based on level.(A quest which starts between, 100-120, if not taken, reappears again in 200-220, mods can add more to these timelines.). Making the game playable for eternity.

I love becoming a super hero towards the end. To me, that's what an RPG is all about.

When an RPG is either just as challenging all the way through, or more challenging towards the end, the developers made a mistake, in my opinion. Because that means, usually, that the combat is too reliant on the skill of the player as opposed to the character.

No matter how long you've been playing, you should get ruined at low levels, and ruin everything else at high levels.

Soft caps, with the "knee" point dependent on birthsign or racial characteristics, but otherwise at 100, would be my preference. Any character should theoretically be able to reach a Skill or Attribute level of 120-150 in something with massive amounts of time, effort, and/or training, but just HOW massive an amount would depend on the initial character. With no bonus or penalty, 100 would be the turning point above which everything got harder to increase; stacking racial bonuses and/or birthsigns could allow you to achieve 110 or 120 at a "normal" rate before the soft cap began clamping down on it, so that character would be rewarded for their specialization to some degree, but "punished" in other "weak" areas where the "knee" point might only be 90 or 95. A very gradual decline back to the "knee" value if you didn't practice the skill would make it theoretically impossible to achieve godly stats in everything simultaneously, although the regression rate should be slow enough that it wouldn't have a large effect on your character's current "direction".

I like the idea of having game world "zones" with greater or lesser challenge, and a mixture of static and levelled (and even a few partially scaled) opponents in each zone. That way, the static opponents would make it difficult (but not impossible) to tackle an area before a certain level, and the levelled and/or scaled opponents would insure some measure of challenge at higher character levels. These could be done so that some would start at a higher level than the character but advance at half rate, or some could even use a direct "offset" from the character's level to insure a fixed combat difficulty for those "combat oriented" players. While I hated that aspect of Oblivion, others found it to their liking; it might not be so bad if it's not overused.

In Morrowind, I switched to using MGE to generate a longer view distance, which I set so that you can more-or-less see the hazy outlines of the next town in the distance, but not beyond. The constant "pea soup" fog in vanilla MW was claustrophobic and ugly, but the unobstructed and clear view across all of Cyrodiil in OB made it look like a model Railroad layout: really compressed and fake looking. Something in the middle would be best.

Moderation and variation are the keys to a good game, unlike the "one extreme or the other" between MW and OB. Variation, such as using some static, some levelled, and some levelled and scaled content all placed in appropriate regions, would beat any one of them individually. Climate and landscape variations as in MW would beat one big "happy forest" as in OB. MW and OB showed that Bethesda has all of the "pieces" to make a great game, now they just have to perfect the "balance" between them. As for "moderation", that's a very good policy to follow, as long as THAT's done in moderation as well.....

I liked it the way it was in MW. Weak at first and Dreadnought of Destruction later. This all streched over a longer leveling time of MW would be nice. After all the point of getting stronger is to be able to beat up what you previously could not.

How about a system that challenged you still to the end but was heavily reliant on character, even more than the previous games. :wink_smile:

Let me describe that in a more detail:

The game is devided into zones each with their level of difficulty, in other words there are easier newbie parts, and there are harder places, and harder places and so on..., so some places might be several levels harder than other places, so let's say that we have places that are at level of 1 of difficulty, and places that are at level 100 of difficulty and other places that are in between.

In each place with a level of difficulty, there are loot and monsters roughly scaled to the difficulty of that particular place, and the difference on the difficulty and the quality of the loot is quite visible as we have a more scaled game-mechanism, so if a player is normaly challenged in a place that is at level 30, if he goes into a place that is at level 40, he would not survive for long but if he goes to a place that is at level 20, he could beat the trash out of any opponent unlucky enough to confront him, something that I have not seen sinse the good ole day of Diablo II.

So when finally you beat the game and win the main quest, you are probably at level 63, and you can go into about %75 of the entire land area and massacre the opponent on those places, but there are still places that challenge you a bit and some places that you have to be careful if you want to go, and some places that you would not survive for long.

You could go into the places that would moderately challenge you and fight and develop your character gradually. This would reduce the amount of places that are too much for your character, but would not eliminate them, so in the end, there would remain a few places that are still too much for any character, and this would result in a never ending challenge for the players who like them.

Other players might want to ignore those places, as they can be in distant outlands, or the deepest dungeon levels, anyway, and there might be some really powerful relics in those places to make it worthwhile for some crazy players who decide to brave the great dangers there.


Nice ideas, we seem to agree in concept if not the implementation.


Adding some random element, or a little bit of level scaling to the zones should make it more chalenging and unexpected, but it should not be excecive, as any player who wanted to have more chalenge could go to a higher level zone, or if he decided to relax he could move to a lower leveled region, but having foes that level a little bit as the players leveled would fill in a bit of chalenge void as until the player finds a higher leveled zone, but it should be limited so that when a player returns to the place after 10 levels, he could mop the floor with the foe over there.

This would result in a great sense of progression, and triumph.


Thats it, exactly! :goodjob:

- The skill/attribute caps:
In theory, it would be nice not to have any caps at all, but I'm not sure that this is achiveable. But the caps sure should rise. I'm not sure whether it should be 200 or any other number, but the implementation must mena that maxing your skill or attribute should be really very difficult. It was very annoying that with some good choices, you coul end up with a character having over 60 in his main attribute just after the CharGen, this must be changed. In connection to this, I really hope they will get rid of the perks the way they implemented them in Oblivion (i.e. tie them to a skill treshold and having them being gained automaticly).

- Character and gear advancement:
I'm not sure what would be realistic here, but I know I do not care. Sure every single skill-up should have effect. This is what I really loved about Morrowind's magic system (and hated about Oblivion's). Every skingle skill-up had a nice visible effect on what you could do. Unfortunately this was replaced by skill perks in Oblivion. I hope the devs will go back to Morrowind's logic behind skill and attribute advancement. As far as gear goes, I would still like the gear to improve, but I think that the skills and attributes should be more important. So, even if you have the suped mega powerful artefact sword, it is totally useless, unless you are good in (long)blade skill. Or in other words, if a skilled person fightes using inferior equipment with another, that have wonderful gear, but little skill in using, the skilled one should win easily. Equipment quality should not substitute lack in skill.

- Scaled Gameworld
Some sort of level scaling is certainly necessary. I like the idea of "zones", form which some would be more dangerous and some less. To a degree, Morrowind did this right. You knew that the ashlands were bad, that the area beyond the Ghostfence was only for the most skilled and so on. If something like this was in TES V, I would be happy. I just hope that it is very clear which area is which. Like make the dangerous ones really ominous and so on. Of course, even in the "save zones" you could find a dungeon that is far more difficult than you would think. Some enemies are just tough everywhere and I would like to enter a dungeon, hoping to find some random bandits and to see a giant daedra smashing me through the wall (yes, just like the old good Morrowind). I, however, would like to be able to feel the joy of being good. The challenge should sort of remain, but at certain moment, you should realise that you can defeat about everyone (with some foes, it just takes a bit more planning and more strategy). I would be really disappointed if no metter how good I am there was still some region inhabited by creatures that are better. That would mean roofless scaling and that is bad. In other words, if they use scaling again (and I hope they do), every single person/creature should have a trashold for this. So at least in theory you should be able to get as high as anyone else. of course if we see some powerful characters (like the TRUE King of Worms), they should be on a level next to impossible to reach. This, however should apply to single and very distinct and imporatnt characters, not whole regions.

- View Distance
I really hope that the view distance is more dependant on current weather. Theoretically on a perfect bright cloudless day, you should be able to wee very far, but there is not many days like this. Also things like fire should be able to be seen form a far distance while a dull grey city wall would be much more difficult to discerne. It is true that if you can see from one end of the gamewrld to the other, it makes the game look small, but I hope this will be prevented rather then by a LOD by the loandscape of the gameworld. I can imagine that upon climbing the highest peak in the gameworld, you could see quite a lot (if you were not above clouds), but this height is not something, where you would spend a lot of game time.

I think there should always be some form of a challenge. I mean, there's the whole class of "normal" creatures and characters that you should be able to rise above and destroy easily when you get to the point that you're using enchanted super-weapons and having armor with reflect damage 80%. Normal would mean things like Goblins, Bandits/Marauders, Bears, Ghosts (Spells & Enchanted Weapons), etc.

But when you're fighting a Daedric Prince, it shouldn't be as easy. Health Potions and Healing Spells were a bit too overpowered in Oblivion, I'd never die as long as I had a potion, which made me wonder why more people didn't carry them around, it was basically a "key to immortality". Too many things are given to Players that NPCs never seem to utilize. Now, a game that goes too far is obviously annoying and frustrating once it becomes more than a challenge. You shouldn't be able to be killed by a boar, because honestly people have been hunting and killing boars for years. Yes, they're dangerous, but killing a person with a sword and iron armor is a bit extreme.

On that note, I think armor should be a lot more defensive, but it should also severely limit speed and acrobatics. So if you're being mauled by a minotaur in just Tan Linens and a Quilted Doublet, you should probably die relatively quickly, if you've got Daedric Armor and an Enchanted Daedric Sword with 20 fire damage, it should be another story.

I don't see why we even need leveling, plenty of games get by fine without the whole "level system".

View distance should have to do with the current weather. I can see across the whole entire landscape of where I live, even up to the tops of the mountains on a clear day. Visibility is supposed to be more of how much stuff is in the air, rather it be water (humidity/rain/snow), sand/dust, etc. On a foggy day I can't see past the fence bordering the field behind my house, which isn't too far away at all.

"Scaling" (matching any aspect of the game environment to the player's level) is a technique used whenever the designer is attempting to artifically extend gameplay. The whole point of getting better is to be better than your enemies, so if your enemies also get better (but only IF you get better) then there is no point in getting better.

Games like WoW are able to avoid scaling because they are online and therefore are constantly getting new content which naturally extends gameplay. They also have alternatives in faction (horde v alliance) that actually prevent you from completing everything in one play through. Additionally, the use of hard-coded "classes" further restricts gameplay, extending the number of playthroughs.

I think that MW had about the best balance of static v leveled content you could ask for in a stand-alone RPG.

You suggest the PC does not level at all? Wouldn't that sort of destroy the RPG possibilities of the game? I mean the point of the RPGs at least for me is to get better wich is achieved by rising level. Without it you could only improve your equipment, which does not seem sufficient to me.

Wayyyyyyy to serious of a poll about this.

Do you like a hard cap of 100 over your character's attributes and skills?
I think some sort of cap is necessary, just so that we don't get out of hand with overpowered mod creatures and hacked game saves. In a way, hitting a cap is interesting because you continue to strive and improve your character, but have to resort to things like producing efficient spells and changing enchantments. You may even ramp the difficulty slider up a bit, or take on a new challenge such as vowing to fight everything in your underpants. In a way, it motivates you to experiment more with your character's abilities. :read:

Do you like to feel the difference in each small advancement of a character and/or his gear?
For the most part, I'd want improvements to be very visible - in Morrowind it was particularly noticeable. One day you'd find yourself unable to successfully connect blows to a mudcrab, the next you would. A spell that constantly failed would suddenly start working from time to time. It really helps to connect the player with their character and convey to them a feeling of growth and progress.

Do you like a scaled game world?
Level scaling is silly. I do think some levelled lists and monsters are nice, but they should be used sparingly like in Morrowind. For the most part, a location's setting and climate should be more important than your level in defining what's going on in the area. By having the occasional artifact guarded by high level enemies, or a particular path notorious for stronger NPCs, you invoke a certain spark of curiosity and adventure in the player. You look forward to getting stronger, so you can finally prove yourself capable of adapting and surviving in situations that previously seemed impossible. Additionall, when virtually everything is levelled, NPCs feel out of place and unnatural. So I'm pretty much vouching for Morrowind's style, although I think the occasional scaled NPC using player classes a la Daggerfall would add an interesting degree of challenge in dungeons as well. :hehe:

Do you like a foggy sky?
I absolutely love things like foggy days, cloudy overcast skies, the rain, the cold, et cetera. I do think that the setting of TES V is a major factor to consider in deciding how the weather works, however. For instance, I think fog really added to the mysterious atmosphere of Morrowind, and whenever I see MGE screenshots using distant land I can't help but cringe - much of the intrigue is lost. By comparison, Cyrodiil is a very uniform and picturesque province, complemented by distant land. If they use distand land however, it better be toned down - you tell me how many times you've been able to see from one side of your state to the other.

What do you like the difficulty of the game to be?
Unforgiving. Daggerfall. Do it. Now.

Well I think that in presenting this question I have made a big mistake, because I did not describe it sufficiently and people who were unhappy with Oblivion's level scaled monsters thought I meant something like that.

But I meant it quite the reverse, i.e. with a scaled world I meant that the game world was scaled in difficulty with a difficulty range from 1 to 100 for instance, so you would see a gradual change in difficulty from an area to the other.

Like a height-map but for the difficulty setting, so like a height-map from the ground of difficulty of 1 to the zenith of difficulty of 100, you had a scaled land that had predefined difficulty set for every inch of the map, but not leveled to the player's level.

So by scaled difficulty I meant regional difficulty changed gradually like a height-map, and it really showed, so people would not dare to go up the ramp of the mountains of invisible difficulty eight-map and would try to stay in the low difficulty lands.

Something like Morrowind but more pronounced.

But as I made a mistake in describing the question, people thought that I meant something like Oblivion which had a flat difficulty height-map that gradually raised everywhere with the player's level.

I'd prefer either Morrowind's way or Fallout 3's way. Both were fine with me.

I think FCOM's way is perfect.

There's not supposed to be an end. It's an Elder Scrolls game. :shakehead:

I meant the end of your character's possible growth, which I hope is more than what Oblivion offered, something about 200th for your character's main attributes and skills and and well after 100 for your character's misc attributes and skills, and a level cap of 100 if possible, but as it would become harder and harder to level, then extremely hard to reach.

There is no need to call a character as journeyman in a skill, but he can gain skill titles as he acquires perks, or he can gain general titles as he accomplishes quests or reaches to social positions and so on...

I'm about to suggest a system which I call "Identity Oriented ..." which would be really interesting, but let's wait and see. :spotted owl:

I don't mind exceeding 100 in stats or attributes, but completely open-ended? I don't think I'd ever use most weapons then: I could just infinitely extend my sword skill.

I don't want switching from a Rusty Iron Helmet to a regular Iron Helmet to make a significant difference in the game, when coupled with a single point of heavy armor skill. Essentially, it turns the whole game into a rush for every point and gold piece. YAWN. If anything, we need to slow massive progression down, not make every last point of everything superimportant.

Morrowind isn't actually scaled enough: the challenge is extremely finite. Coupled with it taking forever to travel between even nearby locations, and the inability to head back to points of interest quickly, you're typically advancing faster than the lists scale. Meaning it's fairly easy to outstrip the scaling. Slower character progression + enemies designed to have some staying power (as in "impossible at level 3" does not become "hard at level 5" and "for sissies at level 7", but rather "has some threat level at level 10" and "might spawn as a harder variant that can eat you alive at level 7" are what we need: enemies that aren't simply overcome through gaining another 3 levels and upgrading your weapon and armor one grade)

Morrowind fog = HELL NO.


Other: I like my game to have enemies that might be easy, or might be really hard... but in a few levels, they won't swing wildly to the opposite. No Oblivion Goblins, but also no Oblivion Mountain Lions. Rather, I want enemies that stay difficult longer, and don't fade for at least another 5 levels after they become "average"

I'd rather see gameplay extended by having smaller advancement effects (less difference between Level 1 and Level 100) than trying to create "uber" creatures and NPCs to challenge a high-level character. You should get better, but not go from absurdly and pathetically weak and inept to becoming a demi-god (MW) in just a matter of a few in-game weeks or months. On the other hand, the opponents shouldn't increase just because you do, taking away the whole point of levelling (OB). Each increase should have its effect (not waiting for 25 increases to add a "perk"), but those improvements should be all but meaningless individually. The cumulative effect over time is what's important for a RPG.

By "soft limiting" the "high end" that that character can achieve, and reducing the effective range between low and high skill levels, the most difficult adversaries don't need to cater to characters who may be 10-20 times as effective (or ineffective) as in the next player's game. The effectiveness of characters under the current system is exponential to some degree, making one with most skills at 80 more than twice as effective as one with 40s across the board (and completely blowing away one with a 5 starting skill in any of the relevant stats).

Yep - I agree - I like to feel as if my character is adapting to it's environment and growing in skills - but can't rush them - in an openended world I'd prefer my skills linked to not just use of them but also how long I've survived I'd like:

Race skills which should be set a little higher than any others and unique from each other race so I can understand if a race is going to progress better in defence, offense, stealth or some other path

Class skills suggest that I have already had some training in the class I have chosen so having a starting bonus for that is fine - I don't mind if they are quicker to level up than the other class skills however I'm also okay with it being much harder to level up skills that don't suit my class - a stealthy character who wears heavy armour doesn't make sense to me - a barbarian who excels at speechcraft - likely that class should be quaffing mead and rolling heads.

This should mean that the NPC's I meet who may be a higher level I still might be able to take on at earlier levels if I have a different skill set from them eg ranged fighting vs hack and slash

I'd rather the skills were time based as well as usage based - so up to say level 5 I can get up to speed fairly quick but after that it starts taking an increasingly longer time for me to upskill eg I have to l survive for x more days/weeks along with usage before my skills improve - that way it doesn't matter if I met a level 50 NPC - I know that they spent years getting to their level

I'd rather such NPC's were part of sidequests than main quests though - I'm not really a big fan of having to go away to grind in order to survive the next boss in the story.