One of the concepts added between Daggerfall and Morrowind was "Specialization" to choose character type: combat, Magic, or stealth.

Do you like the idea? Do you find that the concept is redundant with major and minor skills? Do they aid your role-playing, or do they make it too hard to keep a spellsword/battlemage balanced between combat and magic skills?

I have my own opinion on the matter, but what do YOU think? Why? Tell HMA your thoughts on this under-mentioned area of character creation. Especially if you use a custom class.

The only categories that skills need to be in are their defining attributes. If they do Combat, Magic, and Stealth, it automatically forces Stealth to have all the leftover skills dumped into it. Short swords aren't combat? Speechcraft is a stealth skill? It's just an outdated framework that we're beyond at this point. By beyond at this point, I mean Daggerfall was beyond that point in 96.

I don't like this breakdown of the skills, especially since skills also fall under attributes and attributes don't fall under specializations (I can easily see wanting to play a hand-to-hand fighting theif(

I mildly dislike it, because it nudges all characters towards one of the three archetypes and makes it harder to craft a character that breaks free of all of them. I also don't really see a point to specialization.

Dislike them. They can be convenient for categorization, but they don't really add to gameplay. I already decide if I specialize in combat, magic, or stealth because I chose those skills. It's redundant for characters that fit those roles and a pigeonholing nuisance for characters who don't.

This.

Also, I'd like seamless leveling, something akin to GCD (MW) or nGCD (OB)

The concept of "classes" in RPGs is an outmoded remnant of 70's-era tabletop games that has no place in non-party-oriented sandbox games like the Elder Scrolls series.

they're good
i largely play archetypes, and even if i wanted to play say a warrior/mage hybrid, the problem wouldn't be that my specialization wasn't split, it'd be because switching between using melee and magic in the heat of battle is as smooth as a drunk orc

I don't like them or classes really
I tend to think of the skills a character starts with as what they learnt because of their life prior to the game beginning and they aren't neccessarily an indication of the way the character will develop in the future
Restrictions on character development should come through limitations on time, money and the availability of training, not an arbitrary class or specialisation
If an advantages system was used then picking skill(s) to be exceptionally talented in and quick at learning should be part of that

I kind of like the idea of the specialisations. It could be used better, though. I love the fact that I can make my own class in TES. It, however has a problem. If you make a custome class, this class cannot be recognised by the game and thus you cannot ask for the game to reflect it in conversation and so on. However, if the specialisations are fixed as they were in TES III and IV, you could have (and it is unfortuante that you did not) dialogues based on them. It would of course be nice to have four cathegories: Magic, Stealth, Combat and something like Common, or General, where things like speechraft of merchandise would fit.
In my opinion the specialisations as they are now do not limit the player (or at least I do not feel limited) and a bit to the role-playing. For the same reason I like classes. It is nice when I can call myslef a Shadow priest and know that this is my class.

yeah. i wish you were further noticed as your class, it's been cemented through generation of RPGs that classes are important (to some players) and you want your character to be recognized and treated as such

problem is, most of the basic classes svck. for instance, warrior. the default class hand blade/blunt and hand to hand (as far as i can rememer) which equals 2 wasted skills. i'd like to be able to make a custom class, and THEN select what my character would be recognized as

i realise that some people do not like an emphasis on classing everything but i always have

Theres been plenty of RPGs dating as far back as the late-70s like Runequest or GURPS where class isn't important
I'd rather the game recognise me as something meaningful that exists in game eg Knight Errant of the Imperial Legion, Wizard of the Mages Guild etc rather than a class title that given the rather fluid class system of all TES games isn't very meaningful

Major dislike. What makes Archers anything else but warriors? Why social skills mean you're a sneaking thief? Not to mention huge number of skills cut for no good reason. Some, I bet, cut only to get a number easily divided by three -.-

In my skill list I've used categories but ONLY to make them easilly... well, categorized. Nothing to do with gameplay or classes.
Weapon skills (7)
Magic schools (7)
Physical skills (7)
Know-how or mental skills (14)

35 in total.

Edit: another problem, very obvious in TES4, less in TES3, and nonexistent in TES2: Even if you choose a class, you start out knowing nothing about anything, and end up being master of everything in a week or two. Like whatever you choose in character generation means nothing. The class should represent your earlier actions and training, but the way it is now is just stupid.
In my list of suggesitons: Ten Primary skills count towards your leveling and are easiest to raise. They start at 35, and there's +/-10 points to move around, just like with Attributes. It might take years game time to become the Master in one skill, even a Primary one. After 90 the skill advancing should become radically slower.

That would be nice as well. What I meant more, however is, that you could be given specific directions based on your specialisation. Like, "I see you fancy yourself the sneaking kind, so you might try to enter through that side passage that is far less guarded and leads to nice balcony form where you might snipe,..." Or some such. And of course different specialisations would get a different line. Being recognised as a memeber of a guild would sure be good, but in different situations. Besides, you can have only one specialisation, but (hopefully) can be a member of several guilds at a time. As a battle mage, I can imagine being in both fighters' and mages' guild at the same time and at a more or less similar position, so it would be hard for the game to determin how to treat me (whether as a mage or a warrior), but my inclination to magic would be stressed by my specialisation.

I espouse the opposite position. Oblivion's endgame characters are god-like enough to begin with, at least specialization helps characters focus on one major skillset. I mean, its a single player game, play it however you want, but FWIW I don't hate the warrior/mage/theif fantasy archetype system just because its established. Only my opinion, but if you want to make a stealthy warrior-mage, and not suffer low stats and other limitations, you might as well just open console and 'tgm' yourself, but again, you can play however you want.

Fallout 3 didn't really have anything too limit player character omnipotence, and by say level 10 it was hard not to have a character that was great at everything. I'm sure there were mods to fix that, but I played F3 on the Xbox, so to enjoy the game 'my way' I had to play my characters by my own rules: my main character used melee weapons (the tenderizer specifically for the most part) for 90% of all combat (I'd say the rest was 8% grenades and 2% Blackhawk for those hard-to-reach places). Fable II was (as is always the case) even worse; by the end of that game the PC was highly proficient in at least 2 of the 3 archetypes because the game gave out tonnes of XP, and the combat gameplay generally required strenght and magic skills or strength and speed/firearm skills.

In TES4's execution of specilizations, some of the categorizations were goofy, as people have pointed out. They seemed to hammer some things into 'stealth' skills just for the sake of getting them in one of the big three.

But the general idea of a game rule mechanic that guides characters towards the mighty glacier warrior / the glass cannon caster / the backstab rogue archetypes, and forces compromises to be incurred by those looking to blend any combination of classes is a good thing in my book.

I like my classic fantasy tropes.

Ummm what?

If I want to play a "stealthy warrior-mage" I get 7 major skills to choose from. If I want to play a hardcoe warrior I get 7 skills to choose from. Neither is more godly than the other unless the skills chosen are somehow overpowered, and in that case it's an issue with individual skill balance.

Furthermore, my attribute bonuses are going to suffer badly because I'm spreading out my skill-types so much.

Where do you get the idea that I somehow get "more skills" by playing a stealthy warrior mage. I'm only going to be able to pick 2 or 3 skills from each of the roles.

I like the faster skill increases, so yes.

You missed it. I never said "more skills" (so really you shouldn't have that in quotation marks). You don't get more skills, and you don't need them if you either circumvent the point of specilization or remove it from a game.

Specilizations are evidenced in the relationship between your skills (blade, sneak, destruction) and your attributes (strength/end, agi/speed, int/willpower). If you work with the standard specilizations scheme by say, taking all 'warrior' style skills like blade/blunt/heavy armor/armorer, the governing attributes will increase reliably and quickly with level ups. Such that by mid-game, regardless of starting stats, you will have a character with high strength and endurence (+3s to +5s every level) -- with fewer points possible in the attributes governing 'mage' and 'thief' skills (+1s, maybe +2s per level). So the deeper you get into the 'warrior' skills, the greater the relative limitations on your ability to try to also take advantage of the skills and benefits of the 'mage' and 'thief' playstyles.

On the other hand, if you want to min-max and mod a character that maximizes the mulitclass benefits, and minimizes the penalties incurred by working against specilization; say you play a dunmer and take blade/H.armor/armorer/restoration/destruction/alteration/sneak as your seven skills, and carefully manicure your level-ups to get +3s or better every level to STR, END, and WILL, and run your sneak up to 100 by cheaping some stationary NPC for an hour or so, you will have a character who can sneak up behind somebody in full plate with additional sheild spells, deliver a top-tier blade attack from backstab, and then weakness-to-magic the rest of the room and hit them with a giant fireball. So your stealthy warrior-mage just cleared a roomfull of supposedly equal-level bandits in about 3 seconds with no risk to self. That is what I mean by making a multi-class character without penalties results in a god-tier character.

Now that plenty of people have had their say, I'll jump in.


I only use specializations because, well, you "have to". My skills invariably tend to break down 4-2-1, with 4 combat, Restoration, Marksman, and one other "non-combat" skill. The specialization is fairly redundant and makes me really good at 4 skills, while also making me better at 2 skills I "never" use. Blunt and H2H would be about the last 2 skills in the whole game I'd take for "enhancement", honestly. I'm going to beat the crap out of enough stuff to maximize them as-is.

In fact, there's not a lot for me to say that Absinthe82 didn't: having to equalize the specializations pretty much requires 21 or 42 skills, or more attributes, unless someone can craft a 4th specialization and balance them out. (the bad part would be to have "combat" be reduced to Heavy Armor, Block, and a bunch of weapon skills. It would actually make the specialization stupid handicapped)

"Not really. I use it since it is there."

I am always using different builds for my characters. I enjoy stealth in combination with magic the most, it's just the only way to have fun imo. So specializations aren't really necessary for me, it's nice to have them, just not necessary. And btw, sometimes i don't even notice i am "specialized" in some group.

I ignore it for the most part. I usually choose stealth since I use it a lot but I also use swords and magic a lot too. I should probably change it to magic since some of the magic schools can be a pain to level.

Meh. I don't pay any attention to them. It doesn't really matter.