I don't know, Luck I can understand, but the other two aren't clear cut. It will be a contriversal move, the attributes have been the same since Daggefall or arena. Also as Gizmo points out:



Agility and Speed aren't entirely the same thing, instead of merging them, I would rather have that they make them be more important.

On a similar note:



I think this an awesome suggestion, I just still feel that there's something which Agility and Speed can govern, like for example speed of attack, or damage of a sprint attack, provided such a thing is made.

I give you this, there are decent points, but there's no need to actually remove anything. It's just going to make the game simple and more mainstream. The only way an attribute or skill wasn't useful is if you didn't know how you wanted to play your character. Speed is useful and luck is useful. There's no need to increase luck in when you level because there was no multiplier for it, but with enchanted items to increase it it was a useful skill. Thinking that speed is useless is laughable though. Speed increases how fast you run, including how long you fast travel, and it increases your jump length. In essence those could be changed to be affected by other stats, so my proposal is that speed also effects how fast you swing weapons.

Bottom line, I feel that the number is fine but what they do could be refined. Don't make it into something mimicking the SPECIAL system where it's only 1-10 though.

You speak heresy.
Stay away from my TES.

:shifty:

How about improving Luck instead of scrapping it? They made it an amazing stat in FO3 and FO:NV, why not TES5?

1. Amount of Luck gained per level-up could be based on how many times you made crits, special item effects procced, or special perks procced. (like the knockdown perk destruction had)
2. Increases the crit rate and procc rates more than it did in TES4.
3. Higher chance at better loot and more money.
4. Slightly better at every major skill. (didn't say minorskills too cause every character would just stuck LUCK to no end)

It could become a worthy stat depending on your build.



And Speed is fine, what you smoking?

You raise some perfectly intelligent and valid points, but I am still inclined to disagree. I always thought of speed as the quickness of your muscles, especially the larger skeletal muscles in your legs and arms. Agility relates more to balance and reaction speed, and especially your dexterity.

If you simplify the stealth attributes you could easily make the same arguments for the other skills, like intelligence and willpower or strength and endurance. Simplifying the skills will only lead to more simplification, and this trend will only lead to more shortcomings.

I somewhat agree with you about luck, but for different reasons. I do not think luck should be raised with time; luck should be static and determined at character creation and raised only by means which do not directly correlate to the leveling process. Luck is nearly useless and almost impossible to max out by normal means, making it void of worth for most characters.

I thought so too, but it’s a fair point at the very least.



Indeed thou art corny. Relax dude, it’s a videogame, other people got ideas.

Cannot disagree at all! And your definition of Athletics is exactly my reading of that skill --> Endurance.

I second this 100%. Speed could be broken down into two skills (running and jumping or whatever it is decided) or even go - it's not like there is not gonna be Speed per se at all in the game.

BUT... I have a strong suspicion that this will NOT happen, and not because of some lame-a$s excuse: Six attributes remind me A LOT of AD&D stuff! Maybe Beth developed this (excellent, might add) system so as to justify that it is 'sufficiently different' from Wizards of the Coast one and avoid unnecessary lawsuit potentiality. If this is the case, then I'd understand they keep 8 attributes, if not, then they could Luck and Speed let go. At least Luck - one should never be able to determine his own luck at all (there could be some factor altering the odds of success at stuff you do without Luck being attribute, eg., God's Blessings, enchanted items raising skills more than others, etc...).

I'd turn Luck into two magic effects, Luck and Misfortune. The Luck magic effect would be the same as increasing Luck above 50 in Oblivion and Misfortune would be it's polar opposite. That way it's gone as an attribute, but it's still there to be used in birthsigns, enchantments, and spells.

As for Speed, I'd be okay with taking it out, though I higly doubt it will be done. If they did it, I'd imagine they could increase the number of skills to 4 per attribute. What follows is NOT my ideal list of skills, but rather a suggestion how to reorganize the existing skills. We do need 3 new ones and I decided for Crafting (making things that aren't made of metal), Necromancy, and Streetwise (Speechcraft covers persuasion and etiquette, Streetwise is lying and intimidation).

Strength: Blade, Blunt, Hand-to-hand, Acroabtics (high jumps require strong legs)

Endurance: Armorer, Block, Heavy Armor, Athletics (prolonged running & swimming requires stamina)

Agility: Marksman, Sneak, Security, Light Armor (lighter armor requires combat style with greater emphasis on mobility and dodging)

Intelligence: Alchemy, Conjuration, Crafting, Necromancy (you know you want it)

Willpower: Alteration, Destruction, Restoration, Mysticism

Personality: Illusion, Mercantile, Speechcraft, Streetwise


Specializations would then be:

Combat: Armorer, Blade, Block, Blunt, Hand-to-hand, Heavy Armor, Light Armor, Marksman

Magic: Alchemy, Alteration, Conjuration, Destruction, Illusion, Mysticism, Necromancy, Restoration

Stealth: Acrobatics, Athletics, Crafting, Mercantile, Secruity, Sneak, Speechcraft, Streetwise

And while we're at it, the Stealth specialization really should be called "Utility" instead because only two of the skills in it actually have anything to do with being stealthy.

As for my actual wishlist of skills, I'd be happy already if they simply dumped Light & Heavy Armor in favor of Daggers and Polearms.

I read the title and thought "oh god, yet another crackpot idea..."

I read the OP, and I have no real objection to your argument. Part of me is resistant to getting rid of Speed, but there's no real reasoning behind that other than traditionalism.



TBH, I've never been too big on Willpower myself either...

Generally, it's a bad idea to go solely by Dictionary.com definitions when trying to argue based on definitions. It's not even close to being an authoritative source. It doesn't help that Shades didn't actually use http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/agility to support his argument that Speed should be removed, instead using a portion of one of the definitions for agility found there (and leaving out a very, very important detail, one that you'll find in nearly any definition of the word).

Agility isn't just about speed of movement, it's about the ease and skill involved in those movements. It's that ease and skill that people are usually referring to when they actually talk about someone being "agile", and it's ease and skill that most RPGs are focused more or less exclusively on when they offer a stat like Agility. In the Elder Scrolls series, that's clearly what Agility is referring to: not how fast you move, but how well you move. I really don't see why we should change it - it makes perfect sense that a character could be a fast runner but a bit clumsy otherwise, or that a character could be very easy to beat in a footrace but still capable of cartwheels and backflips. Changing this just because of a dictionary definition would be a silly thing to do in the first place, but changing it to match an inaccurate definition that someone here has provided... well, that's just ridiculous.

As for luck... well, whether or not luck fits is more a matter of opinion than anything. Shades seems to want it removed mainly because it hasn't been used well though, which I don't think I can really support. There's definitely things that an actual luck stat could have some use for.

He doesn't argue for the total removal of luck, he argues for the removal of luck as an attribute ranging from 1-100. Which I think is fair enough. A 1-10 scale makes far more sense, given the minute influence a 1% rise in luck makes.

A 1% rise in any of the attributes is the same, though. Given how leveling currently works (leveling certain skills gives multipliers to certain stats), that makes sense - if you focus on leveling your character in a way that fits their class, the attributes you're increasing will rarely go up by a single point.

EDIT: Just to head this off: I'm aware Luck is a stat that can only be increased by 1 per level. I consider that more an issue with the skills and the way that it's tied to them than with Luck itself - it's something where the kinds of skills that could be tied to it should be considered before it's significantly changed or removed, because at this point it's the odd one out because of Bethesda's decisions in that area rather than because it's impossible for it to be otherwise.

I've always been partial to Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma myself....That might be the DnD/Pathfinder speaking though.

Exactly. There are no multipliers for luck. There is no incentive to even try raising luck, unless you have no other attributes left with multipliers. Raising your luck through experience makes little to no sense anyway.

I completely agree now with the OP. Luck doesn't need to be an attribute at all. It can be set up a similar way to how he described it. Speed can be done away with since it is very redundant to agility. Sprinting can fall under Agility, as one guy mentioned sprinting. And it is apparent that there are not very many skills to fit under speed. Athletics, Acrobatics and light armor? Okay, not sure how light armor fits there. Should be under endurance or agility. And athletics and acrobatics could easily fit under either agility or endurance. So yes, they should remove the 2 attributes AGI and SPD.

Or give us the ability in the Construction Set to add, delete or change Attributes and adjust their calculations and governing skills. Can you imagine what we could do if we had that feature present in Skyrim's CS?


I hear ya! Couldn't agree more.





But then how do you increase how much weight you can carry? People become stronger in real life so why not in TES?

yep

you can have learning points for spells, magicaka, skills etc, so instead of the stupid leveling system, we get a better system where defeating foes is governed by our ABILITIES, not stats that are boring and frankly make the game harder to balance (OP alchemy anyone).

I agree with the OP here.

Never liked Luck anyway, only cared to raise it when all my other useful attributes were maxed out.

But Speed on the other hand ... yeah, merge it with Agility. But how about adding new attributes in their place? six only don't seem enough.

The fact that there are no multipliers for luck is an issue with the way they've handled tying skills to attributes less than with how they've actually managed luck itself. That's not to say that luck is necessarily something to keep as it is, but ditching it because it had no multipliers in Oblivion makes about as much sense as ditching spears because they were underused (because Bethesda made them more or less worthless) in Morrowind. It's something they should be giving more consideration for than just "it's not used by the skills so let's rip it out/completely change it".

EDIT: Again, I'm not saying I necessarily disagree with removing or completely changing the way the game approaches luck. I'm just saying that the reason it's such an odd one out in terms of the attributes we have is because Bethesda has made it so in every one of their games. There are skills that could certainly be tied to it at least in part (Mercantile, Sneak, and Security would all make sense to rely pretty heavily on luck, given that things like item prices in different regions, circumstances that might actually lead to characters noticing you, or exactly the kinds of lock mechanisms you're encountering would arguably be tied pretty well exclusive to it and your results in checks with all three would be bound to it at least partly as a result), and there are definitely skills and abilities they could add that could be worked into it (gambling is an obvious one, but also things like foraging or tracking).

I'm not saying that this is how they should approach it (honestly, adding tracking/foraging skills would be a bit pointless without adding significant new chunks of gameplay to go with them), only that at this point I'm not entirely sure that luck is unsalvageable and I don't want to see something else removed from the game solely because Bethesda's poor implementation of it hasn't worked well in the past.

My 2 cents:

• Attributes should have a larger role in defining your character. There should be a tangible difference between a character who has a high attribute score and one who has a lower rating. Maybe like in Fallout where the ATT directly increases the skill it is tied to.
  
• Increasing your attributes is a central part of levelling up, but the system of awarding points is illogical and encourages gaming the system. Though at the same time, let people determine the direction their character is going.
  
• Many skills have a governing attribute which doesn't make sense. Agility for shooting a longbow?
  
• Like others have said, the distinctions between Speed and Agility are poorly defined. Personally I think that Speed should be a derived statistic, like carrying weight and fatigue. Maybe coming from Agility and Strength? I don't know.

This is another thing that I think is more a matter of opinion than anything, but frankly, the way attributes and skills influence your character is a staple point of the character system in this series. Attributes mainly determine your character's base physical abilities, and skills determine their specific fields of expertise. The attributes do tend to provide a pretty major gap between high and low - someone with high Intelligence can cast far more spells, someone with high Strength can carry much more and hit harder on the whole, someone with high Endurance will last longer in a fight, and so on.

Some of the skills could be tied into the things they're involved with a bit better, but the divide between them is one of the features of TES's general character system and it's one that makes quite a bit of sense - you can be a virtual expert in something specific without being exceptionally intelligent in general and you can be a master with a specific kind of weapon when you could hardly bruise someone with a club or your fists, and by the contrary you can be exceptionally smart without knowing a great deal about a pretty broad array of subjects and you can be exceptionally strong without knowing how to ensure that you do the most possible damage with a given weapon.


I'm not sure how the system of awarding points is illogical. You're going to have to explain this to me.


See my earlier post. Agility in RPG terms generally deals with ease and accuracy of movement. In the TES series, Agility refers to both general body agility and finger agility (dexterity), so this makes sense.


Again, see what I've said on this before.

Speed and Agility could be the same thing. Luck needs to stay so people can enchant items with luck and make them selves very lucky. Thats what should happen.

Disappointed at the lack of a Shafted skill, tbh. Best name for one-handed Axes/Blunt Weapons ever. Also, wouldn't something like Survival be a better name for Outdoorsman? Rolls off the tongue much easier, don't you think?

Oh, I agree with the original post. Just thought I'd add that.

I don't think any skills should be attributed to luck. There is a better underlying attribute for everything. Even something like gambling could be easily attributed to intelligence through the understanding of odds and risk. I think rather than trying to find specific spurious links to luck to justify its status as a 1-100 attribute which can be levelled up through experience, we'd be far better served having it as a 1-10 starting attribute that may be increased by temple blessings and such like.

Except that unless gambling involves being asked if you'd like to play poker and then instantly having some portion of money either removed or added from your inventory without any actual poker involved (which... well, most games wouldn't do), the understanding of odds and risk is already taken into account when the player selects how much money to gamble and when they should or should not continue to do so. And luck in general is something easily explained through certain kinds of intuition that aren't so easily tied to actual intelligence, so it's very easy to justify leaving it in the game and using it for certain skills. And, again, some of the skills that are already in the game seem to have a major and inherent relation to luck, even if luck isn't the only thing that they're related to (nearly all of them have some relation to luck, but some of them have an especially strong one).

Intuition and luck are entirely different things.

And if you're going to have the player actively play the game they're gambling in, then where would gambling as a character skill come into it?