I voted other because I would like to see Fallout 3's levelling system implemented for TES:V. In that game I can wonder around doing my own thing and not have to worry about whether or not I've used my gun enough times to level up or sneaked around enough to raise my sneak level. I can distribute skill points at level up and it's done, no worrying over efficient levelling or immersion-breaking skill spamming to gain xp. I have no idea what GCD is.

I think the Oblivion system works okay but needs some heavy tweaking. Some of the leveling mods are pretty ideal. The level scaling needs to be done away with.

I thought it might be interesting to have an RPG that doesn't have any leveling at all. Meaning all of your stat development comes from acquiring loot.

I fear that this would not be an RPG any longer. The point of an RPG is that you customize and develop your character, but that is rather impossible without leveling. I guess that the result would be more of an arcade or an FPS, but hardly RPG. And as I have said, I like to have at least some controle over my leveling, so I would go with (heavily tweaked) vanilla Oblivion/Morrowind leveling over GCD (although I respect this mod greatly and have been using it for a long time as for Morrowind it was the only well working way to get rid of the skill/attribute caps)

You could have a RPG system without levels.
Derived attributes would be calculated from current attributes, which in TES except for Health they already are and attribute increases could be linked to skill increases like in GCD.
Levelless systems work fine in PnP but levels are useful in SP CRPGs for other things beside character development. Levelled lists for loot and creatures depend on them. Dropping character levels completely would dramatically change TES since all TES games have used levelled lists extensively.

I find GCD/nGCD to be the most immersive RPG level system out there. Your character grows the way you play, so if you concentrate on pure combat, that's reflective in your stats as you become stronger and more battle hardened.

With something like OB/MW's system, the character is FORCED to use skills outside the major, or add things to the major/minor skill set in order to make a more balanced character. And that system seems to punish those who put skills in the major and minor, as they're weakened by virtue of leveling within short confines of certain stats, and allows stats to go to waste.

But, if you want the most customization, the DF system does that, as it adds 4-6 stats to ANYWHERE you want, and no attribute goes to waste.

I picked the CGD/nGCD option from the poll list, but I actually prefer the system used by the MADD Leveler mod in MW in most respects. I used Kobu's system in OB, with a fair amount of adjustment from the defaults.

Most of your attribute increases with MADD happen seamlessly during gameplay as your skills improve, effectively the same as with GCD, but it reserves a small amount of progress (three 1 point attribute increases) for actual level-up when you rest (as with vanilla, except without the "multipliers"). You don't get "multipliers", so there's no need to track your increases or use unlikely skills to boost "multipliers", yet you can manually assign a single point to any three attributes that you feel are falling behind or being "short-changed" by the system. Those can easily represent the character's "other" interests or time spent doing things that aren't directly represented by actual gameplay. You have a small amount of conscious influence on the character's direction, but your progress is still 90% determined by your direct usage of skills. GCD, on the other hand, gives you no direct control over it.

The only "down sides" to MADD for MW were that it caused a very slight increase in level-up speed over vanilla (making the character grow too quickly) and the "cap remover" was a bit awkwardly implemented, although quite functional. GCD in MW was a better programming job in most respects, and actually slows the level-up rate of the character slightly, plus adds dynamic magicka regeneration, which the game really needs badly for Mage characters (OB went overboard on the regeneration rate, but made a much shallower "pool" to partially compensate).

Character creation bonuses shouldn't cause the relevant skills or attributes to "cap" sooner; they should boost the potential maximum. Speaking of which, I feel that "soft" caps that can be exceeded by a small margin only with great difficulty would be much better than "hard" limits (as in: 101 would take +100% as many points as normal, 102 would take +200%, 103 would take +300%, etc.). Someone with a "legendary" skill of 120 (+10 by racial bonus, +10 by pure practice and dogged determination) should be exceptionally difficult to achieve, but possible.

GCD is about the closest poll option.

One such game just came out for the Wii called Monster Hunter Tri. It's an open-ended RPG where your character has *no* stats or levels, your power is determined entirely by player skill and the equipment you've managed to acquire.

Pirates was like that too you could aquire a brace of pistols or better armour - except it had a reverse levelling system where the older you got the slower you would be in combat

I prefer a game where I can manage my player's stats rather than see nothing - XP works fine on a console and I believe Bethesda will be looking to the 360 for a fair proportion of sales fro TES V so will want to have a levelling system that satisifies the majority of it's consumer base - as long as they have a CS released with the game the PC modding community will create more suitable RPG style levelling.

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Boy, this sounds like nothing but grinding, and isn't what a rpg should be like.

Oblivion's system was okay, but everything leveling with you was really stupid. Some stuff is okay, but not on the scale Oblivion did it. And it needs more skill (Some from Morrowind). Arena and Daggerfall were too confusing.

How are no skills confusing ?

I voted other. I like the Fallout 3 system.

That would be an XP system.

Well, to someone who played the older Elder Scroll games first, it was.

I voted realistic levelling. I don't know whether or not it exists allready in some sort of mod, but i wonder if it would be possible to level up more efficiently. With all systems mentioned here there still are "main" skills and secondary skills. This means that training secondary skills will never count into levelling up. It also means however, that if you've maxed out your main skills, you can not level up any more. What if, levelling is based on -ALL- skills?

I noticed lemunde had kind of the same idea, but this would still be a RPG. Counting in all skills towards levelling would mean that you are sort-of class-free. (You could still create a class for faster advances in the class-skills.) The character would still be levelling up, gaining HP and mana and increase stats. Those stats however would include -all- skill-advances. Basically it would mean that if you want to max out your character, you would need 100 pts in all skills. So a character of the same race and gender would allways end up exactly the same (Race and gender do influence the stats, maybe even the starting value of some skill or maybe start with special powers or something else). Going down that path to achieve that however, is the core of role playing.

A few of the mentioned mods (GCD, MADD, Kobu) use ALL of your skills to determine attribute advances. The primary skills count more heavily toward them, though. Actually, I believe Kobu's has the ability to adjust that.

Morrowind had Primary, Secondary, and Miscellaneous skills. Both the Primary and Secondary skills counted toward level-up, at least after the first official patch and/or with the expansions. Even Misc. skill counted toward getting higher multipliers for those attributes, so they were still somewhat important. Of course, Oblivion removed Secondary skills, along with many of the skills themselves, in an effort to "streamline" the game and make it simpler for "mass market" consumption, at the expense of ripping out half of what was good about the system.

I've downloaded nGCD now and will download Kobu later. Try them out a bit, but even using skills to advance attributes, which seems more fair than the vanilla way, levelling itself will still be based on your -main- skills. This can result in a character that is either over- or under-powered. I've had this happen to me a few times in OB, wouldn't get past level 4 for a long time or couldn't face the monsters any more at level 7 without using 100% chameleon. What i would like to see is a way where this is impossible.

I feel that using only 3 skills per attribute for level advancement is just too few. Acrobatics, athletics and light armor are all passive skills, making it difficult to advance in speed. It doesn't matter whether an attribute has 3 skills tied to it or more. What does matter is how and the frequency in which these skills are used. Armorer isn't possible to use as frequently as alteration/blade/speech. So gaining much in endurance is dependent on how much the player decides to 'use' the other 2 skills, but hvy armor is only used when you get hit wearing hvy armor, while block is actively controlable. This is what makes gaining endurance, like speed, difficult.

I am not trying to bash OB here. I am just pointing out the effects of having only 21 skills.

I believe that Kobu's system allows you to assign any skill to provide increases to up to 3 different Attributes, and adjust how much it affects each of them. That means, if you want Acrobatics to affect Strength 60%, Agility by 30%, and Luck by 10%, you can do that, or something to that effect (It's been a while since I played OB, and I probably won't do so again). Major skills generally have a greater effect than the minors, but both have some effect by default (which is a positive step). That too can be configured in the program.

GCD has multiple effects for skills as well, and "levelling up" is determined by the number of Attribute increases you get over time (and has nothing to do with which skills are Major or Minor), NOT like in vanilla MW or OB, where the number of related skill increases determines how much your Attributes can be increased at level-up, and the number of Major (or minor, in MW) increases triggers the level-up.

I agree that tying levels to X number of Major skill increases is an arbitrary and awkward mechanism, and needs to be improved in future games.

It sounds to me like the mod you really want is http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=14304 Progress allows the player to control the speed at which all skills level and even adds ways to level skills that were not in vanilla Oblivion (skill increases for missing magic attacks, for instance). The rate at which skills level is configurable by the player down to a hundredth of a decimal point and can be tweaked at any time according to taste. You can adjust Progress to allow your character to gain Speed and Endurance as fast or as slow as you'd like.

Just as a point of interest, the number of skills nGCD associates with attributes is more than any other mod I am aware of (one of the things I like about it). NGCD's skill-to-attribute ratio runs from 3 (Blunt, which contributes a portion to Strength, Speed and Endurance) all the way up to 6 (Alchemy, which contributes a portion to Strength, Intelligence, Agility Speed, Endurance and Personality). Better yet, NGCD comes with an .ini (I've really begun to love mods with .ini's) in which the percentage gains added to attributes by skills can be adjusted and skill/attribute associations dropped, added or swapped around.

You could have extensive character creation, with a level cap of 1.

Personally, as much as I think XP systems are terrible for sandbox gameplay, I loathe learn-by use. It wouldn't be so bad if it was just attributes (that could easily be fairly invisible), but it tends to promote grind over fun.

If 'twere up to me, I'd change the system to this:
1) Use core quest XP for leveling; but restrict the impact of leveling on character development to allowing you to gain the use of new abilities, 1 per level. (I'd also follow a quest design philosophy that would replace the various isolated guild questlines with a few interrelated plots that any character could get involved with, but from differing perspectives based on their guild affiliations. On one playthrough, you might be guarding a merchant against assassins. On another, you might try to assassinate him. On a third, you might be aware of the assassination attempt and try to use it as a distraction to steal a valuable artifact from his house. On the fourth, you might be sent to negotiate the purchase of a relic that interests your magical institution, and get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. So, rather than a bunch of random and unrelated events, each character's story would have a coherent narrative across all of their core quests, including but not limited to the main plot. But that's a little off topic).

2) Replace each skill with a list of related abilities (for example, replace Acrobatics with Basic Jump, Long Jump, Wall Jump, Wall Run, Vault Attack, etc. or replace a spell skill with the Spell Effects from that school). I wouldn't worry about obsessively balancing different archetypes too much, and boring skills like Heavy Armor and Light Armor would only get one or two abilities, while spell schools would get at least one for each spell effect, along with some other potential perks (I can envision advanced Conjuration specialists playing the game like Overlord, while someone with Acrobatics, Athletics, and Blade plays something like Prince of Persia).

3) You would unlock each ability for purchase through various plausible in-game means (minor racial/background/specialization bonus, paying a trainer, completing a quest, consorting with daedra, performing research, or some non-grindy sort of "practice" activity or mini-quest or achievement). You could unlock as many abilities as you want, but this doesn't provide any direct benefit. You would still need to spend an ability point (gained at level up) while resting to actually obtain the skill.

4) Attributes (Strength, Endurance, Speed, etc.) would improve through use, completely separately from XP or abilities. They would influence ability use in many ways, and using abilities would allow attributes to improve. However, even simple non-ability actions (like walking around carrying a hundred pounds worth of swag, or socially interacting with people without trying to manipulate or persuade them) would build up attributes. The speed of attribute improvement would decline as the attribute got higher, and also as the total of all attributes got higher. Not sure what to do about luck, but I imagine taking actions with fairly random outcomes would be more likely to improve it -- so, for instance, a spell that does 0-200 damage would improve luck, while one that does 100-100 damage (the same average damage value), would not.

Learn-by-use is too fun a system to give up on so easily, even though the way Bethesda implements does have grind > fun.

However there are ways to remove the incentive to grind. The formula I use in Oblivion is explained on page 2.

I think something like GCD should be used, but with Fallout 3 style perks. The perks, however, wouldn't be from level ups, but more used as quest rewards and such. GCD is great, but there is some fun in leveling up and/or gathering perks as well.

Ok just an idea for a different kind of leveling system, Instead of gaining character levels why not gain levels in your chosen class, for instance you could have masters of each of the three specializations,
You start off classless as a classless person you skills are capped at a certain number and you have no major or minor skills. Once you chose a class based upon speaking with a member of chosen class and
and being initiated you can begin to train your skills, base stats increase as a direct result of raising your skills, and your class level would determine your cap on those skills. If you where to change a class you would not loose anything in way of skills or stats just gain a new focus.. I could see this system fitting into TES game quite well.

Like Morrowind.

I voted "Other", this actually is one of my older suggestions.

Unstepped leveling:
I'd go for a totally different system that, while it's based on TES' classic "use to improve" system, is not level based.
This system is based on "fluent leveling", meaning the computer constantly recalculates your stats any time you do something. Since the computer already does keep track of every little thing you do, literally every step you take, it wouldn't be that much of a stretch for all your skills and attributes getting fluently recalculated as you play.
A mod for Oblivion, Kubo's character advancement system, already kinda did this, though it still kept the levels for your skills it automatically recalculated all your skills and attributes before you had a genuine level up. This would just make it finer and discard level ups in general.


Multi attribute bindings:
Also instead of one skill being bound to one attribute I'd do multi linked ones, one skill can be bound to several attributes. Which it levels most then depends on the use of the skill, for example a dagger being bound to speed and strength it would use speed more most of the time but also level strength a bit, however using the dagger differently, like really jamming it into someones body trough a hard armor requires a lot of strength, so more points would go to strength than speed (or probably equally).


Skill Groups
I'd regroup and rearrange the skills, all in all there would be more skills but they are "grouped" together.
For example, daggers, short swords, knifes etc, would each be a separate subskill but all are grouped together under "short weapons". Similarly one handed swords, clubs, small hammer and small axes would be grouped in "one handed weapons" but again, each being it's own skill. The grouping is primarily because the basic movement of your arm/s is similar enough to have the same muscle memory.
The grouping itself does have some effect as well, weapons in the same group profit from each other (I haven't fully worked out the best math for this but I'll try to give an example). The average of all levels of the skills within a group added together gives you the "group level", this basically means a skill within a group that has a lower skill than the groups level still has a higher "effectiveness", similarly to using a "skill buff" spell.
Though the effectiveness is higher it means you won't get some "perks" of that skill until you really leveled it to that point, you just got some extra juice due to your "muscle memory" being more trained to do a similar motion.


Perks:
On the topic of perks I'd also do them completely different, instead of making them a thing you suddenly learn from nowhere perks are things you already can do from the start but they are "ineffective" until you reach a certain level of experience, this means you can execute them but they are likely to not work properly, being to inaccurate or the timing doesn't work. for example a perk of acrobatics could be running up a wall a little like Le Parkour runners do to gain hight, on a low level this is just likely to not not work, you just slide off. You can get a lucky shot though and it works at a low level. But at a certain point it's likely to work every time you try it because you just got the right experience now.
A few other perks could really be ones you don't know from the very beginning but they have to be learned from somewhere first and aren't just suddenly gained knowledge. You could find them in old scriptures, instructed by a trainer or maybe even by visually copying them from someone.


Fluent Level Caps:
As a further point I'd change that reaching "level 100" is NOT mastery, that is reaching "level 150". You could see the difference there between someone who reaches a good running speed and a Olympics sprinter, or someone who can lift a very heavy weight and a powerlifter who can push almost half a ton (~450kg is current world record FYI).
In order to get to that point it really needs dedication as above 100 your skills level slower and they can drop again. They can't drop lower than 100, that is the cutoff point, but if you don't train a skill when it's over 100 it will drop down again. This means that you can become "well trained" (level 100) in all skills, but reaching "above average" (~125) or even "true mastery" (~150) really requires dedication and can only be achieved in few skills.
In this a few "perks" could only become effective when they're close to mastery, that means you really need dedication if you want to perform a certain perk with a very low failure rate.


Differing Caps and modifiers:
Another thing with the fluent level caps is that the maximum cap for each race and even from character to character can differ. The cutoff point is ALWAYS 100, however how flexible the cap is can differ. A Bosmer for example could have a very tight strength cap, meaning when he will take a lot of effort to get past 100 and if he trained to for example 120 and then stops training strength he can have dropped back to 110 within 2 in game weeks. A Orc on the other hand could have a very flexible strength cap meaning he can train past 100 way easier and if he stops training strength at 120 too dropping down to 110 takes over a in game month to happen.
Additionally the different races could instead of giving them a higher or lower cap simply have different "modifiers" on their attributes, again using a Bosmer and a Orc as an example.
A Bosmer who power trained all his life and really crunched it could reach strengths in the mid 100s, a Orc who never muscle trained all his life will not have developed the same muscle and maybe just be at 60. However if the Orc starts training right away he's genetically more capable to build muscles and could catch up or even surpass the Bosmer within just a few years of training instead of an entire lifetime.
That way there would be a difference to playing different races but it's NOT a enforced limit like saying "this one caps at 80".


Training Bonus:
Instead of leveling from reading a book it should instead give you a "leveling bonus", which means you will level a bit faster for a while. Same should be for "fast training" with a trainer, he won't actually do a training session with you but just give you some hints and tips.
Another version of training could be "auto training" which only trains one skill you aim for or "manual training" which actually send you into a interactive training session and actually allows you to level more than one skill in one sitting (training rounds give more "points" so to say).



I think that's pretty much all on that topic, there is a bit on "writing your history" to create your character than just picking skills, simply a more RP friendly method by actually defining your past. And no this would not interfere with TES' "mysterious past" of the character, after all just look how many people actually make up a story for their character, this would allow them to actually bind that into the game. The old method of simply selecting and rearranging should still be in there of course as it's just faster, the written history generally is a more detailed and far reaching version of the 10 questions from Daggerfall and Morrowind (don't remember if it was in Arena already).
I'll write a more detailed post about that at a later time.




TL-DR Summary:
WHHHAAAT, I spent all this time writing this down, don't be a Jerk and just SKIP ALL THIS. :stare:
YOU GO RIGHT BACK UP THERE AND READ THIS, UNDERSTOOD? :bolt: Good. :glare: