Except he wouldn't be. If a warrior used 1-handed weapons and picked sword perks, that character will be rather gimped if they picked up an axe. Not as worthless as someone who never levelled 1-handed, but not as good as he would be with a sword. A warrior that raised 1-handed and picked axe perks will best them.

If you raise 1-handed and don't pick sword or axe perks, you aren't a sword master, you're just proficient at a range of 1-handed weapons.

Also, as a point to extrenuous skills like swimming or "Goblin language", how often are these used to dignify them with a "level as you use them" system? If they aren't used that often, then there's no point in having them as a skill because you could rarely (if ever) practice them to get them levelled any significant amount. In such cases, it's better to make perks out of them connected to a general skill (Athletics and Speechcraft, respectively).

Definitely right.
An axe and a shortsword can handle similarily to some fashion. The big difference lies in weight balance, and how you end your strikes. But you combat tactics don't vary a lot actually. It makes sense

Thats well explained ,and makes sense.
People need to sit back and re-read the information given,but either way it points to more skills/uniqueness.
Some people are just seeing 18 skyrim,21 oblivion,27 daggerfall,and presume it's all bad,when infact it's the oposite.
And like i've said in an earlier post,if you really think about it,3 skills haven't been taken away at all.
Your just seeing the number 18 and presuming that.

The context was the merging of the blade and blunt skills into a McWeapon skill, so yeah the McWeapon master skill would make the PC equally skilled in daggers, hammers, and flails. :shocking:

Doesn't matter does it? Having the skill at 10 (of 100), and being the only one around that knows it, makes you the highest skilled character around. You don't need to have maxed Goblin, or ancient elven, but having it could enable your PC to understand it where few others ever would. :shrug:
You could have that joke amount of 300 skills, and as you use them some get better while others never advance at all, but the details would be different for every PC you ever played. :shrug:


Have you tried it? You don't really do a lot of stabbing with an axe, and the weight balance (you mentioned) is almost polar opposite.

---

Do the majority of TES players truly just want a McWeapon, McSpell, and McSneak skill to be used for any and all situations that they can conceivably get away with applying it too? Seriously?
(This is an honest question with no slight intended, would that solution be preferable to anyone?)

Let me ask this then... Why not treat the 280 perks as 280 skills (that work like skills and advance like skills). Most Players will pick the same first seven or eight, but why make it a requirement, why not just ask the player to pick some skills when making their PC? Honestly I don't see a reason to limit how many they pick either; but it just sounds right to me that there should be a small finite number to start with. Why not add skills to the list during play from locations and dialog... Enter a Wizard's tower, and instead of run to his treasure vault, run to his library and read his books ~for new skills?

I don't understand the reasoning (yet) behind the belief that a skill should only exist if it will be used often and/or get maxed out for most players. :shrug:

Personally, I think there is no argument that has been given on this forum that can make me dislike or be worried with the system in Skyrim. It makes sense, its practical, and reads like its gonna be functional and will fix a few of the issues we've all known since Morrowind. The only gripe people have had here is a basic, unreasonable claim that "I just want more more and more!!". More is not a sound game design strategy.

Because of time constraints. Why spend time making the skill or ability with potential max skill like the others if the chances of anyone using them/maxing them out is to a minimum. You take away from other things in the game that people would actually use and max out. Why make something and take up your resources working on it if it's in consensus that the skills are useless 95% of the time and chances are you won't max it out because otherwise you will gimp yourself. It just makes no sense to make throw away skills just for the sake of having alot of skills. Quality over quantity.

Where the hell are you getting this McWeapon,McSpell,stuff from?....it really isn't going to work like that.
Just think for a minute.
Mysticism as a skill name is gone,but the spells in that are not gone,they have been moved,so are still there...agree?
If ( whichever way you look at it ) athletics or acrobatics is gone,which they haven't,because we will be able to jump,swim,and we can sprint still,so even though the name/names may have gone the skill hasn't.
You could say this with other skills too.
Example: Say stealth/thievery is a skill that combines sneak and security,the skills are still there just under one banner or new name.
Also in defence of this if they merged them. Lock picking is a stealth skill and to me goes hand in hand with sneak.Because when you are breaking into a house or chest whatever,you want to do that unheard,and unseen,it makes sense.
If you look at it like this we haven't lost any skills at all....your just seeing the number 18,but i see that number 18 as an illusion.
Then take into account ranks,and perks,the combinations of things/direction you take with your PC is huge.....surely you can see this my friend
Also one handed makes sense too. Your one handed skill goes up ok,and at the beginning you will be ok,with mace,axe,sword,dagger etc.But then as you get higher,you get to specialize.
Say you pick sword,you can still be decent with an axe,mace,dagger etc,but by no means an expert or master,because your speciallity is swords,you've in a sense studied that more,hense...
making you better,more knowledgeable with it.But because you are good at one handed weapons,your used to the feel of a one handed weapon,thus giving you a little bonus,to other one handed skills,which makes sense...but like i said it will by no means make you a jack of all trades.
I really hope you understand what i'm getting at,look at the bigger picture.
Each to their own,but thats the way i see it.....it's miles better in my opinion.

As I see it, there is no way to waste time in a game, if you truly believe that games aren't a waste if time.

How? Use the language example, and tell me how this works... As I see it, if the PC has a language skill and never uses it, the player doesn't waste any time using it; and if the player chooses to use it, the then they likely don't view it as a waste ~especially if they get what they want to know out of it. :shrug:

Because the consensus doesn't speak for everyone, and not everyone is content with a three button remote. Now I should clarify... Its a given that people who want more skills in the games, want the games to support those added skills. No one wants a Goblin literacy skill if there isn't going to be anything to read with it. The notion is that making the skill entails making the content. This (at least for myself) is the same for weapon skills. Wanting individual skills for individual weapons assumes that the game would implement weapon resistances and immunities; and eventually the hope for unique handling animations. If the game were simply duplicating the McWeapon skill three times and accounting no differences other than names, then yeah, I'd call it a useless skill and say why not just have a McWeapon skill for anything that fits in the hand and can injure. :shrug: (and then I'd trade it for some other game)

I'd rather have the more useful skills fleshed out than a single skill that has next to no use. But even if more was made of it to make it useful, the amount of time it would take to raise it makes it impractical to work as a "learn by doing" skill, and would hence be better as a ranked perk under a general language/speechcraft skill.

I'm not sure what your getting at with this sentence? Are you saying games are a waste of time?



It has nothing to do with "wasting time in game". It's about wasting development time for something that most people might not use.



The consensus I was talking about was you admitting that you wouldn't use them to the max. You would only use a portion of it so that it wouldn't screw you in a game. Why make a skill if you know your not even going to use more than 10% of it? I don't get where you get the "three button remote". Every weapon has it's own unique handling and I don't get why you think that every weapon has to be it's own skill. All the separate weapon skills gave in the past was deciding that the weapon did more damage. With perks, it actually makes true differentiation which the individual skills didn't. Before, if you wanted to be a master of swords, you raised your sword skill. That was it. All that did for you was increased the damage in that skill. In Skyrim, raising your one handed skill increases the damage you do with swords, axes, maces and whatever but to a lesser degree than it was in the other games. This is where perks come in. Now, they are different. If your privy to maces, then you pick a perk for maces and say that perk is the perk that allows you to ignore armor with maces. Now you have more differentiation then you did before. Now if your into axes, you can pick a perk and lets say that perk is the one where your attacks cause deep wounds in your target and causes them to bleed, losing health. See, you have raised one handed skill but the character that specialized in mace perks is vastly different than the character that specialized in sword perks. The mace character has harder hitting attacks while the axe character can cause constant damage after wounding the enemy that will continue to let them bleed for damage even if they are fleeing from you. Skyrim is actually the first game where the weapons are vastly different other than just their look and animations.

That was never implied.

What was implied was that you would not need to max it out;
(* Also... I am not saying that it be intended not to be maxed out. None of the skill need to be maxed :shrug:)

Because that's not what it means. Having a skill at 10% does not mean that you know (or use) 10% of it.
If my PC had a games:Chess skill at 50%, it does not mean that he knows 50% of Chess.

If you had Goblin literacy (to use it again) at 10%, it might mean that the PC could understand enough of what's written on a door (in Goblin) to understand that opening it would be very very bad. If he had Goblin Lit. at 70%, then he'd know exactly what it said, and why it was dangerous to open. If he had no understanding of Goblin... He'd see something scribbled on the door, and just might get curious.


Sure... but I don't agree that its a good policy to lump loosely related disciplines into a ~McGroup :laugh:


One could assume that each of the 'magic arts' is a little different; involves different understanding, and achieves different effects.
Sculpture, Watercolor, and http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/ba/Cutting_girl_1c_1.jpg/450px-Cutting_girl_1c_1.jpg are not the same general thing, they can be called arts (just as fantasy games can have 'magical arts'), but one shouldn't assume that you can do all three just because you are an 'artist'.

This is a good bit of why I don't agree that skill merging is a good idea.

This is what I mean. You don't need Goblin Literacy to be a skill. It could be an ability you pick up during the game and after you find such and such books you learn more and more of the language. It doesn't need to be wasted as a skill when it can be somewhere else in the game.

Also, no comment on the combat skill explanation?

So it progresses as you use it?

I think Gizmo mentioned this before, that is the exact same implementation as a regular skill.
Really the only thing that changed is the growth scale, and it is no longer named as a "skill" but the rest of the mechanic is there.

No, it progresses as you find more books or whatever depending. It's not a skill, skills require you to level which effects your leveling, which is what he is asking for. He wants full blown skills and the way I proposed are abilities that you can find rare books/items that allow you to "rank up" that ability without having to clutter up skills.

I found the language skills in Daggerfall to have interesting abilities but I always disliked them as skills.

What specifically makes this different from a skill? ~~Wait... What specifically differentiates a skill from an activity, in TES? There is the combat activity, and the lock picking activity, and the casting fire magic activity... Now (hypothetically), if your PC were in a goblin prison trying to escape, and reading the sign on every door... Is that not an activity that could get bumped up a bit for each reading(?), and what does the PC/player lose by the game bumping the literacy skill when you read a sign in a foreign language?

I don't see the point of a so broadly applied a skill. Why wouldn't a bump in strength do the same thing? What is the PC assumed to actually be doing? (from the one handed skill) ~training with all of the one handed weapons? ~If so... why not have a skill for at least each class of weapon, and if not... what exactly affords him the one handed bonus(?)

Okay, this would be a better line for conversation then.

Should it just be combat variant skills (sneak, marks., magic schools, weapon classes) that aid in leveling up, as leveling up would only really effect combat? And further more do you think that DF was broken leveling? [covered]

Not trying to bait you, but the other conversations are becoming a bit stagnant.
----
And from that first question, should the game focus more on combat than being a wide-ranged and comprehensive rpg?
Do you think that could hurt RP abilities?

How do you figure that increased damage is by leveling that skill is more diversity than one having a bleed effect and one has an armor ignore effect. I can't see how you believe that. What affords him the ability to use one handed weapons better is that they are all similar in that respect. You hold them in one hand and you learn how to swing them with deftness. Perks are where you supposed to diversify between the different one handed weapons. Where you show your true mastery of a certain weapon.



Skills affects how your character levels overall. Thus skills should be things that are used often and are worthwhile to level up to the max. So it doesn't have to be combat oriented to be a skill, it just needs to be used often. Things like languages should not be skills. They are more of a niche thing that are situational at best. Thus, they can be in the game, they just shouldn't be skills. Because if they are skills, then it encourages people not to level the language skills that much but allowing them to be a secondary ability kind've like greater powers or lesser powers that can be ranked up by finding rare items that increase the effectiveness of the ability like the languages, then it encourages people to max them out without having to sabotaging them in the process.

Who? (Open question?)

I think the developer knows best what's in their game, and should adjust the value of skill use to best suit a balanced viability... Perhaps even alter the mechanics to allow the use of some skills to advance others that are closely related (as opposed to loosely related). ~That reads like double talk to me, but it is what I was thinking.

I don't know about Dagger Fall... I only started the game last week. Oblivion was my first TES game, and I've yet to play Morrowind more than 45 minutes.
:lmao:

I would prefer an RPG not nudge the player toward any one solution...
In general I think combat should be optional (one means to an end)... Though I do not think that every situation should have a non-violent out, or that non-violent outs should always be the best choice.

That is a gross over generalization.


It is the similar to the difference between swimming, running, and climbing. The are all movement and coordination of your whole body, but that is where the similarity ends. They do carry over from one to another, and that carryover exists in the attribute system. The coordination and fighting styles of a rapier to a broadsword to a shortword to a dagger are vastly different, and those are all one handed weapons.

Do you think the system would benefit from more individual skills as well as perk systems for all of them?

Obviously you didn't read the perks part of my explanation. Swinging a weapon with one hand is basically the same motion and you can increase the effectiveness of any weapon with the same general motions, that's not disputable in real life or in game. Using them well is where perks step in. I can swing a sword and a mace with the same general motion and still do damage but with perks it represents becoming skilled in a select weapon. Thus it turns from generalized swings, to parrying and spinning my wrist to knock the enemy weapon off balance. You have to agree, swinging one handed weapons is generally the same motion but perks are where you truly learn how to use the weapon to it's truest potential.

You mean like a baseball bat and a fencing foil?

I have missed something (previously) I think. Could explain that first bit in more detail, (about the effects).


Unless the player prefers to focus on them... no? Players can make any kind of character, and 'do what they want'... So what if the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZHoHaAYHq8?

I wouldn't mind that... but I'm unclear how it would work.
If you had a Blade skill, would that be your competence in all of your bladed weapon perks?
(meaning if my Blade skill is 90% and I choose the Weapon:Scimitar perk... Would I have Scimitar at 90%? ~that doesn't sound promising then)

It only looks the same to the untrained. Also you don't hit something with a dagger the way you do with a sword, (or Sai, or shiv, or maul, or shaving razor).

Gizmo, I am speaking more in generalities. I don't have a system to replace what we see on the ready because I don't expect a re-haul again. Most of my discussion has to do with the idea that everyone should be completely happy with the cut of skills on account of perks. I'm not really. I'm still happy for the perks, but I don't think the cuts were totally necessary to add the perks.



I disagree completely actually.
I think that relegating mastery of a particular type of weapons to a simple perk check-box cheapens mastery.
For an example, the use of a rapier as opposed to a broadsword. Broadswords require much different control, and must be sure to set up solid hits because that is all the blade is made for. You put extreme force behind the swing yet have to maintain balance and fluidity. It takes a good deal of your entire arm and body core to control.
Rapiers have their own degree of control, but they tend towards finesse over strength. You jab and slash with the tip, not the full blade.

I do not think that the difference between styles and skills of styles can be accurately represented when all one handed skills are only differentiated by perks.

For what it is worth Morrowind had different attack types for each of the weapons, and it still wasn't perfect. But if differentiating between different styles and weapons becomes a thing of perks, I will think that perks would be better along with a bigger system.

DF might have a tad too much but Morrowind had perfect amount of them for my taste. I played Oblivion before Morrowind, but after seeing Morrowind I left Oblivion fast. It was just too shallow. Hearing there's even less in Skyrim didn't make me or my bf happy in any way.



Which is exactly what RPG shouldn't be like. Especially sandbox one like TES.

I'll second that three times twice. :tops:

Yeah, I think your misunderstanding what perks do. Perks give effects to certain weapons or spells when you pick them. They allow you to specialize in certain weapons. So you maxed out one handed weapons, you do decent damage with every one handed weapon. BUT, if you try to fight someone who specialized into axes but is only 50 skill in one handed weapon, you will still lose to him if your using a weapon you didn't specialize into. Specialization in weapons is now mostly on perks as opposed to the old way where you had individual weapon skills. With invidual weapon skills, you only raised the damage of the weapon. Now, you raise the damage of the weapon AND you can get special effects with perks. So if you like using axes on your character and you pick all the axe perks, then you will be good in axes and you will have unique effects that are not like any other weapons effects (this would be the one I explained above where one of the perks causes your attacks to make the character bleed, giving them a damage over time effect) Now if you try to fight someone but you try to use a mace after you've specialized completely in axes, you will most likely get your ass handed to you because the enemy your fighting will be skilled in swords and you are unfamiliar with maces as far as your character is concerned.



If the player prefers to focus on them, then they can focus on looking for the special items that rank them up. They don't have to be skills for you to focus on them, but to be skills they need to be more than just situational. So if you want your character to be a librarian, then have them focus on finding all the unique items to level up all the languages and hurray, your a librarian.



But that's not how it works. Most of the power in weapons are in perks now. Weapon skill still gives some damage but most of the power is in perks with their special and unique effects it gives your weapons. Perks aren't a list of weapons and you choose a weapon with a perk and then you can use that weapon. You can use any one handed weapon at any time but it won't mean you will be good at them. Each weapon type has several perks that you can spend points into that will give each weapon a special effect that's unique to that weapon, this is where the true differentiation is and it's true power is from. This is something that previous games have failed to do, they only increased damage you did by a flat value as you raised a certain skill, now you have special effects from perks that make weapons truly different and your effects to weapons may never be the same between two different characters.



I think you misinterpret what makes RPG.