I missed the main point in the long rant then. But I don't understand the phrase "not saying it shouldn't be an action game" and "it isn't". I can say without a second thought, Morrowind is an action game.


We should re-write the books, I guess. I like dice rolling as it adds some randomness to actions. One can use it for any purpose. If I was going to make an FPS game I would add dice-rolling. When you shoot in FPS game, bullets cover an area rather than a point. What decides how much off or where bullets go? Dice-rolls. Is counter-strike an RPG? Normally if people don't consider certain game mechanics in some genre's dynasties, we wouldn't talking about this stuff. Let's use the word hybrid to avoid upsetting them. Morrowind is a FPS/RPG/Action/Adventure/Stealth/economic-political simulator hybrid. It looks like RPGs can have any game theme/style/mechanic.


I see. But grinding will be punished with all skills going down in my ideal system. People will chose to master in certain skills(which I don't call this grinding but mastering) or they will be jack-of-all-trades but that won't make them god of all trades unless they are really inhuman.

I also think of perks you gain permanently to add some encouragement. But that's another thought.

Me, I always play my way. I couldn't care less about what skill is going up or down. It is happening as I play so I play. Choice is there when you play.

OK :rolleyes: slight slip of the tongue there, Conjuration is what i want to nerf, & yes I know I could try some self control :wink_smile: , but I prefer to be tied down :mellow: .
So my enquiry still stands is there a mod out there that will limit the number of critters I can control concurrently with my conjuration skill .
Or is this likely to turn up as a setting in BTB's fixes?

It technically already has, due to the jacked-up cost of most summon effects and the fact that I've set a lot of the enchanted items to the same enchantment to prevent stacking.

The only thing it doesn't guard against is the [censored] who creates ten amulets of summoning and then fires them all off at once, at which point you're looking more at an issue of enchantment abuse rather than conjuration abuse.

EDIT: seriously... what's with the autocensor on this [censored] board? >.>

Thnx BTB I will see how it goes

For some reason, I missed this >.>

So, yeah, I'm guessing it can be done. Doesn't stop the fact that I have no clue HOW, but I'm guessing it can be.

Would it be dependent on MWSE, or no?

Bump.

Or I may just PM Fliggerty, since he seems like he'd be the go-to man for this.

Blasphemy :hehe:. (though to be serious, I'm sure he knows more about MWSE and similar than I do)

Technical stuff:
The script fragment Fliggerty posted earlier should certainly work as far as it goes. The problems start to arise when you add in all the fortifications/curses/damages/drains/abilities... to screw with things - not to mention scripted changes by other mods. GCD handles this by keeping track of a character's natural skill values from the beginning of the game, then using a scripting trick using player->modskillname to detect whether increases are natural increases or magical. Once you know the natural skill value, you can then use some other tricks to limit the natural value to, say, 40 or 70, while preserving any magical fortification.

This stuff is explained in Morrowind Scripting For Dummies 9 from pages 113 to 116. It's not entirely perfect, but it works most of the time - and the vanilla system isn't without its bugs either. Once you know the base value of a skill, restricting it to 40 or 70 using modskillname and setskillname as described there shouldn't be too hard.

An alternative method would be to do what Madd leveler does, and assume that any skill increase of 1 is a natural increase, and that other increases can be ignored. In theory this could go wrong a lot, but in practice spell-effects and mods very rarely (never?) increase skills by only one point, so it works pretty well. So you could just check whether the skill is over 40 or 70, and then modskill down by one every time you detect an increase of a single point. This wouldn't be perfect, since characters who'd reached 70 through a magical fortification would be kept to 70. If they were wearing a fortifying item, they could remove it, gain some skill, then reapply it - but that doesn't work if it's a curse/ability.


Of course MWSE might be able to handle things properly - I'm not sure. One aspect to watch out for there is that a function to detect the base value of a skill might not include any ability bonus; that differs from the modstat-based detection method above, which doesn't distinguish any ability bonus from the base stat value. This might make things easier/harder, but it's something to be aware of (it might not be true anyway - but I think it was a few years back for the attribute detection functions).

That's about it on that front - I can't really say more than is already in MSFD and/or the explanations in GCD scripts (Gals_Sk_Acrobatics might be worth a look). These were written back when I knew what I was talking about, and hadn't forgotten a load of stuff.



Compatibility between BTBGI and GCD:
There's little that strikes me as obviously problematic (I haven't looked at BTBGI in any detail). The changes to level increase GMSTs (the ilevel... and similar) could cause trouble if they've all been adjusted - i.e. both the value required for a level increase, and the amount gained for a skill increase. If both have been changed, you'd get conventional level increases alongside GCD level increases, which isn't good. Fixing this should be pretty simple for anyone who can open the construction set - just don't use BTB's changes to these GMSTs. If the total required for a level increase hasn't been altered from 10, there shouldn't be any trouble - GCD sets this to 32000 for this reason.

I've seen something about a birthsign script in places, which seems to have people worried about compatibility. I'd guess it's not an issue, but I can't say for sure without knowing what that script(s) does - what does it do? GCD ought to work with most alterations to birthsigns. Scripted stuff could potentially conflict though.

GCD is written to adapt to different starting attribute values, so there shouldn't be an issue there. Mmost calculations are done by comparing a starting attribute value to the average of all the starting attribute values. So if BTBGI reduces all starting attribute values, while maintaining some variety, there shoudn't be any real problem.

Changing the governing attributes of acrobatics and hand-to-hand shouldn't cause any trouble - GCD will basically just ignore it. Physical skills already have an impact on all physical attributes with GCD, so the standard governing attributes are already 'wrong' in some sense.



Some thoughts on the hard-skill-limits vs soft-limits vs no-limits debate:
Mostly I agree with BTB's take on things. I can see an argument for hard limits, but I still prefer soft ones on balance - at least in a GCD-like context.

One important point to note on the soft limits in GCD is that while it's always possible to increase any skill, it's much faster to increase major skills than misc skills. This means that achieving god-like misc skills isn't simply a question of player patience - it's a question of priority. Certainly a player could always increase his misc skills further, but if the choice is between spending a few hours to increase a major skill by 5 points, or a misc skill by 1 point, most sane players are going to go for the 5 points - at least until their major skills become extremely high. On top of that, increases in skills translate into attribute increases, and a character's best attributes increase much more readily. This means that even once increasing the major skill is just as hard as the misc (at a much higher value), each point gained in a major skill will result in a greater increase in attributes. Major skill increases also have a significantly larger impact on PC health. So while it's possible for a player to increase all misc skills to high level, it'd largely be a waste of his time - in all but a few cases, he'd do much better by increasing major skills further. [counter-intuitive increases of endurance-related skills being an unfortunate exception, admittedly]

The numbers I used for the default version of GCD aren't as harsh as I would personally advocate: I wanted to provide a default version that would give the majority of people something they were happy with. I'd personally prefer settings that had significant skill slowdown kick in sooner - e.g. after 40 rather than 60. I'd also personally prefer a somewhat harsher rate of slowdown - so in practice, getting a misc skill beyond 60 would be near impossible. There's info on doing this in the GCD readme, so anyone who wants things to be harsh can have them that way.

One of my main objections to hard caps isn't the fact that they're harsh, but rather that they serve to remove variety (compared to soft-but-harsh caps). In the same way that the 100 limit makes all characters eventually the same, hard caps at 40 and 70 will leave all characters with a given major/minor/misc skill setup the same. Certainly it's an improvement over 100-in-everything, but I think it's far from ideal. I think it's right that a character's initial setup should have a great impact, including some harsh restrictions, but I'd want the way he acts in the game world to have an impact too - even in the very long term.

That said, I'd point out that GCD isn't my ideal solution - it's just the best I could do. Ideally I'd have included skill atrophy too - but based on skill increases, rather than on time. I'm not keen on time-based atrophy, since Morrowind isn't a time-based game in almost any other sense. In a game with time pressure throughout (a good thing), I think time-based skill atrophy would be appropriate, but for Morrowind, I don't think it's the best way. I think I'd like a system that removed say 1/50 of a point from every skill, each time any skill was increased by a point (or an average of around 1/50 - perhaps less for related skills to the one increased). This way you'd be losing 27/50 of every skill increase, and your skills would change to fit your approach, and remain varied without becoming godlike. Of course you could increase the proportion of atrophy as the character's total skill count increased, so at some point you might be losing as much as say 48/50 of each point - so your actions would no longer be making you significantly more powerful, but rather focusing your skill into the areas you were actively using.

I didn't do the atrophy thing, since by the time I thought of it, it wouldn't work with the rest of GCD without significant reworking. It's a thought as an alternative to a hard cap though. E.g. you could use something similar to the above, but have atrophy be significantly 'faster' for misc skills than for minors/majors. You could have each increase by one point to a skill result in a tiny decrease to major skills (e.g. 1/100), a small decrease for minors (e.g. 1/40 to 1/60) and a significant decrease for miscs (e.g. 1/25 to 1/40). That way you'd ensure that no-one could raise a significant number of misc skills high without an absurd amount of effort, but you'd keep some dynamism and variety, rather than having the character sheet end up looking like 40, 100, 40, 40, 70, 40, 100, 70, 40, 40, 40..., which is a little lacking in charm.

Just a thought anyway.

Ah, the man himself! I've been waiting a long time to talk to you, Galsiah.

I think your ideas for skill atrophy based on progression make quite a bit of sense, actually... I like it a lot, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

As for the birthsign remover script, I sent an email to one of your old addresses explaining it:

Anyways, I created a mod called BTB's Game Improvements, and people are always asking me about any compatibility issues between it and your mod. Specifically, my mod has a script which removes your character's birthsign just before you level up, and then adds it back again right afterward (the purpose being that it allows birthsign stat boosts to extend past 100). I've heard a lot of reports about general wonkiness, but nothing solid, so I figured I'd go straight to the source and ask the man himself.

I want to write a more intelligent, thought-out reply to your post that was obviously also well thought-out, but I just got home from work and don't really have it in me right now >.<

I see. Well then the birthsign removal script should certainly be unnecessary with GCD - so ideally it'd make sense not to have it running if GCD is running. I guess it could cause some issues, depending on how it's triggered. In particular, level increases with GCD won't generally happen after 10 increases of major/minor skills, so if e.g. you were testing for level increase based on that, then re-adding a birthsign based on the player's level increasing, things could go wrong. You might then remove the birthsign early, and only have it return quite a bit later when GCD decides that player level should increase. But quite possibly you're not doing things that way anyway.

As for the impact on an attribute of removing and re-adding the birthsign, I don't think that should cause much trouble, if any. I would have thought that the worst case scenario is that the player's attribute wouldn't return to its elevated level, and might require restoration.

If users have reported issues, the safest thing would be not to have that script running when GCD is present. You can check for GCD by declaring any of GCD's global variables in your esp, then checking a bit later to see that it isn't equal to zero. There's a specific global in GCD for this purpose, but I've forgotten what it is, and it doesn't seem to be mentioned in the readme - it'll be something like Gals_Chardev_Present or similar, presumably a short, and will be set to 1 soon after GCD is activated.

Not sure if it helps, but this is the script:





I'll try to pass that along... particularly to the folks in the GCD bug report thread.

Again, I'm very interested in the idea you had for skill atrophy. I think that if it's done right, it'll be a much better alternative to what I was thinking. If you were looking to collaborate (or just let me ride on your coattails, hey), please keep me in mind, 'eh?

Amen. Glad that the expert on the matter showed up here. After all, my attempt at a cap removing mod was essentially a failure (though to CMA a bit I blame MWE. )

Good to see you around Galsiah. :twothumbs:

I don't think that script should cause any significant problems. I can't remember exactly what happens when ability-based fortifications are removed/added, but if it doesn't cause problems without GCD, I don't think it should cause them with it. Of course it's still unnecessary when GCD is present, but I wouldn't have thought it'd matter.

On the atrophy thing, while it'd be interesting to try it, I have quite a bit of other stuff I really ought to be getting on with - and I haven't done any Morrowind modding in years. I don't think it would present many real problems - it's mostly just detecting skill increases, some maths in scripts, and the occasional player->modskill -1. It would need to record all the PC's skill values to start with. That shouldn't be hard in most cases, and easy for new games. The only case I can think of in which it'd be tricky would be adding the mod to a game in progress where the PC has skill fortifications that can't be removed. In that case you'd need to use the modskill trick to detect the base skill. It'd also be necessary to test which skills were major/minor/misc. I don't think there's an automatic way to do this for a game in progress - it'd probably be necessary for the player to set things up manually through some messageboxes. For a new game, it might be possible to check which skills are major/minor - or the alternative would be to do what GCD does, and base calculations on the starting skill values, rather than their major/minor/misc nature. This is easier, and keeps a bit more variety, since it makes combat/stealth/magic specialism and any racial skill bonuses more meaningful.

So long as there weren't a load of false positive tests for skill increases, the other main issue would be to get the maths right. That shouldn't be too hard, so long as it's made certain that the total skill loss for any skill increase is always less than one point - or the PC would start losing more skill than he gained, which isn't particularly satisfying. Maybe a reasonable way to balance this would be to have skill loss per skill point gained be directly proportional to the PC's total skill. E.g. if he starts with around 400 skill, you might have him lose a total of around 400/1600 points for every point gained (i.e. 0.25), and by the time he reached 1600 total skill, he'd be losing 1600/1600 for each point gained, so no longer gaining any total skill. Maybe 1600 isn't ideal, but I suppose something between 1000 and 2000 would make reasonable sense (clearly 2700 would allow the PC to get to 100 in everything eventually, which is dull). Your initial suggestion of 100/70/40 limits would tally with 1530 (i.e. 5*100 + 5*70 + 17*40), but you'd need to bear in mind that increase in total skill would be slowing down dramatically well before that.
Making the right amount of atrophy had been distributed to each skill would be a little fiddly - in particular, since you wouldn't want a skill to decrease at all when it itself were increasing, the precise amount to decrease for each skill would depend on whether you were increasing a major/minor/misc skill. E.g. if you were subtracting 0.01 from each major skill, and 0.03 from each misc, then whether you'd just increased a major/misc skill would leave you with one more 0.03, or one more 0.01 respectively. I guess this could quite reasonably just be ignored though - compensating for it would be fiddly, and it'd really make little difference.

Another thought would be to adjust skill atrophy rates according to a weighted skill total, rather than an absolute total. E.g. you could multiply atrophy by [(0.5 * major_skill_total) + (0.75 * minor_skill_total) + (1.0 * misc_skill_total)] / 1200. The point of this would be to allow a character to make larger increases to major/minor skills, than to misc skills, before they start to slow his development down significantly. If you multiplied by an unweighted total, a PC could eventually decide to neglect his major skills entirely, and increase five misc skills to 100 in their place. While the increased atrophy would mean that he couldn't neglect these misc skills for long without them dropping, it'd still be quite possible for a character who started out as a pure mage, to switch to being a pure fighter. If you use a weighted total, this approach is no longer effective: with the above weightings, getting 5 misc skills to 50 causes the same atrophy increase as getting 5 major skills to 100, so neglecting major skills to switch to miscs would be an ineffective strategy.
Of course it would still be possible e.g. for a pure fighter to eventually train one misc magic skill to 100, but this would come at a more significant cost than any major/minor skill at 100.

Such a mod could conflict with GCD if things weren't handled carefully, but it'd be pretty simple to keep things running smoothly. I think the only necessary adjustment would be to put a slight delay between detecting a skill increase, and actually doing something about it. If the skill has still increased after a short delay, it'd be safe to assume that the increase was intended. If the skill gets reduced again almost immediately, it's likely that GCD (or another mod) has overridden the increase, so an atrophy mod shouldn't take it into account.


...anyway.... much as I like thinking about this, I have quite a bit of other stuff I really ought to be getting on with :bolt:

Frankly, I'd be satisfied with your blessings to have your name attached to the project. I think it would make many players more willing to give it a try.

I just reinstalled for the first time in ages, so maybe I will have a tinker with the atrophy thing after all. :shrug:

One aspect I hadn't considered earlier was the impact of significant atrophy on PC level. First it'll mean that with standard levelling mechanics (i.e. 10 maj/min increases for a level), the PC will generally be significantly less powerful: those 10 increases will tend to have resulted in at least a few decreases. Second, it'll mean that there's no limit to PC level: once the rate of atrophy rises to the rate of skill gain, the PC would keep gaining levels without overall skill gains. Probably the largest problem here is that the PC's health would grow arbitrarily large, without the player meaning to exploit anything (e.g. with jail tricks). Of course he'd also be able to 100 all his attributes, which is hardly ideal. That's not a direct issue for anyone using GCD, but it'd be difficult to avoid similar problems with attribute increases. You'd ideally want to tell GCD that a skill has decreased, and have it undo the attribute increases due to the previous increase, but sadly GCD doesn't understand how to do this.

Anyway, there are various possible approaches, but I don't think there's a clean/ideal solution. I.e. you'd probably want to have each loss of a major/minor skill point subtract one from the progress towards a level increase, but that's not possible (at least without script extenders ???). Balor's levelling mod (which has atrophy) deals with this to a large extent by making level increases less significant - IIRC, you only get 1 point attribute increases on a level increase, but gain attribute points from related skill gains. Importantly, you also lose those skill-gain-based attribute points when you lose related skill points. This approach reduces the problem, but doesn't entirely solve it.

Incidentally, it is possible to alter the PC's level in a script - it just requires an annoyingly large if/elseif/endif block, and a specific Player->Setlevel line for every level you want to cater for. [although getting the altered level to show up on the stat sheet before a save/reload requires a trick with menutest; that causes a temporary HUD disappearing act, but it can be remedied through an invisible NPC forcegreeting-then-quit hack (which I don't entirely trust, since some people have reported sneak-attack problems with GCD)]

I suppose you could do a level-reduction script without huge difficulty. You'd just need a way to undo any increases in attributes/health from the last level increase. That could be accomplished in pretty similar style to the birthsign-removal script - i.e. you'd make a note of the PC's level, attribute values, health etc. when he sleeps, and check them again when he's awake and out of menumode. You'd then record the change in attributes, health... and reduce them by that amount if the PC drops to the lower level again. Then you'd have a levelling script that checked the PC's actual level against what you calculate that it should be (based on skill atrophy...), and reduce it if it's ever too high. I guess there are things that could go wrong here though - e.g. if the PC goes to sleep with attributes that are temporarily drained/fortified, the attribute calculations could go wrong. A simpler approach might be to have each level give only x1 attribute modifier, and then have level loss mean a loss of 1 point in the PC's highest three attributes. Not ideal, but perhaps less error-prone.
Of course this should all be easier in combination with something like GCD (no need to work around the standard levelling process), but it's not built for atrophy.


As ever, I know little about what script extenders have to offer in this area - perhaps there's a way to adjust progress-towards-next-level via script....

To me, the obvious solution to the attribute issue is to attach attribute atrophy to the skill atrophy.

As for the reduced health cap, I imagine that outside support would probably be the best idea. Since I'm *hoping* that most players use some sort of retroactive health mod like Talrivian's State-Based HP, I assume that he could modify the script to slow down the health gains per level after a certain point.

Sure, but to keep things in balance it'd be necessary to control/monitor both the increases and decreases to attributes. Depending on a player's levelling mod setup, he might be getting anywhere from around 3 to 15 attribute points per level. It's a good idea to have attributes drop with skill decreases, but it's not clear how much they should drop. One approach would be to emulate Balor again, and reduce all level-up attribute multipliers to 1. Then you'd know that each level gave the PC exactly 3 attribute points, so it'd be simpler to judge an appropriate rate of attribute atrophy.

I suppose another reasonable idea would be to balance things similarly to what I suggested before for skill-atrophy-rates. I.e. you base the rate of attribute loss per skill loss on the current total of the PC's base attributes. This way it doesn't matter so much how fast the PC gains attributes, so long as the rate he'll lose them is very slow when he's got e.g. 250 in total, and very fast when he's got e.g. 650.

I guess the best overall approach might be to reduce the level-up-multipliers to 1, then have extra attribute increases based on skill increases, and decreases based on skill decreases. But rather than having the skill-based-increases match the skill-based-decreases exactly, you'd slowly raise the rate of decrease (by basing it on PC attribute total). The aim would be that once the PC has a very high attribute total, the higher atrophy rate would compensate for the +3 attributes gained with level increase, and the PC's attribute total would stop increasing - before the point where he had 100 in everything.

Yeah - this is simple if players would use an adjusted form of that. Reducing/stopping health gains on level increase shouldn't be any trouble.


I'm not sure how all this would work with other levelling/uncapping mods though. There's no worry about getting it to work with Balor's, since it'd be doing much the same thing in a different way. With GCD, it'd take a bit of adjustment. I'm not sure how it'd work with Madd Leveler.

I think if you spend too much time worrying about how your mod will play with other mods, you'll drive yourself crazy.

I'd say it's safe to assume that people who use your mod won't also be using other mods that do the same thing >.>

Anyways, attribute-wise, I'm sure there's some way to have atrophy actually count against the level up multipliers?

Directly? I don't think so - unless there are sneaky script-extender ways to do this. Unless something has changed in the last few years, I'm pretty sure I'd know about it if there were a way. There should be ways to work-around / compensate for any unwarranted level increases, but I don't know a way to adjust when they occur on-the-fly. If there were a way, I'm sure there would be various mods that took advantage of it by now - as far as I know, there aren't any. GCD only copes with this problem by throwing out the conventional level-up system and starting from scratch, while most other levelling mods just put up with the level-up menu as it stands.

Of course you can go too far with worrying about compatibility, but it's certainly an issue - particularly when the type of players that'll like a mod tend to be the types of players who'll also like a mod it conflicts with. E.g. take BTBGI and GCD: each has a fairly similar, or at least synergistic, ethos, so you get a significant number of users who'd be worried by incompatibility. An atrophy mod will tend to get used by players who aren't keen on the way their PC develops over the course of the game under the vanilla rules. Many of those players will be using some levelling mod already, for the same reasons. While a newer atrophy mod would deal with similar issues, it wouldn't do everything that e.g. GCD does, so many players wouldn't like to use only one or the other. Alternatively, making an atrophy mod that did cover as much ground as GCD would likely put off those people who aren't keen on GCD (not everyone is, alarmingly enough).

It's pretty clear that the ideal approach would be for an atrophy system to work independently, so that it can fit ok with vanilla/GCD/ML/.... Of course that makes things more fiddly, but altering levelling mechanics is inherently fiddly anyway, since there's not really any clean approach. Bethesda never intended TESCS for core-gameplay-system alteration, and it shows.


As I say, in some ways it'll be significantly simpler to get an atrophy mod working with GCD than as an adjustment to the vanilla system, since there's no need to screw around with the standard levelling mechanics. I'll have a look at how easy/difficult/error-prone that'd be.

As a stand-alone levelling mod, the cleanest approach might also be to go the GCD route in throwing out the vanilla levelling system entirely. That's not too hard to do, once the approach is understood. It can mean coping with some annoying special-cases though (e.g. PC vampirism needs to be considered). Once you do that, you can decide on whatever rules for level/health/magicka/attribute increase/decrease you like. Without doing that, you'd either need some fiddly (but doable) compensation for standard attribute increases, or to resign yourself to eventual rows of 100s (or rows of zeros and angry emails if you get the sums wrong ).

How would you want skill increase/decrease to translate into level/attribute/health/magicka increase/decrease in an ideal world Morrowind? What sort of characters/playstyles would you hope for it to create/encourage?

Yeah, I'd say you hit the nail on the head right there.

I suppose, then, that the best recourse would be to raise the level-up requirements for attribute gains. That seems like the compromise-y enough solution.

Except it would be really prone to abuse, now that I think of it.



At this point, I'm open to suggestions. I will say that although I don't use GCD now, I probably would if a good atrophy system is put into place.



That's kind of an open-ended question...

As far as magicka and endurance gains go, I imagine that the vanilla methods actually will work out just fine on their own. You talk about compatibility, and I'm assuming anyone concerned about the health gains would probably be using a retroactive health mod. I talked to Talrvian, the guy who just rewrote Hotfusion's State-Based HP from scratch, and pitched the idea to him to lower health gains after certain levels.

I think I've already spoken my mind on the attribute gains and the rest of the question for the most part. I can't really come up with a response that doesn't repeat anything I've already said.

Then again, I'm tired. I'm sorry that all of my responses to your extremely long and well-thought out posts have been simple replies I've typed up whenever I found the chance, but I've been on shift at work lately, so my brain no worky >.< I really do appreciate all the work you've put into this thus far, though.

I also just realized that I can set the skill growth rate of misc skills insanely high so that training is the only feasible way to increase them >.>

Just realize that to set the skill growth rate of a misc skill so that sold training is the only feasible way I can increase them is highly insane >.>

Oh, I know. I was thinking out loud more than anything.

That, and I'm actually quite insane.

On the atrophy question, where do you stand on synergistic increases? E.g. while it makes sense that an increase in Blunt might trigger some loss in say Speechcraft and Illusion, it makes less sense for it to trigger a loss in Axe or Longblade. While there are certainly differences between the skills, all three involve swinging a weapon and hitting stuff with it. Similarly with Merchantile increases triggering losses of Speechcraft, Athletics increases triggering Acrobatics losses etc. etc.

Personally, I think an atrophy system would be a good excuse/motivation/counter-balance to introducing a synergy system - i.e. when you increase a skill, you'd lose a small amount in unrelated skills, but gain a small amount in closely related skills. Given that most skills will be unrelated to a given increasing skill, it would always be possible to make overall reductions greater than overall increases, so that the total increase in raising a skill were still somewhere between 0 and 1 points. One probable advantage in doing this, is that you could have the atrophy/synergy system make a character quite dynamic right from the start, without needing to subtract an annoyingly high amount of skill overall.

Another aspect I think makes sense, is that you could put in some common-sense synergies, so that a master with e.g. 100 in heavy armour doesn't usually turn into a complete novice when he puts on medium armour without any direct training. E.g. you might have each skill increase to heavy armour increase medium armour by 0.4, light armour by 0.2, and reduce everything else by smaller margins. Similarly, you'd have medium/light armour increases give small increases to the other two. This way you'd rarely get to the incongruous situation where a character is a master in heavy armour, and can't use medium armour at all.
Of course if he has heavy armour as a major, and medium armour as a misc, medium would atrophy much faster, and points in medium would contribute more to overall atrophy rate - so it'd remain easier and more effective to preserve heavy at a hight value, than medium. There'd still be some reasonable crossover though, so while being an expert in one and a complete novice in another might still be possible (after some atrophy), it'd be unusual.

Good point. There's two ways to "link" together different skills: type and governing attribute. It would make sense for both of them to factor in.

For example, raising axe would have no effect on long sword, as both are strength-based combat skills. It would have a small effect on spear, as it is an endurance-based combat skill, and on Acrobatics, which is a strength-based stealth skill. It would have the largest effect on, say, Illusion, with which Axe shares nothing in common.



Good idea, actually. And I think it fits with what I was saying earlier, too... sort of. Heavy Armor and Medium Armor are closely related, but Light Armor is much different.

I think I could help with this project if you guys want. I think the Health Cap would be very easy to implement into my mod. I am still new to Morrowind Scripting, but it feels very natural to me, and I understand many of the things mentioned in this thread, and I even thought about and noticed many of the things mentioned by Fliggerty, BTB, and Galsiah.

I liked your post, BTB, about RPGs, and I agree with you 100% and think it was eloquently written.

The problem with video games, in general, I believe, is a matter of PHYSICS.

Games make an attempt to copy real life, in some form or fashion. It's the nature of the beast. A simulation.

The inherent problem with BALANCE and ABUSE is not so much about player CHOICES as I think it is about player limits.

In real life, people have to obey the simple Law of the Conservation of Energy and Matter. There is a problem, however, that I have noticed for many, many years, ever since I was a kid when I started playing the first video games on my Sega Genesis:

Games never follow this law, and in any environment in which a character can "develop", this will ALWAYS cause problems and opportunities for abuse.

Just take Morrowind as our golden example. Look at the following abuses of the basic laws of physics:

1) You never eat, or drink, and thus have an infinite supply of internal energy.

2) If you rest or sleep, your mysterious Internal Generator of Infinite Energy conveniently refills your Magicka, Health, and Fatigue supplies.

3) None of your abilities atrophy. In nature, as the saying goes, "If you don't use it, you lose it." If your body doesn't consider something useful (i.e. you don't use it all the time), it will relocate the allocated resources to the thing that you ARE using the most.

So, in conclusion of all of this, balancing a game, built around player choices, basically comes down to:

Mimicking the wonderful, amazing system that nature has been providing to us as an example since the beginning of time.

I truly believe that this is the next step in the evolution of game development, and you can start practicing the utilization of this in Morrowind.