Well, okay, I know it's possible. The only question is whether or not it's going to have to involve MWSE or the code patch.

I'm looking to set caps on the levels to which you can raise miscellaneous and minor skills. This is to prevent the behavior in which people set skills they never intend to use as major/minor skills to screw with the leveling system, plus it also helps prevent cheesing large stat multipliers by training miscellaneous skills.

I was thinking something along the lines of a level 40 cap for misc skills and 70 for minors. This way, you still can use them, but you'll probably never be good enough with them to run a character solely off of misc skills.

While I did this in Oblivion on my 360 so that I could see how high a level I could get, there was never a good reason to do it in morrowind since its so easy to just train up levels even after you are "maxxed" in all of your skills.

But to each their own I guess, personally I like being able to max everything out, because some days I feel like being a mage, summoning the elements to fell my foes, some like necromancer, leading an army of soulless minions to do my bidding, others like a rogue, sneaking around backstabbing my enemies, and even others like a barbaric warrior just charging head first into danger with nothing but my sword or trusty battle axe between me and certain DEATH!!!

But yea, I guess I could see it being a good thing to do to make people specialize, its just not something I'd care to use, same reason I don't use GCD......

Part of my point is that the game has far less replay value if you have the ability to max out every skill regardless of what type of character you play.

I believe that GCD does a decent job at making characters more specialized in the long term. However your idea of keeping minor and misc skills lower than major skills is interesting. It would seem that by doing that would sacrifice the ongoing development of a character..... actually I think it would be cool if your idea was incorporated into GCD, keeping all of the features already in GCD but maintaining misc and minor skills a a certain percentile below the average of your major skills, or something along those lines.

Morrowind has the highest replay value for any game that I have ever played...

That still does not invalidate my point, no?

i wouldn't say it invalidates your point, i just think your point is more a matter of opinion. personally, i always enjoyed being able to be good at anything, in fact, that's the approach i took with not only every playthrough of morrowind, but daggerfall and oblivion as well.

now, one thing i don't think i'd mind along those lines was if skills degraded from lack of use as they would in real life. for example if you take the jack of all trades approach like that and level up a bunch then just stop using say, magic for a while, then your magical skills would gradually lower over time like they do while you're in prison..... however, i don't think that would really work too well because it could also potentially lead to ridiculously high overall levels

I think what I was trying to say may have been lost, my point is, I know that I personally, am a perfectionist, and therefore I won't use the mod because I want to be able to max out and make "perfect" my character. I feel like I am the type of person that you are trying to appeal this mod to though, since I don't have the self control to not perfect my character, but its that same lack of control that will keep me from using a mod like this.....I'm not saying the mod is a bad Idea, far from it, and I'm sure some people will be glad to have it available to them, I just figure that the few that would use a mod like this probably already have enough self control to not really need it.

Of course, I'm also a rambling idiot, so don't mind me.

I suppose you could tweak GCD to lower the (soft) caps from the default 60+0.8*(starting skill). No attribute multipliers to cheese here (although I sometimes find myself training certain skills to increase endurance and maximum health).

Actually, it does.

Well no, not really. He said he wants to imporve Morrowind's replayablity. Just because the replayablity is very high doesn't mean it can't be improved. I like the idea myself.

The difficulty with your idea is determining which skills and are minor, major, and misc. The easiest way is to see which ones are the highest as soon as chargen completes. But if adding it to an existing game, there isn't any way to tell. So you would have to rely on player input to tell you which ones they are.

Capping the actual skills is simple:

if ( player->GetAcrobatics > 50 )     player->SetAcrobatics 50endif

Of course we would have to get into the complexities of checking for damage/drain/fortify etc. And that's where the real big difficulties come into play....

Hmm... so, if what Fliggerty says is correct, then this is something that could actually be incorporated into my own mod.

What do you mean "IF what Fliggerty says is correct?" :meh:

I think GCD largely gets to where you want to go already.
From Galsiah's HTML readme
"Slows down skill gain by making skills exponentially harder to increase once they pass a certain threshold. This threshold is based on initial score in a skill, so that major skills slow down at higher values than minor / misc. skills. "

I'm sure that the rate at which minor skills increase could easlly be reduced even more by simply lowering the point at which the slowdown kicks in .

I have a vested interest here I want to play with your recomended collection of mods, but find it really hard to play without GCD in place, so I would love to see them become more compatable

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect at its finest. Lol :celebration:

BTB and I have already been down a path of disagreement on player restriction in another thread, and I have little desire to do a complete repeat in another thread. That being said...

I think that it takes all kinds to make an interesting world, and I believe I see why BTB and I disagree on almost everything that has come up, and that in itself is interesting. To me at least.

Most games are defined by their restrictions on player actions. From Baldur's Gate to Diablo, the players path is narrowly laid out, and there is little choice but to follow that path because there is nothing else to do in the game. That is why I love Morrowind... The restrictions are few, and the player is free to pursue the path that makes him/her happy, and that path is often as much of a surprise to the player as to anyone else.

For instance, I have a couple of friends who are the "manly man" type who, in Morrowind, spend far more time practicing interior decoration on their homes than out exploring and bashing skulls. My first great experice with Morrowind that lit me on fire so to speak occurred in vivec. I was on the top level and decided for what ever reason to levitate my way to the silt strider.

I had just barely passed the foreign quarter when the spell ran out, and I found myself diving into the narrow stretch of water between the Foreign Quarter and the North shore. What a rush! I nearly fell out of my chair, my heart was beating fast, and I actually had a touch of adrenaline reaction...

To get to what this has to with this thread, my character was not an acrobat, and acrobatics was not a major skill. Because I had built up the acrobatics skill so I could jump up on rocks and so forth, my character survived the fall into the water. So, high diving has become a regular sport for me, though it has never been like that first time...

The point is that Morrowind is the only game I know of that such an action would even be possible, let alone surviving it. It's all about Law vs Chaos in the end. Some of us perhaps like matilija are chaotic in nature, relishing the varied experiences provided by having the freedom to do as we please. build a skill, or don't build a skill. Enchant or don't, be a barbarian and be able to use an enchanted weapon, build max abilities beyond the norm, whatever.

some of us are like BTB and want to be the embodiment of law and enforce restrictions on actions and abilities and ensuring that the player doesn't play the system. If we were playing a multi-player game, I might agree that such restrictions are needed to prevent unfair advantages being taken, but that is not the case in Morrowind, and I personally don't see the need to be baby sat by mods I install. No offense BTB, it's just a different world view that separates us.

I like rules that restrict the choices available to me so that I can use my Ingenuity to find my way around them morrowind Leveling, Alchemy, Sneak, & Conjugation to a lesser extent are so easy to abuse that I found that the game rapidly got really boring. I,ve read on here that you can just open up the console & give yourself as much gold as you want or immortality, what ever turns you on but I'm not about to do that.

But if you find yourself as I did when I first played morrowind, very rapidly being totally outgunned by the game & begin to search round for an alternative & discover the rule of 5.

I then started to use it. Thats when the corruption starts :rolleyes: before you realize it is happening, you begin to don heavy armour & stand waist deep in water :whistling: , letting slaughterfish attack you for hours of game time to get your endurance up,Jumping off tall buildings to get your agility up, bouncy bouncy to do more of the same, creating characters with none of their preferred skills as majors, never sleeping until the required 15 points are in the bag :wink_smile: . Its a slippery slope, you then find yourself making fortify intelingence potions swollowing them & making more stack, stack, stack.
I'm sure you all know the drill, next thing your standing down at the back of the mages guild with a small weight on your control key while you cook dinner or go to bed :sleep2:
(this is in the days before toggle sneak).
The end result of all this activity is that by level 20 or there abouts you have restore & Fortiy Health & magic potions (well there were a few traps with fortify health portions :hubbahubba: ) that would be enough to keep you alive for days of game time, your clothes fortify your Strength, Health, Magic et,al ,your armour & jewellery do more of the same you have a small army of conjugated helpers, no one can see you because your sneak skill is at 100 & you have a ring of chameleon ,& you have another item of jewellary that give you at least 10 points of levitate you are a god, nothing in the game can do you very much damage at all & any of the few that can you mob with creatures ,you are rich beyond averice & you are very, very, bored.

That was when I started to look for ways to curtail my freedom.
My first discvery was GCD. That removed the first step towards curruption. Then Super Adventurers that almost took fortify intelingence away & added some realy scary critters to the game L dones made sneaking something you had to work for & traps really scary, they could kill you & did quite often. I added a number of other Mods MCA the unarmoured fixes. Little fixes to stop you going to ghostgate & collecting the set of glass Armour. Ownership of all items in crates reducing the clutter & making it harder to steal, economy fixes Alchemy Fixes. The only thing I never found a fix for was conjugation you could still create far to many helpers to be good for you.

Oblivion fixed that, you can only have 1 ,that's probably to fixed. I stopped using conjugation at all in Oblivion, used the guards instead if I met something that was to much for me I ran like hell for the nearest guards :hubbahubba:

But I would still like to find a mod that would limit the number of conjugated helpers I can have. Well you can guess from this tirade which side of the fence I come down on.

conjugate - to undergo conjugation
conjugation - coupling: the act of pairing a male and female for reproductive purposes
:lmao:

I would try some self control, set yourself some limits and stick to it.

Well I don't think I've done any level of a game as much as Character Generation and Level 1 in Morrowind before - though for replayability Civ is hard to beat (have spent more hours in the past 2 years playing Civ Revolution on my DS than almost anything else)




Classic - would make a great epitaph




I love this forum

BTB - skill progression brings out the fight in most forum goers - I normally get blown away for saying I like playing vanilla levelling - stick with the thread - who knows what you might create or what ideas can be inspired from this debate - if nothing else some of us are getting some good laughs from the comments

The problems:
People train all their skills to max. Making themselves gods, breaking the realism/game.
People should have the right to master in any skill they devote their time.
People try to exploit skill progression by spending long times doing the same thing again and again.

For me the solution is pretty obvious.

Make it so untrained skills go down. Just like when you lose some skill points after serving time in prison. It is already a part of game mechanics.

People make themselves Gods or spend longperiods of times doing the same thing again and again. For me it's pretty obvious too... Who cares? It doesn't matter to me in the slightest what they do in their game, whether it's beating the unbeatable or making whoopee with MCA pros, I just don't care. I assume that if it's boring, repetitive, or too easy, they will change their style of play.

Who knows, maybe they are egomaniacs who get their kicks from being gods, eh?

Yes. This is true.

However...

Morrowind is not an action game. It is not Super Metroid, Mega Man 2/3, Contra, or any of the legendary games that exist in that genre. Morrowind is a role-playing game. And despite what people who develop or play games that were made in the last 10 years may tell you, role-playing games are not about action, nor are they about story.

They are about choices.

Granted, just about any good game will be about choices, but this is by far the most true for games that don't require reflexes or skill. And Morrowind's biggest problem is that any "major" choice presented to you is automatically moot, as all paths lead to the exact same eventual outcome. Regardless of any decision made about the development of your character (which is by far one of the most important set of choices in a role-playing game), the ultimate outcome will be a full set of maxed stats so long as you have either the slightest bit of patience or the slightest bit of gold (the latter, at least, is not that hard to come by).

For a choice to be valid as such, any benefit must come as the result of a sacrifice. Opting to increase your skills as a wizard must ultimately come at the expense of advancing in other areas, or else you're simply deciding which skills you want to increase first. In Morrowind, this is the case. Even your choices of major and minor skills - which should carry great consequences - are just glorified versions of the same concept. In fact, it makes even more sense to select skills you will never use as majors and minors, so that way you can advance in them without everything around you becoming stronger.

I come from a time when video games were designed... well, correctly. Let's turn to one of the more well-known examples: the original Final Fantasy. As with most role-playing games of the time, the most important decisions made came at the very beginning of the game when you chose your team. Four fighters? Great physical offense will come at the expense of a complete lack of magical offense and a near-total lack of magical defense. Four black mages? Awesome power, but your team can probably be taken down by a gentle breeze. Four red mages? Excellent balance, but you'll be unable to truly master any skill to the point of unleashing its full power. Four black belts? Wow, you must really hate yourself.

The lesson is that god-like power in any one area of the game would inevitably come at the cost of sacrificing an equal amount of power elsewhere. Such is the way of the world, and such is definitely the way of an interesting game.

Let's talk about one of my favorite games now: Might & Magic VII. Again, you select a party of four from nine classes at the outset of the game, which in turn sets the limits of the power your team will reach in various areas of expertise. Amongst veteran players of the game, one of the more popular teams is three sorcerers and a cleric, which is the direct equivalent of a white mage/black mage/black mage/black mage team from the above-mentioned Final Fantasy. And this team is popular for the very reason that the ultimate power it provides is the ability to mow down scores of opponents with the greatest of ease.

However, there is a good reason that this team is popular only with veterans of the game: it's incredibly difficult to play for anybody who is not very well-versed in the game. God-like power will come only as a reward for surviving long enough to obtain it, and thus the sacrifice one must make is equal to the benefits received. A much more popular team for new players is the standard Knight/Thief/Cleric/Sorcerer setup, which offers the greatest amount of balanced power, but will eventually become boring tho those who play it and desire to sacrifice more in order to earn more.

Here's another great example: SaGa 2 (known better to American audiences as "Final Fantasy Legend II). I know bringing up a third example of a game that, again, makes you select a team of four from the beginning seems excessive, but this one offers yet another unique perspective. In SaGa 2, each character type grows differently: humans grow from fighting battles and using better equipment, mutants can rely much more exclusively on battle experience alone due to their inherent powers, robots are purely the result of the equipment they use, and monsters are purely the result of the monsters you fight. Balancing these different growth types in your team is key, as a poorly-thought out one can easily lead to extreme difficulty advancing through the game.

But a veteran player can take a team that seems unbalanced or difficult to play and utilize it with great effect. Not a single game I play fails to end with me smashing my way through the endgame with an extremely overpowered team. And the sense of accomplishment I feel for doing so is, well, actually a sense of accomplishment. I feel it because my powers are the direct result of choices I've made in the development of my team rather than a simple level grind towards maxed-out stats. The decisions I made in developing my team are what led me to where I ended up, and different choices would have had far different results. A bad team in SaGa 2 cannot simply reach the same maximum potential as any other team simply as a result of continuing to play. In the worst case, their growth will become stymied almost entirely, thus forcing the player to start over.

Most people who read these little rants of mine think that I'm a) a hardass and B) living at least 20 years in the past, back when games were made to kick your ass and make you like it. And I can't really argue with either of those points. But what I will say is this: Morrowind is, unlike everything else that exists today, a great game. In fact, it has potential to be one of the best ever made. But, in order for it to do so, it must first overcome many of the hurdles that the absolute best before it already have. And playing like a game that was made well after the entire industry went down the crapper is by far the absolute worst handicap a game can have.

So, yeah...

Nice rant. I can argue a role-playing game can also become an action game depending on the playing style, I also understand the people who want to play the game action free. But Morrowind already gives both parties what they want, no? I play the game called Pro Evolution Soccer 6. It is ultimate combination of action, tactics, choice, player skill, character skill, simulation and game. I think it is possible to have it both ways. Don't condemn action from an RPG game.

Morrowind's FPS style is calling action aloud. From my point of view, the hit/miss mechanics is not a derivative of RPGness, it is part of the dramatic action.(which Oblivion lacks). Drama, combat in Morrowind can be frightening, boring, funny, epic, instant, long... shortly very dramatic. And it lacks all the proper miss animations but we still imagine the gaps.

But still you're with me right with fluent skill leveling?

I thought about it and I think, it would be nice to have skill promotions too.

Majors can become minors in time when abandoned for a long period of time. Minors can become misc, and miscs can raise to minors and minors to majors. That would add a new layer to things. Just a thought.

This mod's doing it but I haven't had the time to test it.
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=2699

It is nice, isn't it? Leveldown isn't really important as levelling is not important. I would bind quests to levels and introduce age effects via it. Live fast, die young.

That really wasn't the main point of my post, though. I'm not saying it shouldn't be an action game, but rather it isn't. And if you take away the concept of interesting decisions, then what's left is a very bad action game.



Seriously? 'cause I swear, I can SEE the dice rolling >.>



Not sure, really. I think it would be a bit too much of a pain in the ass to have skills atrophy over time. In fact, I think that it would encourage grinding far more than preventing it.