killing 1, or 1000 dragons will not help me make an iron sword.

No for me. Skill based level gains have been around since Daggerfall and they are one of the few things left in TES games that makes them different from other RPGs.

I remember the first time I played DF. I thought to myself, "Wow, gaining levels from doing what my character was built to do and not completing some arbitrary quest is really cool." It was refreshing then, and it could still be a great system if they just took better care of enemy levelling.

SO in New Vegas I can use energy guns and put all my points into sneak. I am now a master at sneak while never having used it.

Tell that to the people who have made nothing but 150 iron daggers, but can now create daedric weapons and armor.

Also, why would you bother putting points into something you never use? It's entirely possible for someone who never drives to buy a Land Rover, but why bother?

Because it helps them get a quest done, etc. As for the daggers, at least it's kind of close. It's not like saying someone got to go up in Smithing because they found a new location or brought someone food.

Counterpoint: One can easily go to a trainer and train something they never use.
Coherent logic isn't really the issue here - it's gameplay mechanics and overall experience.

Was new Vegas a good game to RP in?

Yeah, I went to a cultural center and signed up for a beginner's Japanese course. Had never spoken the language before that. Your counterpoint is fairly weak.

I was actually thinking about a system that is a hybrid of TES and Fallout. Where you work at skills to level up and upon leveling you get 2-3 skill points to put into whatever you want (I guess the actual number would be based on tested results, etc.) so that your combat ability isn't so drastically affected. You could level just your smithing, but improve your combat skills by a little bit. Or the other way around if you didn't want to smith.

A problem people might have with this system is that you wouldn't ever have to use some skills for them to reach 100. So placing a cap on how far you can level it up through the on-level bonus would probably be a good solution. Thoughts?

As it stands right now I'm kind of against both as it stands.

What in my opinion should be done is re-integrate the old stats or perhaps the special system back into TES, because yeah, even if according to todd howard they were trickle downs and magic intelligence and blah blah blah....it tied the skills together and if done properly that can alleviate a lot of the problems cropping up now.

just a basic basic example. You have 1 hand attached to strength, and you also have blacksmithing attached to strength. You lvl blacksmithing, sure you aren't getting any combat experience from it, but it is building up your strength stat, which in turn increases the damage you do with 1 handed weapons. And even for the most jaded of RPer you can justify it in a lore sense "My character is spending time at the forge, which requires the use of tools like a hammer. It not only beefs him up, but gives him an intellectual knowledge of how to strike a blow as well as some more practical applications of weapons."

Yeah, the old system wasn't perfect and was grindy...but you didn't have nearly as many people feeling helpless or being punished for playing the game how they wanted.

That's pretty much the exact systems that were in place for morrowind and oblivion.

I'm split, so I didn't vote. I prefer learning by doing, but it allows grinding. There is no grinding anything in FO3/FONV. Maybe I'd prefer a mix, where you gain XP from completing quests, and you can assign skill points to skills you've actually used.

Weren't you just increasing attributes and not skills? Or am I crazy?

*edit* Yeah that was attribute leveling, not skills. I meant just skills, since that is the system in place besides perks.

Well, no. It gives you the intellectual knowledge of how to use a hammer on a very still piece of metal.

I can see it helping - slightly - with damage - but the removal of attributes is not the same topic as which experience system would be better.

Edit: not sure why, but my computer decided popping in a random 'sp' at the top would be a good thing. Corrected that.

I just shouldn't have to be afraid of working on my smithing, because if I do improve it too much I'll get wasted by monsters that are too powerful. I would like to see New Vegas's world scaling instead of it's experience thing. I like the way I level in Skyrim just not how because I level a utility skill monsters come to overpower me. If that makes any sense.

It was clearly stated that it was a very basic example. And the stats system is relevant to the topic because FO3/NV used the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system, which was also stated in my post. Leveling was tied to your stats on the back-end, and stats WERE tied to your skills. In Skyrim, for all intents and purposes perks ARE our skills.

Nope. I prefer the TES way. If people feel the need to grind, that's their loss. Level-scaling is the real problem.

I don't think I stated my idea clearly then. What I mean is that with the current system, upon leveling up you get a few bonus points to put into whatever skills you want along with perks. Attributes aren't part of the system in Skyrim, which is what I meant.

But the topic is whether "learn by doing" or "gain XP for kills/quests" is a better way to increase your character level.


Having stats, having a mechanic to increase them..... those topics are independent of the topic. (Oblivion XP mod, for instance. You earn XP for things like in a regular non-TES RPG. When you get enough XP, you gain a level. You then get several stat points to allocate to your stats and several skill points to put in your skills. Same end result as normal Oblivion - gain a level, gain some stats. But the method of HOW you gain that level is different.)

Ditto with all the comments about world scaling - yes, your character level ties in to the world scaling system. But HOW you gain that level (XP or skill use) has no bearing on it. You could have Oblivions scaling, Skyrim's scaling, or New Vegas's scaling; with either method of character improvement.


They're separate topics. :shrug:

Voted "no", but only because I couldn't find the "HELL, NO!" button. One of the things I like best about the Elder Scrolls series is that you improve your skills by using them instead of by gaining abstract "experience points" which, after you collect enough of them, allow your abilities to suddenly jump upwards in areas which may or may not be in any way connected to what you did in order to gain those XP.

If anything, I would like to see it moved even further in that direction to make leveling-up a complete non-event, although the vanilla Skyrim system is already pretty low-key (aside from the reminders to go pick a health/magicka/stamina boost and the miraculous full-heal of all stats when you do). I honestly don't see any good way to automate the perk system, though, so it can't be 100% transparent (unlike Oblivion or Morrowind with the right set of mods).



You're confusing character leveling with world leveling. There is absolutely nothing about "use it to improve it" skill advancement which requires the world to become more difficult when your skills improve. There is absolutely nothing about XP-based skill systems which prevents the world from becoming more difficult when you gather enough XP from picking locks that it bumps you up a level.

The real issue is that a: you have a character level which periodically increases (regardless of what causes it to do so), b: this character level is treated as a measurement of your character's power, and c: when your character is judged to have become more powerful (by increasing your character level to a certain point), the rest of the world also becomes more powerful. There are plenty of "unleveled world" mods out there for Oblivion which fix this in varying ways and varying degrees; I am quite certain that similar mods for Skyrim will appear in fairly short order once TESVCS is released. And very few, if any, of them will involve changes to the game's experience system.

I don't think XP is necessarily "arbitrary". It's just a game mechanic that could be made so that it appears rather fluent and natural. How about the following:
* Use skill to make it eligible for raising. Skill books do the same thing.
* Play the game (rather than just grind the skills) to eventually get enough XP to level up.
* Once you've assigned the points you can go to trainers to learn the perks.
End result is that leveling up is part of the gaming experience. Someone in another thread mentioned that finding the place (quest) was part of the game experience that was now stripped away. Any old timers here remember how we used to level up in Bards Tale? That's what I'm talking about - make these things part of the game to enjoy rather than mechanics that doesn't make sense. Time progression would be well embedded in such mechanics, of course in a way that doesn't occupy any time in real time. That being said, traveling and waiting for stores provide a fairly good time progression mechanic.

But, as we know, many players, especially fresh ones that "don't have the time to play the game" tend to call these things "tedious". It's something you do 50-70 times in 2-300 hours of game time - hardly tedious if you ask me.

One problem I have now with skill based leveling, is that I'm only using skills that are max'ed out. So I play and I play, even begun some questing. But the sensation of leveling progress has completely ceased, something that didn't happen in FONV. In FONV, as long as you "kept playing the game", you were awarded with sensation of leveling progress. It doesn't matter that much though, since in the beginning in Skyrim I felt I was leveling way too fast.

One of the biggest pluses of TES is skill growth is based on acutully using the skill not some totally artificial allocation of points. The point allocation system has always been pointless and non-immersive. Just because something is done a lot does not make it good.

Undecided.

TES could probably benefit from that sort of XP system, but I wouldn't want to bring TES any closer to Fallout as Fallout has been brought towards TES. On the contrary, the should be separated much much more.

I like Skyrim's system. It does have some problems though - since Bethesda determined the rates the skills level, Bethesda determined what skills "I like" more than others, even if I actually prefer one skill a little more. You can offset this by training each level, so if you actually prefer my conjuration over alteration, you can drop some gold to fix their leveling rates, but still, it is a slight flaw in the system. The stones are useful for solving this to some degree, but if both skills are in the same archetype, then you still have a problem with it.

I do enjoy the perk system though, even if most of the trees are pretty linear. Just because I use a spell school like restoration from time to time doesn't mean I think my character is a paladin. I can drop a couple perks in it for the mana regeneration, but it doesn't gimp me out if it levels too high because the perks I acquire from leveling it can be used to areas that I prefer to focus on.

No, they already managed to get too much Elder Scrolls in my Fallout, I don't wanting them putting too much Fallout in my Elder scrolls as well.