What do you want in a new overhaul mod?

[Arrogancy]

Thanks, Doomsdayman, you raise a lot of good points. I'll try to respond to each.

Roles

So a big part of the system - which may not be clear if you don't know where to look on the sheet - is that you gain "Strength" "Finesse" and "Spellpower" by increasing your health, stamina and magicka, respectively, which in turn give bonuses to certain stats and perks. The effects from your Strength, Finesse and Spellpower are considerable, and since you can't increase all three, you'll have to make some decisions about what sort of tradeoffs you're willing to accept.

There are some other tradeoffs as well, in terms of armor and damage sources. Sneaking isn't practical in heavy armor - even with lots of perks. Spellcasting is much easier in cloth. Dedicated mages will have much stronger spells than fighter/mages, and stealthy thieves can aim arrows far better than brutish fighters. Mage Armor (if specialized) is a very reasonable alternative to regular armor (though it starts off very weak), so if you decide to play a mage, you won't need to invest any points in smithing. On the other hand, mages will find the higher-level Alchemy perks very valuable. (Actually, everyone will - but mages will appreciate the health boost a lot more!)

Perks, in general, are a lot more meaningful in this overhaul - like Requiem, you can't pick locks unless you put a perk into the skill. (You will be able to pick novice, apprentice and adept locks with one perk.). Most trees will be about nine or ten perks deep (some trees will have more perks, but those are to accomodate different playstyles - one-handed, for example, has different branches for unarmed, maces and swords). Enchanting requires more, but enchanting is ridiculously powerful, even with the nerfs I've applied to it. I don't want to make trees much deeper than that because I want to make sure a level 60 character can pick up at least six trees.

No Grinding Crafting Before I'm An Adventurer

I'm definitely with you on this. I've never liked the way the game incentivizes this. There are two big things I'm planning to do about it.

a.) No crafting skill will be profitable using vendor-bought ingredients until higher levels. Obviously spending perks in Speech will get you to profitability faster. Hopefully this will get the PC out of town and get them to start collecting materials, instead of hanging around Arcadia's brewing potions all day.

b.) Crafting skills will level MUCH faster if used to craft "exotic" things, usually made from components that drop from big enemies. My hope (I still need to run a lot of numbers) is that this will explain why you become a master Alchemist/Smith/Enchanter so quickly - you've got access to stuff that most who train wouldn't ever be able to afford to use up.

It may also be possible to give bonuses for crafting "new" things - your first Dwarven Sword will give you lots more experience than your fifth Dwarven War Axe. I'm not sure if this is practical or not, however. We'll see!

Block is really good

I'd be interested in some alternatives to making block very strong, but I'm sort of at a loss to what those would be. Blocking certainly won't be as strong as it is in SkyRe (where unblocked attacks could do absurd things like subtract 300 points from your armor). But not blocking in melee combat is going to be a rough time.

Differences in Spells and Weapons

There some meaningful differences in weapons already! Take a look at the one-handed and two-handed trees in the spreadsheet. That said, I don't want to make the differences too pronounced - I wouldn't want to force a player who really likes lightning into feeling like he has to play a fire mage because the fire has some mechanic he feels is superior.

I don't really like the idea of removing weapon and spell depreciation from the game. They provide a clear demarcation (and crucially, a visible one) of a character changing over time, and of the differences in the challenges a character faces. This is especially crucial in a mod that unlevels the world, because seeing a Glass or Ebony geared enemy is a clear sign that they are a high level foe, and if the character in question is low level, he'd better avoid them.

Options In Combat

I'm not sure what the benefits of adding more options would be. Could you go into a bit more why you want these extra options?

Combat Should Feel Fair and Balanced

Yes! I fully support the idea that "Quick" "Save" and "Load" should not be the mightiest words of power. In fact one of the design goals of the mod is that a very skilled player ought to be able to go through the whole thing Ironman style.

Watch the Economy

Well, I actually have a degree in Economics - so boy I really hope I don't drop the ball on that front! My old professors would be awfully disappointed in me!

[ryanshowseason2]

I like what sky-re did in some arenas of blocking... Timed blocking was a great mechanic that kept you engaged and watching enemies intently.

 

One thing I feel we haven't seen explored greatly in any overhaul is meaningful enemy resistance.

 

Sky re touches on it by making some enemies 10-~30% resistant to some forms of damage, even then though it just feels as if a bow user is just mildly inconvenienced to beat down that dwemer centurion, he'll still get the job done in 3-4 more hits than the mace wielder.

 

I for one would like to have to vary my tactics widely based upon the foe I'm up against.

 

Non magical arrows should do nothing more than "chip away" at a frost atronach.

 

Iron daggers should do next to nothing against a mammoth regardless of skill.

 

But that cold enchanted mace should be reasonably effective against that steam powered automaton! Not pokemon level super effective damage but perhaps giving it "deblitations" like less melee damage or make it stagger.

 

Being able to "main" something like daggers to kill even centurions has felt idiotic, and I'm surprised not to see any overhauls adressing it.

[Arrogancy]

ryanshowseason2, Requiem actually does a lot of what you're asking for - Draugr are pretty much impossible to kill with arrows, blunt weapons or cold, whereas fire works great.

 

Making combat against different foes a different experience is definitely a priority.

[ryanshowseason2]

I think I read that before in its manual, but after looking at the heap of other changes to the game I shied away... Actually more like ran away. It looked like far too much difficulty for how I like to play.

 

Getting disarmed and insta gibbed by arrows especially doesn't sound like leisure for me.

 

I wonder if you're thinking of doing this in modules or a single mod workspace...

[Arrogancy]

Well, I'd prefer modules, because compartmentalization is of course great for many reasons. But I'm not sure how tenable that is going to be. Obviously changes to the smithing tree are not terribly meaningful without changes to items. A lot of game balance is wrapped up in several parts. But the broader idea of customization is definitely something we're keeping in mind.

 

You won't be insta-gibbed. Even if you're wearing no armor, arrows will need two hits to kill you at level 1. (Unless you're attacking high-level opponents, obviously.) And I don't have any plans to disarm players for getting hit with low stamina - though the low-tier bows getting broken in melee will probably stay, since that feature plays a big role not just in keeping the PC from using a bow in melee, but also in providing a manner to disable enemy archers once you close with them.

[Kestrellius]

Key features I'd like to see:

 

Get as far away from HP as possible. The entire idea of health is, and always has been, absurd. You can't kill someone by hitting them two hundred times in the pinky. That's not how it works. Precision should be rewarded; it doesn't matter whether you're using a bronze nail or a legendary ebony dagger if you can reach the heart through a chink in the armor.

 

Similarly, instadeath should be a pretty rare thing. Both for the PC and NPCs. Especially with arrows; AFAIK arrows aren't actually very effective in real life. You should be able to semi-permanently incapacitate someone without actually killing them, and you should be able to crawl away from a lost battle and regroup if you can avoid getting put down by a bandit. (Basically, at the end of every fight, you'd go around finishing off all the people you hadn't actually killed.) Granted, if your head is smashed by a mace, or you fall a huge distance...yeah, you're going to die. But in most situations, the body can last for quite a while.

 

Varied combat techniques and animations. A player with a skill of fifteen in one-handed using an iron broadsword should look very, very different from a master swordsman wielding a scimitar. There should be ways to use different techniques in combat (mainly slashing versus stabbing, but it would depend on the weapon), and the animations should get progressively flashier as skill increases, so that by high skill levels you're twirling swords around and such. Also, the animations shouldn't be purely cosmetic; the animations would become faster, and thus the player would land more hits.

 

Small request: remove the smithing modifier from the item name, and instead have it in the information panel like the "stolen" marker. It just gets absurd to look at your inventory and see a whole list of stuff that's all marked "legendary". It's just redundant after a while.

 

An MCM with modifiers for damage dealt and taken. That way, you can have slower combat, or if you're like me, have it so that everyone deals huge amounts of damage and it's mainly a matter of landing the first clean blow.

 

I think I'm missing something, but anyway.

[Arrogancy]

Getting away from hp is a great idea! I love games like Dwarf Fortress that do it. Unfortunately, such a dramatic change to the game system is far beyond the scope of this mod. Sorry!

 

Instadeath will be avoided, I'm happy to say.

 

The idea of people being wounded and falling down instead of immediately expiring is really interesting. I'm going to put that into our stretch goals and see how feasible it is. But you should know that arrows really are very deadly. You can read from this account that they were often more likely to kill you in the 18th century than gunshot wounds. Of course, that's if you're not wearing armor. Armor in this mod (I really should come up with a name) will protect you from arrows very well, as you can see on this page of the design document (scroll down to the bottom).

 

Animations are not really my skillset, but adding them would certainly be a great way to increase verisimilitude. I'll add that to the stretch goals list.

[Kestrellius]

Well, yeah. I doubt you could remove the concept of health entirely. I'm thinking the trick would basically be to create the illusion of no HP, probably primarily by making locational damage differences so extreme that it becomes one of the biggest factors.

 

Actually, your arrow link makes me think of something. Before the advent of modern medicine, most war-related deaths were from disease, rather than actual wounds, right? Now, this might be rather irrelevant on Nirn, because of the existence of Restoration magic, but it still might be interesting if being wounded had a high chance of infection, or something. Basically, treat wounds as diseases, that you have to do something significant to get rid of. Not like "go into town" significant, but more like bandages or somesuch. Just so you can't let it regenerate like your basic health. And then wounds have a chance to become infected if you don't take certain measures, which makes them worse. I dunno.

[Arrogancy]

So there's a mod that does injuries, but it's buggy as all get out.

 

Diseases being more prevalent is definitely a stretch goal. Getting cut by a sword that's been sitting in a tomb full of Draugr is not good for you.

[Kestrellius]

I like where this is going. I was unsure, as I'm really not fond of the entire "Nintendo-hard" mentality, but this seems focused more on realism than fake difficulty, like Req seems to be. (I also found Requiem more than a little pretentious, which along with compatibility is why I went with Skyre in the end.)

 

Hm...I've never done any actual Skyrim modding, but I do have some knowledge of how programming works. I'm not sure why a system for injuries would be buggy; it seems like it should be fairly easy to apply status effects upon being hit...