SSE Magic immersion

[orangeyman8]

Please forgive me if this already exists, I haven't played Skyrim in about 3 years so I'm a bit behind the times on mods (this is irrelevant, but I don't plan to play anytime soon either, I just came up with this mod idea and I thought I should share it in case someone actually makes the mod and it improves some players' experiences). The gist of the idea is to increase magicka immersion by requiring the player to actually be taught and practice magicka before being able to use it.

 

Now to get to the idea (I cover related, existing mods at the bottom of this post):

 

You acquire a spell tome. As a novice magicka user, in the vanilla world you are somehow able to learn the spell despite having no knowledge of magicka. Ridiculous. Now, you must be taught from a knowledgeable practitioner. How it works is you must approach a magicka user with a skill corresponding to or surpassing that of the spell you would like to learn (an alternative is to require the user to learn at the College of Winterhold, and while this would be restrictive, it has advantages I will cover in a moment). You are then taught a "practice" version of the spell. You must practice it in the vicinity of the instructor, and the spell becomes unusable if you travel too far away (or deals extremely low, or even 0, damage) (by requiring the player to practice in the College of Winterhold, you as the mod creator could create particular "training rooms" for each magicka type where the user would practice your spells. This would allow more control over what "training" is actually required for each magicka type). Once you have practiced, you unlock the full spell.

 

I also believe adding a tier system to spells could also add to this mod. When you unlock the usable-anywhere version of the spell, you actually unlock the first tier. Leveling beyond the first tier could be linked to a) your overall level b) your level in that particular type of magicka c) your overall magicka level (e.g. the minimum level of all magicka trees must be at some threshold to level up to the next tier) d) challenges given by the magicka instructor e) some combination of (a), (b), ©, and (d) (these tier requirements could differ by quality of the spell. Each increase in tier would require you to learn from a magicka instructor. It could even require using another tome, and this could potentially be bolstered by adding chapters of tomes where increasing to a particular tier requires the corresponding chapter of the tome (and higher chapter tomes could be harder to find). Additionally, the number of tiers could vary - for instance, Novice spells could have 5 tiers whereas Master spells have 3 tiers, or there could even be infinite tiers that are unlocked as you level.

-Note that this last feature sounds very similar to existing scaling mods (listed non-comprehensively below). However, I believe it has a distinct advantage over those mods. Those mods passively increase your magicka quality as you level, without requiring you to do anything active. This mod requires you to actually train the magicka spell to make it better, something I view as an important feature of immersion. Beyond this, it has the same advantages as other scaling mods by allowing spells to maintain their usefulness as you level.

 

The main advantages of this mod in my view are that it a) helps you feel like you are actually putting effort into learning spells b) prevents you from simply looking at a book for 3 seconds and somehow learning a spell c) requires you to actually focus on learning the spells one at a time by training them, rather than being able to learn multiple spells in rapid succession. I believe these three points would positively impact immersion, and there may be even more benefits!

 

That's it, I hope this idea gets some positive feedback and thank you!

 

Now to cover related, existing mods (this is in no way comprehensive, please let me know if I'm missing something):

 

Back in the day when I played Skyrim, I tried to find a mod to increase magicka learning immersion (I didn't have this idea then, which is why I didn't suggest the mod, I just wanted something to increase immersion). I found the mod "Better Spell Learning" https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/4924 but that mod just requires you to wait to learn spells. The idea is there, but the implementation isn't.

 

Also some quick browsing just now led me to "Immersive Magic Overhaul" https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/9531?tab=description and "Elegy" https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/16839 both of implement scaling for magicka.

 

EDIT: I found the following mod request and mod:

-https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/6517116-magic-overhaul-need-help/?hl=%2Bmagic+%2Bimmersion: this mod request is not really that similar to my suggestion, but it has the idea of having a base book for spells and decoding the glyphs. It could be interesting to adapt that to the tiers, where instead of having higher tier tomes you just have one tome for each spell, with missing pages that you find to unlock the training for higher tier spells.

-https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/19286: this mod includes the idea of reading tomes to increase your magicka progression, but doesn't include the training part (which I would consider more important for immersion).

 

I also remembered that this is somewhat similar to what the vanilla game does to unlock the master spells, but those aren't actually training with spells (and they're too little too late - you don't have anything until the very end of magicka progression?).

Edited February 16, 2021 by orangeyman8