Less Weight?

[Inafog]

I have only been playing the game for a little while, but I must say that whoever decided on the weight of weapons and armor did not know much about the subject. Whence come these 12-pound bows, 25-pound swords, 60-pound cuirasses, etc? A very nice and possibly simple-to-make mod would be one that cuts the weight of armor and weapons in half. This would greatly aid gameplay. (If such a mod already exists, please direct me to it.)

[Lanceor]

That wouldn't be hard, just painstaking. You'd have to edit each and every item individually.

 

Easier would be to just buff the player's carry weight. :smile:

[CommanderEwok]

That wouldn't be hard, just painstaking. You'd have to edit each and every item individually.

 

Easier would be to just buff the player's carry weight. :smile:

That would explain why its the most common response to that problem.

[Striker879]

I seem to recall reading somewhere that Oblivion's weight system uses ounces not pounds (so your '12 pound bow' is actually just a little under a pound ... 16 ounces to the pound). If I find my original source for that info I'll link it.

 

My guy's a packrat, so those transcendent fortify strength and feather sigil stones are gold.

[Inafog]

If weights are in ounces, that means a character with a strength of 50 is capable of carrying just 15.6 pounds before collapsing under the strain. :mellow:

[Lanceor]

The item weights in Oblivion were made for game balance and have very little semblance to real world weights. I just assume that Tamriel is on another planet somewhere where materials have completely different densities to what we find on Earth. :smile:

[Striker879]

I had a look at my guy's level 1 save in the tutorial sewers (strength 40, max encumbrance 200 without any buffs) and I see your point Inafog. If it's ounces the max he can carry is 12.5 pounds.

 

From a realism point of view he could surely pick up and carry far more than that, but for how long? Perhaps that was Bethesda's thinking on the subject of encumbrance. So they didn't have to constantly check how long your character had been carrying x amount of stuff and compare that to a maximum that your character could carry without fatigue penalty while running, jumping and fighting they opted to make the 'running, jumping and fighting' max your character's max all the time. Carrying 12.5 pounds constantly isn't something we do on a daily basis. In fact walking home from the grocery store carrying even just 10 pounds of groceries will have me switching hands every few minutes. Granted, in the case of my character he's wearing some of that 12.5 pounds, but still carrying weighty items isn't something that people do all the time every day.

 

One of the first things my new characters do is buy one of Emma's excellent Packdonkeys once they have enough gold. Until that point I know of plenty of non-respawning containers in the wilderness so that I don't need to worry about losing any of my loot (example ... there's one at Dasek Moor not far from Kvatch that gets all the Kvatch gate loot until I haul it off to sell). Whether you want to consider it a 'game balance' thing or realism thing the encumbrance system makes your job of playing the game a thinking thing, giving you a problem and leaving it up to you how to solve it. The beauty of it is there are so many ways to solve the problem.

[Inafog]

Of course the whole business of carrying stuff is to some extent artificial: after all, where does the character keep it? One does not see the character with a duffel bag or sack that he drags along with him, or where he keeps the two or more swords and two or more bows he always has, or where those 35+ potions are, etc. But once we agree that some 'suspension of disbelief' is needed in any RPG, I still think that a sword that takes up, say, 20% of a character's strength, is silly. / Yes, I too brew up feather potions, and have a ring and headband enchanted to increase strength (and a spell called 'Tote That Bale' for even more strength), and take advantage of the fact that, once mounted, my character is not encumbered until she reaches a destination and dismounts.