LE Pugilistic Participation!

[mindinavoid]

I've learned the hard way that pugilists got the short end of the stick in Skyrim, as unarmed fighting doesn't level a damned thing, and it registers as Two-Handed (according to TESSnip, which I have about as much experience with as I do with the exciting world of professional paint-drinking). Unarmed is literally a "weapon" under the WEAP class in Skyrim.esm! Yet it seems implemented as a last-minute thought, almost. The developers' inclusion of Hand-to-Hand under the Two-Handed skill feels almost like they changed their minds halfway through doing the Oblivion method of Blunt or Blade and never got around to fixing fists after they replaced "Blunt" with "Two-Handed" and "Blade" with "One-Handed". I might be wrong, but that's how it feels.

 

By my (possibly skewed) logic, using two hands separately in the act of pounding idiots into goo smacks more of dual-wielding or single-handed weapon combat than it does of whipping a big heavy hunk of phallic symbolism around, and regardless of that, it doesn't accrue experience for any stat whatsoever. With it so detached from the rest of the game, it leaves those of us who dream of punching dragons into submission having to go out of our way (leveling Two-Handed) to do what drunken louts have done naturally since boozeahol was first invented.

 

As it is, the first three submission fist fights you can get into in the game (skirt-chasing bard, boastful swordswoman, and I forget the third) are right pathetic (doubly so if you're a Khajiit). Heck, the fights in the tutorial are laughable! Sure, I'm supposed to be Dragonborn, but there's no excuse for me to steamroll six "trained" Imperial Guardsmen because I punched them three times in relatively quick succession. The alternative, of course, is to play above Adept, at which point an arrow to the foot leaves me within an inch of death.

 

And once all that's said and done, if you don't invest in any other fighting ability, you're hosed once you get to the higher levels. The heavy armor skill that adds armor value to damage output does help, but it still leaves you gimped in that the only boosting characteristic for your Hand to Hand combat (outside of Two-Handed skill, and again, Hand to Hand kills don't give experience) is the 'damage value' of your 'weapons'. Sure, a big angry orc that built up big strong muscles throwing that battle-axe around is gonna punch hard, but I expect someone who has spent extended periods of time punching things is going to punch hard, too.

 

Why not make Unarmed fighting contribute to Two-Handed skill, you might ask? Aside from the aforementioned (two separate hands, both used as blunt damage dealers), the Two-Handed perk "Sweep" seems logically more suited to a big honking sword than a pair of fists. Fists are small, fast weapons, not big slow ones.

 

As part of the mod I am suggesting, as I've given up trying to dig through the haystack of strings and values in TESSnip to figure out which one tells the game what weapons do what, I seek a simple .esp that:

 

1) makes Unarmed fighting scale to the One-Handed skill (and receive bonuses from that perk tree);

2) makes Unarmed fighting contribute to One-Handed experience;

3) do all these things without modifying hard-coded leveling rates (for compatibility with anything that doesn't modify the Unarmed "weapon" value);

4) (optional) counts two empty hands as Dual Wielded One-Hand weapons (for Dual Flurry/Dual Savagery perks);

5) (optional) count the Unarmed fist as a Mace weapon (for the Bone Breaker perk).

 

 

That fourth I leave up to the modder, as it doesn't sound like something that would be too easy to do without a Creation Kit (although I could be wrong). The fifth is also optional, albeit strongly suggested, due largely to the fact that a wadded up fist and a rock on a stick have much in common when it comes to hitting other things, largely in the realm of what the other thing looks like after it's been hit a couple dozen times.

 

Many thanks for reading this, and a pre-emptive thanks for whosoever decides to take on this request.

[Bahlsa77]

Simple and easy fix once the CK is released.

 

Have a Modeler take a mace model, slice the top off, and any bottom so you are left with a fist around a short stick. tag the animations for it to unarmed, but leave it as a 1 hb weapon.

 

Iron Grips, Steel Gripps, so forth. Make them craft able, just one ingot and a bit of leather strap.

 

You will get a craft able, scaling weapon that looks like you a using either a fist full of quarters, or a small jab stick.

 

And you can even enchant them if you like for fire or frost fists...

[mindinavoid]

That was something I had considered doing as well, as a way around the inability to enchant punches, but it serves as more of a "dirty fix" than a proper one. Being that "Unarmed" actually counts as a weapon type in the .ESM, and I have at least a little scripting knowledge, when the CK comes out it won't be hardly a thing for me to do this myself.

 

As it stands, though, we have no given suggestion on when the kit will release, so the only way we have available right now to do this is through systems like TESSnip, which report only straight code values without explaining what they mean. If I knew what data values governed XP reporting, I'd have the first two parts of this mod done already. If I knew what told the game whether a weapon registered as a mace, sword or axe, I'd have three!

 

But there aren't any resources for this sort of thing, and the values TESSnip reports are in hex code, with no discernible indication for most of them. I only know that Unarmed reports as a 2-Handed weapon based on reports from elsewhere, and the fact that TESSnip does recognize the "ETYP" header as "Equip Type", which for the Unarmed "weapon" is 81733: same as Warhammers, Battleaxes, and Greatswords.

 

Changing that to 81730 would make it scale and gain based off of One-Handed skill, but it doesn't change the fact that Unarmed use doesn't count XP for anything. I confirmed a lack of XP gain an hour ago, too, when I paralyzed a lone wandering mammoth via the console (click target, setav "Paralysis" 1) and punched it to death, very, very slowly. Eventually, it died, and I got jack-all out of it 'cept a tusk and a trunk. (The latter of which is apparently food? What, I can tote a full-sized tusk but I can't carve some of that GIANT SLAB OF MEAT off instead?)