PC and NPC stat calculations, or: What did Bethesda do this time?

[w0yzeck]

I'm working on my own re-balance mod, and one of the major overhauls I'm trying to put in place is consistency in stats between the PC and the NPCs which inhabit the world - i.e NPCs starting at the same health as the PC, and remaining largely consistent with what a player character of their type (mage, fighter, etc.) would up through more advanced levels.

 

Now, of course, under the "Race" entries in the Master file, all NPC species display a starting health/magicka/stamina stat of "50" - half that of the PC. This was, as I recalled, much the same in Oblivion, and simply meant going into the Game Settings, finding the variables which (apparently) referenced PC and NPC starting stats ("fPCBaseHealthMult", "fNPCAttributeHealthMult", "fNPCBaseMagickaMult", and "fLowLevelNPCBaseHealthMult"), and setting them to "1.0", along with setting "fNPCHealthLevelBonus" to "0". After this, I expected I could set individual races' starting stats to whatever I felt was appropriate, and both the PC and NPC would start off from the same baseline, and that their stats would progress about as closely together as the engine allows (NPCs, apparently, do not necessarily distribute points by multiples of 10, or whichever number you've set leveling bonuses to - hence they wind up with stat scores like "217", "133", etc.)

 

Well, the NPCs seemed to start out as I wanted, and level properly, but now any new player characters began with all three stats at 50 points over whatever values I had set in the Race entry - i.e. Dark Elves set up with a starting base of 90 health, 110 magicka, and 120 stamina would, as player characters, start out at 140/160/170.

 

Digging through the Game Settings again, I found entries "fDefaultHealth", "fDefaultMagicka", and "fDefaultStamina", all three of which were set to "50" - so I set them all to "0", guessing that vanilla Skyrim, rather than multiplying the stat values under the Race entries by 2 for the Player Character (as in "fPCBaseHealthMult"'s original value of "2"), but instead added 50 to them. Since every playable race has a vanilla setting of "50" for all three stats, it only appeared to be multiplying the vanilla Race settings by 2.

 

Alas, starting a new Dark Elf character got me this:

170 Health

130 Magicka

160 Stamina

 

So, the obvious question is, what the @%$# asinine, convoluted, utterly un-intuitive clusterf&^k of a formula is Bethesda using now to make a complete mess of yet another basic game mechanic?

 

Seriously, does anyone know how PC and NPC stats are being translated from their values under the Race entries, into the actual gameworld?

 

 

As an aside, if anyone else has modified either Race stats, or perhaps the Firebolt spells themselves, only to find all the Legion mages in the opening scene running around empty-handed, eyes to the sky, apparently looking to engage Alduin in fisticuffs, I'd also like to know what I broke there, as well.