[LE] NEED HELP BRAINSTORMING FOR A MOD: STATS OVERHAUL! PLEASE HELP!

[ShinkeiAnjar]

Hello, so I am trying to make a mod, first time ever, that is essentially a highly immersive stat overhaul that will eventually lead into a highly immersive equiping/carrying capacity overhaul. I have been typing up a brainstorming of all my ideas and how the stats, strength, dexterity, constitution, stamina, intelligence, charisma, wisdom, and luck, all play into each other and the game mechanics, and it is also turning into a bit of a injury, disease, and treatment overhaul.
So I am needing help finish up brainstorming and then talking about how to make this mod, and also how to make this mod work with pre-existing mods so that I will be able to make this without trying to make it all from scrap.

 

So these are the mods that I will be needing to get to work with this by the end:

 

Bandolier - Bags and Pouches by Dragten

Race Menu by Expired

BodySlide and Outfit Studio by Caliente and Ousnius

CBBE by Caliente

WeightMorphs by Ousnius

Apocalypse - Magic of Skyrim and Ordinator - Perks of Skyrim by Enai Siaion

Complete Crafting Overhaul Remade by kryptopyr

Campfire - Complete Camping System and Frostfall by Chesko

Realistic Needs and Diseases by perseid

Loot and Degredation by isoku

iNeed - Food Water and Sleep by isoku

Wet and Cold by isoku

Bathing in Skyrim by mzin

Immersive Horses by sevencardz - CyborgArmGun - KrittaKitty

Craftable Horse Barding by sevencardz - CyborgArmGun - Rusey - DjaySaint - many others

 

And here is my current brainstorming:

Initial Brainstorming:

If instead of how much carrying capacity you have it was determined by stats, space capacity and add-ons. Stats would be your usual, INT (intelligence), WIS (wisdom), CHA (charisma), CON (constitution), STR (strength), DEX (dexterity), STA (stamina), & LUCK. And how much you yourself can carry is mostly based off your strength and stamina. Strength has to do with how much you can carry/ how heavy, and stamina is how long you can carry it before tiring out. Then space capacity is kind of self-explanatory, each item you have taken up a certain amount of space, and there is only so much space that you have available to you, like in rl. And space also comes into terms when using a bag

You can't put something bigger than the backpack into a bag, so for each item you give it a given mass, and then you have a UI that represents the backpack, for example, and the items have a representative "mass" that can or cannot fit within the space of the bag. And so, using that UI you pack your bag accordingly, and if you try going over the space capacity then you risk tearing the bag or speed up the degradation on the bag itself

 

And then you have add-ons to the backpack like straps to tie a tent to the bottom of the bag, hooks to attach spare items and pots and stuff like that to the outside

But even if you get it to all fit into and onto the backpack, if it is too heavy for you then you can't carry it, but you may be able to drag it but then that speeds up the degradation of the item and it can break if not repaired or treated properly.

And then you would also have something like this in place, if your max carry weight is 100lbs and you are carrying 95lbs the. It would be taxing on your stamina for the day, but if you are carrying 50/100lbs then it is less taxing, but at the same time when you are pushing your limits of your stats it is slowly training your body to get stronger and have more stamina

 

Dex for more stealth and finesse related skills, STR for melee skills and max weight, and lifting, CON for resistance to disease and if your con is down then it takes a toll on everything else, INT affects how smart you are and how well/easily you can study magic and its effect, CHA for stuff like innate abilities like dragon shouts and interactions with people and affecting speech skill

Yeah, it'd be a multi-step process, get stats and their alternating variables to work first and then try working the equipment overhaul based off that

It'd also be cool to have a similar thing to affect putting gear on a horse and in a chest or cabinet or drawer

 

Steps That Must Be Taken:

1) Get the stats system set up and then make the skills be affected by the sat system.

a. Determine the stats and how they would affect the skills with a base numeric system.

b. Get the system to work with the game.

c. Determine how certain skills would affect the body and then how to get morphs to work with a body like UNP and how to make it work with something like weight morphs so that you gain weight when you eat a lot without doing much work, and lose weight when eating less and or working out more, and increase body mass accordingly based off getting fatter or building muscle, some things may be possible through the body sliders while others may have to be done with textures. (mods that may be dependent may be the I need to eat sleep and drink, weight morphs, UNP, Racemenu and some others).

d. Then I need to get various animations to come into effect due to the state of the stats, like overweight causes stamina to be bad and make the player go into a struggling or out of breath animation.

e. Make the variables all have their paths and how it changes based on the player’s actions.

f. !!!MAKE CLOTHING NOT BE ONE SIZE FITS ALL!!! Get the clothes to be in categories of sizes, so that pieces of armor and clothes are only usable up to a certain size for the body and if the player tries wearing clothes that are too small then it will restrict their movement and such, can cause them to be sick for something like too much pressure on the stomach, and have a likelihood of breaking easily as well as not giving full coverage for warmth, wetness, and armor. But if it’s too big then it can restrict movement in its own way but may prove warmer and more coverage, but it should still have a tradeoff of being a more negative effect but maybe not as bad as being too small.

i. Get crafting overhauls and bodyslide and racemenu to work with this. Crafting so that you are able to craft the different sizes, and maybe different sizes will cost less or more in materials or money. Bodyslide and racemenu so that clothes match the body but don’t change with the sliders anymore.

2) Get the carrying capacity overhaul started for the player and integrate it with the stat system.

a. Get a UI (user interface) set up and design how it would look possibly.

b. Go through every item and determine how to heavy and how much mass every item in the game would take up and what items can’t fit places with other items.

c. Overhaul the backpack and bags, and determine how much space each type of item can hold without breaking.

d. Get Degradation and Loot to work with this system so that certain variables speed up or slow down the degradation.

e. Also get Complete Crafting Overhaul to work with this version of the backpacks.

f. Either try to make own backpacks and textures, or preferably get permission to have this part also rely on bandoliers, frostfall and campfire’s bags and tents, and other cart systems, and immersive horses and craft-able horses barding.

g. Because the next step, after getting this to work for the player is to make it also work with NPCs, horses and their pouches, and other containers like the chests, cabinets, drawers, and possibly even caravans, horse drawn carts and baskets.

 

Stats Portion:

 

The stats are going to be:

Strength (Refer to picture ; )

Dexterity (Refer to picture ; )

Constitution (Refer to picture ; )

Stamina: This will be dependent on some variables including strength and constitution.

Charisma (Refer to picture ; )

Intelligence (Refer to picture ; )

Wisdom (Refer to picture ; )

Luck: This is exactly what you think, a representative number of how lucky someone is, maybe the actions of the player and their charisma may have an effect for if it goes along with what a god would want and if they give them some favor => more luck.

 

Now this is the interaction between skills and stats, using the skills or doing certain actions can train a stat, whereas the stats affect the efficiency and effectiveness of the skill.

So, as much as we know what the stats are, the issue is how the stats affect everything and how they interact with each other.

Now for some stats, I may have to implement new variables.

 

 

Strength:

So, what would increase strength? I would say a vast amount of the melee skills would increase strength. Along with blacksmithing, using the hammer and stuff like that. Sneaking can also increase the strength in the legs and core. Swimming can slightly increase strength and stamina. Archery can increase core and upper body strength. Chopping wood for upper and core.

Strength may also have to be split into distinct categories such as upper body, lower body, and core. This way you can get different bodies changing their muscle definition based on what is being worked out more.

Then there’s the question of what does strength affect? I would say that strength can affect damage, the stronger you are the harder you hit and the more you can carry. And, strength can play into a factor of how “fit” you are and affect stamina.

Dexterity:

Now, dexterity is more precision/accuracy, agility, and nimbleness. So, I would say that swimming can also slightly increase dexterity. Some melee skills, archery, crafting, lockpicking, pickpocketing, jumping. These are all things that may can affect your dexterity, and so would things like encumbrance and carry weight.

Now dexterity may can affect how steady your hand is for things like not being detected while pickpocketing or sneaking (being light on your feet), not breaking you pick while lockpicking, able to avoid traps more, steady your hand while aiming a bow, crossbow, and dealing precise deathblows for assassination (allowing for more chances for critical hits and such). Dexterity can also affect how fast you are able to swing your weapon or how quick you are at certain tasks. So, if you are not that strong and don’t have the same damage output as those who are stronger than you; then you can hit them more often rather and are more capable of not being hit.

Constitution:

Constitution is your ability to resist diseases, ability to take more hits, and a bit of a measure of how fit you are. So, things that can affect constitution are more along the lines of how well you take care of yourself; eating, drinking, sleeping, bathing. These can bolster or handicap your constitution if not taken care of correctly. The same with not properly taking care of wounds. So, when you are in a fight and take damage, it can be categorized into types of wounds that have a chance of afflicting different things; such as an illness because you didn’t clean a wound and or bathe so it got infected, or you are bleeding and if you let yourself bleed out then you can die. And it will also be a matter of the wounds taking time to heal, some wounds take longer than others and can require diverse types of remedies, same for diseases.

Now, constitution affects everything about your life. For the most part, depending on the ailment, it can cause all your physical stats to be majorly handicapped; such as a broken leg affecting walking speed. To even being able to swing your sword and how tired you get by trying to do things. If possible, also implement a way to heal your companions, horse, pet, and let a npc or companion treat you. This will also change the functioning of healing potions, this will make it so that healing potions will likely no longer heal a set amount of hp, rather it might heal a little hp, if any at all, but would mostly affect the constitution’s healing rate, helping your body over time; same with healing spells, spells that would instantly heal an injury would have to be of expert level of magic, require a massive amount of magika and magik knowledge, as well as the spell being extremely hard find and difficult to obtain (Will have to get this to work with apocalypse magic overhaul). Similar implement may also be used with magika potions. But, will be used with first aid; applying the proper treatment/first aid will not instantly heal you, rather it will help prevent you from getting into a worse condition and help your body be how it should so that it can heal itself and maybe heal faster depending on the materials used, if they were magical with healing properties, poisonous, or normal, etc…

I will either have to modify how much hp the player has overall based on the constitution score, and also change how much damage is incurred or caused due to the type and effectiveness of the attack.

Stamina:

Now, stamina is kind of tricky. There must be an accurate equation to determine how strength, constitution, and dexterity affect stamina. As well as how there may be different versions of stamina, such as short-term stamina for things like power attacks, sprinting, constantly being in combat for a given time. To long-term, how traveling throughout the day whether by walking, horseback riding, mining, crafting, swimming, or a carriage as a few examples can vary in how tired you get and how quickly. And even a mental stamina, having to do what is determined to be mentally taxing can also tire you out sooner than not. As well as doing things that are physically taxing on your stamina can cause you to need to eat and drink more often, and make you get dirty more so you also need to bathe. Other actions can also cause your stamina to increase, like doing things for extended periods of time, but it doesn’t affect you as you are doing it, it slowly builds up over time as you continue to do set actions while staying healthy and get full rest. So, say you are traveling by foot, if you cause yourself to try sprinting a lot then you may be able to increase your stamina, it will tire you out quickly at first, but continuously doing so day after day while properly taking care of yourself will cause your short term stamina for sprinting to increase a lot over time and your overall stamina will also increase by a bit and you will find yourself able to do more and more in one day without needing to constantly rest. Now things like weather conditions and terrain will also have to play a part in all this as well. Various other actions like continuously mining, chopping wood, prolonged durations of time in constant combat, training skills at a dummy, etc will also have a similar but varying effect. Then things like reading can increase intelligence and make understanding harder subject easier and have that, in turn, make it less mentally taxing to read a book or do other mentally taxing activities.

Charisma:

Charisma will be affected by constant use of dragon shouts, talking to people/npc and buying things, and generally slowly over time as you gain “street smarts” by being alive. Not bathing can also have a major effect in charisma, and if using bathing in skyrim, highly suggested, then it makes bathing even more necessary.

Charisma will affect the efficiency of the speech skill, the power of a shout and the cooldown, and the amount of the player’s magika pool and its recharge rate. Charisma also affects how willing people are to listen to you and whether they give you a discount or something like that, and if animals are likely to be indifferent, scared, hostile, or friendly to you and listen to what you say and do it. Same for coming across new npc, a high enough charisma can also make a bandit more likely to befriend you rather than attack you on sight. And charisma is the perceived beauty of the person, so you may also get different reactions from people reacting to your ugliness, to hitting on you, or even trying to rape you while you sleep, or even just out right disrespect you or bully you. Charisma will also affect the potency of your spells themselves, and the duration of your enchantments and a bit on their potency.

Intelligence:

Intelligence is affected by studying/reading books, as well as magic spell books, doing crafts like blacksmith, alchemy and enchanting, finding your way in the wilderness, etc.

Then intelligence affects how easily you learn something, or how smart you are. So this will change the process of learning spells, when you get a spell book you will have to spend time to study it, because without doing that you won’t know/learn the spell, and then after a while of studying, along with some chance (like rolling a dice and adding the studying like a modifier that will get you over that threshold to actually learn the spell), the spell will appear in your spell list and tell you that you have effectively learned the spell, and as your intelligence increases it will become easier and easier and faster to learn a spell. And certain spells will have a level like in vanilla skyrim and your intelligence and your skill level in that school of magic will have to be at a certain point to have any chance of learning the new level of spell. Intelligence also affects how well you make items that you are crafting, affecting its armor rating, durability, warmth, and damage. And it may also take some studying to learn how to craft a potion, poison or even regular items as well, now books would be available to learn these things but that would take longer than it would to learn these things in comparison to going to someone and asking and/or paying them to teach you how to do these things, being taught by someone else would speed it up a lot faster. This applies to all forms of crafting and of magic. You will also need to study first aid to learn how to actually do first aid. This will also apply to cooking.

Wisdom:

Now wisdom is also tricky. In the matter of knowing what to apply it to, ironic right? Things that will affect wisdom are interacting with people (not as much as is gained for charisma, like a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio), then time in general as you survive, making sure to eat, drink, sleep, staying warm, drying off, eating the right amount, and bathing accordingly will all slowly increase your wisdom over time because it is not a matter of knowing how to do those things but rather knowing that you should do those things and, in turn, actually doing those things, proving that you know to do them. Now as much as you have earlier learned how to do things like first aid, or building a fire, wisdom has a say in when you should do those things and how to do them. So, in this case, intelligence increasing for certain skills will also increase your wisdom for those things as well, so the more that you study first aid the wiser you are for applying first aid. So, without studying first aid at all, you will not receive a notice that you need to apply first aid, but the wiser you become then you will start to see notifications that warn you to do first aid, then with more wisdom notifications will tell you what specific first aid you should apply, when you should change the bandage, when you should bathe, eat or even stop eating or else you will gain weight. And, if possible, what not to say in a certain place that could negatively impact the opinion of people there, though this is mostly charisma. But if you are wise then you might find npc asking you for help with a disease or curing a wound and possibly paying you, increasing your reputation with people, factions, etc, or giving you gifts.

 

Now these 6 stats are trainable over time and you can actively try to increase if you figure out how, books with explanations on how to increase stats would be possible to find.

Luck:

Luck on the other hand, is not trainable. This will be changed by your actions and your actions will reflect to the gods and other beings on whether they agree with what you are doing and if they give you their blessing, but at the same time it can be cursed by others that disagree with you. Your luck will be randomized for your stat, and when you complete certain quests, hunt animals, kill people, etc, it will affect the views of the higher beings of you and they will roll with your luck on how much of a blessing or curse they give you and then everything will be added and subtracted to the point where the overall sum will be added to your base luck and that overall luck can affect the outcome of everything you do, like better or worse prices, actually hitting, hitting harder than usual, cooking, crafting, learning a spell or recipe. This way, the player has no control over something that can make it all completely broken.

 

Skill Effectiveness on Stats:

 

This section is to figure out the numeric effect that skills have on the stats, like by how much the stats are increased. and then there will be a section that shows numeric representation for how much the stats affect the skills.

Edited October 27, 2017 by ShinkeiAnjar

[sevencardz]

Hey there,

I haven't been modding for the past few months, but I may get back into it soon. Anyway, to your question/request/idea dump - my first thought is that you need to scale back your goal drastically and start on just one aspect of what you want to do and then prove to yourself that you can do that, then reasess and move on to the rest of your ideas later. Brainstorming your ideas and forumlating a possible plan is a good start, but now that you've done that you need to see what actually can be done within the limitations of Skyrim's engine before moving forward with your design.

So your idea is a stat overhaul - have you looked at other stat overhauls and studied how they are designed? If not, then I would recommend doing this as your next step. Even if other stat overhauls don't do what yours does, chances are they need to solve a lot of the same problems that you will need to solve - like how to apply the stat changes quickly, efficiently, appropriately, and without causing bugs. This process will help you understand what can be done in Skyrim's engine and how to do it.

But, again, start small with a proof of concept. You can easily get lost designing a massive stat overhaul with a bazillion features and never actually get anything done. Instead, focus on implementing a small piece of what you want so you can understand how that piece might fit into your mod later on.

Once place to start might be with a simple mod that does nothing but edit how an existing perk works. Perks are one way to semi-permanently modify stats on the player and on NPCs as well, so this piece will probably be valuable in your learning/design process. Take one of mine for example and open it up in TES5Edit to see what I changed:

Balanced Necromage Fix: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/76019/?

TES5Edit: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/25859/?

Afterward, you can move on to learning ways to apply perks with activation triggers, scripting, magic effects and so on.