Unless you're playing a roguelike where going into a dangerous place is something you really have to sit down and think about, that's how players view quests anyway (people don't like to avoid content). The only reason players ponder whether they should do a quest or not is when it sounds boring.
And that's the problem here. In a well designed system any decision should cut you off from content and quests should have multiple, mutually exclusive entry points. For example you could have a quest involving people being duped into some shit and kidnapped. You could start it by hearing the rumours and investigating, getting hired by local authority, stumbling upon kidnappers hideout or getting duped yourself and waking bound and butt-naked in a cell in some dungeon.
That way you could spend time wondering about cost/benefit in character rather than masturbating to content.
Whatever restrictions you attempted, use based system is based on grtinding end of story.
And XP based is based on either scripting or combatfaggotry. That leaves us with static builds as the only legitimate way.
Draq restrictions sounds mad through.
NO, U MAD.
Delayed consequence is just nasty
So is ability to bypass any consequence and manipulate any probability with a single press of a button.
Unless you consider oblivion, where there are no consequences, no failure and you're doomed to succeed no matter what you do a pinnacle of cRPG design (in which case kindly off yourself) there are going to be either delayed consequences or forced ironman (or active reload discouragement) in order to have consequences.
Of course there should also be a lot of soft failures.
also how do you know what effect potions will have that you found and then sold?
You couldn't. You could auto identify it "improperly" with skill based chance of being wrong.
Moreso, NPCs could check for their alchemy skill when buying or accepting such potion for you and react adversely if it's not what you claim it to be. Probably still better than getting them poisoned and having it traced back to you.
Obviously, the barter system should have item value negatively dependent on NPCs ability to craft it (so selling potions to master alchemist would be pointless if they would accept them at all) and positively on item's utility to that character (alchemist might be interested in rare ingredients, while normal shopkeeper might not).
Test it?
you want to create a system where you offloaded your loot in a location and never come back in fear of prosecution?
You'd run out of places to sell.
How about just not pushing unidentified crap on NPCs or living with consequences?
Why do you want to create a system by use and then prevent player from using? and your idia about increasing cost of new skills should be banned and you put on a stake for creating retardation.
You mean you prefer it when every character can become identical master of all skills?
I thought people had limited potential for learning new stuff, so slowing global skill gain rate with every skill increase sounds like the right thing to do *AND* it just happens to make player avoid grinding shit for the sake of grinding shit, preferring to focus on stuff he actually need for given build and playstyle.
Finally, this is in addition to scaling skill gain with difficulty (meaning no gain on trivially easy or impossible), and slowing levelling of all skills on each subsequent skill gain to discourage grinding useless ones, which are my standard anti-grind measures.
Yep, this should be mandatory. It's really hard to balance it properly unless you've got a fairly linear or restricted game world, though.
I'd rather balance it by having world open wide enough to count on player always having some way to survive and not dead-end himself.
It'd probably prevent a low-level character from maxing out those skills early in the game, but it'd hardly be a problem for more experienced or wealthy characters (and everyone in TES is rich as fuck after a couple of hours).
But then you have adventured a lot already and due to skill leveling getting more and more difficult you'd rather focus on skills relevant to your build, so if alchemy or illusion weren't relevant to you then, they still won't be now.
Also, you'd have to balance a skill like pickpocketing around the fact that it's mostly useful for inexperienced, piss-poor characters who cannot afford decent equipment otherwise.
It's also useful for obtaining odds and ends or pinching legendary items off characters unwilling to part with them without involving yourself in bloody murder.
Introduce too hard a punishment for failure and you'd make the skill even less useful than it already is.
You don't get any harder than getting killed when using insufficient combat skills. In any case, I prefer having multiple degrees of soft failure. Fun is when character faces the odds and gets in various trouble, not when he's killed off for slightest imperfection.
I don't think you can fix pickpocketing by punishing the player more from failing at it.
Not more. Later.
Instead, you should make it a skill that actually sees some regular use in quests and gives more benefits than it currently does (by making the economy harsher or rewarding the player for non-violent solutions, for example).
Of course. Regular use in quest is already in in Morrowind - if you need to obtain an item off someone, then pickpocket is already an option. Or mugging, for that matter (one of the patches broke it but MCP brought it back).
The more I read that, the more I wonder, why do we need non-combat skills in the first place. All they do is demand to sacrifice a portion of combat power (i.e. skillpoints/xp that could be otherwise invested into combat skills) in order to unlock some part of content. "You can only open this door if you spent 2 skillpoints on some otherwise worthless shit rather than your mace skill." "You can only receive that quest if you spent 2 skillpoints on some otherwise worthless shit rather than your fire magic skill."
Do we actually need that?
mondblut still doesn't get it.
Yep. I don't get it why having a gimped character is mandatory for access to optional content. It's like some kind of a silly reward. Hello, we have a special candy for cripples.
That's because you constantly think in categories of combat and noncombat being neatly segregated and combat having no negative consequences.
If you ever get over this way of thinking I can guarantee you a bit of
experience, so I'll try to not spoil it for you.
