cyrano on 1/10/2004 at 04:59

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Morrowind’s leveling system came under criticism shortly after it was released. Mind you, it builds on the excellent notions introduced with Daggerfall (use of skills improves them and contributes to leveling), but doesn’t seem to go far enough. Rather than awarding discretionary points to improve attributes each time you level, it is nice that it is linked to the related skills. However, the player still selects which one to improve, and other than the three attributes that the player selects, the remaining attributes experience no advancement regardless of how much the related skills were practiced.

With various ideas offered, I finally settled on a system where each skill (major, minor and miscellaneous alike), add some fraction advancement to its governing attribute. This was further modified by the ratio of the skill/governing attribute, making under-developed (miscellaneous) skills have less of an impact than well-developed (major) skills. I do permit one discretionary point so it is still possible to improve luck should I choose. For two years, I would crunch the numbers in a spreadsheet, and then update my stats each time I ‘level’ through the console. It is certainly does not lead to overpowering character development if that is what you want, but it makes sense to me and I have been very happy with it.

About six months ago, I finally figured out how to script it for a plug-in, but it is not very sophisticated when is comes to dealing with fortification enchantments (since I don’t use enchantments that is not a liability). A few months ago, another modder developed something similar. His emphasis was on seamlessly managing fortifications and has done an admirable job (which reminds me that I have to ask him if I can use that part of his code :) ). I think that the final results of his leveling script are too generous, but it is more palatable to the general population of players. It is also can be customized, if you want to dial it down a bit. If you are on the PC and are interested in it, here is a (http://www.cosmicspeck.com/morrowind/maddleveler/) link.