A Question of Class, s/Question/Rant/ Options

[Cardboard Box]

I'm trying to get into Skyrim, but the operative word is 'try', because Bethesda, no doubt advised by Sheogorath, decided to throw out half of the character creation system.

"Hi, I'm ___, the ____ ____. That means I'm intrinsically better with this, that, and the other from the get-go, because that was what I did before I got thrown in jail."

Fast-forward to Skyrim.

"Hi, I'm ____, the ____. I'm not especially skilled in anything, because I didn't exist before I was almost beheaded in Helgen. I'm just a one-dimensional pair of hands for some kid at a computer to drive around the countryside killing people and things."

You get my problem? (and no, the stones outside Riverwood are not enough.)

Classes provide limits and shape what you do, and when; Bethesda for some reason threw all that out the window. I'm literally struggling to connect with my character, since I have lost the mechanism by which she would have gained her drive. As it is, she's barely more than a Minecraft skin.

Does anyone know of - since Skyrim Nexus' search is © UselessCo - any good mods that bring classes back? Or failing that, any tips and tricks on developing a skill set and sticking to it?

[Grits]

One thing to try without a mod is to pick a race with starting bonuses that are consistent with the class skills they should have according to your own class assignment. A Breton starts out with +10 in Conjuration and the Conjure Familiar spell, so they feel like decent summoners from the start. My Redguard swordsmen (+10 in One-Handed) and Bosmer archers (+10 in Archery) have always felt right even in the beginning. Of course it’s up to you to make them use the skills that they’re supposed to be using, but this way the game provides some feedback by having them be better at them even before they develop in the game.

But it’s miserable to play against racial bonuses at low levels. A Nord stealth archer truly sucks at their chosen (by the player, not the game) skills at the beginning. I would not hesitate to re-assign skill points with the console to what they’re supposed to be good at according to my idea of their class. I don’t actually know how to do this, but I’m sure others do. What I’ve done to compensate in the game is simply play with the character’s restrictions in mind. Nothing stopped me from having my Nord archer pick up a war hammer except me. Eventually she got better at her class skills, and then she got awesome.

Assigning the right perks helps a lot. The game rewards you with experience for everything you do, but the player assigns perks according to their ideas. So in my Nord archer example I would focus perks in Overdraw to boost that skill even though experience has been gained from skills like Speechcraft and Lockpicking as well as the core skill of shooting things.

Also SubRosa has a thread about homemade alternate starts here. That would be a way to start off with appropriate equipment without having to pick up the correct items in the game’s Helgen start. Maybe adjusting skills in a batch file is also possible.

Now that I have Skyrim on my laptop I use Live Another Life to avoid the prisoner scenario. It doesn’t change the starting skills, but it’s easier to play a new mage starting off in the College of Winterhold or a disgruntled farm worked ready to make her way in the world when they’re not all dropped into the same cart as every other character.




EDIT: Also I found this mod on the Nexus: Character Creation Overhaul. I have not used it, I just did a search to see what I could find.

This post has been edited by Grits: Nov 10 2013, 04:21 PM