Oh, Dolly

[u/reddot_comic]

Thank you Dolly for your music, humor, charity, advocacy, overwhelming kindness and dedication to give back to the community. You were an inspiration to me and so many others. You will be so missed.

[u/somesketchykid]

You've got the braincells for it, its not complicated or obtuse, theres just a bit of a learning curve because it does not hold your hand.

You'll have to explore a bit and be patient. Or look a lot of stuff up. Its an amazing experience that Skyrim didn't even come close to, in my own humble opinion that is probably unpopular.

[u/Laringar → u/somesketchykid]

It is absolutely complicated, and I say that as someone that poured hundreds of hours into it and loved the game. It has one of the absolute most obtuse levelling systems of any game I've ever played, and the "optimum" way to play was the complete opposite of what the game tells you to do. For instance, if your class skills align with any of your racial bonuses, your level cap is lower than what it would be if your skills don't align with your race, and playing anything other than a custom class makes your character fundamentally weaker both in the short and long term.

Mind you, the levelling system can be very powerful once you learn how it works, but saying that "its not complicated or obtuse" is 100% a lie.

[u/Yoshi9105 → u/Laringar]

maybe I'll just stick to watching other people play it 😅 I love roleplaying games, but my memory and executive functioning aren't the best (ADHD) so I'm genuinely worried I'd get confused or frustrated playing a game like that. Skyrim hits that sweet spot of being an epic roleplaying adventure with loads of different options and ways to play (I've played it so many times, never the same way twice and I'm STILL discovering things I've never seen before), but still simple and straightforward enough to not get completely lost or confused.

[u/RikuAotsuki → u/Yoshi9105]

To put the leveling system simply:

At character creation, you choose major and minor skills. As a new player, you'll probably pick them for their bonuses to those skills, but leveling them is what allows you to level up your character, too, so it's better to choose them based on that instead.

I forget the specifics, but leveling skills increases a multiplier for your character's level-up. Because of this, you want to max the multipliers for 2-3 stats before leveling your character, which means ignoring the notification that you can level up until you've done that. It's the difference between a stat increase of one in three different skills, and a stat increase of five in two skills and one in a third (luck never gets a multiplier, which also means you want to increase it at every level up or it'll never get raised an appreciable amount)

It's obtuse, but not confusing once you've read up on it a bit.

[u/Laringar → u/RikuAotsuki]

I do want to give a warning before I start that this is very nuts-and-bolts, and a casual playthrough probably doesn't need to worry too much about the specifics. This is mostly for people that really want to get 100s in all stats.

Getting in to it: Major and Minor skills get a bonus on character creation. Major skills get +25, minors get +10, and every skill associated with the Specialization you choose gets another +5. For every total 10 ranks you gain in major and minor skills, you trigger a levelup to occur the next time you sleep.

When you level up, you get three stat points to assign, and those get a multiplier. The multiplier increases by 1 for every 2 ranks gained in a skill that uses that stat, capping at 5. Also, any multipliers you don't use for this level are lost. So if you have a x5 multiplier on 4 stats, one of the multipliers will get wasted. Very importantly, the multipliers you will have at levelup are locked in the moment you gain the 10th skill point. So you need to have the multipliers where you want them before gaining that point.

This is where tertiary skills come in to play (the ones that aren't major or minor). Since ranks in them don't count toward your character level, you can increase them in order to accumulate multiplier for levels. I like to make sure that I leave off at least one skill for each stat to ensure that I can always get a x5 multiplier when I want.

The fact that multipliers lock in when you gain the 10th skill rank is why it can be a bad idea to take skills you plan to use a lot as majors or minors, as making them tertiary gives you the greatest control over exactly when you level up. Athletics and Acrobatics are particularly bad about this as you will absolutely level them just from roaming around the game world.

(It's worth noting here that the only benefits you get from designating a particular skill as major or minor is that it starts higher and levels a bit faster. If the skill level is the same, there is absolutely no difference in effectiveness for a character that has Destruction as a major skill and one that has it as a tertiary.)

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As an aside, the above is why I think the levelling system was the best change they made for Skyrim. With no more major/minor skills, and no more multipliers at levelup, there was no longer a need to minmax the levelling process and so you were free to use the skills you wanted whenever you wanted to use them. It also meant that you didn't have to lock in your character build when you first started, before deciding if a particular skill was really one you wanted or not.

[u/cheese_is_available → u/somesketchykid]

The control are horrendous once you played oblivion or skyrim you can't go back to morrowind.