Tynethor's Attribute-Based and Natural Magic Skill Advancement

by Tynethor

Version 0.1 -- This is a Beta version -- Please give feedback so I can improve it!

Requires OBSE v.0011 or higher (download it at http://obse.silverlock.org/)

The Brief Description

This mod does up to four inter-related things. First, it allows attributes to influence the speed at which related skills increase. Second, it makes health and fatigue more realistic in that their levels now have an impact on how quickly you increase your skill levels (as your fatigue drops, your skills increase slower), or whether you can learn at all (if health drops below a critical level, no learning). Third, you can incorporate my previous mod, Natural Magic, which uses a dynamic system of spell costs to determine how quickly your magic skills improve. Otherwise, they are incompatible. Fourth, you can turn on a training cost modifier that is influenced by personality, intelligence and willpower.

The overall goal is to make the attributes more influential in terms of skills, rather than just the other way around.

**Does not conflict with leveling mods**

The Full Readme

Attribute Influenced Skills and Natural Magic Skill Advancement

by Tynethor

Version 0.1 -- This is a Beta version -- Please Give Feedback
Requires OBSE v.0011 or higher (download it at http://obse.silverlock.org/)


Background:
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This mod has several options, but if used in its entirety, addresses four issues with Vanilla Oblivion:

Issue 1: Attributes have minimal influence on skills. This mod addresses that lack of influence by linking attributes to skill increases. The higher the attributes associated with a skill, the faster that skill will increase. See below for further details.

Issue 2: Health and fatigue have no influence on skills. This mod makes lower percent fatigue result in slower skill improvement rates, so if you're in a fight and exhaust the character, the character won't improve skills as quickly. In terms of health, if a character is near death, the character isn't really concentrating on learning, so none occurs.

Issue 3: The difficulty of a spell has no influence on magic skill improvement. With this mod, you may choose an option where the current cost of a spell, the mastery level required to cast the spell, the range of the spell and the player's skill level all influence how much of a skill increase the player receives from casting that spell. see below for more details (Note: This is actually an incorporation of an earlier mod of mine called Natural Magic Skill Advancement, in case you are interested in only this aspect of the mod).

Issue 4: Training cost with trainers is affected only by your skill level. I've included an option where you can modify the cost to train based on Personality, Intelligence and Willpower, under the assumption that more intelligent people and those with greater willpower will tend to learn more quickly (less time = less cost) and those with great personalities will tend to get things for less, no matter what.

Methods:
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Attributes Influencing Skills:

Each skill action has a primary attribute that influences advancement of the skill. These coincide with Vanilla Oblivion. I also chose a secondary attribute that has a smaller influence on that skill's advancement. The overall effect is as follows: Say a character has high marksmanship, but low sneak and security, resulting in agility that's only so-so. The player will that the marksman skill is harder to advance than normal, but that the sneak and security are easier to advance than normal. On the other hand, the player has advanced block, heavy armor and armorer about equally, so his endurance is quite high. This makes advancement in any of those skills somewhat easier than normal.

The secondary attribute influence can give you an additional route to faster advancement. For instance, the secondary attribute for marksman is strength, so someone who hasn't focused on sneak and security but has a high strength can balance the negative out with the positive.

Acrobatics -- Jump: Speed, Strength
Acrobatics -- Fall: Speed, Agility
Alchemy -- Potion: Intelligence, Agility (Don't want to make a mistake)
Alchemy -- Wortcraft: Intelligence, Endurance
Armorer:Endurance, Strength
Athletics -- Running/Swimming: Speed, Endurance
Blade: Strength, Speed
Block: Endurance, Agility
Blunt: Strength, Endurance
Hand-to-Hand: Strength, Speed
Heavy Armor: Endurance, Agility
Light Armor: Speed, Agility
Marksman: Agility, Strength
Mercantile:Personality, Willpower
Security: Agility, Intelligence
Sneak -- Avoid Notice: Agility, Willpower
Sneak -- Pickpocket: Agility, Speed
Speech: Personality, Intelligence

* The following are only true if the Natural Magic option is _not_ used.

Alteration: Willpower, Intelligence
Conjuration: Intelligence, Willpower
Destruction: Willpower, Intelligence
Illusion: Personality, Willpower
Mysticism: Intelligence, Willpower
Restoration: Willpower, Intelligence

One choice some may think is odd is using Agility as the secondary trait for block and the armors. Since agility affects being staggered and knocked back, this makes sense to me. You're welcome to change it.

For technical/mathematical details, see below.

Health and Fatigue:

I have done nothign to change how they are calculated; however, there is a minimum health at which a character can no longer learn, given by the equation (1.6 * BaseHealth)^0.6. This tends to return a very low number, for instance 18 for someone with 200 health. The goal here is to add just a tad bit of realism. If you're almost dead, you're not going to be focusing on learning.

Fatigue is a different story, and probably the most influential change I've made in terms of influencing your skill increases and how you play the game. The equation here is Fatigue Factor = ((Current fatigue / Base Fatigue) + 0.07)^0.2. This is multiplied by your attribute adjustment and your base skill increase rate to return the final skill increase rate. The number for the Fatigue Factor ragnes from just over 1 (when the player has 100% faigue) to just under 0.6 (when the player has zero fatigue). The result is that exhausting your character leads to learning rates of approximately 60% normal. I compensate for that to some degree with the attribute adjustments, but not completely, so if you want to increase your skills, you have to be smart about not exhausting your character.

Natural Magic:

I've placed the readme for Natural Magic at the end of this, with al the details. This replaces the * aspect of the attirbute-skill influencing system. Having both proved to be somewhat incompatible, and also, in my opinion, overpowered intelligence and willpower. Since higher-cost spells are much more important using this system, and intelligence and willpower are the route to casting those spells and regnerating magicka to cast more spells, having lots of intelligence and willpower effectively speeds your skill leveling in the magic skill areas.

Training Cost:

The Training cost is mediated by the built-in cost multiplier (fTrainingCostMult) and the TCPersFactor from this mod, which is given by (1.325 - ((cPers * 2 + cInt + cWill) / 800)), where those are Current ability levels and thus can be spell-influenced. If you have 100 in everything, then the normal cost will be multiplied by 0.85, thus costing 15% less than normal. If you have 40 in everything, the cost will go up by a factor of 15%. Personality counts for double.

The complicated part is that I haven't been able, for some reason, to pull the base value of fTrainingCostMult from the game, so I have to make you set your own. If you're playing Vanilla, the number is 10. If you're playing the Full OOO, the number is 30. I've also included the option of using 5, 20, and 50. You choose these from a menu in-game. If you want a different option, you'll have to go into the script and create it.


Game-Play Impact:
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Natural Magic has a pretty substaintial impact, in my opinion. The rest of the attribute-to-skill changes can result in anything from about 20% faster to 20%, realistically, though the tendancy will be to make you increase levels faster, because...you have to contend with the Fatigue Factor, which will slow down skill increases. In the end, depending on how you want to play it, the impact on the actual speed of your skill increases may be small, but you can play with the comfort of knowing that the game makes a little more sense than it did before. Ditto with training. i do, however, think that the influence of fatigue is liable to have a fairly significant game-changing impact, especially if used in conjunction with the DA Run Fatigue mods.

Changing Options:
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Cast the spell that was added (It's a Lesser Power) to bring up your options.

If you change mods that influence leveling rates (OOO, KCAS, etc), to ensure a smooth change, exit Oblivion, unload my mod, load Oblivion, save the game, close Oblivion and reload the mod. Sorry, I'm looking into how to make this work better, but that's what I've got right now.

Known Issues/Conflicts:
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1. Currently, fatigue has no impact on magic skills if the Natural Magic option is selected. I'll keep working on that, but I'm having difficulty getting it to work.

2. Why does the options menu come up twice when first loaded? I have no clue.

3. See issue with fTrainingCostMult

4. Conflicts with Supreme Magicka unless his Skill Progression is turned off (use the config file--it's fun and easy!)

5. Intelligent Training Mod -- since both modify the fTrainingCostMult, using both is a bad idea, unless you turn off my Training Cost option. Then, they should work fine.

6. No known issues with any mod that alters leveling rates. This inclues KCAS and OOO.

Technical/Mathematical Stuff for Attributes and Skills:
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Here's one skill action's script block

Set PrimmarkB to (((agi + n) * pm) / (Bmark + (d / Bmark)))
Set PrimmarkP to pow primmarkb Pexp
Set secmarkb to (((str + m) * sm) / (Bmark + (d / bmark)))
Set secmarkp to pow secmarkb Sexp
Set nmarkr to (Bmarkr * (PrimmarkP + secmarkp) * fatper)
SetSkillUseIncrement NmarkR Marksman 0

agi and str are the base values, as is BMark. Bmarkr is the base skilluseincrement captured before the script goes and modifies it. The other variables are currently set at:

Set Pexp to 0.57
Set Sexp to 0.57
Set pm to 0.6
Set sm to 0.2
Set d to 400
Set n to 4
Set m to 4

What do these numbers do? The exponents set the rate at which the primmarkB and secmarkB terms level off, as well as the size of their values (to some extent). I have them set close to the the 0.6 average exponent that governs the number of "actions" per skill level, which holds true, more or less, for Base, Specialization, Major and S&M. The smaller the exponent, the more squished together (closer to 1) all numbers raised to that power become. So, if you wanted the secondary attribute to have a larger impact earlier on, you would make that exponent smaller. This, however, will cause the overall numbers to be smaller later on. If you wanted to dramatically slow down skill increases early on and speed them up later in the game, you could make the exponents greater than 1.

The pm and sm determine, along with the exponents, how many times more important the primary attribute is than the secondary. I actually have the primary as slightly less than twice as important. Changing 0.6 to 1.4 would make it 3 times as important as the secondary atribute, but would also dramatically increase the rate of skill-ups, so if you want to tweak these numbers, make one bigger and one smaller to avoid huge game changes.

The n and m are mainly affect the lower attribute levels to give them a small boost if positive or a penalty if negative. The influence fades as the attribute number becomes large compared to n or m.

Finally, a larger d means slower skill increases. The influence of this term is greater when skill levels are low.

Thanks:
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The good people who developed OBSE.

Kobu for showing me (through the example of his mod) how to do messagebox menus, and a spell to bring them up.

Natural Magic Readme:

Background:
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This mod addresses one of the primary issues with magic in Oblivion, namely the way that low-level, 1-magicka cost spells can train a mage as effectively as a spell costing 100 magicka. The approach that I took, which differs from the other mods I've encountered that address this issue, is that I look not at the base cost of the spell, but at the current cost for the player. Why is this important? If the base cost for a spell is 100 magicka, a mage with a skill level of 40 is going to find that difficult to cast -- approx 92 magicka. Casting that a couple times should really make an impact on the skill of the caster. However, by the time the player has progressed to a skill level of 80, he or she has jumped up two levels of mastery and that 100-base magicka cost spell is now only going to require 44 magicka. It's old hat, it's been cast a hundred times -- is casting it again really going to have the same impact on the skill of the caster as it did the first time? But that new Expert level spell, which is costing you 120 magicka a pop, should make a huge impact on your skill increases.

Important Notes: This mod requires OBSE v.0011 or higher.

I would also like to thank tejon and his Magicka Based Skill Progression for Oblivion mod for showing me how to get started. Without being able to look at that, I would have actually had to figure things out on my own.

Method:
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In essence, the equation looks like this: [Range Modifier * Skill Increment Modifier * Spell Modifier]


The Range Modifier
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The Range Modifier is about 1 for a self-cast spell, about 1.05 for a touch, and about 1.11 for a target spell to account for the greater difficulty of landing a touch or target spell. This becomes especially important when considering that it is actually much better for improving your skill if you cast a hard spell costing a lot of magicka. If you miss, you could be in some trouble, so I wanted to give a bit of a reward for the effort. Since it's a multiplier, the bigger the spell, the bigger the reward.

The Increment Modifier
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The Increment Modifier takes into account the skill increment rates set in Vanilla or whatever leveling mod you’re using, then adjusts the rates as described below.

Here are the OOO increments and the Vanilla Increments. The increments for any mod you are using can be found in the Skills section of TES.

Alteration1.64
Conj2.26
Dest0.481.2
Illusion1.23
Myst1.23
Rest0.240.6

In the script, I multiply your base rates by the numbers 0.875, 0.75, .875, 0.93, 0.93, and 1, respectively. In general, this lowers the increase rate slightly to account for the increased rate due to touch and target spells. I left restoration alone because it's awfully slow anyway, and most of my use of it is for healing with some touch absorption thrown in. If you use it to throw healing spells at people, then you may want to knock it down to 0.93 or so. The other exception to the norm is Conjuration. Due to the cost of most of the basic summoning skills at the expert level, in particular, skill increases were happening very rapidly between 75 and 100.


The Spell Modifier
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The Spell Modifier goes like so: ([Current Magicka Cost]*[Mastery Level Modifier]/[Base Skill Level])^[Mastery Level Exponent]

The current magicka cost for the spell and the base skill level in that school are pretty self-explanatory and are the most important factors. The Mastery Level Modifier and Exponent work in conjuction to make the numbers turn out just right. The basic ideas behind them are as follows.

The Modifier pulls the numbers down into the fractional range, decreasing the increment increase per cast. Using decimals, except for the early stages of each mastery level, allowed me to use the Exponent to either smooth out the diminishing effectiveness of a spell in terms of raising your skill (by using an exponent of less than 1) or to try to hasten the decline of the spell. For the low-level spells, the decrease in their worth occurs quite rapidly and they would become utterly useless at higher levels. While they’re still not very effective (see below), they're somewhat better than worthless for longer due to the small exponent. On the other hand, the Expert level spells never get their magicka costs down very low, and there's not much time to let them diminish naturally with any significance, so I had to hasten their decline a bit with an exponent of greater than 1.

For those interested in modifying these numbers, that’s the gist of it. To make the spells effective for longer, give them bigger Mastery Level Modifiers and smaller Exponents. To do the reverse, do the the reverse.

What are the Results?
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The examples below are for OOO. However, I’ve tested it on Vanilla and on weird custom leveling mods of my own, and it levels accordingly. So, if your leveling rate is 2x that of 000 for Illusion, your numbers will be about half of those you see below.

Take a magic specialist with Illusion as a Major skill Note: Mastery level, magicka cost are in parentheses for reference. All cast #’s are approx, +/- 1

At Level 30 - OOO requires 13 spell-casts
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Starlight (Novice, 23 magicka) - 22 casts
Eyes of Eventide (Apprentice, 58) - 13 casts

This isn’t too earth-shattering, other than that it may be a bit tougher to skill-up at these levels because the little spells don’t help quite as much. However, for non-specialist majors who start at 5, 10, 15 or so as their beginning level, starlight will be just as effective as ever, until you get toward that Apprentice level 25.

At level 50 - OOO requires 34 casts
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Starlight (Novice, 17) - 65 casts
Eyes of Eventide (Apprentice, 43) - 38 casts
Chameleon (Journeyman, 111) -17 casts

Now we’re really starting to see starlight fade, but note that Eyes of Eventide held it’s own. What this means is that, as you approach Journeyman level, it’s going to get harder, like you’re hitting a bit of a wall. Once you get to Journeyman, however, a whole new world opens up and, assuming you have the magicka to cast it now and then, spells like Chameleon will help you speed up your skill-ups for a while.

At Level 75 - 000 requires 63 casts
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Starlight - I didn’t bother trying, it’s high.
Eyes of Eventide (Apprentice, 26) - 94 casts
Chameleon (Journeyman, 66) - 46 casts
Custom Invisibility, Mid-Powered for Expert (Expert, 122) - 34 casts
Ditto Above, But Maxed out For Expert (Expert, 175) - 27 casts

Once you hit Expert, the Apprentice and lower spells really fade away as far as helping you increase your skill level. Not useless, certainly, but they give diminishing returns. The journeyman level spells still retain a great deal of usefulness for giving you skill increases, and the new Expert level spells, if you can afford to cast them, provide great learning experience for your spell caster.

At Level 95 - 000 requires 90 casts
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Chameleon (Journeyman, 29) - 82 casts
Mid-Powered Invisibility (Expert, 55) - 56 casts
Maxed-Out Invisibility (Expert, 88) - 44 casts

The Journeyman spells continue to just about hold pace as you progress through Expert, and while the Expert spells give diminishing returns, they still greatly reduce the number of casts necessary. This, of course, is counterbalanced by the fact spells that may still have a great deal of utility, like lower-level night-eyes or light spells, no longer give you much training benefits, and the relatively high cost of casting the Expert level spells.

Implications
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High Intelligence and Willpower, for a large Magicka pool and faster regeneration (both of which are augment by OOO), become even more important for spell-casters. Those not majoring or specializing in magic will see similar changes to their spell cast rates, though they may have more difficulty increasing their levels unless their willing to use some money on fortify magicka/int potions and so on, which adds an added strategic dimension.

Judging whether to use a spell that’s going to get the job done or one that will give you the biggest boost per cast also adds to the strategic dimension, since the former won’t raise your skill much, but the latter could drain your magicka and leave you vulnerable.


***Important Note for Supreme Magic users***

The two mods are compatible so long as you use his Configuration File to turn of his skill progression system.


If anyone has suggestions for improving this mod, please let me know. [email protected]

Thanks!