Give Feedback
About this mod
NaturalLeveling and More by InbredMonkey Installation: Dump all the files in the zip in your Oblivion\\Data folder. More specifically: NaturalLeveling.esp in Oblivion\\Data levelup_menu.xml in Oblivion\\Data\\menus You should make a new character for this mod! (The attribute advancement script won’t run with an old char
- Permissions and credits
NaturalLeveling and More by InbredMonkey
Installation:
Dump all the files in the zip in your Oblivion\Data folder.
More specifically:
NaturalLeveling.esp in Oblivion\Data
levelup_menu.xml in Oblivion\Data\menus
You should make a new character for this mod!
(The attribute advancement script won’t run with an old character)
One step Character Generation:
As soon as you start a new game you choose your race, birthsign, and class. Changing your race, birthsign, or class before leaving the sewers is disabled. This was done to allow the attribute advancement script to get your correct endurance for retroactive health calculations. It also prevents other weird problems that may occur such as reducing a player’s max level due to switching classes.
Custom Race Fix Included:
You should be able to play with custom races without getting stuck because the guy in the cell across from you has no taunt dialogue for your race.
I sure hope it works, because I didn’t test it.
Removal of Default spells:
The 8 point heal spell and 6 point damage spells have been removed. They have been replaced with a 10 point heal and 10 point damage spell that you only get if you pick restoration/destruction as a major. This will not be an issue for casters, but non-casters will start with no spells at all. The primary motivation for the removal of these spells was that, first of all, they seemed out of place for some characters, and second, these spells’ low cost and effectiveness combined with the fact that they were given to all classes at the start horribly inflated the skill gain rate of restoration, and to a lesser extent, destruction. This wouldn’t have been as big of a deal if Bethsoft had decided to give more skill for casting bigger spells.
Dynamic Attribute Advancement:
There are tons of mods out there that automatically increase your attributes when you skill up, but many of them completely change which skills raise which attributes and all of them either can’t handle custom races and classes or force you to configure something to get it to work. This mod (hopefully) suffers from none of those problems.
When you level up, you don’t pick which attributes to increase. The mod will give each attribute a bonus based on the 3 skills that are associated with an attribute. The bonus is capped so that the bonus to attribute cannot exceed 5 times the number of level-ups gained. Also, the overall bonus is limited to +60 per attribute. This bonus can cause the total attribute value to exceed 100, depending on the race, favored attributes, and birthsign. Luck does not ever increase.
This system is meant to prevent the player from maxing out an attribute at a level earlier than was possible in the unmodified level up system. This plug-in only caps each attribute individually, so it is still possible to max out all attributes at level 13. (but only if you max out many of your skills!) Also, since it is based on current skills, not skill gains, the player will get a rapid boost of attributes at early levels that will slow down as the bonus cap increases.
My method only adds or subtracts to attributes, but never sets them directly, so in theory no custom race or birthsign should ever break the system. There can be issues with other plugins that set the player’s attributes directly, but that is a bad idea to begin with.
Luck was left uncapped to allow level-ups to occur after all other stats reach or exceed 100. For those of you who are worried about not being able to raise luck, luck’s only effect in the game is to boost the effective skill level of all skills, but since this bonus is capped at 100, luck is only useful when you are using skills you have not already maxed. (powergamers don’t need luck, roleplayers who need luck can get it as a favored stat and pick the thief birthsign)
In order to determine what bonus to give, the advancement system uses a weighted average of the player’s attributes, with precedence given to higher attributes.
Some examples:
Blade: 15
Blunt: 10
Block: 10
+0 strength
Blade: 60
Blunt: 5
Block: 5
+20 strength (at level 5 or higher)
Blade: 35
Blunt: 35
Block: 35
+20 strength (at level 5 or higher)
Blade: 100
Blunt: 5
Block: 5
+40 strength (at level 9 or higher)
Blade: 100
Blunt: 100
Block: 5
+60 strength (at level 13 or higher)
Blade: 81
Blunt: 81
Block: 81
+60 strength (at level 13 or higher)
The actual formula:
clamp(sqrt(skillA^2+skillB^2+skillC^2)*0.5-10,0,(playerlevel-1)*5)
(hint: clamp(value, min, max))
I wanted to weight based on the exact number of skill uses needed to get to each level, but oblivion scripting lacks the math functions needed to do that. I need more feedback to help balance these bonuses.
Precise Retroactive health:
Unlike other retroactive health mods, this mod seeks to give your character the exact number of hitpoints they would have in unmodded oblivion if that character raised endurance as early as possible.
Any time your base endurance changes, the algorithm will kick in and recalculate your health. This had to be done, in case your character reaches max level before getting the maximum endurance bonus, otherwise that character would be forever gimped.
Skill cap enforcement:
Night Mother’s Blessing, Grey Prince’s Training were removed. Now the game simply manually adds the same number of points those bonuses would give, but does not let those skills exceed 100. The main difference is now accepting those quest rewards will not alter your maximum level, and will count towards a level up if those are primary skills. All other quests in the game that boosted skills were checked and fixed as needed, so now your skills should never go over 100.
The Oghma Infinium no longer boosts your skills; it only boosts your stats. For each skill in the chosen specialization (combat, magic, stealth) it gives +5 to that skills primary attribute. (This means you get +35 stat points! In arena it gave +50 attribute points to distribute freely. In Daggerfall it gave +30 points.) Before it gave +20 points, but also boosted some skills. (Not that having over 100 skill would do anything for any skill other than athletics or acrobatics.)
Potions Toned Down:
Added a 1 second delay to all common health, magicka and fatigue potions.
This means you can’t go in your inventory a fraction of a second before being dealt a deathblow and drink half a dozen weak restore health potions.
Spell penalty limits removed:
Spell effectiveness can now range from 0% to 100% while wearing armor.
Wearing full Daedric with 5 heavy armor skill now penalizes your spell effectivness by a crippling 90%, but getting a skill around 50 removes this penalty completely. Now your armor skill lacking mage can feel truly helpless in armor. Penalties to casting while wearing armor were clamped in the range 30% to 5%. This arbitrary limit of 5% really didn’t seem fair, considering the master perk for heavy armor makes it weigh nothing while equipped. In general the penalty was an annoyance, and did not give enough incentive for an armor trained mage to go back to cloth, so it was removed.
Willpower Influence on Magic Recovery Increased:
Now the rate at which magicka recovers is only a factor of willpower and maximum magicka. Before there was a constant added to allow low willpower characters more recovery and high willpower to be of little benefit. Now 30 willpower characters should recover magicka 1/3 slower, at 75 it is the same as before, but characters above 75 see an increase to their rate of regeneration. (100 willpower recovers magicka about 10% faster than before) The regen rate is something like willpower*max_magicka*0.03 in magicka per second.
Spell projectile speed increased:
Speed multiplier up from 1000 to 1500
Magical projectiles felt too floaty. They should also be more likely to hit their target.
Skill changes:
Marksman:
Speed multiplier up from 1500 to 2000
The arrows are just a bit slow… and easy to dodge.
You should always be able to retrieve arrows that hit a live target.
How much sense does it make that your arrow that killed a deer breaks 50% of the time, but you can slam arrows into stone walls and trees all day without breaking them?
Knockdown and paralyze perks disabled.
These perks always felt too strange and random, especially the paralyze one. Am I the only one who thinks that an arrow hit randomly making the target get all green and glowy is weird? If you want to paralyze someone, you should use poison and get a near 100% success rate :-) Through my testing, the knockdown seems to happen every so often even though I tried to disable it.
Block:
Stagger and Disarm perk disabled.
When blocking with hand do hand, the stagger perk would cause you to randomly put your guard down and uncontrollably swing at whatever you are facing, even if you are hit from behind. Similarly, with a shield you have an extremely erratic shield bash that forces you to move forward whether you like it or not. This would have been awesome if you had some degree of control over it, but the developers decided to make it no more than a random seizure, so away it goes.
New Master perk, No Damage.
Blocking with a shield with 100% skill now deals you no damage. Broken you say? Well spells still hurt you, and you can’t attack while your shield is up, so why not let the master of block feel a little bit safe behind his shield? Also blocking with a weapon and hand to hand has been improved to about 80% and 50% respectively at master level. It really didn’t seem fair for armor you wear to be capped at 85%, but your shield to be capped at 75% (Testing has lead me to believe I did not successfully disable disarm)
Sneak:
Insane Overpowered Critical Multipliers:
Melee 4x 5x 6x 7x 8x
Ranged 2x 3x 4x 5x 6x
Now your master assassin can more easily enjoy putting down an unaware victim.
(With the 100% retrieval rate, you can kill many targets with the same arrow!)
Skill gain rate tweaks:
Acrobatics:
Falling skill gain reduced. Taking any amount of fall damage formerly gave 10 times the skill of jumping once! This has been reduced to 4 times the skill of jumping once. This used to lead to the absurd practice of massive skill gains through dropping just far enough to take fall damage.
Alchemy:
No more skill for eating bread and cheese. Now alchemists get good at making potions, only from making potions. Role-players rejoice! Your barbarian won’t be a master of alchemy just because he eats common food.
Athletics:
Swimming now gives twice the skill of running, instead of only 33% more.
Magic skills:
All now gain at the exact same rate. Hopefully this should be more balanced with the removal of the “free” cantrips every new character started with. Magic skill gain is impossible to balance due to every magic spell in a school giving the exact same experience regardless of the casting requirements or mana cost. The main point of this is to allow some reasonable skill gains in destruction and restoration when casting bigger spells.
Speechcaft, Security:
Significant increase to skill gain rate due to the low frequency at which these skills are used. It doesn’t help that these skills are made completely useless by magic. (NPCs should get upset when you cast a charm or unlock spell, but for some reason they never do.)
Installation:
Dump all the files in the zip in your Oblivion\Data folder.
More specifically:
NaturalLeveling.esp in Oblivion\Data
levelup_menu.xml in Oblivion\Data\menus
You should make a new character for this mod!
(The attribute advancement script won’t run with an old character)
One step Character Generation:
As soon as you start a new game you choose your race, birthsign, and class. Changing your race, birthsign, or class before leaving the sewers is disabled. This was done to allow the attribute advancement script to get your correct endurance for retroactive health calculations. It also prevents other weird problems that may occur such as reducing a player’s max level due to switching classes.
Custom Race Fix Included:
You should be able to play with custom races without getting stuck because the guy in the cell across from you has no taunt dialogue for your race.
I sure hope it works, because I didn’t test it.
Removal of Default spells:
The 8 point heal spell and 6 point damage spells have been removed. They have been replaced with a 10 point heal and 10 point damage spell that you only get if you pick restoration/destruction as a major. This will not be an issue for casters, but non-casters will start with no spells at all. The primary motivation for the removal of these spells was that, first of all, they seemed out of place for some characters, and second, these spells’ low cost and effectiveness combined with the fact that they were given to all classes at the start horribly inflated the skill gain rate of restoration, and to a lesser extent, destruction. This wouldn’t have been as big of a deal if Bethsoft had decided to give more skill for casting bigger spells.
Dynamic Attribute Advancement:
There are tons of mods out there that automatically increase your attributes when you skill up, but many of them completely change which skills raise which attributes and all of them either can’t handle custom races and classes or force you to configure something to get it to work. This mod (hopefully) suffers from none of those problems.
When you level up, you don’t pick which attributes to increase. The mod will give each attribute a bonus based on the 3 skills that are associated with an attribute. The bonus is capped so that the bonus to attribute cannot exceed 5 times the number of level-ups gained. Also, the overall bonus is limited to +60 per attribute. This bonus can cause the total attribute value to exceed 100, depending on the race, favored attributes, and birthsign. Luck does not ever increase.
This system is meant to prevent the player from maxing out an attribute at a level earlier than was possible in the unmodified level up system. This plug-in only caps each attribute individually, so it is still possible to max out all attributes at level 13. (but only if you max out many of your skills!) Also, since it is based on current skills, not skill gains, the player will get a rapid boost of attributes at early levels that will slow down as the bonus cap increases.
My method only adds or subtracts to attributes, but never sets them directly, so in theory no custom race or birthsign should ever break the system. There can be issues with other plugins that set the player’s attributes directly, but that is a bad idea to begin with.
Luck was left uncapped to allow level-ups to occur after all other stats reach or exceed 100. For those of you who are worried about not being able to raise luck, luck’s only effect in the game is to boost the effective skill level of all skills, but since this bonus is capped at 100, luck is only useful when you are using skills you have not already maxed. (powergamers don’t need luck, roleplayers who need luck can get it as a favored stat and pick the thief birthsign)
In order to determine what bonus to give, the advancement system uses a weighted average of the player’s attributes, with precedence given to higher attributes.
Some examples:
Blade: 15
Blunt: 10
Block: 10
+0 strength
Blade: 60
Blunt: 5
Block: 5
+20 strength (at level 5 or higher)
Blade: 35
Blunt: 35
Block: 35
+20 strength (at level 5 or higher)
Blade: 100
Blunt: 5
Block: 5
+40 strength (at level 9 or higher)
Blade: 100
Blunt: 100
Block: 5
+60 strength (at level 13 or higher)
Blade: 81
Blunt: 81
Block: 81
+60 strength (at level 13 or higher)
The actual formula:
clamp(sqrt(skillA^2+skillB^2+skillC^2)*0.5-10,0,(playerlevel-1)*5)
(hint: clamp(value, min, max))
I wanted to weight based on the exact number of skill uses needed to get to each level, but oblivion scripting lacks the math functions needed to do that. I need more feedback to help balance these bonuses.
Precise Retroactive health:
Unlike other retroactive health mods, this mod seeks to give your character the exact number of hitpoints they would have in unmodded oblivion if that character raised endurance as early as possible.
Any time your base endurance changes, the algorithm will kick in and recalculate your health. This had to be done, in case your character reaches max level before getting the maximum endurance bonus, otherwise that character would be forever gimped.
Skill cap enforcement:
Night Mother’s Blessing, Grey Prince’s Training were removed. Now the game simply manually adds the same number of points those bonuses would give, but does not let those skills exceed 100. The main difference is now accepting those quest rewards will not alter your maximum level, and will count towards a level up if those are primary skills. All other quests in the game that boosted skills were checked and fixed as needed, so now your skills should never go over 100.
The Oghma Infinium no longer boosts your skills; it only boosts your stats. For each skill in the chosen specialization (combat, magic, stealth) it gives +5 to that skills primary attribute. (This means you get +35 stat points! In arena it gave +50 attribute points to distribute freely. In Daggerfall it gave +30 points.) Before it gave +20 points, but also boosted some skills. (Not that having over 100 skill would do anything for any skill other than athletics or acrobatics.)
Potions Toned Down:
Added a 1 second delay to all common health, magicka and fatigue potions.
This means you can’t go in your inventory a fraction of a second before being dealt a deathblow and drink half a dozen weak restore health potions.
Spell penalty limits removed:
Spell effectiveness can now range from 0% to 100% while wearing armor.
Wearing full Daedric with 5 heavy armor skill now penalizes your spell effectivness by a crippling 90%, but getting a skill around 50 removes this penalty completely. Now your armor skill lacking mage can feel truly helpless in armor. Penalties to casting while wearing armor were clamped in the range 30% to 5%. This arbitrary limit of 5% really didn’t seem fair, considering the master perk for heavy armor makes it weigh nothing while equipped. In general the penalty was an annoyance, and did not give enough incentive for an armor trained mage to go back to cloth, so it was removed.
Willpower Influence on Magic Recovery Increased:
Now the rate at which magicka recovers is only a factor of willpower and maximum magicka. Before there was a constant added to allow low willpower characters more recovery and high willpower to be of little benefit. Now 30 willpower characters should recover magicka 1/3 slower, at 75 it is the same as before, but characters above 75 see an increase to their rate of regeneration. (100 willpower recovers magicka about 10% faster than before) The regen rate is something like willpower*max_magicka*0.03 in magicka per second.
Spell projectile speed increased:
Speed multiplier up from 1000 to 1500
Magical projectiles felt too floaty. They should also be more likely to hit their target.
Skill changes:
Marksman:
Speed multiplier up from 1500 to 2000
The arrows are just a bit slow… and easy to dodge.
You should always be able to retrieve arrows that hit a live target.
How much sense does it make that your arrow that killed a deer breaks 50% of the time, but you can slam arrows into stone walls and trees all day without breaking them?
Knockdown and paralyze perks disabled.
These perks always felt too strange and random, especially the paralyze one. Am I the only one who thinks that an arrow hit randomly making the target get all green and glowy is weird? If you want to paralyze someone, you should use poison and get a near 100% success rate :-) Through my testing, the knockdown seems to happen every so often even though I tried to disable it.
Block:
Stagger and Disarm perk disabled.
When blocking with hand do hand, the stagger perk would cause you to randomly put your guard down and uncontrollably swing at whatever you are facing, even if you are hit from behind. Similarly, with a shield you have an extremely erratic shield bash that forces you to move forward whether you like it or not. This would have been awesome if you had some degree of control over it, but the developers decided to make it no more than a random seizure, so away it goes.
New Master perk, No Damage.
Blocking with a shield with 100% skill now deals you no damage. Broken you say? Well spells still hurt you, and you can’t attack while your shield is up, so why not let the master of block feel a little bit safe behind his shield? Also blocking with a weapon and hand to hand has been improved to about 80% and 50% respectively at master level. It really didn’t seem fair for armor you wear to be capped at 85%, but your shield to be capped at 75% (Testing has lead me to believe I did not successfully disable disarm)
Sneak:
Insane Overpowered Critical Multipliers:
Melee 4x 5x 6x 7x 8x
Ranged 2x 3x 4x 5x 6x
Now your master assassin can more easily enjoy putting down an unaware victim.
(With the 100% retrieval rate, you can kill many targets with the same arrow!)
Skill gain rate tweaks:
Acrobatics:
Falling skill gain reduced. Taking any amount of fall damage formerly gave 10 times the skill of jumping once! This has been reduced to 4 times the skill of jumping once. This used to lead to the absurd practice of massive skill gains through dropping just far enough to take fall damage.
Alchemy:
No more skill for eating bread and cheese. Now alchemists get good at making potions, only from making potions. Role-players rejoice! Your barbarian won’t be a master of alchemy just because he eats common food.
Athletics:
Swimming now gives twice the skill of running, instead of only 33% more.
Magic skills:
All now gain at the exact same rate. Hopefully this should be more balanced with the removal of the “free” cantrips every new character started with. Magic skill gain is impossible to balance due to every magic spell in a school giving the exact same experience regardless of the casting requirements or mana cost. The main point of this is to allow some reasonable skill gains in destruction and restoration when casting bigger spells.
Speechcaft, Security:
Significant increase to skill gain rate due to the low frequency at which these skills are used. It doesn’t help that these skills are made completely useless by magic. (NPCs should get upset when you cast a charm or unlock spell, but for some reason they never do.)