Reading books now grants you experience in a randomly picked skill. Why? Two different people may read the same book and learn totally different lessons! And, this way, the normally-useless books cluttering Skyrim are now potentially useful to all classes!
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Reading books now grants you experience in a randomly picked skill. Why? Two different people may read the same book and learn totally different lessons! And, this way, the normally-useless books cluttering Skyrim are now potentially useful to all classes! I also didn't want to specify a skill for each of the hundreds of books - so I let the randomizer do the hard work for me :-)
Inspired by (alternatives) - all of which are pretty much the same concept, but only boost the speech skill, and many lack Book Covers of Skyrim support.
Reading is Good - I like how this mod handles skill books; you benefit by reading them early, versus saving them until the late game. My mod doesn't touch skill books, so they work great together.
Perkapalooza - My perk overhaul of choice, but it's hard for some characters to advance in the new "Fortune" and "Prodigy" trees - so I built a version of this mod that's more likely to advance those two skills.
How it works
When you read a book that you haven't read before, you receive a variable amount of experience toward a semi-randomly chosen skill. I’ve attempted to make the amount of experience gained noticeable at lower levels, but not overpowered.
This mod does not touch skill books (since I like how "Reading is Good" handles those) or notes/letters/journals (there's nothing to learn in those.)
I like the idea of random skills versus the more common speech-only mods, because two people might read the same book and take away totally different lessons. It also makes books more useful to all classes – even a barbarian might learn something about how to swing an axe - you never know!
That being said, I made some skills more likely to be randomly chosen than others, since you can only learn so much about swinging an axe from a book!
Bonus: The optional "Perkapalooza" scripts make this mod choose the pickpocket and lockpicking skills much more frequently. Why? Perkapalooza overhauls these into new skill trees (Fortune and Prodigy) but I don't often play as lock picking / pocket picking characters, so it's very difficult to advance those skills and get those perks. Now, it's a bit easier, since a lot of books help!
Configuration
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No MCM currently available, but if there’s demand I can make the skills toggle-able, and a slider for the minimum/maximum XP learned per book.
Script Load
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Tiny! Less than 100 lines of code, which only runs when you open the books included in this mod. Nothing active or intrusive running in the background to cause you any grief.
This mod has been bundled up as an ESL-flagged ESP, so it doesn't count against your load order. Neat-o!