Master of One is a perk overhaul that reimagines character progression. Rather than perks making you unambiguously more powerful, they instead let you enhance some traits at the expense of others. This makes perk selection an important choice because, depending on your playstyle, not all perks will help your character. It also creates more pronounced differences between builds (even those that use the same skills) as by taking different perks they end up with different strengths and weaknesses. Lastly, it slows the player's ascent to godlike power, as even in the late-game your character will have weaknesses you will need to defend against, and enemies you will need to prepare for. The key design principles are:

1. All perks have benefits and drawbacks. For instance, increasing weapon swing speed comes at the cost of decreased armor piercing, while enhancing fire spells brings a weakness to the other elements. This is the core mechanism by which perks facilitate specialization as opposed to simple progression.
2. All perks have 5 ranks, and while benefits grow steadily with rank, drawbacks start small but grow exponentially. Multiple ranks lets players choose the extent of their specialization, while the drawbacks creates differences between in builds in terms of how many ranks they want. For instance, a dedicated cryomancer may want to take all frost spell perks to their maximum rank, but the downsides mean a generalist mage or frost battlemage may only want the first 2 or 3.

The end result is that rather than "filling in" a perk tree by taking each perk as it becomes available, you will instead pick and choose from a wide variety of specializations, crafting a unique niche for your character.

1. Effects are largely passive. In vanilla, many important mechanics are locked behind perks (e.g. dual casting, sneak rolling). This is the exact kind of "perks-as-power-progression" I want to avoid. As such, many vanilla abilities are available from the start, although some remain behind low-level perks and some new perk-gated abilities are added (lock smashing, explosive arrows, framing targets for theft, etc.).
2. Perks only have skill requirements, not perk requirements. This means you don't need to take a perk you don't want in order to get one you do, while still saving the more extreme perks for the late-game. Perks are rated as "novice", "apprentice", "adept", "expert", or "master" according to their skill requirements, which, for the first rank, are 0, 10, 30, 55 and 80, respectively. Skills requirements grow with rank though, with top perk ranks requiring skill 80, 90, 90, 95 and 100.
3. MCM to respec your character. The double-edged nature of these perks means you may regret your choices! As such, the MCM lets you remove any chosen perk at any time and regain your perk points. This also means you can totally rebuild your character. Lastly, the MCM also lets you change the skill requirements for all 5 ranks of the different tiers of perks.
4. Compatible with everything. Compatibility was a priority throughout development, and Master of One should be fully compatible with everything, except for other perk overhauls. Even mod added spells (a common issue for perk overhauls) will work out-of-the-box provided they use vanilla keywords appropriately. 
5. Perk trees actually look like their skill symbol. Many vanilla trees look nothing like their skill symbol (e.g. illusion). This is fixed in Master of One, but note this means that the novice perks aren't always placed at the bottom of the tree.

All warrior skills' start with a novice "conditioning" perk that collectively force a trade-off between physical and magical prowess: Without these perks, using weapons, blocking or running in heavy armor all drain stamina*. Taking the conditioning perks removes these stamina costs, but replaces them with reductions in your magical capability. For pure warriors the choice is clear, but mixed builds will need to strike a balance.

*For players who want to start off proficient, the MCM lets you give yourself these perks for free, but you will still get the penalties associated with them.

Archery

The main trade off in archery is between the long-range sniping style, and the agile close-quarters style. Specialists can really invest, tweaking draw speed, effective range, movement speed, stagger chance, and so on, but pulling off a mixed style is harder. The master perks lets you modify arrows to produce exotic effects.

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Notes


Block
Shields offer excellent protection against physical damage, and the apprentice and adept perks let the player customize this, enhancing defense contingent on positioning, adding mobility at the expense of defense, or trading between different elemental resistances. The expert and master perks focus on the offensive use of shields, enhancing bashing and counter attacks, but doing so places much greater demands on the user.

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Heavy Armor
Heavy armor offers excellent protection, and the apprentice level perks enhance this provided you can find a complementary set. The adept perks take it even further, but at a cost to your mobility and carry capacity. The expert perks, on the other hand, support more offensive play, but you sacrifice some of heavy armor's defensive potency to get there. The master perk gives heavy armor itself some passive offensive capacity, but you must put yourself in danger to take advantage of it.

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One Handed
The one handed tree emphasizes timing and strategic, duel-like fighting, it also increases the differentiation between swords, war axes and maces. The expert perks reward well timed attacks, with each weapon excelling at different moments. Meanwhile, the master perks allow power attacks from each weapon type to cause additional effects that are doubled under the right conditions. Collectively this means each weapon type favors a different fighting style, but the apprentice perks prevent players from freely switching between all three. The adept perks, however, provide utility across weapon types and include an unarmed perk.

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Smithing
The smithing tree offers specializations in different materials and different items. A total specialist, for instance focussing on elven one handed weapons, can improve them far beyond vanilla limits. To make and temper wider variety of items, however, requires some sacrifice.

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Two Handed
The two-handed tree emphasizes all out attack and heavy burst damage, but you can burn through your stamina very quickly and so prolonged battles are a challenge. As with one handed, the perks provide additional differentiation between greatswords, battle axes and warhammers, which specialize against unarmored, blocking and heavily armored enemies respectively. The adept perks enhance the use of all two handed weapons, and also provide general support for a barbarian playstyle.

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All mage skills share a novice "conduit" perk that reduces casting cost but brings a weakness to magic. This encourages mages to specialize in fewer skills, until they can find a way round this weakness. The casting cost reduction decelerates with rank, this helps novice mages get their foot in the door, but also means the number of times you can cast a spell before running out of magicka grows linearly from 1.33x at rank 1, to 2.66x at rank 5.

Alteration
Early alteration perks enhance your defenses and can offset the magic weakness that comes from conduit perks. The mid-game perks allow you to develop element specific resistances, up to complete immunity, but you become weak to the others. The expert perks allow you to tune mage armor spells for different purposes while the master perks let you modify your own essence, gaining the traits of an atronach or plant.

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Conjuration
Conjuration offers three branches: bound weapons, summoning, and necromancy. Bound weapons deal moderate damage, but can be tuned to target either the undead the living or mages, just not all at once. Summoning and necromancy are in mild opposition too, but both allow you to enhance the offenses and defenses of your minions at a cost to yourself. The master level perk lets you control up to 6 minions at once, but they constantly take damage.

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Destruction
The main trade off in destruction is between the three elements; the apprentice spells enhance one element to the detriment of the other two, while the master spells unlock exotic effects. The expert perks add situational utility and are great for a secondary skill/element (e.g. frost spells as mage killers), but be careful not to gimp your primary element. The adept perks facilitate different playstyles; serpent for sneaks, meteor for those who keep away from direct combat (summoners, illusionists or team leaders), and bull or fortress for battlemages who rely primarily on spells or weapons respectively.

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Enchanting
Enchanters face trade offs between different elements, different items and different ways to enhance the wearer. You can create obscenely powerful enchantments if you truly specialize, but you will limit yourself to effectively a single enchantment and so the challenge is to maintain breadth. Master tier perks automatically recharge weapons and allow two enchantments on the same item, but for a steep cost.

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Illusion
While all enemies are vulnerable to illusion spells, in order to manipulate high level targets, Illusionists must specialize in a target type. For early perks the hostility of the target matters, at higher levels the target's race comes in to play. The master perks unlock additional effects that suit different builds. But in no case do illusion spells deal direct damage, so an illusion mage will always need additional damage sources.

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Restoration
Novice and apprentice Restoration perks enhance your regeneration, while reducing your stat pool. The top ranks of these perks only make sense if you have increased your base stat to around 200, otherwise the penalty is too great. Adept perks and up offer two complementary paths. One is defensive, allowing you to augment your wards by increasing their efficacy but decreasing their cost. The other is offensive, specializing is damaging the undead, with options for magic and melee based builds.

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All thief skills tree start with a concentration perk that provides general proficiency in the skill, at a cost to the players offensive or defensive capacities. As such, dedicated stealth characters can find themselves frail in open combat, becoming dependent on remaining unseen. Across all the trees this is the challenge to being a successful thief: balancing investment in your strengths against the need for a viable plan B should things go wrong. 


Alchemy
Each tier of the alchemy tree has a different flavor. The initial perks get the new alchemist up and running and greatly enhance foraging, taking the tedium out of ingredient gathering. The apprentice perks encourage specialization between four kinds of potions: those that heal, harm, buff and debuff. The adept perks favor different delivery methods. The expert perks change how your potions and poisons work. While the master perks allow you to bias your physiology towards either potions or poisons.

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Notes


Light Armor
Light armor sacrifices raw defensive potential in favor of supporting a wide variety of playstyles oriented around speed, agility and rapid attacks. While it can't  do much to stop the blow of a giant's club, light armor is still defensively potent when the player has plenty of stamina. Concerning offense, light armor perks can enhance your unarmed attacks, movement speed, stamina regeneration, sprinting, perception and weapon speed. It is also a flexible skill with relatively few perks requiring a full set, instead most perks require only that you wear a light cuirass and abstain from heavy armor.

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Lockpicking
The lockpicking tree is versatile, supporting both a thief playstyle that specializes in unlocking doors, avoiding detection, and trespassing, and a more general adventurer playstyle that specializes in unlocking chests, finding useful items, and exploring dungeons. While the novice and apprentice perks support basic proficiency, the adept perks increase the chances of finding spell tomes for mages, weapons and armor for warriors, and ingredients for alchemists. For those who hate lockpicking, there's even a perk to smash locks open, but it is difficult to break high tier locks without investment. The master perks, favor dedicated thieves and allow you to pick locks quickly and without being detected.

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Pickpocket
Pickpocketing emphasizes the pilfering of small valuables. In this way it is differentiated from lockpicking which favors finding practical items on your travels. Early game pickpockets will focus on gold and keys, and will rely on remaining hidden to get away with their crimes. By the mid-game, however, you can step out of the shadows, using crowds to divert attention and fine clothes to avoid suspicion. The expert perks allow for more elaborate schemes; using reverse pickpocketing to poison targets or frame them for a crime. Only at the highest levels does it become practical to steal larger items like equipped weapons and armor.

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Notes
Sneak
Sneaking gameplay has two key elements: first approaching enemies while remaining undetected, and second using this to your advantage with high damaging sneak attacks. Perks for both of these are across the tree. Sneaking can be muffled at the cost of speed, or sped up at the cost of carry weight, and so on. Perks that increase sneak damage enhance bows, daggers and spells. Daggers in particular can become very powerful; penetrating armor and assassinating sleeping targets, however their utility in open combat is lowered. The master perks unlock special abilities that rely on reserves of magicka and stamina to execute.

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Speech
Half of the speech tree is based around interactions with other NPCs. The entry level speech perks let you specialize as a buyer, seller or a fence. Adept perks create a tension between persuasion and intimidation. The expert perk lets you bribe guards, but knowing you are a shady character, they will watch you more closely. The master perk merges investor and master trader letting you invest in the global economy. The other half of the tree focusses on shouts. There is a conduit perk, mirroring those in the mage skills, that increases casting rate. Later perks increase shout power and unlock secondary effects; accelerating stat regeneration or blasting nearby enemies back. The master perk lets you drain your targets to recharge your shouts at the cost of your defenses.

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Requirements
SKSE - Several perks and the MCM will not work without SKSE.
SkyUI - The MCM requires SkyUI.
Spell Perk Item Distributor - Several perks rely on NPCs being given other perks or spells by SPID.
Keyword Item Distributor - Without this the Warrior Priest, Poisoner and Shout related perks won't work.
Scrambled Bugs - You must turn on "Perk Entry Points: Apply Multiple Spells" within ScrambledBugs.json. Without this fix many perks will cancel each other out.
Attack Speed Framework or any other mod that fixes the vanilla weapon speed bug - Without this fix all perks affecting weapon speed will not work.

Optional suggestions:
Configurable Perks Per Level - At 1 perk point per level, you shouldn't become very strong until level 75. For faster power growth, give yourself extra perk points; 2 per level will make you very strong by about level 40. Alternatives: the (fixed) uncapper, SkyShards, or the Radiant Quest Point System.
Know Your Enemy - Master of One facilitates extreme character specialization, but without something to penalize this your character can end up very strong. That's where Know Your Enemy comes in: it encourages breadth by giving enemies resistances to different elements and weapon types meaning you cannot rely on a single skill alone.
NPC stat rescaler - Many of Master of One's perks let you deplete an enemies magicka or stamina, but this isn't very useful given that enemies typically have huge regen rates compared to the player. The stat rescaler fixes this, and lets you tune other stats too.

Installation
Install through your mod manager of choice. If installing on an existing save, you'll probably want to return all your existing perks in order to choose new ones.

Uninstallation
Use the MCM to return all your perks. Then, in the "general" page of the MCM, untick the "installed" toggle and a message box will let you know the mod is uninstalled. After that just save, exit, and uninstall the mod.

Compatibility
Master of One edits only the 18 actor value records that contain the perk trees and the single record for the "unarmed" weapon. As such, conflicts with other mods should be rare to nonexistent, provided you don't install another perk overhaul. If you install Master of One but some of the trees are missing, then some other mod in your load order is editing these records. You can either resolve the conflict manually, or just move Master of One lower in your load order.

Master of One is inherently compatible with mod added spells, provided they are given appropriate keywords.

Performance impact
Little to none. Most perks rely on basic entry points and magic effects. Some perks involve scripts, but these are simple and only run when relevant events occur.



The Player
Master of One - A perk overhaul that transforms perks from generic character progression into a means to craft unique and specialized builds.
Curse of the Firmament - A standing stones overhaul that emphasizes tough choices.
Legacy - A race overhaul that bring strengths and weaknesses to each race.
Acolyte - A progressive-yet-unobtrusive religion overhaul with a long path to divinity.

Enemies and Combat
Know Your Enemy - A resistance and weakness overhaul for enemies and armors.
Know Your Enemy Redux - Same as the above, but enemies only and done through SPID.
Know Your Enemy Redux: Armors - The armor module of KYE, done through SPID.
NPC Stat Rescaler - A patcher that adjusts player and NPC stats for faster, fairer, and less spongy combat.
Enemy Releveler - A patcher that adjusts NPC levels to truly delevel the world.

Skills and Leveling
Trainers Galore - An expansion of the training system designed for "training only" leveling.
Challenging Spell Learning - Spell Tomes trigger a costly ritual you must pass to learn spells.
XP Editor - A patcher that adjust xp gain and leveling.
Configurable Perks Per Level - An MCM to edit how many perk points you get on level up.
Pick Your Poison - An alchemical handbook to support strategic foraging.

Mod Lists
Thoughtful Skyrim - A small, gameplay-focussed modlist that rewards preparation and planning.




Thanks to KernalsEgg for rebuilding and reintroducing the "Apply Spell Perk Entry Point: Multiple Spells" fix to Scrambled Bugs; to SimonMagus for feedback on early perk drafts and for including alchemy keyword fixes in Apothecary; to nightman0 for feedback on all perk trees; to r/skyrimmods for feedback on perk drafts and for technical help when I ran into a variety of problems; to the authors of all mods on which this work depends; to the authors of other perk overhauls who have provided inspiration and enjoyment - perk overhauls are a lot of work; to the creators of xEdit and zEdit; to Nexus Mods; to Bethesda.