How to make Intelligence appealing to non-mages?

[Greywander]

The way I see it, attributes are meant to provide bonuses to intensity while skills affect chance. Same way with Str and weapon skills, str increases damage for all melee but long blade defines the chance to hit.

Agility also increases chance to hit. Honestly, I think there's a lot of overlap between attributes and skills, and Skyrim doesn't seem to suffer for getting rid of attributes. I like having attributes, but I'd have them do something different than skills.

It all depends on how you interpret attributes, for me intelligence revolves is about understanding the magical forces and being able to concentrate them to create spells. It is not about being smart.

And I get that, I just don't like it. Intelligence is such a useful trait in real life (where we can't sling fireballs or teleport), and yet none of that utility seems to make its way into games. Particularly fantasy games, sci-fi is generally better about this.

I'm afraid that sort of utility would require huge changes to Morrowind, and outside your intended scope for a mod.

And herein lies the problem with most of the ideas proposed here, as well as the ones I've come up with myself. It's hard to work within the limitations of the system when it wasn't design for this from the outset.

I've seen games with no real use for their intelligence stat make it provide a bonus to experience, so clever characters can learn faster. It shouldn't break the game too thoroughly to do this.

This was probably the first thing I thought of. Unfortunately, the rate at which your skills increase is determined by GMSTs rather than global variables. Global variables can be changed from a script while the game is running, whereas GMSTs have to be manually changed in the editor and cannot change during play.

I would say you could build the "retention of facts and experience" into your optional decay part of NCGD. Characters with higher intelligence would lose their skills more slowly.

This is actually the best idea I've heard, and I've already started implementing it. I'm still trying to work out the exact formulas, but the general idea I'm thinking is that you have a sort of "skill memory" that basically tallies up all your skills (or, more likely, the squares of your skills, so that higher skills consume more memory e.g. just like a skill of 10 contributes 4 times as many points toward attributes as a skill of 5, so would a skill of 10 also take up 4 times as much memory) and your skill memory is balanced against your Intelligence (somehow) to give some value of decay acceleration. Higher memory = faster decay, higher Intelligence = slower decay. I'm still working on the exact formula; I have to balance it right or it becomes virtually impossible to raise your skills past a certain point because they would decay too quickly.

Not sure if it's possible with Morrowind, but one general idea I've seen thrown around is to have Intelligence improve your critical hit chance. The more you know about the physiology of people, creatures, etc, the more effective you would be at knowing where to hit to do extra damage. The main issue is, IIRC, Morrowind doesn't really have "critical hits" as such, just sneak attacks.

This one might actually be doable. The question is, is it possible to get the target of a player's attack in a script? If so, it's a trivial matter to mod their health down on a "critical hit". Perhaps a better way to implement this feature is to detect via sounds when the player is initiating an attack, then buff their damage (Strength?), then check via sounds if the hit was successful, remove the buff, and notify the player of a successful critical hit.
In other news, apparently Strength has no effect on Hand To Hand. I feel kind of silly making it a Strength skill now, but I still feel it fits somewhat (and I'm not looking forward to doing another shuffle of the attributes).