I've honestly never liked that about RPGs, and is the biggest hurdle to ever get into one. You're asked to make choices that affect the entire game before you even know what those choices will mean in the context of gameplay. That's a critical component since the player is going to be exposed to gameplay 99% of the time.Greywander wrote:Part of the point of this mod, as well as the mod that inspired it, Galsiah's Character Development (GCD), is that your initial choices will still matter endgame.
Choices should matter, but A) the player should have a reasonable enough amount of information to pick one in confidence and be able to stand by it, regardless of what it leads to, and B) it should have reasonable in-world consequences, rather than gamey artificially-inflated consequences (i.e. you picked this skill at the start of the game, therefore it will always be treated differently no matter what you may do, vs. you picked this skill at the start of the game, therefore it starts higher but otherwise behaves like any other skill).
IMO, it should be possible to start with a character that's good at one skillset, than over the course of their adventures decides to switch into a different skillset instead. Just because you're decent at something when you start your adventuring career doesn't mean that's what you're eventually going to master in. I mean, it's not like a person that gets out of school with a major in business can't go on to excel at game development or something.
Skyrim is the first TES game where I didn't feel need to restart a billion times before getting a character I was comfortable playing, because of the flexible leveling system. If there was something I thought I'd like and use but end up not, I could just stop using it and use something else, rather than having be stuck with it because I picked it at the start. Ironically, it was also the first TES game that didn't encourage characters to become Master of Everything, despite such a flexible leveling system. Sure, you could max out all skills to 100, but you only have enough perk points to fill out a couple skills, so all the rest would be lacking without those perks (well, in theory..). And since getting the most out of a skill required filling it with perks, it encouraged specialization rather than generalization.
Having skills atrophy through neglect is another way to solve the Master of Everything problem, since it means any skills you're not using will go down while the ones you are using go up. This still leaves the player with a choice, but rather than a static once-at-the-start choice like MW and Ob attempted (and failed), it's an organic continual choice. You can choose to start leveling and get better at other skills at any time, but the consequence is that the skills you've been using will go down. If you're good at Long Blade but then decide to focus on Short Blade, for example, Short Blade will raise while Long Blade goes down, thus the next time you get a nice Long Blade weapon you won't be as good with it anymore. So you retain a choice, but there's always a consequence for picking it.