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SPOILER INFO
This article tells a little bit about how skill improvement works in Skyrim. That can hardly be considered a spoiler.
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I saw this recently and couldn't believe my eyes:
What he says is essentially: "Don't expect to increase your skill by using it in a trivial way many times. With my mod, you will have to do what real American warriors do: pay money and get your skill improved without having to move a muscle!"
Because, let's face it, that's what training in Skyrim is. ("Spend many long hours practising," he says? Has the fool even played Skyrim? Doesn't he know that training takes seconds and requires less effort than scratching your ass?)
Crafting a hundred daggers may be trivial but it still requires time and effort, to say nothing of finding the sufficient amount of raw materials (which requires walking around in the world a lot and encountering many challenges along the way). Hitting weak enemies many times may be easy and some may say cowardly, but it still involves doing at least something in the virtual reality, what is more that can be said about paying money to a trainer and being done with it.
(Mind you, even if the game were designed so that training would require you to actually move your ass, it would still be reasonable to expect that doing things out in the world should advance your skills more than doing things in a training hall. Kind of obvious when you stop for a moment to think about it, isn't it?)
Apart from which – 50 training points per level? Um, isn't that more than sufficient to advance to the next level, resulting in 50 more training points? Meaning, as long as you have enough money (which will be the case in the later stages of the game), you'll be able to just sit on your ass and advance level after level without having to do absolutely anything? You call THAT realism?
I bet the author of that mod is a fast travel user.
P.S. Just to clear away a possible misunderstanding – I have never and would never craft daggers one after another to advance my Smithing skill, or shoot at target boards to advance my Archery skill, for the simple reason – it's dull. I was rather astonished to read in forums how some people do that, causing some other people elaborate on how it's wrong to allow people to advance their skills that way. Me, I like to explore the world and do things right and get rewarded for it. I even remove all training dummies from my houses because, firstly, I don't want something that ugly in my home, and secondly, I would never use them anyway. Whatever. The point is, it's everyone's choice. If it makes you happy, craft a thousand daggers instead of thinking how to put your available crafting materials to the best use for creating things that are useful, interesting and/or expensive. If you like a mod that gives you 50 training points per level, go ahead and use it. For that matter, you can advance your skills with console commands. Someone may ask "What's the point?" but, hey, it's your time, it's your computer, and you owe no explanation to anyone.
The purpose of this article is not to prescribe to you how you have to play.
The sole purpose of this article is to point out what kind of jaw-dropping nonsense someone would refer to as "realism".
[originally published 2016-12-14]
