Balanced Passive Races and Birthsigns

Balanced Passive Races and Birthsigns

Summary

This mod is a rebalance of the game's races and birthsigns, based on the related portion of BTB's Game Improvements, with each race and birthsign having only permanent abilities rather than powers or spells.

Description

In creating BTBGI, BTB strove to make each race and each birthsign unique, interesting and useful, as opposed to many being generic, mostly indistinguishable clones and some being worse than useless. See BTB's original documentation, included in the archive, where he goes into great detail about his changes and the reasoning behind them.

However, I had two general complaints that this mod seeks to address. These complaints are not specific to BTB's changes - the same issues exist in the vanilla game.

First, a few races have multiple weapon skills and/or multiple armor skills among their skill bonuses. This might make sense in the abstract, especially for a warlike, martial race like the Nords. But in practice, you're likely to only be using one primary weapon type and one primary armor type, which means that, in any given playthrough, the additional weapon and armor skill boosts are wasted.

This mod adjusts the skill boosts as needed to ensure that no race has bonuses to more than one weapon skill (not including Marksman and Hand-to-Hand) or more than one armor skill (not including Unarmored). Racial skill bonuses are not modified from BTB's version except as needed to ensure this, so by and large they're the same as in BTBGI.

I endeavored to make the distribution of weapon and armor skill bonuses balanced, and to choose replacement skill boosts that make sense for the race in question and that are balanced with respect to other races. The archive includes a spreadsheet detailing the skill bonuses for each race in vanilla, BTBGI and this mod, and the skill distribution in each.

My second complaint was that all races (in BTBGI) and many birthsigns have once-a-day powers that are only useful when actively used by the player. Some players, including myself, forget that they have these once-a-day powers, and so the powers end up going unused, and therefore useless.

This mod removes all racial and birthsign powers. (BTBGI had already removed all spells from the races and birthsigns, converting them to either powers or abilities.) Instead new permanent abilities are added, or new effects added to existing abilities, on top of the changes made by BTB.

In selecting the new abilities, my objective was to make each roughly equally useful. In many cases these new abilities will have a significant impact on gameplay, but not so powerful that they break the game. I endeavored to make races and birthsigns even more unique than in BTBGI. Like in BTBGI, none of the races or birthsigns have negative effect