Master of One - A Double-Edged Perk Overhaul

Master of One is a perk overhaul that reimagines character progression. Rather than perks simply making you 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 and some will actually harm you. It also creates more pronounced differences between builds - even those that use the same skills - because taking different perks creates different sets of 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 prepare for. The key design principles are:

• []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.

  []All perks have 5 ranks, and while benefits grow steadily with rank, drawbacks appear at rank 2 and grow exponentially. Multiple ranks lets players choose the extent of their specialization. The exponentially growing drawbacks mean that you will take only a few core perks to rank 5, creating more differences between builds. For instance, a pure cryomancer and a frost battlemage may both invest in frost spell perks, but while the cryomancer will likely take them to their maximum rank, the battlemage may stop at rank 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.

  []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.).

  []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.

  [*]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 an