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Skyrim Scaling Stopper

A leveled list overhaul to make it so weapons and armor of higher quality than steel are rare, treasure is not leveled, and most enemies aren't leveled.

Mod: Skyrim Scaling Stopper 1_8
Game: TES V: Skyrim
Author: David Brasher
Date: 4/7/12
Download Point: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=9857

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1. INFORMATION ON THE MOD
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This mod is a leveled list overhaul to make it so weapons and armor of higher quality
than steel are rare, treasure is not leveled, and most enemies are not leveled.

I think that leveling is pretty lame. Why should the whole world revolve around you?
I have this trouble with suspension of disbelief. I look at something that is ridiculous for
awhile and put up with it, but then the point comes where I cry out, "The emperor has no clothes!"

Think about this: When you start a new character, you fight a lot of wolves and
skeevers. The bandits all have iron and steel weapons. The shopkeepers will sell you iron ingots.
But you keep on playing and the world starts getting weird. Wolves and skeevers are going extinct
and there is this plague of cave bears on the land. The bandits suddenly have all these really
awesome weapons made of valuable materials. The merchants are trying to sell you ebony ingots instead of iron. Lame! Lame! Lame!

I want a more static world. I want leveling up to be meaningful. In vanilla Skyrim,
you can actually become weaker in battle and have a harder time surviving as you level up. This
happens if you use your perks on non-combat skills such as alchemy or blacksmithing. (Especially
if we are talking about skills like speech and lockpicking.) I want there to be an incentive to
level up. Some players purposely do not level up because they can find situations in which they
are more powerful when they are lower level and weaker. (Being more powerful when you are weaker? Something is seriously wrong with this picture!)

So with this overhaul, the world around you remains constant. (But very erratic and
highly variable.) You start out pathetically weak, and gradually become a mighty hero that fears
nothing and can kill anything. You have a very strong incentive to level up, because you don't
want to be dying all the time.

The actor mix is always the same. Both weak and strong variants of the different enemies
will spawn all throughout the career of your character.

The merchants always sell the same mix of stuff, no matter what level you are at.

NPCs always carry the same mix of gear. They usually just have things like iron, steel,
hide, and leather gear.

Loot is always the same mix of stuff. Not like in the base game where you find crumby
loot at the beginning of the game and awesome loot when you are level 30.

All of this makes a more realistic and believable world. But it ends up being a very
deadly world. The game is really hard at low levels. You have to be very cautious, and you spend
a lot of time fleeing, sneaking, sniping, and looking into the distance trying to see enemies
before they see you. It kind of gets the adrenaline flowing when you know that the next enemy you
meet might possibly be 45 levels higher than you.

The leveled lists are not leveled. Everything on a list spawns at level 1 or higher.
The leveled lists were adjusted to be more like the bell curve. There are a few wimpy enemies, and
a few extremely powerful enemies, but most of them are in the middle of the range.

The way things have been rebalanced for version 1_3 and newer, the toughest enemies,
level 21 and up, would have around a 3% chance of being what spawns. The weakest category of
enemies, usually level 1-14, usually have a 10-20% chance of being what spawns. The medium-
strength enemies, usually level 15-20. have around a 77-87% chance of being what spawns. The average enemy you meet has been carefully set to be level 15-20. So more than three fourths of the full range enemies you meet are likely to be between level 15 and 20. (This excludes things like mudcrabs and skeevers which do not have any variants that are as tough as level 15.) This mod does not generally edit the vanilla Skyrim actors, it just mostly changes how frequently you meet particular ones, and changes the spawnpoints on the roads to only spawn average enemies and not the toughest ones. When traveling on a main road, you should not meet any level 21 or higher enemies unless they are dragons. This makes it safer for lower-level characters to travel, but it is still quite dangerous if they get off the main road or go into a dungeon.

So when you are playing this mod, you can meet all the possible strengths of the enemies included in the game when you are at any level. The enemies you meet will usually be level 15-20. You will meet wimpy things like skeevers and mudcrabs. You will also meet horrible hard things such as level 36 Dwemer centurions, level 44 Falmer, level 46 warlocks, and level 50 dragons. But the tough enemies can spawn no more frequently than around 3% of the time, or once for every 33 enemies you meet. (And many of the tough enemies are somewhere between average and the very toughest, and are not the toughest.)

With the balancing, a similar deal applies to weapons, armor, loot, and vendor goods. Most of the stuff you regularly see is in the lower middle part of the range.

This overhaul makes it so that weapons and armor other than iron, steel, hide, and leather
are rare. But it also makes it so that rare items are potentially more common early in the game.
The best items are carried by bosses, placed as clutter by vanilla Skyrim, or found in treasure chests in dungeons. You could potentially find a daedric weapon at level 1, but this is offset by the fact that you encounter level 36 enemies fairly often, and you would have to look very hard for a very long time to collect a complete suit of Orcish armor.

The dungeons in one area of the world are easier than the rest of the dungeons. These are the dungeons closest to Whiterun. The enemies in those dungeons are more often level 1-10, rather than the normal level 15-20 with a 3% chance of meeting a level 21+ enemy. The explanation lore for why these dungeons are easier than the others is that the Whiterun guards do a better job of maintaining order and protecting the people than do the guards in other holds. The enemies in range of the Whiterun guard tend to get killed or incarcerated before they have time to level up a whole bunch of levels and become really frightening. If you are having trouble leveling up, you might go visit these dungeons:

White River Watch
Graywinter Watch
Shimmermist Cave
Bleak Falls Barrow
Halted Stream Camp
Silent Moons Camp
Redoran's Retreat
Fort Graymoor

It may be that the balance of this overhaul is wrong, and will need to be changed. Things might just be too random and too dangerous.

This mod is still under development, and is the sort of mod that needs long slow play-testing under many conditions. Feedback is welcome, and your input could change the way this mod is balanced, but keep in mind that this mod is designed to stop level scaling, so any suggestions wanting me to use level scaling to level things a certain way will be summarily ignored.

If you are a hardcore Skyrim player who wants the challenge of never knowing what will be around the next corner, and whether or not you are tough enough to face it, this might be a good mod for you.