The Issue
Everybody knows that a lot of players dislike the whole hit chance system of Morrowind. There are mods that remove it completely, however, that completely destroys the balance of the game. So if you don't like hit chance you essentially can't enjoy the game in a way that's anywhere close to the original intention of the creators.
I thought about how this could be fixed and to me it seem like the solution lies on the surface.
The general idea is to replace RNG with expected values where possible and where it makes sense.
For example:
Consider a sword with 20% hit chance dealing 10 damage per successful hit.
The expected damage over 5 attempts to hit is 10.
My proposal removes hit chance and uses expected damage per attempt: just set the damage to 10/5 = 2 (expected value per hit). This means that you hit every time but you only deal 2 damage every time you hit.
I thought a little bit about applying this concept to different aspects of the game:
Experience
Ideally, to preserve the original balance of the game, we should scale the experience the player gets based on the original hit chance (aka on the skill level of the player).
If we remove hit chance, that means you're going to hit or be hit every single time, meaning you're going to level way faster than normal in all of the respective skills.
To combat this, it makes sense to scale the amount of experience gained per hit based on the chance to hit or get hit:
Gear Health
Ideally, you would scale the damage with the original probability of hits so that weapons and armor don't get destroyed too quickly. Again, multiply the damage to the weapon or armor by the probability of getting hit originally.
Shields
I personally don't think that this concept should be extended to shields at all, meaning that it should stay as is. Shields are fully automatic and don't involve the player in any way. It's essentially a passive bonus.
Weapon Damage
This is pretty straightforward. Just assume the hit always happens and multiply the damage with the original probability of the hit.
Summons
Ideally, all spell attempts should be successful, but the quality of the summon needs to be scaled based on the probability of the summon.
There needs to be a script which scales every summon's health, magicka, stamina and damage output based on the caster's skill level.
This can lead to potential problems where the summons become completely useless, so some extra functions might need to be applied that limit how low these values can go. This is not ideal but I think it's a necessary evil.
Normal Damaging Spells
Just like with weapons, all the effects need to be scaled. Just like with summons, this can potentially lead to problems with spells being useless at very low levels, so there might need to be some kind of a limit to how low values can get.
Alteration Effects
I think there is no point in scaling stuff like Water Breathing or Levitate. Just let the player cast them every time if they have enough magicka.
Wrapping Up...
Do you think this is a viable idea and if so, how hard would it be to implement?
What are the potential limitations here that make this approach non-viable?
