I'm curious, why would skills working similarly to Skyrim be a bad thing? While both systems to increase the PC's skills have their charm, I always found Skyrim's "become better at sneaking by successfully sneaking" to be more logical than Fallout's "shoot molerats with a laser pistol to level up and become better at speech, somehow".
Elder Scrolls skill points: You do a thing. You suck at the thing. You keep doing it and, eventually, your character stops sucking at the thing. Once your character stops sucking at
that thing, your character
continues to suck at everything else so long as he does that thing that you spent the entire game becoming good at.
Fallout skill points: You suck at everything. You do
anything with an XP reward, and get a chance to suck less
at anything you want. This continues until you run out of XP to gain. It isn't just "Oh, I hit a mole rat with a shovel, and I can talk now!" It's "Hey, I delivered those bits and bobs to Bobbit and have some special insight I can put wherever I want."
To me, the
Elder Scrolls system is "realistic" in the same way that your character periodically stubbing his toe, having to use the restroom, and watching out for tetanus is "realistic:" It's realistically tedious and dull. It penalizes specialization because, once you've maxed out a skill, you stop getting anything for using that skill. If you want to advance your character again, you effectively have to go back to level 1. It also makes quests less enticing because the
only reward you get is whatever the NPC's offer you.
By contrast, the traditional
Fallout skill point system
rewards you for specializing, and
lets you get around sucking at one skill by farming points with another. If you yourself are a lousy shot, you don't want extra game mechanics getting in the way. By contrast, use Speech enough, and you can put points into Guns so you don't have to deal with rifle sway. It's more artificial, but in a good way: Direct skill points allow more efficient player control. It also means I want to do just about every quest available
for the XP. Grognar's Quest for the Mighty Mace of Masonry is frigging useless if I'm playing a longsword enchanter. (This was a bigger problem in
Morrowind, where finding someone with adequate gold reserves to sell useless quest rewards was pretty tough, especially when you took into account encumbrance limits.)
Is the
Elder Scrolls system more logical, more realistic? Certainly. But I, personally, find this particular realism
less fun.
