In that particular run my main idea was to decrease direct income in order to force myself to experiment with some alternative income methods.Bombiz said:May I ask exactly what mods you played with?GabeZhul said:I don't know why you people are recommending Amalur. It is not only not in the same genre (one is a first person exlporation RPG, the other is a single player MMO), they play nothing like each other and Amalur is in no way fulfilling the OP's request for an RPG with slow character/loot progression.
For an actual recommendation, I say mods. There are a lot of them out there for all Elder Scrolls games and I recommend mix-and-matching them (and even tweaking them to your own liking). In my latest Skyrim playthrough I modded my game so that prices were exorbitant, loot was scarce but boss-chests and unique items were much better. Really, ES games (and Skyrim in particular) can be tweaked to however you want them (unless you are playing them on a console, in which case... what the hell are you doing playing them on consoles? ಠ_ಠ
The core of this particular mod-train was Scarcity [http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/49496]. It is a fairly simple mod that reduces all kinds of loot in the game with a specific emphasis on enchanted loot. I recommend the 8x loot and 4x merchant modules.
The second mod is Morrowloot [http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/44212]. It removes everything above Dwemer tier from leveled lists and puts them in the world at the appropriate places (so dwemer equipment is in their ruins, orcish equipment is on Orcs, etc.) It also alters crafting so that these items cannot be made at a forge, but I just loaded the mod before Perkus Maximus (an overhaul mod that completely rebalances the game and re-does all the perk trees) so it didn't affect me anyway.
The third mod is More Interesting Loot [http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/48869]. This one does two things: first it adds a number of new enchantments to the game, some of which has to be discovered by use (like a shield that you have to bash people with repeatedly to reveal that it sets people on fire). More importantly though it places these items, and more, into boss-chest and dragon-carcasses in order to provide an actual worthwhile reward at the end of dungeons. Highly customizable with MCM.
Then comes the economic part.
The first mod to help with that is Gold Adjustment [http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/13248]. It lessens gold rewards, but it only slows down the inevitable windfall that one collects after a while, and I am not a big fan of it, but I still used it in my latest playthrough specifically to force myself into using other income sources aside of clearing dungeons.
A slightly better alternative to this is Trade and Barter [http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/34612], which one can use to tweak shop prices to their liking along a number of other things. I used this increase prices quite a bit for a more scavenge-oriented game, though by the end-game this price-increase is mostly off-set by Speechcraft and other discount bonuses for being a Thane/Faction leader/etc.
Finally, for the late-game, when one would swim in money no matter what, I installed the only gold-sink I approve of as something that actually adds something of value instead of just being a fancier way to throw money down a well: The Perk Point Potion [http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/10836]. It's exactly what it says on the tin; it's a potion that gives you a single perk point for the low-low base price of 10k gold (which for me was about 20k in-game due to the aforementioned Trade and Barter tweaks)
At last I cannot recommend the aforementioned Perkus Maximus [http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/59849] enough. It completely revamps the game to support more play-styles and makes all of the equally viable. Sadly it doesn't have the extensive AI and balancing modules its predecessor, SkyRE did, but it is still a mod that became my default Skyrim experience to the point I can't even really remember how vanilla Skyrim played like...
I also had a few mods that tweaked uniques, such as daedric artifacts, the Staff of Magnus, the Gauldur Amulet and others to be much better and thus be worth the time re-doing their quests for the tenth time, but they are kind of breaking the balance of the game unless one plays on the hardest difficulty settings (or uses some of the downright unfair difficulty mods from the Nexus).
