ClockworkBard

Blast, foiled by chronology once again! To follow up, taking Recorder out and loading a save prior to adding her did solve my instance of the issue. Just lazily pulling the mod out mid-quest didn't cut it; I ended up doing BFB and Dragon Rising over again. While I doubt she's been scripted with time travel to go back and bug a game several months before she existed (though I'm not completely ruling it out!), her presence will probably make troubleshooting any other causes of the glitch very difficult.

I just now ran into a similar situation. According to my Mod Organizer, Recorder is conflicting with a USKP script: "qf_mq105_000242ba.pex". The mq105 in the name leads me to think it's very likely the problem.

"It's not easy being a woman in Skyrim, I know. But stay strong, men will come to respect you, and maybe even fear you."

I don't remember there being much in the way of items that were different between the factions other than the whole crossbow suite of things. For example, both sides can get Harkon's blade. Only a vampire benefits from it, so if you pickpocket it off of him (I don't think it's equipped, so you can get it with a high PP skill level and an affinity for the Quick-Load button), the vampire lord side can get and use it near the beginning. The Dawnguard side has to wait until the end when you can get turned without the Dawnguard pitching a fit and putting an all-stop on your quest progression. Likewise, the faction armors are available to both sides as well. Since you're attacked so frequently by the opposing side, it's pretty easy to have your pick of their wardrobe. Like Harkon's Blade, the "Vampire Royal Armor", coveted for being light armor with Expert Robes quality magicka regen, also eventually drops for both sides. (Edit: Now that I think about it, Harkon's Sword may be too hard to pickpocket on the vanilla game, depending on its gold value. I might have been using a mod that made item value less important for pickpocket when goofing off with such things.)

Get Cloaks of Skyrim. No self-respecting evil character walks around without a grand and flowing cape. Find yourself some rags and a red cloak to wear. Begin the Dawnguard questline. Join Lord Harkon and become a Vampire Lord. Anytime you shift into Vampire Lord form, shout: "Ancient spirits of evil, transform this decayed form to Mumm-Ra, the Ever-Living!" Repeatedly fail to conquer Skyrim.Bonus points if you get yourself a Khajiit or Argonian follower minion to blame for your failures.

Yup, the game is how it is. To disprove such a tautology would rip a hole in the very fabric of space and time. We of Internet fandom only think we possess such armchair god-powers, when really we are only endowed with an uncanny ability to analogize anything and everything to Hitler. Sorry, silliness aside... Aye, the thread devolved into a bit of a whine. Sorry, my bad; I started that. I kind of broadened the scope of the discussion. But in my defense, I did so to try and snipe at a more root cause. I get something of a nerdgasm from analyzing game mechanics and how players react to them. Though perhaps I didn't shape it as such, because: Internet. It's easy to get caught up in the mood of the thread. My theory, as of the moment, is as such: It's less about a lack of options and more about storytelling (not necessarily just through writing, but the presentation of the narrative as a whole), at least as far as I see it. More specifically, it's a matter of "invisible walls". A game cannot exist without limitations. Every line of code is, by its nature, a limitation. Even something as free-form as Lego blocks are defined by the rules imposed on any given block. Our imagination is inspired by these limitations, which is why I imagine so few tabletop RPGs come without settings and we tend to be so drawn to established lore. The problem comes when the rules of the game, or the rules we infer from a combination of game rules and the knowledge the player brings to them, don't function as we're lead to believe. A street alleyway that ends in a dead-end is a concept we inherently grasp. Unless we're playing Spiderman or something, we accept without much questioning that this is the end of the road. Even something as easily climbed as a chain-link fence is generally accepted, if fence climbing has never been introduced as a mechanic. But an alleyway that looks like it leads to another street, but suddenly blocks your path with an invisible wall, is a jarring and frustrating experience. Skyrim dances precariously on that line some of the time. A lot of it is through storytelling, which is harder to nail down as right or wrong, because it is as much influenced by the game's inconsistencies as it is what the player brings to the table. Sure, you see your share of posts wanting to do anything and everything. The free-form nature of the game can easily cause the slippery slope of players inferring anything should be possible. However, some specific issues are far more common than others. There are trends. Just as a tiny but frequently mentioned example: children. Is it a problem that children are immortal? Some will say yes, but most are simply frustrated at the way some children are presented. They will taunt and talk down to heavily armed warriors with fire spouting from his fingers. Is charring the virgin flesh from their tiny bones a reasonable reaction to this? Our society tends to institutionalize people who answer "yes" to that question. But beyond the occasional quest and pilfering their poverty-stricken pockets, the game offers no real interaction with them. They're mechanically about as static as a tree; at least a tree sometimes has mushrooms to harvest. And we'd pay about as much attention to them as we do trees, if all they did was wander the background and engage you in the occasional game of tag. Players are fairly reactionary like that in nature. The moment we're provoked, we start analyzing our mechanical options. When we find none, well... In Skyrim, immolation solves about 99% of our problems, and thus child killing mods are born. True story.

If "needs" mods are a category, then Frostfall obviously needs to be mentioned at some point in this thread.

You might enjoy The Snake Pit. It's not a vampire-specific home, but it is thematically appropriate. http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/33908 On the surface, it's a modest lakeside cabin. A trap door beneath a table leads down into the true home, which has a much more sinister atmosphere. It has most of those bullet points, except the cattle cages. (It has torture rooms, but it's more thematic than functional and is primarily for storage.) It has two follower/merchant NPCs as well. The only loading happens between the topside cabin and the underground area. My only problem worth mentioning is that it takes a little more work to get around. There are traps, secret doors, cavernous hallways and the like to pass through. It's not that sort of home where everything is super simple and open. Instead, it sacrifices a little accessibility in order to achieve a very effective atmosphere. As a random aside, my vampire lives in Amethyst Hollows Dreamworld (http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/18575). It isn't quite as fitting, but it's an all around awesome place. The permanent sunset of its dreamworld exterior isn't real, and so doesn't cause any normal anti-vampire sun effects. It's the closest my vampire can get to enjoying a sunset.

It definitely helps to craft the most expensive things you can. You eventually reach a point where it becomes a chore finding people with enough money to buy your crazy wares, at which point you'll want to buy out any raw materials you can get the NPCs to stock. At that stage, it just becomes a time sink. Get back from adventuring, buy up all the materials, make stuff, sell what little you can before they all run out of money, dump the rest in a box at home so you don't break your back carrying all that junk. In the case of enchanting, you also get a little advancement for recharging items with soul gems. This can be gradually abused with a certain artifact and a soul trap enchanted weapon. Use the weapon to get a soul, then use that soul to recharge the weapon. The gain is minimal, but something. I wouldn't do that with regular gems though, since they are better spent actually enchanting items. I've taken to side-stepping the entire affair now. I use the Community Uncapper to reduce skill advancement to about half, then add SkyXP with the rewards turned down to half. This has been a huge blessing, since I no longer find myself grinding skills. I retain the organic feel of skills I use going up over time, without having to bend a knee to what Skyrim deems as normal usage. No more avoiding keys like they're toxic, just so my lockpicking skill doesn't suffer. No more mass pickpocket sessions with my finger hovering over the Quick Load button. No more being a dagger factory assembly line, casting Courage on guards or dancing around mudcrabs while spamming Oak Flesh. While these things would make for a hilarious Rocky-style training montage, they're just not a fun way to spend my Skyrim time anymore.

In my case, I was a vampire prior to Dawnguard (and for basically the entire game). The Dawnguard lets you join as a Vampire, though it's hinted that they simply don't know about it, with Serana commenting that they'll find out what you are eventually when you first meet her. They sort of wrote themselves into that corner in that the only way to start the Dawnguard DLC is to join the Dawnguard, if only long enough to make it to Harkon. I forget the order of events, as it's been a while. I forget if Serana settles in before or after the first official "vampire check". But I don't remember the check being handled with any sort of meaningful transition. Just, at some point, everyone in the Dawnguard suddenly becomes aware you're a vampire, and Isran refuses to continue the quest until you cure yourself. I could stomach this with a grain of railroading, if it wasn't handled identically to the Civil War situation. You are suddenly an outcast to the Dawnguard for being a vampire, but your only option to progress the plot is to get cured. You can't convince Isran of your intentions. You can't change sides. There's no third path. You get cured or the quest goes into all-stop limbo, which itself carries no consequences either. I guess it's actually an on-going theme in Skyrim plots. Don't want to sacrifice your eternal soul to a Daedric Prince for the good of a certain guild? Quest limbo. Not keen on being a werewolf? Quest limbo. Personal sacrifice loses a lot of narrative power in those situations. The plot railroad, which I generally have nothing against, suddenly becomes uncomfortably obvious. Basically, I'm fine with Skyrim not offering me choices. Just don't design your stories in such a way that the narrative begs a different path. The Civil War situation again: the game goes out of its way to make you attached to Whiterun. Jarl Balgruuf is intensionally one of the most (if not THE most) likable Jarls in the game. Of course people are going to not want to attack it. Likewise, the very origin of this thread: Isran yells at you for how stupid it is to take Serana to her father with an Elder Scroll. How is it not at all a thought that maybe your players might just come to a similar conclusion and just want to kill the vampire? And my vampire situation: Was it really necessary to check that I was a vampire, after you'd basically let me be one for several missions and the Dawnguard is buddy buddy with another vampire? Why are the checks even there? Most of the quests are on rails, and that's fine, until those moments make you aware of them.

Remember that the only thing that will absolutely play on every single Thalmor wish is letting the war drag on. Not really. Either way the Thalmor got what they want, which is weakening the Empire. Skyrim was part of the Empiric Provinces of Tamriel. With the Civil War, they ceded from it, thus weakening the Empire and weakening Skyrim. If they wanted to invade, they could, and the Imperials couldn't even help them even if they wanted to considering what's inside the White-Gold Concordat. So what it really boils down to is that the Thalmor have already got what they want before the game ever starts, and your choice is entirely whether and how you want to dance about in the aftermath.

And then you get double-wammied if you're a vampire who sides with the Dawnguard to hunt other vampires. My vampress anti-hero was able to buy that not all vampires are pure evil. That would be the pot calling the kettle black, otherwise. I let her buy into the plan to take Serana home, rather than recognize it for the absolutely horrible idea that it was. I RP'd it as a moment of weakness. She kept her few friends distant. They could never completely understand or trust her. And she burned her bridges with fellow vampires long ago. Yet, here was this vampire who knew her to be both a vampire hunter and vampire, and seemed fine with that. Not just fine, but friendly. It was silly, but I felt I could make the "mandatory BFF" angle work. This doesn't really stick later. The Dawnguard are content to be Serana's BFF as well, even if they grumble a lot about it. But my character? "Get cured, monster!" I can't really work the "two BFF vampires in a vampire hating world" when one of us is hated to the point of no longer being accepted and the other is a mild inconvenience. I vouched for her. How can you continue to trust her if you don't trust me? I think the "Serana has mad seduction magic" angle is looking highly viable. The only time I've felt more frustrated with a Skyrim plot was when I had to leave the civil war in limbo, because the game wouldn't let me change sides when Whiterun did. Asking me to attack the home and people I'd spent several days becoming trusted with and attached to, and not offering an alternative, was kind of a dick move. Forcing me to trust a vampire, then immediately asking me, and not her, to give up my character-defining vampirism ranks kind of close.