akumabana

Frustrating moments? Hmmm... 1) Dying of a sprained ankle trying to run down the hill just outside of the Imperial City. I get that I'm a new character, but getting killed by a sprained ankle just sucks. 2) Getting hit so hard my character flies *through* the wall or floor, or dropping items to have them do the same thing. Sometimes I mysteriously teleport to some other random part of the structure. Sometimes, I'm just stuck, and using tcl is tricky when you're getting mobbed. 3) Guards. Somehow, it's okay for them to attack me without provocation. The instant I defend myself, however, they get all up in arms. Okay, so you can shoot me full of arrows, but I can't fight back? How is that fair? 4) Vanilla quests that assume PLAYER = IDIOT. Main Quest - you're not allowed to figure out the Mythic Dawn book-puzzle on your own. Dark Brotherhood, you're not allowed to notice that those fake dead-drops aren't in Lucien's handwriting. Hello? I'm a reasonably intelligent player, with a more than reasonably intelligent character. Why can't I make good old fashioned D&D Wisdom checks/Intelligence checks to figure it out? And then, of course, there's the moments when I realize I've mucked up a mod install and something goes awfully wrong. But that's my bad - I take full credit for operator error. The vanilla stuff, though, that's frustrating indeed.

You've been getting sound advice so far - play a while in its vanilla format, taste it before you spice it up... But there is a Streamline mod that can add extra autosave points and increase your FPS if you work the ini correctly. It doesn't add anything except autosaves for every cell change and not just interior->exterior. If (and this only after you've played the game enough to know what you want to change, if anything at all) you think the monsters need a little souping up to give your character a challenge, Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul may (or may not) interest you. But yeah, everyone else has a point. Play first, mod later.

If you're okay with a romanceable male companion, I'm gonna suggest CM partner Valtierro, by NellSpeed. He's got a great personality (funny as all get-out, really), immersive awareness of what you're doing in the game world, and the humor in what he has to say is really worth the effort of downloading him. Another companion worth checking out is Stoker Wolff, or Dairanath Avari perhaps. But that's the romanceable men. I believe several worthy ladies have already been mentioned.