NDrakkon

514 hours currently, split between nine characters and it'll no doubt end up much longer since none of them have finished the main quest and most still have a lot to do. I'm mostly playing some other games at the moment though, before I go back to Skyrim.

I'd love a mod which did this as well. The exploring nature of the quest does seem more in line with bards than thieves. I know some of the gems are in NPCs homes, but they're tagged as take not steal, so it's not technically thievery. Or failing a mod which changed it to a Bard's College quest, something which let's us get the quest from Vex without joining the Guild. Realistically we should be able to approach the Thieves Guild as a client rather than being forced to join for the quest, since we pick up the unusual gem ourselves and need to find an appraiser, not get sent by Vex to find the gems. Which gives me another thought. It would be interesting to have a mod that allows us to hire the Thieves or Companions for jobs if we've not joined them. I don't know how it would be done or if it would be feasible, but it would be interesting for immersion's sake if we could hire the companions to clear out caves or the Thieves to steal an item from an NPCs house, or be able to perform the Black Sacrament to send the Dark Brotherhood after someone.

I just had a run in with my first Thalmor execution squad tonight. Strangely, this was on the fifth character I've created who not only has not killed any Thalmor yet, but hasn't even seen any until these three fools tried to jump him. So far he's only killed the dragon outside of Whiterun, not gone to High Hrothgar yet. Of the other four characters one is still at Riverwood while the others have fifty plus hours each on them ranging in level from twenty to forty. It's the ones I've played longer that have been killing Thalmor every chance they get, and I'm wondering if for some reason the game is triggering the Thalmor attack based on the actions of these other characters (although the correct character name was in the execution order note). Well, it's more reason to kill Thalmor I suppose. After all, they're using the many worlds theory to justify attacking me.

I recognised the picture from this video.