Khorak

I definitely think they should have allowed players to become a Jarl. It frankly makes less sense that Ulfric would fail to reward you in such a fashion. You're the Dragonborn and a well-proven supporter of his cause who can be directly linked to his victory. VERY directly linked. It's good political sense to put a loyal and practically unkillably powerful supporter in charge of one of the Holds, let alone also benefitting from the symbolically powerful association with the Dragonborn himself. And since everything Ulfric does is predicated on his hatred of the Thalmor and protecting Skyrim, he can rest easy knowing that if he goes down, the Dragonborn can take up the reins and keep Skyrim safe. It's win win win. And in gaming terms it allows for more quests with the variety of 'making your city better'. Hell, remove any ambiguity of taking power from other political supporters of Ulfric by having them killed. No, not by you, you bloodthirsty lunatics, I'm proposing we get MARKARTH! Yes. We all hate Markarth, but I'm proposing a questline that cleans it up and makes it great, a fitting accomplishment for the Dragonborn and evidence of the greatness of his future endeavours! There can be a massive Forsworn attack that kills the Silverbloods, leaving a power vacuum Ulfric wishes to raise you into as reward for your fealty. We can inject some humanity into the man at that point as well, by having him genuinely apologise for not being able to reward you in such fashion immediately, due to all such positions being sworn to his network of supporters; he never expected a powerful mythological figure to rise up so quickly and suddenly. He's decided to just bite the bullet and take a political hit by elevating you over the objections of other powerful figures who wanted the job. You can easily translate all of this into the Imperial Legion questline; the same Forsworn attack can happen, and you can be sent in as military governor to restore Imperial power. You do all the exact same things and at the end you are offered the position of Jarl if you want it by the ragged remains (most dead by initial Forsworn attack) of the city court as appreciation for your decisive, inspiring, profitable and all round awesome leadership. It gives you the opportunity to gain some power, it opens up a s***load of quest options (the Reach is overflowing with quest building opportunities against the Forsworn, on top of city improvement), and most importantly it allows a cool way to vastly improve a horrible, horrible place. And I just had another idea...you can bring other characters back. Maybe convince a deposed Jarl to help you. For me specifically I'd choose Balgruuf....you can have a fairly ugly conversation with him and explain that you were doing what was best for Skyrim, you never truly wished to fight him or do him any harm, but there was no other choice. You want to give him the opportunity to restore himself and his family to importance and prominence as your advisor and member of your court. Or he can sit in the Blue Palace complaining for the rest of his life. His choice. ....city building is fun! :D

Yeah there's no more direct road from Whiterun to Morthal than going through east to Rorikstead and then north round the mountains, or initially north pretty much to Dawnstar and southwest from there.

A thousand gold is peanuts to pay if you want a horse, as stealing one that will immediately start walking off somewhere when you dismount it (for absolutely any reason at all) is a massive pain in the butt. One quest conversation and the thing is halfway across Tamriel.

Doesn't work like that in Skyrim. All your armour weight is taken into account. You need the level 70 Heavy Armor perk 'Conditioning' to remove it as an impediment to sneaking.

Atheism is incompatible with a universe that can provide concrete proof of deities. Atheism is the outright denial that God (or in this case, Gods) even exists, and in the real world it works because....there's no non-faith based evidence he/she/it/they do/does. It's the atheist who's the crazy person when they're in a world where God tells them to take this sword and go kill undead with it. You can be an antireligious adventurer. Tell those deities to shove it up their bum.

And is completely irrelevant to this discussion. There is literally absolutely no indication whatsoever that the Aldmeri Dominion made concessions to the Empire. Provide some evidence of it from the game. There isn't any. You can't just make something like that up and start talking to people like it's true. It's not even slightly supportable with anything from the game. Let me make it clear, there is absolutely zero indication AT ALL that the Thalmor made any concessions. *LOL* That is utterly pitiful. Just...pitiful. You're an idiot. Don't try to argue logical fallacies when you have no idea what you're doing with them. What you are doing is claiming that because evidence cannot be explicitly provided that the Thalmor made no concessions, your position that they made concessions must be true. Even reading that makes you look dumb. It gets more dumb by taking your argument and placing it in other terms to display how dumb it is. Example: I say unicorns exist. You cannot explicitly disprove this. Therefore it is true. Example: I say Mars is made out of cheese. You cannot bring me a piece of Mars to disprove this. Therefore it is true. Example: You say your blood is made out of milk. Since I'm not going to be coming over there to beat the blood out of you, therefore this is true. You are claiming that because I cannot pull out the White-Gold Concordat itself to disprove you, it must contain things you claim for which there is no evidence or indication. THAT is a logical fallacy. It is no different than the absurd examples above. You cannot bring me a sample of the sun, so clearly it would be a logical fallacy for you to argue that I cannot claim it is full of chocolate and Belgians on the basis of there being absolutely zero indication or evidence that it has any chocolate or Belgians in it. Another example of what you're trying to pull against me here. It is insulting that I even have to field such....lunacy.

And make sure the very first decoration you buy is "Clean up that murderers mess", to avoid any problem with the option going away and your house being the permanent home to a vast pile of human remains.

You spend weeks winning the guy a civil war against the Empire, you bring him a priceless artifact to legitimise his reign that the ungrateful s*** never puts on, you buy property in the city and solve every problem......but take one God damned sweetroll from his table, a massive table always laden with food for a court that doesn't exist, and you're part of the SHOUTED APART BRIGADE! >:(

Screw the Dragons, what about the courageous Stormcloak who got executed in the intro!? If we'd let that damn priestess finish her insulting ritual to the Eight Divines (because people fighting to restore Talos would really appreciate that) and maybe made some more fuss, he'd have had a chance! xD ...and even worse, later on you realise he'll probably get eaten by Alduin in Sovngarde anyway! >:(

When your entire existence hinges around the goodwill of one of those deities who provably exist, you damn well put up a statue and throw a flawless garnet at its feet now and then even if you're not a devout worshipper. You certainly don't steal their stuff and shank their personal coterie in the back. Mostly that's a matter of simple intelligence, because a Goddess is quite likely to employ some dragon slaying engine of death who can slaughter you with just their voice to go get you, and send your soul to said Goddess for some personal retribution. Bagging on the Thieves Guild for putting up some supplication to Nocturne is daft. I'd agree with forcible joining of the Nightingales though. You should have been able to just tell them you're willing to break Mercey Frey in half and return what he took. If Karliah wants to argue about it you should be able to give her a FUS (not the RO DAH!) to point out you don't need the meagre 'advantage' of being a Nightingale, you're already something far better.

I have. Want to give us your time for that? Done that too. And if you think that's in any way comparable to melee combat, it really shows off why you didn't bother responding to me pointing out your experiences are, to put it politely, inapplicable. Children can ride horses. When you're claiming your horsie riding experience is in any way a muscular endurance exercise of the magnitude required to compete with veteran men in win-or-die melee combat, you're just giving people reason to start posting facepalm pictures. Done that as well. Do tell, exactly how many hours of full contact combat were you engaged in against the kind of at least 160lb male powerhouses I was talking about the last time I responded to you? Yeah, it does. You just don't have the stamina you seem to think you do. Your experiences are irrelevant. Be in a professional male rowing team. Step into an MMA or boxing ring in a male league. Do something that matters, instead of vague allusions to things you want to think mean something. It isn't just horse riding children can do, I've also seen pre-teens doing re-enactment training....well, I haven't if the people who were insuring the troupe ask. Doesn't mean they're capable of full blown combat. Archery as an exercise involves heavy use of the shoulders and the back. Anyone can do archery up to the limit of their personal strength and be as fat as they like considering they don't need to be using the bow non-stop. It's a matter of single draw strength and that's it, no actual endurance required. He's a very typical archer. There's pretty much no archer on the planet now who is anything like a medieval combat archer. If one were to be unforgiving and make comparisons to English longbowmen, they are most certainly far beyond any modern archer because they used bows of such large draw weight for so much of their lives, with an expectation of such swift use in battle, they developed twisted spines and bone spurs in the wrists. Such longbows are an eighty pound draw on the lowest educated estimates. Do tell, what's your draw weight on an all-Yew straight bow with a war arrow? And how many shots can you make on it in a minute? *LOL* No, you're the one trying to equate a modern athletic standard to a medieval fantasy setting. You're trying to apply your own supremely inadequate modern athletic experiences to the argument of why a woman capable of acting as a melee death machine isn't going to be hefty in the chest department....if she didn't want to get killed by men, anyway. Ultimately, the argument is against ludicrous boobs hammered into female armour, and it's at the point where you can't even properly justify a female hardass having much boob at all, let alone requiring such modification. Hell, I gave names for actual examples of modern female fighters (who still can't take on their male counterparts anyway) and you're....talking about your horse riding and 'several thousand meters' of rowing. You might have gotten away with that if no-one knew what that actually meant, but I do, and you are not even close to fit enough to serve as an example.

It should be amusingly noted that in the fight between the Roman Empire and the barbarians, it's the Roman Empire who went around slaughtering everyone, taking all their stuff, and using them as slaves until the primitive slave and conquest based economy of Rome finally fell apart because it never reformed itself and lost everything. The barbarians then went on to form the nations that would define human civilisation as we know it, and made Skyrim. Oh I forgot, people like to think Rome were the 'civilised' good guys. Uh...go Rome?

We know absolutely NOTHING about what the terms of the White Gold Concordant was beyond the sucession of parts of southren Hammerfell, disbanding the Blades and the outlaw of Talos worship. No treaty, to my knowlege, exists in so few concepts which are completely against the relative victor. It is reasonable to assume there were also concessions which the Domminion had to agree to, but since its the Empires concessions which form a driving part of the storyline in Skyrim, we don't hear anything about what the Thalmor had to give up. Even pro-Empire sources are entirely silent on the subject of there being concessions by the Thalmor when they should be trumpeting them as loudly as possible. Admitedly, Mede screwed the pooch on that one. I think his death at the end of the DB questline shows he recognises that, and he seems to beleive that his death will make the Empire stronger. Whether it does or not remains to be seen. Regardless, this isn't the place for more Empire/Stormcloak bickering. The whole point is, nothing you do is pointless. Even if you're just resetting the clock, your giving the world more time. There is absolutely no indication at all that the Thamor did anything but put up peace as their half of the White-Gold Concordat. It wouldn't be contentious if the Empire had gained any sort of concessions out of the Thalmor in return! It just doesn't make any sense to assume, from basically nothing at all, that the treaty is anything other than what we are very consistently told it is. It is even noted that the terms of the treaty are basically the same as the demands the Thalmor made before the war started, and that such a demand would have been just flat-out impossible for the Empire to concede to until the war reached an end. This is a big driving point behind why the Empire can be seen as a failing institution for people who pick the Stormcloaks; it really has massively dropped the ball by signing a lopsided peace treaty and then allowing monumental dissent to develop through its enforcement to appease the Thalmor. Thanks to this one-sided treaty the Empire has lost Hammerfell and depending on future choices, Skyrim as well. It doesn't track that they got anything out of the Aldmeri Dominion for it, such an idea runs counter to....well, everything.

This is what boggles my mind with the argument people make that the Empire is supposedly the only thing that could stop the Thalmor, as an argument against the Stormcloaks. The Aldmeri Dominion is a single province that's pinning down a lot of territories that in at least one case are being actively 'purged' (unlike the Empire, quelling dissent by at least having sacks of money and trade opportunities available for anyone who could make trouble). They started the Great War expecting a more normal conflict with the very modest strategic objective of gaining southern Hammerfell. But they caught the Empire completely flatfooted and achieved such crushing initial victory that they tried for the whole lot. They can't just swallow the complete and total obliteration of their entire main force, then the grinding, losing attrition trying to defeat Hammerfell, without a problem. Whoever the Emperors advisors are, they're cowards or idiots. The Thalmor couldn't possibly have been in a position to continue that war any more than the Empire could, but the Emperor blinked first and accepted simply insane peace conditions. When two sides are that beaten up, it's the defenders who are going to be able to carry on more than the aggressors.

With heavy armour and my usual magic resist stacking (if you know what you're doing, the shield perk is pointless....just a waste of a point since you've maxed magic resist), a shield isn't anywhere close to being a necessary choice for tanking for me. Doesn't even need to be heavy armour, it just makes lower levels easier before everything starts hitting the armour cap anyway. I've been running a dual wielder and it's an fun alternative. Personally, I don't see there being any real difference in viability between two-handed, dual wield or shield. Certainly a shield is easier if you're not a good player, but any idea how the game works and how you can build your character makes it ultimately a matter of preference as opposed to being the only way to go. Hell, with two-handed I often just plain forget I can block anyway. Don't need to really.

Alduin was unstoppable because he was able to set his soul snare in Sovngarde to gain power and also to retreat there at will. Such power is how he would have been able to bring other dragons back from the dead, with only the Dragonborn able to stop him because he would actually consume the souls of those dragons....can't raise something again after some mortal tool of fate tears out and destroys their soul. Alduin can come back, and it won't truly mean jack s***. He has been defeated and no longer has the unconditional fealty of all the other dragons, and he no longer has the power to consume souls in Sovngarde, so it's unlikely he could go about raising dragons again. Oh sure he could try going into Sovngarde, but it seems likely that Shor didn't allow the souls present in his hall to go forth and murder the f*** out of Alduin because the Elder Scrolls had already mandated the events to come. That's not going to be the case anymore. Alduin tries going back to Sovngarde, and he's not just going to be squaring off against the Dragonborn who slaughtered him last time round, but thousands of years of heroes who want to know what dragonmeat tastes like and are still pissed off that they were forced to sit around letting the damned lizard munch on lost souls. Without being able to abuse Sovngarde, Alduin is a powerful but ultimately very, very killable dragon like any other who can't afford to try and take on the mortals in open combat anymore. And that's even if new dragon leaders and factions don't tear him to pieces for messing up their status quo with his inability to change to the new world. I was damned happy to have smeared that fool across the head of my warhammer.

Argonians have never appealed to me in the slightest. *shrug* Don't want to be a giant lizard....tree....thing.... Khajiit I don't have a problem with in terms of them being a beast race or cat people. They just look fairly rubbish to me, because I'd want to play as something more like the better depictions of Kilrathi; a big, scary liony thing instead of the more subtle and diminutive cat-people present in Elder Scrolls. No intrinsic problem with beast races, it's just that the particular Elder Scrolls ones don't hold any interest for me.

I know, I've had to buy my entire Steam game inventory all over again three times thanks to my computer rebuilds. Oh no wait, what on Earth are you smoking?

Both suck, stick with Steel Plate, Orcish or Ebony. You'll mash the armour cap anyway, so might as well go with what doesn't look pants. Though to be fair, I hate the Steel Plate and Ebony helmet with the fury of a thousand exploding suns.

Yeah it kills the moment when important battles and events are happening, and no-one has bothered to think that maybe they can make the whole thing feel more impressive by setting the ambient music to play the decent battle music non-stop. Like Whiterun for example. Screw it, someone thought the usual ambient battle music would suffice.....the ambient battle music that is broken insofar as it will fade in and out like a dying old guy on life support when it deems the combat to be insufficiently worthy of it. I'm assaulting a God damn city to the tune of wilderness wandering. I should have been hearing the awesome Dragonborn battle music you only get when things get ugly with a dragon, all the damn time. We're attacking a city! AWESOME MUSIC. We're attacking a fort! AWESOME MUSIC. I'm doing a sneaking quest! TENSE MUSIC. I'm in a Falmer cave! DISTURBING MUSIC. I'm fighting a dragon! DOVAHKIIN! DOVAHKIIN! NAAL OK ZIN LOS VAHRIIN! Music is massively important, and the poor range and use of it in Skyrim is probably why the world feels so dead to a lot of people.

I have a man crush on Farkas, and I'm in love with Ralof. It makes me sad that I can't finish the civil war for the Stormcloaks simply so Ralof will appear as a persisent NPC I can hurl all my characters at. Now if you don't mind, I'm going to go have a bubble bath with smelly candles everywhere.

DLC and expansions will just add more stuff connected to current events in the game. They're not going to invalidate choices by determining a particular outcome in anything but a new game, or double their work having to accommodate everything, when they can stick more content in what we already have. Back to Solstheim would be good. It'll have changed a lot. Maybe they can make an effort and it can be covered in a new, gigantic Dark Elf city that comprises pretty much their whole civilisation.

It'll be because you've done quests for Windhelm and their faction likes you. Often just the main quest missions where you splat your first dragon are enough for it in Whiterun. Hell, at least your guards seem to have the right idea by handing you a good drink for your work. People keeping handing my daedric armed, dragonscale clad ass iron weapons as gifts. I'm wielding an ebony deathblade powered by the soul of a demon! JUST GET ME A DRINK! OR SOME CHEESE! ANYTHING! EDIT: Wrong city. Woooo! Score for reading comprehension!

You always had boobs because you weren't doing strenuous strength and muscular endurance training with the expectation of potentially hours of melee combat with a horde of veteran male soldiers whose job is to turn people like you into a can of dogfood. To compete directly with men in intensely physical pursuits like combat a woman has to go above and beyond in order to overcome the biological hurdle put in front of them. When your archery experience includes pulling at least eighty pounds on a straight limb bow with a heavy war arrow instead of a flight arrow, six times a minute, it'll be relevant. When you can sprint in eighty pounds of armour without counting padding and weaponry, then that might be relevant. When you can row a galley at ramming speed into some perfidious Persian invaders, your rowing might be something worth bringing up. As it is, you've provided a pile of completely meaningless anecdotes; you're not performing relevant activities to the extent of being able to compete directly with men. Feel free to type 'Middleweight MMA fighter' into a Google image search, to see the kind of physique you need to be on equal terms with. Hell, go Welterweight. When you can step up with the strength and endurance to fight a guy like that....then we'll see how big your boobs are. Cristiane Santos is the top ranked female MMA fighter in the world....in fighting trim she loses her boobs to the extent that they'd be of little concern in steel or other rigid armours. And she'll still be completely obliterated by her male counterparts (also of note, male MMA weight classes reach a point over one hundred pounds heavier than the highest womens fighting weights, that's what a woman has to keep up with). Gina Carano has nice boobies, she's the female #3. Got beaten s***less by Santos though. A women with naturally huge breasts might still have something left over after the kind of training required, but sure as hell the idea she'll need boobs hammered into her cuirass for any reason at all is ludicrous. As it stands, people have already been giving actual examples of women who ended up in plate armour, in support of an OP that began by asking an educated source. The only response to this has been, frankly, ignorance and anecdotes in defense of absolute silliness. It's one thing for people to say that, yeah, it's bloody silly and childish to be doing something so tactlessly sexist and patriarchal as making all the womens armour have over the top sexualised features like freaking boobs added to them, but they like it and they'll be over here playing the game trying not to think too deeply about it thankyou-very-much. It's quite another when people try to defend it like it's somehow reasonable or a good idea in any form of reality. And you know what....why the hell doesn't it go both ways? Where's my colossal codpiece? The women all have cartoon f-cup breasts that are so solidly pert they need voluminous contoured cuirasses. That's the thing being strangely defended as totally reasonable. On the male side this should surely translate to a good foot of manly sausage that would inevitably require a grand extension in the trouser department. On every single man.

Though to be fair, you can happily finish the game with iron weapons you smithed up. It's not too much of a big deal that the daedric weapons might not be quite as good as the absolute top-end of what's possible, because you'll be an unkillable God of War by the time you should be carting that kind of stuff around anyway. You could break out a fork and murder everyone with it by that point.