RedRavyn

1. Just about any innkeeper with a "Rumors" dialog option when you talk to him will give you the quest to "Innocence Lost", because he's almost certain to mention the boy in Windhelm who is performing the Black Sacrament. There are other rumors, but I've never heard any of them, because this seems to be the very first one that the game pushes off on you. 2. Just about any guard in Windhelm will push this onto you without even asking. He'll just mention the "Aretino boy" as you approach him (even if you're just passing by) and it's in your Journal whether you want it or not. 3. I think other people will also mention him, including guards elsewhere in the country. Again, you'll get an automatic journal update. 4. You can talk to the orphans in Riften. 5. You can overhear the conversation between Idesa and Grimvar just outside the Arentino residence in Windhelm. 6. You can kill Grelod and then just go break into the Arentino residence and talk to Aventus without having to get any rumors sending you there. You'll get an extra little bit of dialog with him if you do it this way. There might be other ways, since Bethesda doesn't want you to NOT do this questline and goes out of its way to make sure you'll eventually have to deal with "Innocence Lost" unless you go out of your way not to, as I generally do. Now, if the innkeepers aren't giving you this dialog option then I have to think that you have a mod installed that's altering something in their dialog. I don't know what you're talking about with the innkeeper in Riverwood just telling you about "love stuff". Are you sure you aren't mixing up Orgnar (the innkeeper) with Lucan (the shopkeeper), the latter of which is all buddy-buddy with you after you retrieve the Golden Claw for him? To my knowledge, there's no conflict between between the Thieves Guild and the Dark Brotherhood. I've done both quests concurrently and had no issues with them, nor have I heard of any that have been substantiated through gameplay or by inspection of the game code.

Yeah. It's OK to have people chopping off each others heads in this game (or to even witness public beheadings), but can you imagine the outcry if Lars and Braith had their own scene in the market circle of Whiterun, with him kissing her and they make up and become great friends? What horrors! Public affection ... and between children, no less! Give me blood and guts and gore and ... anything but that! So, what does all this have to do with guys playing girls in Skyrim? Nothing? Actually, it has everything to do with it, because both issues stem from something that seems to be part and parcel of our culture. It's called "double standards". A guy plays a female character in a game and suddenly he's "suspect". A girl plays a male character in the same game and nobody bats an eye. Extreme violence? Sure, mate. Bring it on! Drugs (don't forget Skooma, Moon Sugar, Hist Sap, and Sleeping Tree Sap)? Absolutely! That's good stuff! Gimme more! Sex, even implied? What are you, anyway? Some kind of pervert?

Thanks for the advice, Georgiegril, but no ... none of those conditions applied. I had done nothing at all within Kynesgrove prior to walking in, and there were no guards in the area of the dragon burial mound (except the already dead ones that are spawned there). I could only fix the issue by going back to a save very early in my game before there were even dragons (except for Alduin) -- basically all the way back to my early explorations around Riverwood and Whiterun, before I even engaged the main quest. And, I had never been to Kynesgrove before that. I had already cleared my bounty for both Whiterun and Falkreath, but I found that I could revert to a save before I ever got those bounties and the problem was still there. The odd thing is that in trying to find out what the problem was, I found other places where random NPCs would go berserk on me as soon as I showed up in town, and yet others wouldn't, even in saves before I ever visited Kynesgrove. This is obviously an example of a glitch in the game that happens for no reason at all and that only emerges much later on. I've experienced these before in Skyrim, even with no mods installed, so I know it's a failing of the game, itself. My fix for this was to scrap the game and start over, again, because there was just too much weirdness going on. I find it interesting, for instance, that this problem was associated with the "Karthwasten bug", in which the people in that town would constantly cry out in pain and shift into "battle dialog" as though they were being attacked, even though they, otherwise, went about their normal daily business. I've only seen this one other time -- another aborted game, because that was just too immersion-breaking for me and I'm not at all convinced that it's not indicative of a more far-reaching problem.

Don't use "placeatme" AT ALL in this game. Seriously. It's not a matter of if, but of when your game will become unstable, possibly to the point of CTD, and your only recourse will be to start a new game. "placeatme" creates duplicate instances of an object. If those instances are unique, named, actors you will have more than one in the game at a time. This can, obviously, cause problems, but more to the point, it causes game bloat because the Skyrim engine does not clean up well after placeatme is used. This is up to the person using the command, whether from the console or within a mod. There are still modders who use this command and know nothing about how to clean up after it. Those mods probably cause more problems than any others. If you lose an actor then use "moveto" to either get that person or animal to you or to go where it is located.

Meeko does level up with you. I think his minimum level is 10 and his maximum is 25, though. To change this would probably require going into the CK and changing those parameters. He's classified as an "animal follower", so you can have an NPC follower with him, but not a "stray dog" or Vigilance. Vigilance is the better option, since I think his level caps out around 50.

Yep Rooker, I failed to mention that, and that's my bad (and I knew better). You have to get off the Unrelenting Force shout before the NPC throws up his ward. This is what momentarily disrupts the NPCs actions. You don't even have to do the whole thing. Just the first word will usually stagger him enough to follow through with something else. An arrow with a paralyze poison applied to the bow will do this most effectively, even with a ward up, allowing you to use a shout. I've used this on a number of occasions (OK, it's one of my favorite tactics), especially when the NPC in question is standing next to a cliff and I'm pretty sure he doesn't have anything in his inventory that might interest me. Using shouts to counter prepared shouts (vs Draugr) should be in everyone's standard battle plans. They give an audible warning right before they shout. Hit them with Unrelenting Force or Ice Form and you have them right where you want them, especially if you have spells that can stun-lock them just as they recover.

I think one good suggestion is to never, ever give a unique item to any NPC. There are just too many things that can go wrong, assuming you might want them back. Especially with the dragon priest masks, these are involved in a quest that you might discover later on while you're exploring Skyrim, and you'll need every last one of them or you won't be able to complete the quest. I have no idea how this quest might be affected if there are multiple instances of any of them in the game, either.

@ Moraelin: As much as I agree with everything you've said, and you've done so at least as thoroughly and eloquently as I'd like to have done, I think you were a little hard on Charlinho. You assumed, from his third sentence that this was a statement intended to cover ALL role-playing, when, in fact, he started it with "Depending on how much a player allows it ...". This qualification shows that he understands you can role-play without "self-exploration". That said, a lot of my role-playing is self-exploration, even when I'm playing a "bad guy". There are times that I'd just love to stick a dagger between someone's ribs -- in Real Life. I've never done so, and never will do so, but playing an assassin in a game like Oblivion or Skyrim at least lets me do it vicariously. I firmly believe that every single person on this planet can be represented by a point somewhere on a two dimensional graph. On the x-axis, you have gender, ranging from male on one extreme to female on the other extreme. I'm not talking about anatomical sex. I'm talking about the "inner person" -- how he sees his/her own reactions to the world. On the y-axis you have sexual preference, ranging from heterosexual at one extreme to homosexual on the other extreme. I also firmly believe that very few, if any people, actually rest at any extreme, their claims to the contrary notwithstanding. I'm firmly heterosexual. I didn't say 100%, but it's pretty close. On the other hand, I have a lot of views which could be regarded as "feminine". I've used role-playing games in the past to explore that and understand it, once I started playing female characters just to offer a little balance in the "PC group". It was fun, it was educational, and I don't have to do it, anymore. I understand and accept the fact that not all of my views and feelings are 100% "super-male", and I prefer myself that way. I've known too many of those ultra-males, and they grate on my nerves, big-time, so I'm glad I'm not one of them, and I'm glad that 90% of the guys I know aren't in that group, too. Maybe you can just have fun playing someone who is so totally NOT you that you have no persona connection with that character at all. I've done that, too, although I really don't seem to have a lot of fun doing it. I'm not a thief. I don't even remotely have a desire to do this for a living, or even a "hobby". However, I very much enjoyed the Thieves Guild questline in Oblivion. I hated the one in Skyrim, because Bethesda made them no more than anti-social thugs in that game, and that is so counter to my own personality that I felt bad about doing some of the things I had to do to advance the questline. So, what Charlinho said is possible, but as he also said, it's only one option a player has. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (not actually a quote from Freud, contrary to popular belief).

Solution: Unrelenting Force. It's best if you have all three words activated. This will severely disrupt said Thalmor's plans, and give you some breathing space (and time). Once you've interrupted the Thalmor's attack, you can then stun-lock him using dual-cast destruction spells, if you have the necessary perk. Combine this with an Amulet of Talos. You can get one from the pilgrim on the way to High Hrothgar (the woman right before you meet the frost troll). Lure the frost troll to her location and then hide, and they'll duke it out for a few moments (the troll always wins). Loot the amulet from her body, equip it, and it decreases the cool-down time for shouts by 20%. Second Solution: Ice Form shout, if you have it. Hit him with it after you disrupt his ward by whatever means (see above), and it will paralyze him and do a bit of DoT while you can recharge your shout and magicka. Third Solution: Combine the above two (or a Paralyze spell) to immobilize the Thalmor. Equip a dagger, maybe poisoned, and cast invisibility. Go into sneak mode and get behind him. The instant he regains control of his body, hit him with the dagger for extra sneak attack damage -- even better if you've put some points into the appropriate branch of the Sneak tree. Note that paralyze poisons are easy to make and they would be the best one to use, here. You can even make one using three ingredients that does damage to Health. Moral of the story: Justiciars are tough SOBs. Use every trick in your repertoire to fight them, and don't go toe-to-toe with them at lower levels when you're running a magic-based character. Thalmor soldiers are easier. Those are the ones that tend to charge you dual-wielding a weapon and spell, but the same maxim applies.

I've never heard of this problem, before, either. I almost suspect a mod conflict of some sort. Do you have any mods installed which might have modified Karthspire in any way? If so, changes can persist in your save game even if you have uninstalled a game. It's theoretically possible that uninstalling such a mod might leave you with missing meshes. Have you tried starting a brand new game just to test out whether or not Karthspire is intact?

Yep, croc123, I'm fully aware of how big Australia is. I'm going by the necessary constraints which the existing geography we know about Tamriel places on the size of the continent, as well as the fact that Cyrodiil mysteriously changed from a tropical area to a temperate to sub-tropical area in the space of a few games. The Niben valley is largely responsible for my estimate on the size of what Tamriel needs to be, and we can assume the high plateau of Skyrim is the reason for the alpine climate, there, and not it's latitude. Similarly, we can only assume that Leyawiin is sub-tropical because of its latitude. Unfortunately, that doesn't account for the nearly polar climate along the northern shore of Skyrim, but you can blame Bethesda for creating a "country" in Skyrim that is barely as large as any respectable American metropolis.

Well, mrminty, I hate to rain on your parade, but you're right that the vast majority of warriors have been men, but you're wrong in the implication that women cannot be just as capable in combat as can men. I personally used to know a woman who could beat any guy I knew in one-on-one combat, unarmed or even with bladed weapons, and could out-shoot most guys at the range with weapons up to .357 Magnum. She was also trained in small group tactics and could hold her own in military-style maneuvers. She was not a large or powerful woman, either. She knew her strengths and weaknesses and her combat style was based upon those. Was she the exception to the rule? Sure, but the heroes we play in-game, whether male or female, are supposed to be a cut above the general population. Several cuts, in fact. They're supposed to made of stronger stuff than the "common rabble", as Skyrim jarls are so fond of saying, so it's not unexpected that there are female warriors. Are there too many in Skyrim? Yes, I think so. There were too many in Oblivion, too. Borderlands almost got it right, but went the other route. All the bandits in that game were men. However, this isn't about that "common rabble". It's about the rare person who stands up and advances and saves the world. Why not a woman?

That's good to know, Xen0tech. I'm still running 1.4, though, and I think it's still broken in that version of the game. I have a mod installed that corrects a lot of the discrepancies in weapons and armor, though, so it's not an issue for me. I'll sometimes dual wield with a dagger and I like that dagger to be Ebony, once the game starts dropping them for me. It lets me keep a high-damage weapon at the ready, while I shift to a quick spell. At that point, the Ebony dagger is frequently the highest-impact one-handed weapon you can get, swords included.

@ sajuukkhar9000: I repeat, and it's very clear to anyone who is reading this thread: You're the one who got us off-topic with a theoretical statement regarding where player's characters might go when they die, when the OP wanted to know what the Players thought about their own characters. Your input was unrelated to the topic, even if it did lend a little extra information about what "could be". It has nothing to do with lore or perceived examples of lore. It has nothing to do with what Bethesda employees say at conventions, since the developers have obviously not been totally in agreement with each other even during a single game, much less between games. All that mattered in the context of this thread was what each individual player thought about his specific character. His question was, and I quote, "Where do you think your character will end up when they die?" My current one would be delighted to spend her Eternity hunting with Hircine, or perhaps going to the Shivering Isles, since she has a crush on Sheogorath. Dreamsleeve be damned ... it's all myth and legend, anyway, just as is all religion, and she frankly doesn't believe in it. Whether I do, or not, is irrelevant. I'm playing a specific character and I have to answer from the perspective of that character. The very concept of the Dreamsleeve is at odds with the religious beliefs of the Nords, who believe they'll go to Sovngarde, and we know from the game, itself, that Sovengard exists as a real place. My character has been there (in a previous playthrough). To her, in that playthrough, it's "real", and it even conflicts with her own long-held beliefs that are based upon Khajiit religious tenants, and not upon those forced upon people by Imperial rule. I've been to the Shivering Isles, Boethiah's Realm, Peryite's Realm, Sovngarde, and a few other such places in playing ES games, but never have I encounted the Dreamsleeve. Like I said. If something's not in the game we can't accept it as "truth" unless there is an official declaration by Bethesda, the company, and not by individual employees in casual conversations or even interviews. I consider this subject closed for any further input by me. We've both made our positions clear and neither of us is going to change them. I'm not here for a flame war, or to be lectured by someone who probably knows more about the lore than I do, but who clearly does not understand the existential implications of a game that is based upon truths which the developers probably have not published. I wish you well, but have no desire to fan any flames on this site or any other, so I suggest that we agree to disagree and get on with our lives. Perhaps the best thing that could happen to this thread is for a Moderator to lock it, since I doubt it will ever get back to the original topic.

How large are your save games? None of mine are much over 9 MB, and I'm on my twelfth playthrough, with some of my characters over level 50. It sounds like you're the victim of save game bloating, which is usually caused by badly-written mods and/or excessive use of the console command "placeatme", which shouldn't even be in the game-system because it has a long, documented history of causing this issue. The problem is that some inexperienced modders make extensive use of this script command, and you won't even realize this until your game goes belly up. The use of the autosave feature has also been implicated in this problem at least as far back in the ES as Oblivion, and I'm not convinced that Bethesda has fixed it for Skyrim. Basically, never use an automatic save. When the game autosaves, and it looks like you might need to revert to it at some point, create a fresh, manual save and use that, instead. The problem is that overwritten saves in ES games can become buggy and bloated (so never overwrite any of your manual saves, either).

The boss Falmer who has the crystal is the one you meet at the Aedrome (I think I spelled that right). The first time I did this quest I missed looting his body and wound up wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what I did wrong before I discovered my mistake. He won't necessarily be a Nightstalker. The type of Falmer you encounter will be the best that can spawn for your level. Also, what xlcr said -- sometimes it seems that a quest is destined to bug out regardless of what you do. Skyrim is just like that.

Moraelin, you're spot-on, if a little wordy about it -- no worries, I tend to be that way, myself (wordy, although not always spot-on). I'll sum it up with a paraphrase of Leonard Nimoy who has gone as record saying "I am not Spock" (the title of his 1975 autobiography). I am not my character! That's final enough, isn't it? Sure I play female characters -- lots of them. In face-to-face table-top games I probably have about a hundred characters, total, played at various times since I started playing in such games about a half-decade before Gary Gygax released Dungeons and Dragons on the world. Of those, about 65% or so have been females. Does that make me 65% female and 45% male, even though I have quite recognizable male anatomy? Of course it doesn't. Nor does it make me a "closet homosexual", like I'm sure a lot of people who learn that some guys can play believable female characters in games would accuse us of being. I am a role-player! There, that says it all. The trouble is, I doubt a lot of people who play these games even know what "role-playing" is, so I'll define it the way we old-timers use the term. A "role-player" is someone who assumes the role of a person who is not himself. This doesn't mean pushing a "toon" around in a world using a keyboard, joystick, or game controller. It means adopting a background and personality that is not your own and playing to those parameters faithfully.

Be flexible and don't get into a rut. What spell you equip in your off-hand should reflect the situation. If you're fighting a mage who gets in pretty close, then you may want a ward. If you have opponents off in the distance who are sniping at you while someone is toe-to-toe with you and intent upon removing your head from your shoulders you might want to have a missile-type spell to use. If you're up against a particularly tough opponent it might not be a bad idea to equip a healing spell. I've even used the sword / conjure option to keep my opponent's attention divided between me and my familiar/atronach/whatever. One good tactic I've found is to use a simple flames or frostbite spell. Hack with your sword and then backpedal, while your opponent advances on you, spray him with your spell until you deplete your magicka and then back to hacking with your sword until your magicka pool is refreshed. Regarding the use of daggers, I don't see the point unless you have a very good dagger. The extra reach of a sword means you can hit your opponent from farther away. Daggers offset this partially by being faster than swords, although the Ebony Dagger is bugged and doesn't have the speed of other daggers in the game (it's only a speed of 1.0, vs. 1.3 for the others). I think the key to success as a spellsword is to be able to dish out as much damage as quickly as you can using whatever means are at your disposal. That means concentrating upon destruction magic and possibly conjuration to complement your melee weapon. The more ways you have of hurting your enemy the greater the chance that he'll go down before you will.

"moveto" doesn't work with the base ID (34cb8). It only works with the ref ID (1ed2f). By the way, the "help" command will only return the base ID. As far as I know the only way to get a ref ID in-game is by clicking on the object in the console. I'm pleased you've figured out what the problem was, and have managed to advance the quest. And, yes, sometimes NPCs seem to be completely oblivious about what you tell them. Get used to it. The AI in this game is sometimes pretty much brain-dead.

I don't think it's an either-or situation. It's certainly true that the Gamebryo engine, in whatever incarnation you have it, is not very robust when you start adding lots of NPCs. On the other hand, with just a few object-intensive mods running on a computer that barely meets the minimum standards for an ES game, you're going to see stuttering and even crashes in certain areas. Add to that all the simultaneously-running AIs in a well-populated city, and whats a poor, overworked CPU to do? Answer ... croak. So, yes, Tom, that's what it should look like. This is a medieval setting, after all. Very few cities were totally enclosed by walls. That was something restricted to the "high rent district". The "common rabble" lived outside the city walls, just as the picture you posted shows. But what Rennn said is quite true. This would make my laptop cry. My current gaming rig would probably be easily able to handle it. Whether or not the "Creation Engine" can handle this on a large scale is debatable. Heck, there were computers that could run vanilla Oblivion without a stutter, but they would come to a grinding halt with just something like Open Cities installed -- one of the reasons I never got around to using that mod. I'd love to see a totally open world based upon Tamriel, about the size of Australia since that seems reasonable, with cities that make sense, populated with people who have unique and complex AIs. I'm just not sure anyone is capable of making such a thing, or that any commercially-available computer could run it. Bethesda should have scrapped Gamebryo and licensed a a better, more up-to-date, and beefier game engine, but, after all, they're creating games for consoles and not for PCs. We PC gamers are probably going to have to look elsewhere for anything approaching realism in the populating of cities.

Yes! Bloodwing for Skyrim! Now that's a mod my Khajiit hunter would approve of. As loki said, though, it would be very difficult (possibly even impossible) to make a small companion animal that sits on your shoulder. On the other hand, I thought sailing ships in Oblivion were impossible -- until someone made it work.

The only total overhaul mod I'd ever be likely use is one I make for myself, and that isn't likely to happen. In every single one I've ever investigated, either for Oblivion or Skyrim, I've loved some things about them and hated other things about them. I look for mods that tweak the game in smaller ways to as near to what I consider "ideal" as I can find. That sometimes means I just have to do without, since in most cases the vanilla version of the game does something better (in my opinion) than 95% of the mods out there that try to change things.

It's a mixed bag for me. I like some of your ideas and I dislike others. This is why I don't use "complete overhaul" mods, but just install smaller ones that tweak things just the way I like them. I do have one specific comment, though. You do know that forcing timescale to "1" is going to cause quest-breaking and possibly even game-breaking bugs unless you completely revamp all the various time-dependent AIs in the game. This has been well-documented in Oblivion to break the game. I ran with a timescale of "1" in Skyrim and found a lot of quests stalling out. "2" works much better. Safer, still, is a timescale of "5" to "8". The main problem is that with low timescales NPCs AI's seem to get stalled, and in many cases they aren't able to get to places they need to be for timed events. Try starting a new game, immediately set the timescale to "1", and follow your guide into Riverwood. You'll see all sorts of strangeness when you get there too early in the day because people won't be where they're supposed to be, but other people will be acting as though they are. I wish you well with trying to discover, unravel, and fix all the many time-sensitive events in this game

First statement: You could have murdered someone yesterday. Does that give me the right to assume that you did? And does anyone have a list of the atrocities that you're assuming Paarthurnax committed. I doubt it. You'd be hard-pressed to present this case in any modern court, although I'm sure that the barbarians that populate Skyrim would have no problem with this little bit of ill-logic. Your second statement is a prime example of an association fallacy. If your father happened to be a mass murderer, then that probably makes you one, too? Logical, yes? No.

Except for the first option, I had a bit of difficulty making my choices, here, since it depends upon what part of the game I've reached. Ultimately, I go for Ebony weapons because I make my own weapons when I can, and Daedric weapons require Daedra hearts, which are in short supply in Skyrim. Besides, there's not that much difference between the two. I'm a bow-man. Since I generally play a sneaky type, bow + stealth = win most of the time. As a result, I specialize it that from the moment I grab my first longbow in Helgen Keep, and I never look back. Early in the game, I go unarmed for melee combat. I play a Khajiit, and Khajiit claws do 15 points of damage. You have to get well into the game before better melee weapons become available. At that point I generally go with a greatsword as soon as one becomes available. It's funny, too, since I detested those weapons in Oblivion. They just seem more effective in Skyrim, and I use them for the coup when an opponent manages to close in on me. In this playthrough, I decided to go with one-handed swords all the way for melee combat. I've been playing with dual-wielding, and I love it, but I just got Spellbreaker, so I may have to temper that and start working on my Block skill. As for composition, I generally go with whatever is the best that comes up in-game, until I can craft Ebony. I'll boost Smithing occasionally, but I don't grind it for levels like a lot of people do. I'm still playing 1.4 Skyrim so I could do that if I wanted to. I will, however, get the ability to craft Steel items at the earliest point in the game, because making a steel sword and arrows (you need a crafting mod to do the latter), and being able to improve Ancient Nord Bows (especially Supple Ancient Nord Bows), gives you a very good head-start on most of your opponents.