Stemin

Yes I did. You agreed that it was possible to cheat yourself of an experience, but disagree on general principle that you its possible to cheat in a single player game. The definition of cheating has nothing to do with who is effected. Cheating is cheating, whether or not it's a single player game or not. Whether or not it effects anyone is a separate issue. Like you said. It effects no one. I don't really care if you do it in the long run. But cheating is still cheating.

There's no evidence they didn't turn into big fluffy stuffed animals and transport into the realm of cotton candy, but we don't know that either. Like everyone else, I really don't care what you do, but stop trying to justify it because you're just conflicting with every known bit of lore out there. Saying lore isn't lore because Todd Howard said it's not reliable isn't helping your case either. You would have been fine with this whole mod if you hadn't called it lore friendly and then tried to change everything we know about them.

Who it effects or whether or not it effects anyone has nothing to do with the definition of cheating.

Wait a minute. How does asking you to bring him a bottle of ale prove he doesn't care about the welfare of his people? You're a stranger walking through the town of Falkwreath. Why should he be relying on you to help his people in the first place? This is pretty inconclusive as well, since bandits and mercenaries are all lumped together in TES. There IS a difference, but since TES doesn't differentiate except to add one token random encounter with a fellow named "Mercenary" with a broken quest, again.. inconclusive. And that's an opinion I would disagree with just based on his putting pride ahead of common sense with his one liner about the empire "shaming us all." Regardless of the truth of this, it's still a wash.

Talk to the priest of Arkay who is part of the dawnguard.

That's really not true. Elisif, and Balgruuf are two of the better Jarl's in Skyrim, and Balgruuf has more quest involvement than anyone unless you did the civil war before even going to whiterun (and chose the stormcloaks). Igmund played Ulfric like a fiddle and got exactly what he wanted. Regardless of what side you choose in the war, whoever rules Markarth is still at the disadvantage of the Silver-Blood family owning the silver mines. What evidence do you have that Siddgeir is corrupt? He's young and arrogant certainly, but what corruption? Is this from the stormcloak Civil War quest? I don't recall it. And Idgrod doesn't need the confidence of her people as long as she has the authority over them. She's clearly wiser than they are if for no other reason than her lack of superstition compared to the rest of them. In a town full of fools, one intelligent person should be fairly secure. I stand by what I said earlier. I would even go so far as to say after you choose the stormcloaks, the replacement Jarl's are more ignorant than the Imperial replacements.

Not to mention did anyone consider they meant 7000 foot steps?

I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. I don't get it when people say you can't "cheat" in a single player game. The hell you can't. You're cheating yourself. When I was growing up, we called them 'cheat codes' for a reason.

I have 2 characters above level 78, and one character at 81.5 in stock Skyrim. It's really not as bad as people make it out to be if you just put the hours in. Honestly, the worst are the ones you use normally, One-Handed, Two-Handed, Destruction. All the other stuff levels pretty fast. You can play the percentage game and switch guardian stone's often while taking advantage of things like Lover's Comfort, or you can grind it out, whatever you choose to do, but I usually just play a normal game. There's too many people who want to throw the words 'roleplaying' or 'immersion' around and limit themselves. I play the role Bethesda wanted us to play. I'm the dragonborn. I'm a member of all the factions and the most powerful, and dangerous man in Skyrim.

The answer to your question is going to be an opinion. I would argue that yes, it can be a bad thing to have a lot of mods. If you don't think so, take one look at the Dawnguard threads about people complaining about all the bugs. If you run it stock, it actually functions pretty well. But the problem with 90 mods is you don't really know what changes were actually made to your game. Something seemingly insignificant could end up being a character that gets heavily scripted by Bethesda in a later DLC or patch. Once the GotY is out, assuming all the patches and DLC's are out at that point, then the risk becomes a lot less. But you can still run into problems that you can't foresee. The reason Bethesda's games are so buggy, despite the naysayers saying it's because they do a horrible job, is more due to the fact that the game has such an immense amount of content and such a larger number of people playing it. Skyrim was developed with a team of less than 100 people. You can't properly test a game with 100 people that's going to be played by millions of people when it's a game of this type where the players choices can effect something you didn't properly foresee changing. People are always doing things outside of the realm of "normal" play that can potentially break something in the scripts. This is how exploits are found. Sometimes it's a simple oversight by whoever is doing the scripting, like a young kid who goes through a town and just kills everything and then complains his quests don't work, but sometimes it's something that's just not supposed to happen, like when a player finds a way into an area before he's supposed to be able to. In other words, your mods might seem stable now, but somewhere along the line, you might do something, maybe years later and it's something you never tried before and all the sudden, ctd. Texture and mesh mods are _usually_ harmless, but you also have to consider that unless it's a replacer, some type of change in the creation kit is always necessary to put it in the game, and that means the possibility of conflicts down the line. I mostly play the game stock. Mods often feel like cheating to me, unless they're a new area or something, so I'm of the opinion that I would rather put as many hours into the stock game as possible before opening pandora's box. As long as there are still things for me to do in the stock game and with the addition of Dawnguard, that becomes even more relevant, I'll continue to play the game stock for many hours until adding mods. I read these threads and honestly, I haven't come across 90 mods I want to install.

There used to be a mod out when I had just purchased the PC version (around February or March) that gave Annekke a unique armor, and supposedly improved elements of her fighting style to make her a better fighter. I have been unable to find it since though and didn't d/l it at the time. I'm guessing the author removed it. Too bad really. It was a nice idea.

Wow. From Whiterun? Not easy to give directions. From memory, it's almost directly south of Windhelm on the map, but whereas Windhelm is in the north, Dark Water Crossing is almost directly in the center north/south wise. You're gonna want to take the road east from Whiterun stables, then cross the small bridge before high hrothgar and start following the road north. I believe it will eventually lead towards Dark Water Crossing, but again, without deliberately tracing my steps, I couldn't be sure. I usually go to the hot springs area, and head south until I see mine icon near the atronach stone.

I dunno. Logically it seems to me that they (Bethesda) sided with the Imperials, but that doesn't mean I'm right. Considering the Storm Cloak Jarl's... Law-Giver is clueless as hell, relying on Mavin who is the most corrupt person in Skyrim, and a steward who feeds her a bunch of bs she swallows whole. Not to mention she's on the take, IIRC. (The steward, not the Jarl) Skald, who treats his servant like an inferior and laughs when he says he wants to join the army, but then tries to put a bunch of lumberjacks in stormcloak uniforms, along with wanting to put all his citizens on the front line of the stormcloak battle while abandoning Dawnstar in the event of attack. ( And this is prior to his citizens being cleansed of their "nightmare" problem of which he is ready to do absolutely NOTHING about. ) That leaves the guy from Winterhold, who's the only Jarl you can see leave his longhouse to go spend time at the local tavern, and spends all his time complaining about the Mage's College (the biggest and nicest landmark in his city) instead of making an effort to rebuild his town. Did I forget anyone? It doesn't exactly seem like Bethesda went out of their way to make the Stormcloak Jarl's look like geniuses. Then consider the fact that in the Civil War quest line, Ulfric dies if you choose the Imperials, but if you choose the Stormcloaks, Elisif still lives (even though Tulius dies). So regardless, Elisif, an Imperial supporter in the Empire's capital is left alive. Also, I thought it was a bit of humor on Bethesda's part that Ulfric carried the Steel Axe of Cowardice. When you read what it does, it might make him seem intimidating, but taking it at face value it's a pretty good joke.

Ok guys. I couldn't get it to work either, but then I found out I was adding the dawnguard.bsa file to the wrong line. This video tutorial is what put me on the right path: Hopefully you guys were just making the same mistake I did and adding it to the wrong line in the skyrimeditor.ini. BTW, I didn't add the line about masterfiles=1 and it still worked fine. It does seem to take a lot longer to load, but it works.

IIRC, older windows, like I dunno maybe going back to win 98 (I can't remember if XP had it) had a program, I think sound recorder, where you could load .wav files and cut and paste them and edit stuff. Win 7 still has a program called sound recorder, but now when I start it, it complains that I have no audio hardware. I can only assume it's looking for a microphone, but the old program I'm thinking of never required that. Can someone tell me where I can find a copy of the old sound recorder, or tell me if I get a microphone, will this program still work like the old one did?

And yet there are already many people in this thread who have pointed out just that. What do you think we're complaining about? Why would the game difficulty help at all? All it's going to do is make the overall combat easier. It's not going to adjust the level difference between vampires and NPC's in any given town. If an NPC can die when there are 4 NPC's and 1 Vampire Thrall, then clearly there is no level balance between NPC's. They don't "decimate entire city populations" all at one time, but over time, it's quite possible. The only ones left in Morthal on my first character build are essentials, basically the Jarl's family, half of which don't leave the hall. And I don't even have dawnguard on this one because it's on PS3. Yeah, basically what he said. We should all change our play style to suit this "feature." Ridiculous. And I haven't installed any mods to date, I don't see that as a defense, particularly since console players don't have this availability.

Actually, the DLC is a lot of fun. I had 25 hours into it and that didn't include checking out the new dwarven area, getting all the books for ulrag (or whatever his name is), checking out the vampire or werewolf perks, or even trying the Vampire quest line (I did the dawnguard). Just as the other poster said, I don't want to be on watch every time I enter a town and I don't want my towns to become ghost towns like Creepypasta. The DLC has a lot of bugs in it, but they seem to be minor ones. I know I see a lot of people complaining about it, but this is Nexus. There's very few people on here who aren't loaded down with mods. Bethesda shouldn't be held accountable for that.

I take it your one of the people who uses mods so much you don't really know the stock game, eh? The answer

So you're another one who isn't playing the game stock and yet you're telling us how the stock game should behave. Fantastic.

That's your argument. Everyone in this thread is a liar or incompetent except you. Ignore listed.

It's become clear to me that you're not really interested in actual logic, you're only interested in winning an argument. I'm not going to put up with it much longer before I just decide to put you on my ignore list. NPC's can clearly cross zones. You can watch dragons do it all the time. And these scripts have clearly been tightened up since release to optimize the game. You used to be able to watch the dragon from Bonestrewn Crest from _many_ surrounding zones. Now you must be extremely close to be able to see him flying around. I'm not arrogant enough to claim I know more about the game's code than you, but claiming something is unbreakable is point blank: Laughable. Everything is capable of breaking. Barring that, like I said before, it doesn't matter how something is intended to work, if it's not working that was in a practical sense. I like how you apply something from your personal experience and use that as evidence of your point, but when I can point out countless examples from my experience and other gamers, you borderline call me a liar and say it doesn't work that way. Regardless, the idea that everyone should play like you is again, laughable, and was clearly not Bethesda's intent when they designed the game. I would also call your statement blatently false. It's statistically impossible to predict how or what NPC's are in the area or what position you're in when they do attack without specifically scripting the events to work that way. Since dragons don't only attack at the same spot when x number of npc's are in the area, I'll go out on a limb and say they're NOT scripted that way. Which means its impossible to predict that you're going to end up with zero deaths on a regular basis. My countless number of reloads also verifies this. So you just arbitrarily applied that assumption to me. That makes even less sense. Making assumptions is just one more logical fallacy. Why don't I just claim that since you claim intimate knowledge of the game's engine and are defending the game that you work for Bethesda and are therefore bias? Because I don't know that so I shouldn't be running my mouth about things I don't know. I should have stopped you at "People want NPCs to stay alive." That's another assumption, and a dumb one. There are kids out there that go out of their way to depopulate towns and get mad when they encounter an essential. You can't apply something that's not essential to the game's objectives as being part of the difficulty. That's an opinion sir, not a fact. Like I said before, YOU are the one who pointed out they are non essential, so if I don't care about having NPC's die, the difficulty is removed. That's roleplaying bs, and once again you apply your own expectations of the game to someone else's gameplay. Not everyone does or should play like you do. And again, evidence says otherwise. Like I said about the dragons, these are random events. There's no guarantees what NPC's will be in the area, how many, what level the vampires will be etc. It's already been established that many NPC's levels are established by what level you enter the zone. Can you guarantee the same is said for the vampires that make random attacks? I started Dawnguard on my level 81.5 character. These Vampires aren't "tough" for me in the traditional sense, but they do take a long time to take down. I find it very hard to believe they're the same level as the other NPC's in Whiterun for example, particularly since I watched them die. There are also other factors such as when you use a carry weight potion to fast travel while over encumbered and you can't attack quickly upon arrival. It goes back to what I've said several times now. Not everyone plays like you do. That's the whole reason mods exist, why some people love the game and some people hate it, and basically why Bethesda did away with the mandatory classes to begin with.

You should have posted this in the mod request section, or at best the mod talk forum, but you're not the first to bring this up and the last I read up on this nobody had been able to figure out how to accomplish it. I guess it was possible in Oblivion, but something was changed and it doesn't _seem_ possible in Skyrim. Of course people are discovering new things all the time so maybe someone will figure it out. If you try a search you might be able to find the thread.

"Can't break" Uhhuh. Also, you clearly missed the part where we were discussing dragon attacks, pre-dawnguard. Maybe you shouldn't make assumptions and actually read the thread. What part of that contributes to the difficulty of the game? As you keep pointing out, they're non-essential in the first place, so whether or not they die has no game-related consequences. Therefore they do nothing to add or take away from the difficulty. It's called environment. And an empty town doesn't have one. Except as we already established, I don't even have to be aware that the vampires have attacked. I could be in a completely different part of the city. I can't be bothered to make a sweep around the whole town every time I'm ready to leave. That's just ignorant.

The animation doesn't change the way the weapon is handled. You have to change the settings(for lack of a better term) in the .nif files and then make the appropriate changes in the ck, but you don't change the animations. http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/600056-using-two-handed-sword-as-one-handed/page__p__5478359__fromsearch__1#entry5478359

Casual gamers who use mods? o_O