sisterof

I'm glad to see the thread back to its tumultuous life. mighty zog made some excellent points. I'd like to add that I don't think Skyrim has much of a chance attacking the Aldemeri Dominion, but that alone it can withstand any forces the Elves may muster. The Dominion has been relying solely in sabotage and infiltration, in weakening opposition indirectly and making individual people "disappear". The Empire is betraying Skyrim big time by allowing them to roam free in its territory. Once the Stormcloaks eliminate the Thalmor from inside their borders, Skyrim has very little to fear from the Dominion. As for an attack... I think that once the provinces all are independent and holding their own ground, the Dominion won't have room to expand anymore. The issue with keeping the Empire is that it lets the Thalmor grow roots and sabotage everything freely. We get absolutely no signs that the Dominion is still a military potency after the war - all we see is far more indirect means of domination, and them having their asses delivered by Hammerfell. I think an attack against the Elves will be made by allied, independent provinces. Not unified because of the reasons I just said - the Empire lets Thalmor infiltrate everything like a plague, there's no way to plan a counterattack when the Elves have eyes and pointy ears everywhere, and the ability to forge false intelligence. I also like the point of "what it looks like from outside the game" vs "what a character inside that universe would think". Standing in my Dragonborn's shoes, it seemed like Skyrim could be crushed if alone, but it's also very disturbing to see the Thalmor camping in the woods with no opposition, not a single word from the Empire about a initiative to drive them off. It's much more serious than simply the ban on Talos worship. The Empire used up resources and the war took its toll on the provinces' levels of poverty, not to mention the number of dead soldiers. This point is often forgotten in the wave of "the Stormcloaks rebelled cause of Talos!!111". Skyrim was impoverished and left defenseless, and now must open its borders to the Thalmor freely, with no Jarls saying anything about it, not even the High King - who is not a boy by any means. As for Ulfric's usage of the Thu'um... He isn't a follower of the Way of the Voice. The "ancient Nord art" the song tells about is not the Way of the Voice, but the Thu'um itself, without mention of any rules about its usage. So I don't think he was breaking any vows, as he is not a Greybeard, who are the only ones who do take the vow. I do think it was overkill to Shout Torygg but maybe it had something to do with showing that someone with willpower can stand the Voice, and Torygg couldn't. Ulfric says something along the lines of "anyone with enough determination and ambition can learn the Voice, my Shouting of Torygg proved he had neither" or similar thing. Maybe it was just to prove this point, that the High King had absolutely no willpower, instead just enjoying royal life and courting his young queen. @HighkingUlfricStormcloak: Thanks for the chuckle. There is a method to my madness and a story to my nick, the fact that it sounds like some weird russian name or something is a fortunate coincidence. If you allow me to indulge your heart-to-heart, I am also minorly annoyed by the length of your signature, and your double posting when the "edit" button works (buggily - sometimes just hitting "full editor" solves the tag issue). Hopefully your annoyance will fade in time, I'm sure there are far worse things about my posts than merely my nick. :biggrin: On a related note, the first time I saw TheLoreSeeker's nick, I totally read TheSoreLoser, my bad. And mighty zog's always makes me think of "take off every zig! for great justice!"

And that's why the world needs more single player RPGs. :happy:

Agreed and disagreed with gsmanners. There is no "way this game was designed". I do agree that it's terribly boring to simply Hulk smash everything before you (with weapons, spells or sneakily). The only way I found to make Skyrim really amusing and not just an exercise in repetition was to not complete any quest that goes against my character's personality. And to not skip dialogues and so on. So my advice is - make a character, trace a personality and stick to it. This "master of all trades, leader of all guilds" simply makes the character utterly unbelievable and the game completely mechanic - it gets down to fetching objects, killing people with quest markers over their heads and doing everything for what? For a bigger number in level/skill? Flawed, limited characters are much, much more fun to play, in my humble opinion. So if you're making the heroic kind but get curious about, say, Thieves Guild... then you make another character who's a thief, play both separately, and both coherently. The Profile Manager mod is excellent for that - it groups your savegames per character, so when you launch the game, you choose which character you'll be playing and don't have to use that long list of savegames - only the ones related to the character chosen at startup appear. It's something every single game that calls itself RPG should have by default, but Bethesda is... Bethesda. :dry:

I had a bad case of "not let allies die" with my Dragonborn until I installed Warzones. Now he can't save everyone. :confused: The only thing I can think of that I do with absolutely every character is always sprint. Oh, and not sprinting for long while on a horse as it makes me feel like I'm abusing the faithful beast. :ermm: I end up stopping or just walking while mounted, or even leaving the horse near some lake to rest for a bit.

Total hallucination mode: it would be grand to be able to control several characters that exist in the same world, so my Dragonborn could benefit from the Listener's actions without ever getting involved with the Dark Brotherhood, like the demise of the Shatter-Shields and so on. Alas! @Bhanqwa: take a look at the UESPwiki's page for the marriage quest and the console commands for the quest stages. I wouldn't try it, though, sounds quite game-breaking.

There was no announcement of the next DLC - no name, date or content. as far as I know. There had been (debunked) rumours. I do hope it will be all about the Civil War - though I also hope for a whole game about defeating the Dominion... I guess all I want is more stories coming our way. :biggrin:

I found it absolutely delightful. I begun really getting into my current main character because of Dragonborn - and precisely because Mora steals your chance to win. I felt so angry to be manipulated time and again by Daedric Princes, and then having Mora kill the shaman and then not even let me have my victory over Miraak - and then saying with that uber annoying sleepy voice of his that I was his servant.... Gods, if I was angry here outside their universe, my poor Dovahkiin went in a wild rage and alignment shift. :biggrin: Apocrypha's atmosphere was brilliant! Lovecraft-inspired stuff make me so happy. And not seeing his face is part of the frustration the DLC makes you feel. That's what makes it a great story in my opinion - it provokes emotions, even if negative ones. Unlike Dawnguard, that I played in a totally detached way 90% of the time and had to make up some wild stories in my head for my character to feel engaged when I was not (the only genuinely exciting moments where finding the two Dragons at once, Durnehviir and, of course, the Snow Elves). Are you sure you did not like the DLC, or you liked it in a "I love to hate you" way? :P

Oh, thanks for the tips, Tidus44. I wasn't aware there was a Decoration Assistant for Skyrim - I used it extensively in Oblivion. I wonder why there are so few endorsements, though, in Oblivion having that option was a lifesaver (or at least sanity saver) for "Must Display Trophies!"-maniacs like me. Maybe Skyrim's is buggy? @Dohkaviin: You can leave stuff hanging around (over tables and such, not in proper displays where they get fixed) but upon reloading they'll probably be on the ground or thrown around randomly. Even inside glass displays, you can put stuff, close the lid and then it may appear on the ground the next time you enter the cell. So something like the Decorator Assistant is necessary to keep stuff in place, like in Oblivion. I'll take a look around if it's buggy and maybe try it today.

I was running madly around the Reach looking for my horse in a pitch black night after an ambush by conjurers and a Dragon, and stumbled across three hunters having an orgy. Well, there were two women and one men and they were all sitting in the water, one of the woman actually laying on her back, and since I use anatomically correct bodies it looked quite... orgy-ish. My well-behaved good-boy Dovahkiin was not amused. .... I was.

Aaand I'd like to point out yet again that the Empire always had a supernatural reason for existing, and since Martin Septim there are no Dragonfires to be lit. All dynasties had been blessed by the Divines until the Septims, so whatever we have now is a purely political entity, not a sacred institution. Since the First Empire was founded to fight the Elves, I can see the rise of a next one if the Thalmor issue becomes great enough for a whole new game (I hope so, even though it's gonna be painful to wait so long for resolution). But it will be a new emperor chosen by the Gods, who will unify all the provinces again, and will have nothing to do with this current empire we have. It would even make more sense if all the provinces became independent, the Empire dissolved, and we have a new warchief unifying everything from zero. I see the current Empire as a moribund, defective institution with no plans to stand up against the Dominion, and making Skyrim vulnerable by letting the Thalmor grow roots in it (they even have a military base!). All our talk about Skyrim being easy or hard to invade make little sense if the Empire is letting the Thalmor have a presence in the land anyway. It would be awesome if the Dragonborn, Ulfric and Tullius became similar to Tiber Septim/Underking/Who was his name again, I would love to see a single entity holding the three. But unfortunately Tullius didn't get the same level of character development as Ulfric, we know nearly nothing of him other than "he's a dutiful servant of the Empire". The only flash of personality we had was in the final battle for the Stormcloaks, because he chose to surrender. We know nothing else of him, and it's a pity, he becomes quite a plain character if compared to the attention Ulfric's writing received. I would love to have this triad bickering into godhood together. Maybe what we'll get is unrelated DLCs (which would be weird since the moot isn't supposed to take years to be called), and then a new game with the Dominion as the great power. And the Dragonborn, with all his power and et cetera, got swept out of the board because of reasons. Maybe something along the lines of "the Thalmor did something against Lorkhan/Shor and the Dragonborn went to Sovngarde to solve the issue and never returned". Alas, I wanted to keep playing a demi-god. :confused:

I think you have to cleanse only the first one with the first word of Bend Will, and then cleaning the rest becomes a side-quest. I think only Fate of the Skaal is a prerequisite - finding Frea and taking her to the village, and then cleansing a single stone. I could be wrong, though, my memory is all full of fog and glitter and unmentionable things.

Oh, I do not mean that Skyrim is terribly written, but it's far, far, faaaar from a masterpiece in terms of writing. I too agree that the quest doesn't need to be something filled with grandiose (LotR is delightful and it's all about throwing a ring in a volcano). The journey is what matters - but Skyrim doesn't offer much of a journey either. It offers absolutely no meaningful dialogue. All companions are cardboard cut. You don't even have many choices of your own voice - the kind of answer you give and so on. All tone in answers are 97% in the player's mind. It does give you material to make your own story, in your head, about what you're doing. Play a game like Mass Effect and see the difference - Skyrim is a sandbox game, it gives you a few elements and then you have freedom to roam. Things that happen to your character are totally disconnected - Guards mocking your Speechcraft regardless of your status as Dragonborn, Galmar wanting you to get a goddamned Ice Wraith even if you defeated Alduin and so on. Bethesda gives us a hell lot of amazing dots, but it's the player who connects them with their own imagination. "If the game was that poorly written, few people would have played it so intensely." Don't underestimate just how much imagination the average person has. :wink: As for mighty zog's "nobody will change their minds" - it would be awesome if everyone could play an Imperial and a Stormcloak, even having a personal preference. I'm trying to make my Dunmer thief completely anti-Stormcloak (and having quite a hard time), so this thread is precious to develop him coherently.

I'm not sure people can be that passionate as to fall for what you call "emotional hijack" - it actually takes a lot of effort to get into Skyrim emotionally. With such a sub-par writing when it comes to most quests and all dialogue, it takes a lot of imagination and willingness to be taken in by the story. I'm a big fan of getting lost in fiction, and I confess it took me more than a year to actually care about Skyrim. I played several quests, had some minor fun, spoke against the game being named "game of the year" in several occasions and also got pretty annoyed at it being called RPG because of the shitty writing. It's only been a few months since I mustered enough suspension of disbelief + enough imagination to make the game engaging. Otherwise, Skyrim is a pretty mechanical game. Talk to person, go to quest marker, kill every living creature around it, fetch object, rinse and repeat ad infinitum. I cannot fathom how one can be amused by the game without investing a hell lot of their own imagination into it. The game itself gives very little. I quite agree with you, Tidus44. There are no right or wrong choices and Bethesda was very bright to make the Civil War very ambiguous. They throw in very little information about it, just as they do with the nature of the Dragonbon. Maybe because they can't come up with something good enough, maybe because they really want us to fill in the spaces. Don't call your swaying because of that movie "hijacking". Call it inspiration! :biggrin: Skyrim is so much better if we can forge emotional complexity for our characters and put ourselves in their shoes for those hours of gameplay. Now dragging the character's opinions outside the game is a whole different matter indeed.

Oh okay. <lowers oversized battleaxe and erases warpaint> Sorry for that. :biggrin: Maybe brushing my hair too would help. Oh, and washing off some of this blood. Erm.. mead for everyone? Maybe we just need to wait for the next wave of newcomers to arrive. Or hope the last one wasn't too terrified. :ermm:

Eh, I think they were greeted quite warmly. Maybe the Imperial supporters just don't care about organizing arguments? Which is a pity, I can't think of many arguments for them either, though I do want them to jump in. :confused: If one side seems "victorious", we're missing something.

That is an hypothesis, not something said in the game. Besides, no other Dragon seems aware of the Dovahkiin, and Alduin never tries to find him again. It's not even said how the hell Alduin emerged in the Time Wound and Paarthurnax still lives.

Welcome to the discussion! I'd like to point out again (as I did before, but nobody reads all posts anyway) that I too think that both documents should be roughly the same size, but we aren't receiving much input from Imperial supporters for some reason. I do think there is no right side or better side - and I think that every player may have different characters with different loyalties. The documents are supposed to give basis for either kind of character. And also, they're not meant to kill debate - but rather avoid that newcomers keep going over the same points everyone did 10 pages ago, so the older users don't have to keep repeating themselves - both Imperial and Stormcloak supporters. Also note that the docs are free to edit (it's not something that belongs to this person or that person), so hopefully we will get Imperials to put theirs to the same level as the Stormcloak one. I, for one, don't believe at all in "convincing" people to choose this side or the other. What I am guilty of, though, is of kinda looking down on people who get passionate about their arguments without the ability to recognize both sides are not heroic, and neither side has a better chance to win against the Thalmor. Bethesda made the Civil War quest precisely like this - you can't play the hero as there is no villain, it's a civil war, you can at most play your character's beliefs and hope for the best. I also find it strange when people defend either side as people - by which I mean, "I, the player, hate the Empire". That makes no sense. That's something a character can do, and you can roleplay. And I'm aware I'm being a judgemental assbutt. Alas! :biggrin: As for the "everyone is unbound"... I think it's just gameplay issue. They didn't want to add an extra cutscene showing everyone getting rid of bounds. Or maybe the player character blacked out for longer than we think. That introduction quest was quite more about the awesomeness than about reasonable occurrences. You have THE Rebel Leader, THE General, THE Thalmor Ambassador, and the friggin' greatest Dragon ever with no explanation (all hypothesis of Alduin's presence are purely things players came up with, not backed by ingame sources). I think they just wanted a BOOM! Welcome to Skyrim! feel.

You don't have to cleanse the stones, you can go straight to him, if I remember correctly. Try reloading and just doing the absolute necessary to get to him.

We have repeatedly asked Imperial supporters for aid, TheLoreSeeker, so that both documents would be roughly the same size. Do add to it! It's a group effort.

I simply don't get this bastardization of the TES universe with armors/hairs/etc that go completely against everything that makes its atmosphere. But each to their own and good you're having a great time with entertainment you paid for, of course - if people want to make such mods and use them, go for it. Though I cannot see the appeal of dressing characters as, say, schoolgirls with flawless skin and balljointed doll physique and then go play the stories Skyrim has to offer. Aren't there games out there that cater specifically to that kind of taste? Sounds very unfulfilling to pay for a game that is utterly different from what you want, and then have to mod the hell out of it, and then the quests are still completely dissonant with this new "feel" you gave the game. I do use skin textures to make the characters look "better" - and by that I mean not terribly old, as even the young men looked in their late 40s, and the old ones looked on the brink of death. It's difficult to find such textures that preserve the ragged and dirty feel I want the characters to have, and I completely destroyed the females trying one mod after the other as absolutely all of them made the females look too pristine and young - now any new one comes with deformed eyes for some reason. :confused: I see the OP was talking specifically about men who play as women, but I want to butt in anyway. I'm female, as my nick suggests, and I always play as male given the option (with only one exception coming to my mind). Not sure why, either. Perhaps I already play too much as a woman in this RealLife game. :biggrin: And while I do use anatomically correct nudes for both male and female, I don't consider Skyrim a source of eyecandy. Characters are nearly always dressed and I don't really care about admiring the physique of pixels - though my Dragonborn is quite a hunk. As for the revealing clothes... There are a few ingame that are revealing. Like the fur armors that make the men bare chested and showing their flawless biceps against the chilling winds. ;D Now armors that are supposed to be protective and have things like "boob plates" are just so utterly absurd in a practical level, so I find it upsetting when the developers themselves do it.

@HighkingUlfricStormcloak: I'm not sure we can say "this and this Divine favours Men, this this Mer". Akatosh is hardly anti-mortals. We don't even know for sure if Akatosh was indeed tricked by Lorkhan. What do we know for sure about the Divines' plans for mortals? The Thalmor seem to think that mortals should aspire to get rid of mortality and become like the gods, and that Auri'El taught them a way to do so. Now would that mean that the Divines want the Thalmor to succeed? Lithium Flower brought up a good point a while ago, about the Akatosh/Magus/Lorkhan conflict being re-enacted by Tiber Septim/the Underking/I keep forgetting what the other guy was called. We need to also take in consideration that Auri'El was an avatar of Akatosh, but maybe didn't represent Akatosh's will fully. So we could have Aurii'El's approach not being necessarily the same as Akatosh, for the same reason that Talos has been three entities that do not necessarily agree with each other when separated. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the Divines' plans maybe be unfathomable, and maybe the conflict exists only between avatars (avatars of Shor against avatars of Akatosh and such). Maybe what we'll have is another epic friendship/rivalry relationship like the one between the three people that originated Talos, not a fight with the Divines taking a stance. Maybe we'll have a demi-god from the Dominion and another from the Empire to represent the other two sides of the triad that, with the Dovahkiin, is complete. So I have no idea. This is too trippy and I'm sleepy. :confused: Edit: I totally wrote Anui'El instead of Auri'El every single time. Hopefully it's corrected now. -_-

I loved the dialogue when you enter the Dawnstar Sanctuary to kill him! His voice actor had a moment to shine there - when Cicero goes "This isn't what Mother would want. You kill the Keeper or I kill the Listener?! Now that's... madness!". He starts so angry and then his voice falls to this pathetic little whimper. Even if I didn't have Lucien Lachance telling me in plain certainty that killing the Jester was against the will of Sithis, that moment alone would have made me spare him. He is crazed as usual, plotting a treacherous last stand if it comes down to it, but he is entirely faithful to the Dark Brotherhood. He'll only kill someone he respects (and later comes to worship) as the Listener if the Listener really showed himself a traitor by serving Astrid instead of the Night Mother. So I think his despair is quite honest in that moment - he is appealed that the DB fell so low that the Listener would kill someone who held a sacred position, the Keeper, and also agonizing over having to kill the Listener himself after so many years looking for him - and look at how fiercely he was worrying about finding the Listener, just read the journals. I think that no character that is loyal to the Night Mother would obey Astrid instead of her, when Astrid has made the DB her personal fiefdom. The DB without the absolute loyalty to Sithis is not the Dark Brotherhood, it's just a band of hired killers. Like him or hate him, Cicero is the only true member of the Black Hand other than your character, and he's just as "sacred". Killing him out of sheer annoyance is strange, too. Astrid is clearly plotting against the PC and dying with jealousy from the beginning and the PC doesn't attack her. So why execute the only member of this mercenary group that is loyal to the Night Mother and who acknowledges you as the leader? Because he's suffering from some extreme hyperactivity? That sounds like bad management if the new leader of the faction starts off by eliminating his only subject. :biggrin: Though I can see why so many people hate him, since he does plan to kill you if you don't stand back - I certainly don't. He's BFF with my Khajiit Listener, who is such an abusive egocentric bastard that he does love having this entirely faithful puppy of a man jumping around him and obeying blindly. Also, what annoyed my said Khajiit was the fact that you cannot denounce Babette for treason or at least punish her somehow. I mean.... she was around when the DB was still the DB, and she saw how Astrid did not represent the Family at all, and still laid aside her faith in Sithis and her devotion to the Night Mother (which she had at some point) and did nothing to stop it. Quite the contrary - when you meet her, she's more than glad to just tag along with Astrid like a happy little servant.

I giggled at that. Sorry for your pain Ok, so you say that he goes and kills all Dragons and you get their souls. And I take it you tried toggling godmode and just hitting them until he does all his scripted actions - you're not supposed to hit the Dragons, it's between them. He's supposed to fight you, retreat and get a soul, fight some more, retreat and get the other soul, again, and then retreat to the centre, where he'll be impaled by Mora once his energy drops enough. You are saying that nothing of this happens, right? And you also tried updating the quest stage by stage? You already read the bugs session of the UESPwiki, right? The last topics talk about the fight never ending. Sorry if I'm just repeating stuff you already tried, but just to make sure. Because the topics of the "bugs" session talk about specifically that - notice that several quest stages that you can advance do not have a journal entry and as such don't appear in that list far in the bottom of the UESPwiki page. Ok, I just re-read all your posts here. You haven't mentioned using that previous save you said was quite far back - but after 4 hours of pain trying to get around the bug, maybe you could invest the next 4 hours in that tedious playing up to the point you were. :/ Cheers, brother. Your pain is understood.

It is a notoriously buggy scene, as scripted things tend to be. I had no issues in the first playthrough, but had all sorts of weirdness in the other 3 or 4 times I did it again for pictures. Good you got it working! The link to UESPwiki explains how to advance the quest using setqueststage, which is a good trick if you've tried 10 times and cannot muster enough Jedi patience.

Oh it wasn't about it being your fault. It was Vilkas being Vilkas. You were already a member of the Inner Circle, not just some runt who just joined. The game lets us rise in rank too fast, so that gives us the sensation of "I just got here and I'm your leader already", but try to see it as a more gradual process. At this point, you were already someone trusted, and close to the Harbinger. And you were out with Aela doing missions that Kodlak disapproved of. But again, it's only Vilkas dealing with loss in his stubborn, fiery way. While Farkas, the big guy, just sits in silence. As for being in their headquarters... That's probably the issue. They were all drunk. :dry: And didn't the city guard notice a pack of heavily armed people marching in?