jpw1991

It depends on my character, but ultimately all my characters are pretty horrible as far as morality is concerned. I just do what I want. I have a few characters and rules for each, but I'll just list my primary character for now: 1. My Breton Mage (female) a) Hoarder - She loves to collect all books, staves, weapons, armour, etc and store them all. b) Unseen - She likes to kill remaining always 100% unseen. With solitary enemies, she will paralyse them from a distance with a Paralysis spell and kill them with arrows. With groups of enemies, she will use Frenzy or summoned minions to do the job - always trying to remain 100% hidden. She prefers to remain an observer, engineering circumstances that lead to someone's demise rather than doing it directly. For example, she's lured enemies to the edge of a cliff above a great river with arrows, then cast paralyze upon them so that they fall into the water and get washed away... all done without ever being discovered... c) Destruction of the Thalmor - She believes the empire is lost, and that it is up to the strength of Skyrim's Nords and Hammerfell's Redguards to drive those knife-ears back to their nasty little island. They have no place to outlaw Talos, and the Empire is no different Vichy France in WW2. d) Few causes - Aside from seeing all the Thalmor destroyed utterly, she has few cause or motivations. The troubles of others are often of no concern to her. Hunters killing animals? Fine. Bandits killing merchants? Fine. Forsworn killing Nords? Fine. It's of no concern to her, but she may decide to destroy them all after watching the fun - then take the glorious loot for herself. She does have a slight affinity with human-like creatures, though. Witnessing beasts, spriggans, werewolves, giants, dragons and vampires attacking humans/humanoids will often result in her engineering the fight in the favour of the humanoids. e) Realism - She entertains certain notions of realism such as a need to eat, drink, sleep and stay out of freezing cold water etc but I don't have any mods that enforce these things.

Yes, as others have said, I do believe this is a symptom of having played the game too much. It's also a factor with the idea of creating a character and playing that character is more fun than the reality of playing it. In Oblivion the combat and magic system seemed so terrible to me that I could only ever play the game as a Stealthy Archer. Despite creating mage character destined to become the "Master Necromancer" or warriors to become like Conan the Barbarian, I'd end up scrapping them after the first few hours playing them. It simply wasn't fun having the never-ending slashing war with some stupid guard, or casting that same Firebolt over and over. After a while, it got to the point where every time I sat down to play Oblivion I'd end up creating a new character and then ditching it after that session. Then I'd start from scratch again the next time I played. I only did the main quest once, and I never did it again or any other quests afterwards - despite playing the game from its release up until Skyrim was released in 2011. In Skyrim the combat was thankfully so much better. I started out with a female Orc warrior and got to maybe level 40 or so. Then I ditched it and created a Breton mage that got to level 62 and completed far more of the game with her. Since then I've made a Stealthy Archer (oh no!) and gotten her to Level 45. Once again it seems only that sneaking and using a bow appeals to me, and I don't do any of the quests anymore. I still haven't done the Main Quest with any character yet, despite 705 hours played. My girlfriend criticises me endlessly for never having done the MQ in all that time, and since she bought me Dawnguard all I've done is taken a crossbow and used that to further my dreaded Stealthy Archery and haven't even started the questline for that. Now I'm starting to slip back into creating a new character each time I play, just like with Oblivion. It's really quite terrible, but at least we're having fun and we aren't alone...