Making SHORT playthroughs?

[InDarkestNight]

I like to pre-plan my playthroughs, deciding beforehand what my build will be and what order I will do my quests in.

 

I've long thought about doing a Halloween playthrough. Problem is, my playthroughs tend to take around 6 months to complete. Also, I tend to take the same amount of time to plan playthroughs. I've only begun a new playthrough, and here I am thinking about another one. Point is, it seems sorta silly to do a halloween-themed load order when I won't finish it until March (assuming I start it on October 1).

 

So I started thinking: why not do shorter ones? I saw a build on youtube along ago that was designed to 'cap out early'. Simply put it was a berserker build that only used 3 skills, which from my math should put you somewhere in the high 20s by the time you max all your skills. If I want a shorter playthrough, then why not do something like that? Of course, I don't know how long such a playthrough would last. Of course, the length of time it takes me to complete a playthrough is more dictated by quests than level. I don't just abandon characters after they've hit max level. Or course, none of the vanilla quest lines are that long in length; I think it takes me a week at most to complete some of the longer ones, assuming I'm going at a casual pace. How then do I design a quest order that will only take me one month?

 

On a side note, this has all reminded me of Ordinator. I never liked the mod. It made you level too fast, and I thought the number of perks it added were excessive. I was told that you can't invest in 5 skills like you do in normal Skyrim; you have to stick to 2 or 3. I've just had a hard time wrapping my head around such a build. Of course, Ordinator sorta fixes that by adding a lot more perks. Maybe then Ordinator may be worth re-installing? I know Brodual did a few builds in the past that only used 2 or 3 skills, and to my knowledge they all used Ordinator. So, if I'm planning on doing a really narrow character build, would ordinator be ideal for that? On a side note, I have been thinking about trying out Vokrii at some point, though I don't think its meant for 2~3 skill builds.

 

As for quests, Heavy Burns did a horror mod list once that was meant to not last long. Of course, he installed a crap ton of difficulty mods, along with a permadeath mod, AND alongside Draugnarok with the 'aftermath' setting turned on at the start. Watching him seriously trying to play it, he kept dying within minutes of beginning the game. Of course, he foresaw that it would be hard to last long in the game with such a mod set-up, and so he installed Undeath to give the player something they could finish quickly. My personal take on that, Undeath ISN'T a quest-mod meant for a 'short' playthrough. You have to max both your alchemy and enchanting skills to get the final reward, and of course given the theme of the mod it makes sense to have a necromancy build, which means conjuration. Such doesn't make a complete build though, so you need at least destruction, and honestly restoration is probably a must if you intend on running around in robes (unless you plan on grinding your alchemy by massing healing potions).

 

Anyway, how do I got about designing this? Would Vokrii help with a short build with a narrow skill set? Would Ordinator be required? What about quest order? No one quest line is going to last a full month. Given that, perhaps a survival horror playthrough may be wiser. Essentially, the goal of the game would be to max my skills, forget everything else. Of course, that wouldn't help too much with a non-horror playthrough (that berserker build I mentioned wasn't meant to be a horror build, though the mod author did make quite a few of those). Either way, this could give me an excuse to actually do a full playthrough with the highly acclaimed Ordinator for once.