What personal rules do you play?

[gsmanners]

Interesting how many nice characters there are in this thread. The only rules I diligently obey:

 

1. Always sleep 8 hours for each day that passes.

2. Always eat at least once a day.

 

Everything else is fair play.

[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.

[RatcatcherOfKvatch]

Hunting is fine, but every part of the animal must be used.
Hah hah, does that include its soul? You should just call this "The Mammoth Rule". Poor mammoths.

And the job you have held the longest, gets done first.

Whoa ...

 

My Rules ... let's see ...

 

Permadeath!

After Master level where do you go? Permadeath! It's still new to me, so I'm not quite so hardcore as the ones who've been doing it a while. That said, it is truly amazing how the fear of dying makes a game you thought you were an expert in new and exciting ... and gut-wrenchingly painful when you die. Ahh the ignominy of watching that intro movie ... but that pain is what has made the game playable again.

 

Fast Travel

No fast travel without a horse or carriage. The hazards of walking should be faced. Galloping past bears before they can react isn't nearly so dramatic. I can skip that part.

 

Forbidden Exploits

No stacking FR potions or selling homebrew. Who's going to spend $1000 on a potion with poisonous side effects? Or buy a fortify carry weight potion when the only things in Skyrim worth their fortified carry weight in gold are fortify carry weight potions?

Heh, someone should make a mod where taking FR under the influence of FR paralyzes and makes you hallucinate or something. That would fix the FR stacking exploit with Rule of Funny.

 

Homicide

Justifiable homicides only. Kill Thalmor on sight if the fight is winnable, try to solve things peacefully with anyone who doesn't deserve to die (you're really going to let The Caller live another day?), protect people from violence whenever possible including pre-emptively, so that takes care of Callisto and the Markarth Forsworn assassin. That about covers it I think.

 

Theft

It must serve a higher purpose than moving money around, and the innocent must never be victims.

 

Charity

Always buy from the Windhelm orphan girl. "Give a girl a fish and she can eat for a day. Teach her to cultivate Deathbells and ... "

Where the heck does she get those, anyway? Avrusa Sarethi is the one who needs to adopt her.

[Relativelybest]

Homicide

Justifiable homicides only. Kill Thalmor on sight if the fight is winnable, try to solve things peacefully with anyone who doesn't deserve to die (you're really going to let The Caller live another day?), protect people from violence whenever possible including pre-emptively, so that takes care of Callisto and the Markarth Forsworn assassin. That about covers it I think.

 

I'm curious, how do you feel about killing soldiers as part of the civil war?

[Acetoolguy]

There are enough things trying to kill me in Skyrim, if it leaves me alone, I leave it alone.

I never loot the innocent bodies I find along the way, a quick look for a journal or some story info is it.

[AlphaQ23]

I always tend to go the Imperial route. Mainly cause I do not agree with the Stormcloaks. I have only made one char in attempts to try out the stormcloak but it didn't feel right killing the Legion so that char was quickly deleted.

 

Fast traveling is fine for me, A lot of the time I don't have much time to be fully running around, and my skyrim likes to crash a lot when I approach many of the cities unless I fast travel in.

 

I prefer having multiple follower mods, and add multiple followers from various mods, including 3 followers I made for my useage. Once I join the Imperials I will outfit my followers according to rank and unit type. For instance, Leather means basic, studded imperial armor(With metal helmet) means "Sergeant" Heavy Imperial armor(With Officer's helm) means second in command. Crimson cloak is Basic Soldier, Brown is the Archers, White is my Medic(Natallie normally, such a good medic), Blue is my second In command, Black is the spy, Purple is my mages.

 

I tend to let my unit have breaks and if it is a good enough location and we had traveled for a while, I will let them set up camp.(Take over the camp we just cleared of bandits or fornsworn or stormcloaks).

 

Now for my personal playing style. I HATE MAGIC! I never could stand it in games. And shouting, except for Dragonrend(I will kill any dragon as fast as possible since I don't like fighting them anymore, It got old. Hell I have a mod that got rid of all dragons except the ones suppose to be there). I like using bows/one handed/duelweilding sneak tactics in my travels.

 

From the start of my char. As soon as I get into the tower I start cheating up my marksman/onehanded/sneak to 100. I do not care so much about the leveling up procces. I would rather be under the assumption that I am already a good warrior, I learned quickly because I am this important hero (Well he/she is the Dragonborn after all), I should have knowledge of some sort of trade. Usually my magic stays very low, around what you start the game with since well, can't stand it. The only time my mage skills rise is if I accidently read a book that raises them.

 

I never use a shield. If I'm using my downloaded Katana, its that and sometimes a dual wielded weapon (Depending on the opponents). I have a rule when traveling. I will not kill things unless I am hunting them, or they attack me or innocents around me. This excludes Stormcloaks unless I am performing the quest to go into Windhelm to speak to Ulfric the Traitor.

 

Also I will always go Imperial as I don't like playing beast races, or Elven races. I like making champions that look like me (Well as close to me or close enough to represent me). I know I am not some amazing archer sword weilding assassin irl (as far as you know!). But I'd like to think I am one in this fantasy game!

Edited March 9, 2013 by AlphaQ23

[RatcatcherOfKvatch]

 

Homicide

Justifiable homicides only. Kill Thalmor on sight if the fight is winnable, try to solve things peacefully with anyone who doesn't deserve to die (you're really going to let The Caller live another day?), protect people from violence whenever possible including pre-emptively, so that takes care of Callisto and the Markarth Forsworn assassin. That about covers it I think.

 

I'm curious, how do you feel about killing soldiers as part of the civil war?

 

A terrible feeling of remorse, unless they're Thalmor ...

[TheLoreSeeker]

It depends on the playthrough really.

I spent some time creating many characters at the very begining and so I had maybe 10 saves at Helgen, each a different character. Then I'd write out a list of what class and race they were, their motivations, their skills (even getting as specific as which perk branches they'd take), what weapon types they were limited to, and what armors they would progress through.

Then while playing through them I try to play them all at once leaving Helgen and going out into the world in different ways. I try not to do the same quests with two different characters or befriend the same followers. Each traveller gets a certain group of followers that they can use on their adventurer based on their role. The hirelings can be picked up by anyone though....

I try to always carry food and drink on me as if I needed to eat and drink to survive. And if the weather is too stormy or its too dark/dangerous to travel, I seek out shelter (whether it be in a cave, an abandoned hut, in a fallen log, or up against some large overhaning rock formations) where I then either sleep if a bed is avaliable or I crouch and wait out the storm.

[hardarg]

For me, If a follower or NPC dies (generic one don't count though), they remain dead throughout my playthrough, (no loading here). :D

 

I do make sure to give them a proper burial though, dressing them in fine clothing and putting flowers on their corpses,

[Falshire]

Well after seeing this thread...my rules

are few and simple.

1...Always have Lydia as a companion.

2..Marry Lydia and use a mod to make her essential...the number of times she has saved me makes it worthwhile.

3...If anyone helps me in game they deserve the right to live.

4...Adopt 2 homeless kids.

5..Above all else games are fun ,so have fun.