I am sworn to carry your burdens - Skyrimming for fun and profit

Do conjure instead. It aims itself!

yeah i use reanimate and conjuration the most by far. kinda pissed that i havent figured out how to cast muffle yet, because that sounds pretty awesome.

i do a lot of flipping between weapons and spells and stuff mid-fight. my favorites menu is probably a little too long

use muffle when you're sneaking! just don't cast it when you're near anybody, because (w/o perk) spellcasting makes a noise. tho yeah there's no notification when it wears off (your feet will have blue glowy stuff around them)

no i mean i havent learned muffle yet at all

oh

it's intro level so most mage shops sell it

Lol feeling you on the long-ass "favorites" menu

I haven't been able to play for almost a week due to travels but expect to binge starting tomorrow night.

there is apparently some kind of exploit involving fortify restoration potions. i don't quite understand it but word on the street is that there is a recursive loop you can get into ending up with items? potions? with bonuses in the multiple hundreds of % and worth millions of gold

i get pretty aggro about little advantages but man i fear for the person who figures that kind of shit out. maybe being on pc helps but damn

btw is anyone playing a primarily magic-using style? idk how you'd get thru some of these situations w/o armor, weapons, good sneaking etc. do you have to juggle a bunch of buffs in the favorites?

Finally got home after staying at my folks for Christmas and opened up that collectors edition that I treated myself to.
That Dragon Statue is massive and was put pretty much immediately back in its box and into the garage, but the art book is worth the heavily discounted price I payed for the CE. if its available separately, Then I'd jump on it.

Gonna roll my Snow-Orc tonight and then shit's getting Tamriel.

also i cant seem to really marathon this that much, i can basically run a dungeon, load up, dump the stuff in my chest at the mages guild, and then its really hard to roll out and do it all over again right away.

I try and mix things up a bit with some simple non-quest based riding round the countryside and taking time out to craft some quality armour, potions etc. Have made a matching set of Dwarven and then Orcish armour, and an Elven set for Lydia. Because I love her. Will do it all again, and again, and again, when I get the requisite smithing perks.

I got given this for xmas by my bff and he's nagging me to play it even tho Ive hardly got thru Oblivon yet. Can I just mage it up and wander around doing spells/alchemy/side quests forever like I do in Obliv?

(lol such a girl way to play I kno)

Pretty much. There's no real imperative to do the main quest but you do get some great perks.

Cool, I must get started on it while the holidays are still on then.

(would have started sooner but I took an arrow to... etc)

Old student-slob-days gaming partner visited from America, so we broke into my girlfriend's house to play this on her son's ps3 while she was in the West Country. All got a bit messy when we set off her extraordinarily loud burglar alarm, but she was very understanding, indulgent even, and me & old friend wasted precious grown-up weekend passing controller back and forth.

After the weekend marathon, can now only fit in an hour here and there, but found a rhythm of wandering into a side-quest, eating mushrooms, hammering a few bandits/draugrs/vampires, then tinkering at the forge/alchemy lab.

Became a companion and a bard.

Started off a bit confused & dropping perks all over the place, but getting comfortable with one-hand, heavy armour, sometimes dual wield, sometimes shield.

I;ve been messing around with side quests waaaaaay to much. I'm on L17 and I've only just got the Dragonstone! However, I do have some kickass archmage robes and L55 on archery, so happy days.

My follower has disappeared (I don't think she died, she just . . . went) so I need to recruit. Is Lydia the best of the bunch, and where do I get her from?

You need to kill a dragon at Whiterun - activated after you get the dragonstone. Then the Jarl will appoint her to be your personal slave housecarl.

Aaaah, I think killing my first dragon is next on my to do list. I'll give it a go tonight and see what happens.

so THIS is where the skyrim thread is

guys: skyrim on mac! baller!

The idea of playing through to L17 before unlocking the dragons in a game about dragons is so great.

Now I will listen to Therapist Sweater/J3ff T.'s "Dragon" to celebrate.

this DL of skyrim i got already had a character started (but only right at the v beginning), so i played that guy up to level 6 or so, and i did the dragonstone quest super early, like @ 4/5 i think.

started a new character for the ~full experience~ and have skipped that dragonstone quest for now, just cuz i didn't want to go slog through a dungeon twice in a row. just joined the dark bros

kinda envious of peeps that havent started fighting dragons yet since the goddamn things seem to be everywhere now in my game. still tho, shouts are awesome (slow time u my boo). i am a little shocked by the lack of variety enemywise in this game though, pretty bored with killing draugrs and dwarven spiders over and over and over

ok so here is a question that is maybe really stupid, but: does skyrim automatically adjust the levels of your foes to whatever level you are? i've never seen any indication that the dudes i'm fighting are like LVL 60 TROLLs or anything, but it certainly ~feels~ like quest-specific foes are tailored to your current ability.

which, if true, is awesome game design, imo. i was always a little bummed in WoW that whole areas were unable to be explored because they were above yr paygrade. or that accidentally landing yourself in a new zone could mean instant death because even the lowliest creatures were totally elite. i never played AD&D or anything, but i always thought that the nice thing about DMs was that they could downgrade/tailor an adventure to be commensurate with the players' abilities. and in a sandbox game like skyrim, exploring and side-quests should be picked up or ignored by players for reasons other than "yeah i'm not ready for that right now."

(nb i'm basing this entirely on the fact that i got the dragonstone at level 4. and:

I;ve been messing around with side quests waaaaaay to much. I'm on L17 and I've only just got the Dragonstone! However, I do have some kickass archmage robes and L55 on archery, so happy days.

like, was your experience in the dungeon to get the stone just pitifully easy, or were the enemies scaled up to meet you? i didn't have much of a problem at the entry level (playing 'normal'), and i'd imagine that someone significantly higher on the food chain would breeze through the place)

some stuff def doesnt scale with you, for example my first fight with a giant was impossible but now they are relatively easy to kill, same with not having to run away from bears anymore. not sure about the quest stuff tho

well yeah that's why i was thinking 'quest-related' specifically.

i was able to kill the dragon for the dragonstone quest, and then soon after got aced because i thought i could step to a giant, being a dragonslayer and all

The second time I did the High Hrothgar quest I was farther along, and the enemies on the steps were much tougher than the first time when I only faced some wolves and the ice troll. There were a bunch of sabertooth tigers or whatever the second time, and some spiders.

how's the combat in this?

do you like first person melee?

that's a red line for a lot of people, but i'm getting into it. getting a rhythm down with the blocks, staggering, bashes and power attacks is pretty satisfying imo.

Killed my first dragon last night! Hurrah! wtf am I mean to with these dragon bones? I just left them there tbh, I need to offload some loot first.

re leveling up: It certainly feels like some baddies level up with me, and some aren't. Certainly saber-tooth bears or whatever don't panic me like they used to, but it still took me a couple of goes to kill the dragon.

The idea of playing through to L17 before unlocking the dragons in a game about dragons is so great.

I have to say, the perversity of this did attract me, but it was made easier by the game not really telling you which quests are the "main" quests and which are sidequests. Everything in the "misc" section I'm guessing is a sidequest, but everything else seems to be given equal importance in your journal, so I didn't even twig that maybe dragons were like, the big device around which the game revolves. Tho I suppose I could have worked it out by the whole dragon-attacks-city opening sequence. Oh well.

And I've been enjoying the game sans dragons, just bumbling around the map "adventuring", so I didn't feel much imperative to get on with the main story. I tend to do that with sandbox games tho; I'm very much a sidequest kinda guy.

i was happy just goofing around with sidequests until they all started involving traveling to the very edge of the Whiterun, past several locations i'd never been to before. now i kind of want to get back to the main quest to move things forward a bit. there's a war map in the castle of ulfric stormcloak that reveals most of the locations in whiterun if you examine all the little pieces, and i wish i never would have done so. it was more fun to lack knowledge about what was in the unexplored territory of the world map. now i look at it and see dozens of additional locations in whiterun alone and feel like it will take me the rest of my life to finish the game (in a bad way)

finished the main quest yesterday but will prob keep playing for awhile just so I can get some better armor (I have a full set of dwarves at the moment)

ah transmute spell, you are a grinder's dream

Alchemy for fun and profit: I enchanted some alchemy gear (hat, gauntlets, necklace & ring at +20%) and potions made from two cheap ingredients sell for 120 - 750. The problem has become offloading them, but every cycle through Solitude-Windhelm-Riften-Whiterun yields 5000 gold + enough ingredients to repeat. I'm looking into that Solitude mansion at a young level 33.

A special set of armour just for alchemy! Nice thinking. And one for enchanting too? And for smithing...

The Smithing gear is actually much more effective on a +% basis. There's no enchantments that improve enchanting, but potions can be made.

Downside of the level advancement from learning crafting skills means I'm facing level 35 Elder dragons with level 25 combat skills (but good kit).

wait you can own property in this??

yeah... what did you think lydia was all about?

(jkjkjk!)

Do quests for the jarl in each hold (or high monarch in Solitude) and you become thane and can buy houses, starting at 5k gold (unfinished) in Whiterun rising to 25k in Solitude. Double those figures for full furnishings.

You can also invest 500 gold in businesses to increase cash available for transactions, as a perk in the Speech tree.

The opposite of how I play Skyrim (I've yet to return to High Hrothgar): a speed run in 2 hours 47 minutes (the current record is 2 hours 13 minutes). Too many spoilers for me to watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mmg6H2qxFAw

speedrunning skyrim seems like totally missing the point

Yeah but 2 hours and 47 minutes later you have plenty of time to play it the right way.

So far the only person or creature he has killed is the dude with the book and the king Draughr in Bleak Falls. He is finished with Dragonstone quest and is only like 1/4 of the way through L1.

Read the collected written works of Skyrim offline on your Kindle, iPad, or other device.

in addition to other treasures (including all my creative writing notebooks from grade school and all my sports + trading cards) i found these in my parent's garage while cleaning out my boxes this week

http://i41.tinypic.com/55gzfm.jpg

sanpaku that is nuts. the writing in those books is so badddd

Eh, they're quick reads, and its a better option for absorbing some of the background (this is my first Elder Scrolls game) than sitting at the desk.