I can't decide on character

[theposhmudcrab]

I have a problem that I am sure other people have encountered as well. I find it difficult to decide on a character to play in Skyrim. With so many mods and options and things to make and do, I find my self creating a whole bunch of different characters but not a single one gets proper play time. In Fallout 4 it was much easier to make a character and stick to it. 

[Warlock3000]

Ah, that would be Alt-itis. That's a quite common condition. It's normal.

 

Quote

 

• A strain of alt-itis develops in single-player games as well; RPGs like Morrowind or Neverwinter Nights, for instance. Or Avernum or Fallout or Oblivion or...
  • On the official Morrowind/Oblivion forums, this trope strain is usually called Restartitus.
  • Games with plugins or mod packages are particularly prone to this. Install a few nifty new mods, roll a new character so you can experience all the mod content. Then, repeat forever and never finish the main plot.
• With the near-infinite number of character creation options available, this is unsurprisingly common throughout The Elder Scrolls series. Fans have taken to calling it "Restartitus" on the official forums.

 

I also often create new characters. Might have something to do with the fact that I actually like playing an early-game survivalist who has to put up with some shit due to being a wimp.

 

Also, why do you think "Alternate Start: Live Another Life" is the 11th most popular Skyrim mod on Nexus? ?

[theposhmudcrab]

3 minutes ago, Warlock3000 said:

"Alternate Start: Live Another Life"

One of my must-have mods, I always used this one.

[Ashra XIII]

I am exactly the same way, where I am constantly wanting to play a different character than the one I currently have going. Even worse, with Skyrim my different characters also include different mod lists to suit the play-style of that particular girl, which makes it a bit more complicated to switch back and forth.

 

I've currently got a feisty Breton mage-girl going, but just before this I was playing a rather dominating Nord futanari warrior that didn't work out mostly because I was trying some new mods I ended up not liking as much. Before that I was doing a thief who tried to stay out of combat as much as possible, but who mainly only leveled skills related directly to being a thief. I liked that character, but I also really love getting into fights so that sorta thing just never works out for me, sadly. Yet I keep trying! ?

[Jinxxed0]

You know what I've been wanting for Skyrim? Multiple characters for one play through. With an option to have 1-10 or even more because why limit it. I want to do everything on one playthrough and therefore make a character that's centered around each faction questline, one that's all about living a simple life and never fighting. Just farming or fishing or something. Then maybe have a character that does the civil war crap and then retires to do something else.

 

Personally, I usually end up needing like 3 or 4 characters and have to bend logic to justify doing content since i'm limited to one character. I usually want 3 characters that know each other, but do their own thing and then one character that's completely separate 

[Neko91]

I've used two different solutions to provide variety within one play-through:

 

One was a character who is a Penitus Occulatus special agent -- she was thrown out of the P.O. for being too much of a maverick but was then re-recruited as a special undercover agent -- so she might get a mission to go undercover as a Forsworn or D.B. assassin or Stormcloak etc. etc. At the least it let me dress her up in a lot of different armors. I thought about turning it into a full mod with a mechanism for giving her missions (and maybe the appropriate armor as well) -- perhaps a delivery from the courier or a letter in a chest in a secret location -- and all very Mission Impossible: "Your mission, should you decide to accept it ..." -- but wasn't ambitious enough so I just pretended that she got a message telling her to impersonate a Forsworn and infiltrate Bruca's Leap Redoubt.

 

The other was a character who became a plaything of the Daedric princes because they found it amusing, each prince transforming her in some way. I don't remember what all the transformations were but remember that at one point she was turned into a Dagi-Raht Khajiit and think she was a succubus at one point. I used a custom race (I think I used Ningheim but you could use any custom race, including "Custom Races") to give her different body textures.

 

Anyway, those are two things I did to justify changing my character drastically within one play-through ...

[The First Lady of Hats]

I feel yer pain, creating a new character is sorta like reading a Steve Jackson/Ian Livingstone book.

 

1] You have made a new character. Do you go look for mods to go with it?

  Yes? -> Go to 2

  No?  -> Go to 4

2] Do You look at Nexus Image share or LL Screenshot threads whilst mod hunting?

 Yes? -> Go to 5

 No? ->  Go to 3

3] Does the mod you're looking at have screenshots of a character that is cooler than yours?

 Yes? -> Go to 5

 No?  -> Go to 4

4] Your new character goes well untill you join a guild or start a quest that does not fit your character's theme -> Go to 6

5] The screenshots show characters cooler than yours, In your frustration you delete all your saves -> Go to 1

6] Your character has an identy crisis, after thinking on the situation whilst making a coffee and a sandwich you decide to load a previous save to avert this catastrophe only to find they are all broken. Restart Skyrim and go to 1.

[theposhmudcrab]

sometimes i wish The Elder Scrolls games had an option to have four different characters at the same time, and play with them simultaneously. A custom made party of four, when you switch from one character to another the others will be auto-controlled by AI, or maybe something like in GTA V.

[The First Lady of Hats]

1 hour ago, theposhmudcrab said:

sometimes i wish The Elder Scrolls games had an option to have four different characters at the same time, and play with them simultaneously. A custom made party of four, when you switch from one character to another the others will be auto-controlled by AI, or maybe something like in GTA V. 

Closest I've seen to something like that is Familiar Faces. 's a fun mod. But it can be tempermental, use with caution.

[Grey Cloud]

15 minutes ago, The First Lady of Hats said:

Closest I've seen to something like that is Familiar Faces

In a similar vein:

Alternate Actors lets you flip-flop from one NPC to another.

 

I view my character as a sort of tourist. I have a series of mods which remove as much as possible of the vanilla game and a series of mods which allow my character to be flexible at all times. I then wander around Skyrim doing what I want and not what the vanilla game wants.

[The First Lady of Hats]

Now that'un. Looks interestin'. Gonna have to give it a whirl.

[Grey Cloud]

2 hours ago, The First Lady of Hats said:

Now that'un. Looks interestin'. Gonna have to give it a whirl.

I haven't used it a great deal though it's been in my mod list for a while and also on my 'to do' list. On the cheese level it would be a handy way of getting an item without stealing it. Not that I would stoop to such a tactic, of course. But if the hat fits . . .

[Warlock3000]

3 hours ago, The First Lady of Hats said:

Familiar Faces

I have it in my load order, but haven't exactly made use of it yet. Just tested a little. But it's a good mod. Even if somewhat quirky. It claimed to have uninstalled due to an error a couple times, but still seemed to work after that. Possibly loses saved characters after changing the mod list.

 

As for the topic itself, I've also deemed it good enough to sort of "recreate" a previous character with a radically changed mod list by just using console to "restore" the necessary skills. Helps that it has been a long time since I started a story quest line... (and playing Requiem, where a Level 1 character is basically a scared teenager, so using console to gain skills when creating a more "mature" character doesn't feel too cheat-y.)

[The First Lady of Hats]

1 hour ago, Warlock3000 said:

I have it in my load order, but haven't exactly made use of it yet. Just tested a little. But it's a good mod. Even if somewhat quirky. It claimed to have uninstalled due to an error a couple times, but still seemed to work after that. Possibly loses saved characters after changing the mod list.

Definitley quirky, and certainly tempermental with mod organizer, it seems to spontaniously stop recognizing the folders yer create from override and then suddenly it does again. but when it works it's quite something. Might have to give it a whirl with the mod greycloud suggested and see if'n the party hop between player characters can be a thing.

 

[Warlock3000]

I wonder if that "change actors" mod properly keeps track of things like bounty (would certainly require storing and changing of global variables), faction and personal relationship ranks, and skill levels...

[Grey Cloud]

1 hour ago, Warlock3000 said:

I wonder if that "change actors" mod properly keeps track of things like bounty (would certainly require storing and changing of global variables), faction and personal relationship ranks, and skill levels...

If I understand you correctly, no. You are that NPC with that NPC's skills, stats etc. Your PC is either stood waiting somewhere or following you (with your original skills, stats etc). As an example. if you took over Silda the Unseen and ran around Windhelm pickpocketing then Silda gets the XP not you (your original PC).

[Warlock3000]

15 hours ago, Grey Cloud said:

If I understand you correctly

Nope.

15 hours ago, Grey Cloud said:

As an example. if you took over Silda the Unseen and ran around Windhelm pickpocketing then Silda gets the XP not you (your original PC).

That's exactly what I meant, and this is sooo cool. Gotta check out that mod.

Still wonder about relationship ranks (which are actor-based) and bounty (which is a global variable, and not exactly tied to a character).

 

So. Would need to check out how it works with Familiar Faces. Which would mean combining 2 mods that are believed to be fickle and quirky. Oh well.

[Grey Cloud]

5 hours ago, Warlock3000 said:

Nope.

That's exactly what I meant, and this is sooo cool. Gotta check out that mod.

Still wonder about relationship ranks (which are actor-based) and bounty (which is a global variable, and not exactly tied to a character).

 

So. Would need to check out how it works with Familiar Faces. Which would mean combining 2 mods that are believed to be fickle and quirky. Oh well.

I did well there, failed to understand correctly but my example was exactly what was meant. ?

[theposhmudcrab]

I came up with 5 different female characters

and 2 different male characters

Maybe if i decide where they start and end(at which point a character retires) i can kinda deal with Restartitus (or Alt-itis)

If anyone is interested i could post screenshots of the characters i came up with and people will vote on which one i should play first

[RW311]

I turn all my alts into npcs and stick them in random areas so I can run into them anywhere I go. I don't even have to draw my weapon in most parts of the world, bandits get owned by my alter ego.

[theposhmudcrab]

I think I came up with a way to solve the problem, maybe create a bunch of characters and decide to retire them at a certain point. trying to let the character take you on a journey, and not the other way around. every character should just have certain mile-stones it must reach and once these are done the character can be retired.

[Warlock3000]

22 hours ago, theposhmudcrab said:

every character should just have certain mile-stones it must reach and once these are done the character can be retired.

Pretty much how it happens to me. Not that I deliberately set these goals, but for some characters you just know when they've reached their goal.

 

By the way, I gave up giving Alternate Actors a try when I read that it was incompatible with Death Alternative...