Support/advice for playing the underdog?

[Daguy]

So... I like the fight to keep my head above water in games, but when I reach the shore I tend to get board. Or to put it another way, role-playing a incredibly capable character, with fantastic armor, great weapons, a vault of gold, and powerful friends... well... it bores me. I don't find it interesting.

 

It's why in Morrowind I like to attach a slave braver to my character, and pretend they are the 'personal adventurer/agent' of a powerful Telvanni or Vampire, and end the roleplay when they finally free themselves. Why in Oblivion I play summoner mages with the atronach birthsign, or try and do something like in Morrowind, and was once looking forwards to the mod that would have made you a slave to an NPC. Why in FO3 I recently made a character who became student, and as payment property, of Jericho. Why in New Vegas I plan to make a broken but capable slave of the Legion.

 

In Skyrim, for some reason i'm having problems. I had the idea of using the 'blind' eyeset, and then using clairvoyance and the detect spells, but have never brought myself to try it. I considered a character with no combat stats and just healing abilities, who relied on companions to do the fighting.

 

The various sex mods are useful for getting into bad situations, but they often are further than what i'm trying to go for. I'm not trying to be bound to an NPC and unable to travel more than ten feet from them.  

 

I need mod suggestions, adult or not, that give either motive or direct cause for keeping a character slow to advance or weak. Or even just practical ways I can roleplay, and ideas. For example, in Morrowind we had the Telvanni and slavery, and it was fairly easy to roleplay a slave. In Skyrim I can't think of a faction that would enslave, or be able to reliably keep enslaved, a character that they allowed to roam. Joining the Vampires in Dawnguard is the closest i've managed, and frankly, being one the few near-pure Vampire Lords in Skyrim even as a servant to Harkon doesn't feel like an uphilll climb, especially not with BFF Serana.

 

I've considered making the disgraced and runaway daughter of Neloth. Dunmer (or even not, the way TES races work), blind, AND with the atronach stone activated, in Skyrim trying to start a life of her own, with a desire to study Dwemer ruins (with a seeing eye companion, of course). I'm just not sure how it would play out practically. Having stunted and using clarevoyance/detect spells to find her way around and fight would give her upper limits, with being 'capable' potentially the top rung, but I don't know if it would flow well in game-play.

 

Another was playing as a none-combat Bard, who travels with a bodyguard, adventuring just to have more stories to tell. Other ideas have been playing a character based after the idea of the painslut companion, but marked by Molag Baal instead, and thus falling afoul of bad situations and people as a side effect. I considered a character who joins the Thieves Guild purely to feed a Skooma addiction.

 

Has anyone got an idea for some underdog characters? Or anything they themselves have played like it?

 

[rawr22]

I enjoy a similar style of gameplay.  I think the 2 that make the biggest difference for me are Better Fast Travel and No Death Mod.

 

No Death Mod for obvious reasons.  If you lose a fight you lose all your stuff and keep playing.  No loading old saves essentially making you invincible.  It makes fighting big monsters way more scary.  You will sruggle to keep good gear and will have to run rather than fight quite often.

With Better Fast Travel you can disable fast travel and set custom prices for using carrages (I use 100, 200, 300, 400).  I find almost all my gold goes on travel expenses and regularly have to steal or otherwise try to find some way to make gold in a town in order to be able to travel somewhere.

 

Frostfall and Less Lockpicks also help with this style of gameplay.  Let me know if you find any others as I am also interested in this style of play.

 

I have tryed playing 'non-combat' characters also but I find Skyrim just doesn't have enough non-combat content to keep the game interesting for very long.

[Guest]

Great topic.

 

I find immersion mods are good ground levelers for a character, they help to lower the scale of events to more fundamental and pressing challenges like rest and recuperaton, eating and drinking, exposure to the elements, having to find cures to potentially fatal  diseases from infected skeever bites or spoiled food or unboiled water. Also, overhauls like ACE or Skyre help a lot too. I also think it's important that nights and dungeons really are dark, it has quite the impact. And I don't use fast travel if it's not a coach, horse or teleport type spell.

 

Those sorts of mods are good as a foundation for a good old roleplay setup, the rest I tend to define based on a character outline I've got in mind and then I impose restrictions and motivations or weaknesses accordingly.  My last long term play through was as an uncouth backwoods druidy character who was illiterate and physically very weak, totally ineffective at  any kind of combat, she could only use nature based practical magic as she was unable to read tomes or scrolls,  she lived exclusively in the wilderness and only ate what she could forage. Her only real strength was speech craft, she beguiled the unwary, was intimidating and persuasive, any dirty work she left to thralls and proxies.

 

 

[Veladarius]

I use a number of immersion mods so I have to eat, drink and sleep so my character does not seem like a machine. I also use the Skyrim Community Uncapper mod to alter how fast skill level and how the affect player leveling. I slowed down how much enchanting and smithing level the player (1/10th normal) and also reduced how fast most combat skills increase. For the most part most of the skills I use the most help level the character the least. This helps me keep my level and skills down as once they get over 60 it gets a lot easier.

[javamonsoon]

My most fun game was with a coward. She was a mage who really wanted to be a thief. So she had the mage-stone, but spent most of her time trying to be a burglar and pickpocketeer. On leveling I always gave her Magicka and whenever possible, put perk-points in any magic-school, instead of perks for stealth, lockpicking and pickpocketting. (Still had to legendary Sneak at lvl31 though)

 

I had Private Need's 'wet yourself'-chance at 80%, so everytime an enemy so much as looked her way in battle, she peed herself. With RND I upped the strenght of alcohol and had her drink everything she could drink if she looted booze. She was a party-drunk and when drunk, stripped naked and solicited sex from anyone with a heartbeat.

 

When she was caught doing crime, she yielded on the spot and thanks to Prison Overhaul, spent a lot of time in the pillory.

 

Most of the time, she sicked Lydia on her enemies while she herself cowered out of sight.

 

Even the first dragon she didn't kill. The guards and Illereth killed the dragon, though it took them almost 15 minutes to do it, lol. My DB was sobbing and calling for her mother in the tower itself.

 

There are a few drawbacks to roleplaying a coward.

Many questlines you just can't do. Like taking on Mercer in final quest for the thieves' guild. Though any quest where you can sick a follower to your enemies are do-able, even though I felt that many situations were too heroic in how they played out for them to be fitting my coward. Also, even with legendaring skills, your coward eventually becomes too powerful to remain a coward.