Roleplay: What's your characters motivation for joining all the guilds?

[Emhyr]

I try to plan to roleplay my characters a little and ether have them start as bad people with the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood before becoming the hero, having a change of heart, and doing the 'good' quests, or the other way around, doing the good stuff first, some event causes memory loss and my character finds themselves on the streets of Riften to join the Thieves. 

 

Although most of the time I just do one guild, get bored, and start again.

 

I'm looking for some new ideas.  What are your character motivations for doing what they do?

[sonia82sarkar]

Well, for Thieves guild, some debts to settle in easy way and Dark Brotherhood (I rarely play as an assassin) to make someone high and mighty pay whenever they think they are untouchable.

[JobiWanUK]

I recently started a playthrough as someone who had been held by bandits after they took her and killed her parents. I set my character as bandit faction in Skyrim Unbound (most people attack on sight). My imagination said that there was a notorious bandit who had left the bandits who could get the bandit marked removed from me, which she 'did' and I removed myself from the bandit faction.

 

I then used the console to set 4k bounties in each hold on me,meaning the guards demanded bounties everywhere I went.  I paid off the bounty in Riften so I could join the Thieves Guild in order to earn enough money to pay off my bounties in each hold, working my way through them one at a time.

 

Another one involves an Imperial who was ditched the night before his wedding, his fiance ran off with a Nord Stormcloak to Skyrim. So I've come to Skyrim to join the Imperials here on a mission to kill all Stormcloaks because I hate them all.

[Sarathis]

It varies from character to character. I hardly ever join all the guilds on the same character. For example, I'm currently playing an amoral assassin / sword for hire character. He'll join the Thieves Guild and the Dark Brotherhood but he's got no interest in fighting for fighting's sake or magic, so I won't do any Companions or College stuff this time around. The only time I ever joined all of them on one character was the first time beating the game. It felt like my character had multiple personalities, though, so I won't do it again.

[iheartpuddin]

This time around my Dragonborn started life in Riverwood, a simple peasant with dreams of becoming a bard in Solitude. He managed to escape the small town drama but couldn't make any money in Whiterun so he started stealing. Little things at first but by the time he got to Solitude he was sneaking all over the place. He went straight for a bit at the Bard's College and even had a great 'you're a bard now!' party but it wasn't long before he was back to his old ways. Joining the Thieves Guild in Riften seemed a natural career move. When the Dark Brotherhood came calling, I was going to have my guy turn 'em down but that one chick really got on my nerves so I offed her. I look at it as a favor to Skyrim. Astrid was pretty impressed but I haven't officially joined with them yet.

 

I haven't joined the Imperials or the Stormcloaks or the Greybeards or anyone else. I'm all right with being a thief-bard with a leaning toward assassin. Let someone else free Skyrim. I've got stuff to steal and throats to slit!

[GimmeBACON]

Character-by-character case... My main male only joined the stormcloaks because a high ranking Imperial imprisoned him and raped/murdered his beloved (Sweenie Todd 'esque, I suppose) My main chick joined the companions... but not because she's a warrior (she's a former pirate, with questionable honor) she just wanted to cozy up to Farkas. My assassin girl is a former slave and worked in the shadows to destroy everything her "owner" built, my thief and mage I didn't come up with a detailed backstory for. 

 

 

Truly though, joining guilds doesn't sit well with me as the game is about exploration and adventure, and guilds usually don't want their leaders leaving for months on end.

[dult]

Eh, honestly, one of my favorite characters actually had a twisted motivation for joining all of the guilds: He was a self-centered prick who basically wanted to master everything. He had no moral reasons for any actions, and saw the guilds as a means to an end. So to master combat, he joined the companions, to learn stealth, he worked with the dark brotherhood and the thieves guild, to master magic... well, it's obvious. The only things he didn't do were the daedric quests and the civil war, because he joined to learn the related skills and didn't actually want to serve anyone but himself, which is something he felt was easier to do in the smaller factions. In the end he joined the vampire courts, took power over from harkon, and that's where I left him: as a nearly godlike immortal vampire who was easily the strongest being in all of Skyrim. I thought about continuing onto Dragonborn, but I knew how that ended, and basically becoming hermamora's servant would have been a really depressing(If fitting) ending to the asshole's story.

[Mud]

The excuse I came up with for my completionist-styled playthroughs is that, as "the Dragonborn", all of my characters are in fact the same immortal soul experiencing the same period of time in different ways, and so already come with the knowledge of what's in store for them. Their travels hope to discover something new, until every inch of Skyrim has been exhaustively catalogued in their collective minds.

[Lodakai]

Intelligence gathering, covert operations, and political connections for the underground slave network.

 

ETA: oh and free sweetrolls

[Guest enip]

Joining all guilds on one character is just a very mediocre approach in a role playing game. It's one of my biggest upsets with Bethesda and this so called RPG.