General rehearsal game, hours 03..04

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SPOILER INFO
This story follows closely my actions in an actual game, so it's inevitably a spoiler.
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previous part


I made some adjustments to my body. I also chose a different haistyle for testing.

I increased my height by 0.10 units. Now I don't have to look up to people anymore, but on screenshots I look a bit too much like a basketball player. No matter, this is just for testing anyway. I'll try lowering my height by 0.05.

Now, RaceMenu is an awesome tool for making changes to your body, if you happen to notice you have done something wrong during character creation. However, it is rather irritating how the sequence of the sliders is different every time. I am storing all my settings in an Excel table, so that after I have made my body as perfect as I can, I will be able to use it in the real game without having to invent everything anew. Since sometimes two different sliders have exactly the same name (such as two titled "Brow Width"), one must be very careful to not mix them up.

I also noticed that RaceMenu had 4 sliders this time which hadn't been there the previous time – including "Eye Color". They are in my Excel table, which is why I had been wondering why they were missing. This time they were there all right, so I was able to give my eyes a color that is actually pretty.

I checked out the rest of the houses in Northkeep. All I found was locked doors. I didn't want to risk lockpicking without the able-to-pick-locks-without-being-noticed perk, and in broad daylight at that. That's why I decided not to spend the afternoon and the night here, but to go to Falkert instead. I figured the distance was short enough for me to arrive there in daylight (or almost). Before leaving, I almost bought an empty waterskin, but at the last moment I realized that a couple of pelts would be cheaper. From those I crafted my own waterskins.

Then I left the town. I went to the southeast to fill my waterskins in the big lake nearby, so I wouldn't have to drink mead which will only make you thirstier in the long run. I discovered Half-Moon Mill. I decided to practise my Lockpicking skill by breaking into the house. Unfortunately, I failed to notice someone walking on the road and got a 15-septim bounty. Now, that amount is peanuts, but I was carrying a lot of stolen stuff, so this mishap was really inconvenient. In order to make the best out of it, I stole everything from the house, ended up overweight and dropped some things.

After exchanging a few friendly words with the proprietress Hert, I moved on. I met a Khajiit skooma seller on the road. Since it would make no sense that he would not buy stolen items, I used the console to bypass stolen item check, and sold most of my loot to him. A few stolen items were actually useful, so I kept them, taking the risk of having them confiscated by the guards. Then I discovered a village named Aurora nearby. Dusk was falling already. I sneaked past the guards, used an Arcane Enchanter to learn a couple of enchantments from the gear I had stolen, succeeded in getting some training at the inn (just a little bit, because I am not exactly wealthy yet), and spent the night there.

In the morning, I decided not to go to Falkert at all. Rather than be forever running away from the guards, or bother with dropping all stolen items somewhere and then going to a guard, paying my bounty and then picking up the stolen items again (and risking being seen again), I decided to go to another hold instead. I headed north, towards Roriksted.

Among the things I had stolen, there were a few gold and silver ingots. I used the forge in Roriksted to craft some jewelry, and sold it in the village shop. It would appear that when you craft something from stolen materials, the product won't be flagged as stolen – which makes sense, of course. I also gained a level and chose the Novice Restoration   perk. (Mind you, I am using a perk overhaul mod, so many perks have slightly different effects compared to their vanilla namesakes.)

In the meantime, a courier had brought me two letters. One asked me to go to Windhelm to get something from someone, another one was from a man with the last name Hlaalu who wanted to meet me at the Riverwood inn. Both places are further east. I had, however, planned on checking out Morpork in the far west. On the other hand, my magical visions tell me that in the area around Morpork, there is a great risk of meeting very dangerous native bandits on roads. So I'm hesitant to go there before I'll have more experience under my belt. Of course, being a woman, I have very high chances of avoiding death and getting raped instead, as long as the attackers are male. But that doesn't mean I fancy getting raped, and potentially beaten up and robbed. On the other hand, I'm reluctant to go to the east. I really want to avoid the area of Hviterun during the general rehearsal, so as to not spoil the novelty of the real game.

I am playing this game without any spoiler map markers. Meaning, when the game begins,
the only locations visible on the world map are Helgen (which is all right
because the real game will start there anyway so it doesn't need to be discovered)
and The Dunpar Wall* which I couldn't find a way to get rid of.
On the other hand, I am using a world map with roads on it which is a spoiler of sorts,
but I'm so fed up getting stuck in mountains in same places over and over again.
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* As I found out after 500+ hours of playing, I had failed to find The Dunpar Wall map marker because it was not created by skyrim.esm . It was created by a mod, the same mod that created the town of Dunparwall. I knew the town was mod-made, but I had self-evidently assumed that the wall was vanilla, because it never occurred to me that someone could be idiotic enough to create two world map markers practically on top of each other, and with almost the same name at that. [GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR]

Today, I shall explore Roriksted, most likely spend the night here, and think about where to go next. Maybe north, to Dånstar, and from there to Windhelm, giving Hviterun a wide berth. Maybe find Elisdriel along the way.

It occurred to me earlier that it would make sense to establish a rule that when a male guard arrests me, he'll let me go if I let him fuck me. Of course, I wouldn't get rid of the bounty altogether, I would just gain some time, like 24 hours during which no guard in that settlement would arrest me. At this moment, though, I don't see how I could do it physically in the game in a way that is not unreasonably complicated. I'll have to give it some thought.

Further, I noticed myself eyeing beautiful women longingly, wondering how I could get them to agree to sex. I know that as a woman I am supposed to fancy men, and indeed I wouldn't mind one (and in fact one of my goals for today is to find a man to have sex with in Roriksted), but I can't help it that I, the real person, am a man. Of course, when I decided to play a female character, I knew she would be bisexual, but I was planning on her sleeping mostly with men, and have lesbian intimacy with only a few very special friends. At this moment, I am doubting if I'll be able to do that.

That said, I had a very curious experience with Hert yesterday. She is remarkably sturdy in this game, with strong arms. (Not fat, mind you.) I so wanted to have sex with her, and it was very clear to me that it was I as a woman  who desired her. I fancied her as a stronger woman to look up to and to get emotional support from. As a male character, I wouldn't have paid any attention to such a woman. This is a most fascinating demonstration how I can really switch between thinking like a man and thinking like a woman in my head.

Come to think of it, it's strange my female character hasn't felt anything like that towards any man. Maybe it has to do with Skyrim men being overwhelmingly stupid drunk brutes, to say nothing of butt-ugly. Never mind, the game is still young. She'll have plenty of time to feel all kinds of things.

next part

The absurd impossibility of (profitable) stealing

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SPOILER INFO
Some may call this a mild spoiler. I think it's rather a bug warning. A minor aspect of gameplay has been designed in an unacceptably mean way and I think you ought to know about it.
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I don't mind that you can't steal stuff when someone is looking. That is, you can, but the witness will raise alarm and the guards will arrest you. That is perfectly normal.

I don't even mind so much that a person downstairs can magically see you stealing something upstairs. That is physical nonsense, but it's not too disturbing.

What I really hate is how they have designed the system of stolen goods trade.

Firstly, it makes no sense that Khajiit caravans don't buy stolen goods. Neither makes it sense that Enthri with all his cloak-and-dagger attitude doesn't buy stolen goods. Then there is that secretive fellow on the Windhelm marketplace who totally acts like a fence, but his actions don't correspond to his words.

I wouldn't put up with that kind of nonsense, so when I encountered a merchant who was obviously shady, I used the console command
player.setav BypassVendorStolenCheck 1
That is not cheating. That is correcting the obvious lack of reality in the game.
(Do not forget to enter player.setav BypassVendorStolenCheck 0 afterwards, or else all vendors will be buying stolen goods fom you!)

I also used that console command in the rare cases when a vendor was my steady girlfriend. After all, they can be reasonably expected to help me get rid of hot merchandise.

I played hours after dozens of hours and became increasingly confused about not meeting any merchant to whom the game itself would let me sell stolen items (that is, without my having to use the console). I mean, if the Khajiit caravans don't buy stolen goods, if clearly shady merchants don't buy stolen goods, then who does?

Eventually I searched for information online and found out that fences will begin to buy stolen items from you only after you have become a member of the Thieves' Guild!!

I couldn't believe my eyes. Are they trying to tell me that unless I do that disgusting job for that jumped-up little worm Brynjolf (which appears to be the only way of joining the Thieves' Guild), I will never be able to sell any stolen goods to anyone? Never, as in never ever? That's crazy!

Apart from that limitation being a logical nonsense, it makes the gameplay absurdly unbalanced. The time when you really need to steal stuff is in the beginning when you are very poor. In order to complete Brynjolf's mission, you need reasonably high skills, meaning you will have played for a considerable time. This means that you can probably live quite comfortably off your loot. In other words, by the time you will be eligible to sell stolen goods, you will already be so well-off that you won't really need to risk punishment by stealing. I mean, it's not like there's anything all that valuable to steal anywhere. Cleaning up dungeons and enchanting is far more profitable than stealing and so is alchemy.

And as if the above wasn't outrageous enough, there is even the rule that the first time when you steal more than one item from someone's house, the owner of the house will somehow know who the thief was (even though there were no witnesses and there is no bounty), and send a group of three thugs to kill you. Each one of them is strong enough to wipe the floor with you (unless, again, you are on a level so high that you are bound to be so rich that you won't need to steal.) You can't even run away from them. That is, you can, temporarily, but those three overwhelmingly superior thugs will never give up chasing you, which means you can just as well start a new game (and remember to never steal again).

I can't imagine what possessed the developers of Skyrim to make stealing for money so utterly, overkillingly unfeasible. Stealing in vanilla Skyrim is for cleptomaniacs only, that is for the people who steal because they enjoy the act of stealing as such. For let me repeat it one more time for clarity: you can only afford to steal when you are very very strong. If you steal in the early phase of the game when you actually need the money, you, firstly, can't sell what you've stolen, and, secondly, are certain to be killed after a while.

That is insane. The people who conceived the theft system in vanilla Skyrim are either mind-blowingly stupid or they get some kind of a perverse enjoyment creating a game feature that is useless for all practical purposes.

Therefore it's necessary to tweak the theft system if you want it to make any sense.
Firstly, I am using a mod that makes all Khajiit merchants buy stolen items.
Secondly, I will continue to use the console command player.setav BypassVendorStolenCheck 1  in order to make obvious fences (such as Enthri or roadside skooma traders) buy stolen items (and, of course, set it back to 0 after the transaction). The same goes for shopkeepers who are my intimate partners, should I acquire any.
Thirdly, for my most recent game, I created a rule that when those Hired Thugs  attack me, I use the console to decrease their health 10 times and speedmult  4 times.
That is not cheating, it's repairing Bethesda's blatant blunder. (Wow, I just invented a new acronym: BBB – Bethesda's Blatant Blunder.)



[originally published 2016-11-30]