» Fri Oct 02, 2015 8:57 pm Last night I had a pretty fantastic adventure in my heavily modded game. Like most of the great ones, this one came from "letting it stand". That's what I tell myself when something happens in the game that makes me want to reload my last save even though my character hasn't died. Maybe I should be caling it an "Alive Ain't Dead" playthrough. I've done "Dead is Dead", and I enjoy it... but I rarely get very far. So my "in-between" is that I play the game and whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger... or at least makes me deal with the consequences.
I've run away from combat and left allies to die. I've had companions I cared about killed, leaving me to go on alone. I've been put in impossible situations and somehow emerged victorious.
Last night I was traveling East of Winterhold, and the coast is always perilous when you have to worry about hypothermia. Jumping from ice floe to ice floe, I managed to slide off an oddly shaped piece of ice and fall into the freezing water. After dragging myself to shore, I immediately started to freeze. My companion, Serana, kept me from getting jumped by a pair of saber cats while I fumbled with trying to make a fire. But it was no good. Too cold to build a fire. I figured that was the end, but in the distance I saw the warm glow of a fire by a shipwreck. I'd seen some Nords earlier in the day manning a horker hunting camp, so I decided to hope that this was a similar situation. If I could trudge there fast enough, I might just be able to warm my bones and make it through to morning. So I left Serana to her task and shambled forward.
A minute later, covered in ice, I turned around a rock to see the shipwreck and immediately heard the curses of its inhabitants-- a trio of bandits. Normally three bandits wouldn't be anything to worry about, but Serana was still tied up somewhere behind me and I was freezing to death. I immediately chugged some wine to warm my innards and a potion of brief invisibility to buy me time. While two of the bandits went looking for me, I slunk up to the fire and waited. I was soon warm enough to move my legs, but I knew that once the wine wore off, the cold would return with a vengeance. I drew my sword and waited.
Finally, the bandits returned, immediately seeing me and rushing toward the fire with weapons drawn. A power attack lopped an arm off the first one, but the second was fast. I brought up my shield and he began to hammer it again and again, pushing me back toward the freezing water. Worse yet, the bandit chief had emerged from the wreck and started launching crossbow bolts into the fray. I managed to take the second bandit down, but found myself facing the chief with only a sliver of health left, not a drop of stamina, and not a potion left to drink. The chief fired his crossbow at me and I slowly folded to the ground.
And, in real life, as I reached for the Esc key... my character awakened. Serana had dragged my unconscious, frostbitten body to a fire at a nearby camp. A camp so nearby that it was, in fact, the very same camp I'd just passed out in. I got to my feet near the fire to see Serana rushing the bandit chief with her sword, glowy hand launching shards of ice! I pulled out my own crossbow and planted a few bolts in the bandit chief while Serana grappled with him. Finally, she froze him solid and my last crossbow bolt shattered him into chunks of frozen gore.
We spent the rest of the day at the fire together cooking salmon and drinking wine. Before, being a vampire hunter, I hadn't trusted Serana. But now things are different.
So how about you guys? Does anyone else play this way? Do you have any amazing adventures that have come out of it?
