One common trick in Morrowind and Oblivion is to abuse alchemy to make early money. I suppose one could do the same in Skyrim, just harvesting a lot of flowers and butterfly wings, and making a lot of potions you don't need, just to sell. That, and looting and selling everything that isn't nailed down.

I'm more with you, though. My characters tend to be cash-poor, and I often leave perfectly good loot behind, just because I can't bother becoming encumbered just to grab another 50-septim piece of armor.

Yeah, I'm sure if I wanted to, I could get that kind of money early on, but I'd have to go out of my way by either not buying things Many of my characters ordinarily buy or doing as you suggest and making potions solely for money, which I only do if playing a character that fancies himself an alchemist.

Enchanting is in the game, but enchanters aren't (If I'm wrong, someone please tell me where or point me to a mod ).

In Morrowind, once you learned a spell effect, you could pay someone (typically at the Mages Guild or Temple) to enchant an item with the effect - cost depending on the duration and magnitude. A ring of 100% chameleon could go for 70-100k depending on your barter skill. Pretty much any spell I wanted to cast I'd stick on an item - no chance of spell failure and much easier than worrying about magicka pools. Water Breathing, Night Eye, Fortify Strength, Restore Health, Cure Common/Blight Disease, etc... That was (is) my biggest cash drain in the game.

Yeah, I've always been a bit of an "economical" player. My first MMO was Final Fantasy XI, soon after the NA launch. By the Goddess, what a great economy that game had. I was a 'broker master' in Everquest 2 as well. That and my first cRPG's (going all the way back to Wizardry on real floppy discs) were pretty stingy with cash, so you learned to scavenge whatever you could.

You don't even need to go crazy with alchemy to make coin. You can pick up decent change just chopping wood waiting for a store to open... Fast travel does lend itself to the loot, sell, restock mechanic though. Then again, I've got a cupboard full of bowls, plates, and misc junk on the off chance I get my 'speech' perks high enough to sell them for a septim each, so maybe I do take it a bit too far.

Only 5k for a house though... The 'starter' homes in Daggerfall started at around 350k and the nice ones were at least double that.

Enchanting is different than previous games in that you cannot have someone else enchant an item for you & enchantments are NOT based on spells you know. You can, however, train enchanting to increase your skill via the trainers as outlined on the page Lady Selene linked.

Changes to enchanting as in your opening post being a part of accepting Skyrim for what it is and not comparing it to previous TES games. I too envy your "first" experiences that have faded into the distant past for me!

Happy Adventuring!

I did redo the beginning to see if following the Nord instead of the Imperial made any difference, but not much that I could see. Then I remembered I had no desire to repeat all the 'alchemy bingo' I had already played revealing ingredient properties so happily kept on from my main playthrough

I've become Thane of Falkreath and have a nice little homestead going. Building it was a nice diversion, one I may return to from time to time, but time to get back to actually exploring the world. Harvest Moon, this ain't. And why oh why with all the money spent on voice acting do the bards just know two crappy tunes?!? I forget where I was playing WoW years ago but there's a horde metal band in some hold somewhere that actually wasn't that bad... (ok, mini-rant over).

I've set my housecarl to decorate while I'm gone (I'm hoping she can't actually screw anything up) so I get to be a bit surprised whenever I come 'home'. Hopefully the vampires won't have killed everybody in town while I'm away...

Edit: Oh man, got the carriage... That really feels like cheating. Think I'll have to let that guy sit, at least until I'm ready to join the Dawnguard or something.

You found some Skyrim quirks... Their are several mod's that change the music, I have http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/61113/? which is good enough for me, but their is one that the Bards don't sing at all except on request, which I have thought about downloading. Their are a couple, Bards that are truly horrid.

I never get that carriage driver, more for RP reasons than anything else, but I have had a dragon land flat on top of the carriage and well Skyrim physics it, the dragon got stuck and the carriage wasn't flat.

That's pretty funny. When I first went to my land plot, being the stealthy archer that I am I shot some big game that was standing around. Didn't really think much of it. Finish the small house and notice I have the rear end of an elk sticking out of the ground near my door Fortunately, the body eventually disappeared. Had me worried for a while. It is a beautiful plot of land though, with a gorgeous view.

Right now, the bard mod I'm using is called "AC/DC in my headphones". I dig it.

LOL... I have a couple mods that add "nature" sounds to Skyrim, so I like listening to that when walking around, I have the "music" turned off, so their is no "dah.da dah DA" the baddies have arrived... no little red dot either. The crickets will stop chirping and that is my 1st clue that the character is about to be attacked by something. ( They don't always stop though).

Yeah I leave the wildlife and plants near my houses alone, cause I am never gone long enough for the plants to respawn and I really don't want to look at an Elk's backside at the doorstep.

The only difference between following Ralof and Hadvir is who you are friends with in Riverwood and the enemies you face in the tutorial. Unfortunately a lot of choices in the game are like that and don't really have much impact in your game. The civil war questline, for example. If you complete it for stormcloaks and then go back and do it again for imperials, you will see that both sides are a mirror image of each other, just like the tutorial dungeon, and neither really has any real affect on the game world. Still fun though.

There are like 40,000 mods for Skyrim! Some of which are so good, they are "better" than their anologs in the vanilla game. I'm all for a gamer doing whatever they want to do with a single player experience, but just to put it out there: if there is any particular aspect of the game you find "deficient," "annoying," "incomplete," "lacking in aesthetics," "unsatisfactory," or otherwise in need of change, just ask. There are likely at least 3 if not 30 mods that address any given issue.

Not to say that every single thing in the game has been modded and modded well, but many of the main 'quirks' of the game have been, and here is my list of the biggies:

1. It is wonderful that they managed to design a game that runs on console, particularly since the lionshare of their revenue comes from consoles. The downside for we PC users is that we are "stuck" (but not really!) with a horrendous UI that is better suited to consoles. --> http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/3863 is the solution. A beautiful mod that completely overhauls the User Interface, while retaining the overall look and feel of the vanilla UI, but adds much more functionality and ease of use for the PC platform.

2. Bugs: it seems that even after the final patch, there were a lot of bugs in the game. There are http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/searchresults/? that address these both for the base game and all the DLCs. It seems to me foolhardy to NOT install at least these mods. All of these are available on the Nexus forum, and the Nexus site has its own free mod manager game launcher application that many of the more technically astute seem to disdain (there are many other options too, such as Mod Organizer, or simply using Wrye Bash, which you may recall from Oblivion), but which many thousands of us use and love.

The above two are certainly "optional" but IMHO, they should virtually be regarded as "obligatory" for any PC install of Skyrim. As far as I know none of the above will perform poorly on a lower-end machine. If your machine can run Skyrim, then it should be able to run the above "mods" without any impact on game application performance (somebody more expert please correct me if I'm wrong).

3. Scripting extensibility: http://store.steampowered.com/app/365720/ Many mods use SKSE, and it is in my experience exceptionally easy to install and configure. Many mods that "require" it also offer alternative versions for those who do not have SKSE installed. My understanding is that SKSE is not a "mod" so much as an application which you use to launch Skyrim. If you have it installed correctly and launch it correctly using the SKSE launcher (.exe or .dll or whatever it is) you will not really notice anything different about Skyrim. But what it does is it makes a large body of some of the highest quality mods an available option to you. As far as I know SKSE can run just as well on a low-end machine that can run Skyrim as on a high-end machine, although the more "script heavy" mods you are running will certainly be problematic on lower peformance hardware.

Out of the three, this one is probably the "most optional." But if you do start to consider a few of the best mods, you will want to have this tool installed.

For the unsightly corpses and carcasses littering your garden: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/59340/?

For the problem of landscape elements not respawning by the time you return home: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/50346/? I use the "144 hour" version and it is fantastic.

ADDIT: and somewhat related to the latter issue of "stuff" in the landscape, a mod that I adore, as it makes virtually every crate, barrel, wood pile, box and chest in the game "lootable" (and also allows you to set any container you want to be a "safe" container which will never respawn), and it ALSO allows you to CHOP DOWN TREES! and either set them to respawn (which does sometimes result in some graphical glitches) or to never respawn: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/32448/? . . . ADDIT^2 although I should note, it is possible this one might be bad news for a low-end processor, actually not sure.

. . . sorry to ramble on . . . I'm a bit of a "Mod Using Evangelist"

I played Skyrim for a couple hundred hours vanilla and it was great. But I absolutely adore my mods.

I did the same thing. Unlike Oblivion (where I had to add mods right away to make it playable) I was able to play Skyrim for a couple of hundred hours without mods, and enjoyed it very much.

I'll play another vanilla game sometime in the near future. I like to return to vanilla with all of Bethesda's games now and then. It's helpful to me to "get back to basics" and remind myself what the vanilla games are like. This often has a very dramatic impact on what mods I use afterwards.

Thank you I'll look at those. I played for 3 years on 360, so vanilla it was for me... Now I tend to pick things that I think will enhance my game or add to it.

Skyrim!

Just kidding. I played the first 2 ME episodes; I dropped the third after a few hours instead. Skyrim is and remains for me the best game ever. Even better than the oh-so fabulous The Witcher 3.

Sounds like someone's got a favorite

I'm still having fun in Skyrim (wondering whose bright idea it was to make a 25 lb quest item I can't put down through - blasted dragonstone. Wish I gotten that spoiler and knew not to pick it up...). I've picked up a few odds and ends quests. Explored Arknthang. Otherwise just exploring and little stuff.

As for "favorite" game: Mine change like the wind. Today's list includes Baldurs Gate 1+2, played with Baldur's Gate Trilogy mod (definitely up there). The Xenosaga Trilogy is one of my favorite console series ever (it's a very story-based game). Syberia is a point and click adventure that absolutely blew my god-damn mind (Loads of puzzles - do yourself a favor and NO SPOILERS/HINTS. They are all solvable.). Highly recommend hunting down a copy and playing it (Note: I know Big Fish Games chopped it up into parts - don't get it that way, play the original). Final Fantasy VI, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, Morrowind, KotOR, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (recently on sale at GoG) round out the list.

Oh, and how can I forget my all time favorite handheld? The World Ends With You for the Nintendo DS. Great game, great mechanics, great story, great message.