........ Stuck to your guns and played any of the ES games without using ANY form of Invisibility, or Chameleon magic, enchantments, or potions? Specifically, just used your sneak skills to accomplish whatever mission your tasked to do?

I'm primarily a mage character, of which I have immense fun with, however, as a war veteran in real life, I can very much appreciate the tactics used/needed with stealth. So, I was thinking of trying the purist approach to replaying, let's say, Oblivion, and using one of the starter MODS that don't come with the Flare and Heal spells. I just think, however, playing a game in pure stealth mode has got to be EXTREMELY tough! What are your thoughts? I'm not looking to get into any arguments here.....I'm genuinely curious. Thanx ahead of time for all that reply !!! Yes, I'm on a PC game, and any MOD suggestions/recommendations that don't require OBSE would be helpful (8 port, 64bit issues).

You can easily get away without invis or pots/enchants in Skyrim, sneak eventually becomes practically a superior form of invisibility except when dealing with a few enemy types such as briarhearts.

I didn't find any of my stealth characters to be hard to play. Quite the contrary. I've played pure stealth characters in both Oblivion and Skyrim and I actually thought they were easier to play than most of my other characters. I played them without using any enchantments or spells or magic of any kind, in both games. I used healing potions, but that's all. At higher levels, I think sneak + archery can become so easy as to be almost boring. Even sneak + dual wield in Skyrim can be easy at higher levels.

i remember doing this in oblivion, and it was so easy that after a while i realized that i was like 120 sneak...So its actually so easy that its kind of ridiculous when u experience it you can almost hide in plain sight