my favorite thing in oblivion is bows and arrows, can anybody think of anything fun i can do with them?

Well the last time I went through the tutorial dungeon, i used an arrow to trigger a tripwire, swatting a goblin with the giant pendulum mace things. I thought it was quite amusing. I'm not sure that something similar can be done elsewhere, but it might be worth looking for.

You can actually do that?! OK, I have to start a new character just to do it!

You can use an arrow to knock welkynd stones off their high perches.

You can trigger the proximity traps in Oblivion planes.

You can 'denock' your arrow if your acrobatics is 50+ by using the dodge manuever (helpful to save poisons and charges if you use them).

Cast a spell with 100% weakness to poison for a few seconds on a poison immune foe, then quickly shoot them with a poisoned bow - it will bust their immunity - green ghosts and atronachs!

You can block up to 50% of melee damage by blocking with a bow (instead of up to the 75% that a shield provides).

You can 'equip' a shield with a two handed weapon like a bow. You can't use the shield to block and it won't help your armor rating. It will do two nice things for you: You will get whatever enchantment is on the shield. It will not hurt your spell effectiveness.

Get the max Detect Life you can and practice long range sneak kills.

Fire an arrow off in a random direction and see if you can find it. This is a good way to explore places you've never been before. Unless you've been everywhere.

Try to hit people with arrows that you fire straight up into the air. If you don't charge the shot too much they make an arc. This is best done with stationary NPCs. I wouldn't recomend trying to fight enemies this way, no matter how good you are.

Nothing's more satisfying than getting an insanely long range one-hit kill with one shot. Deer are really good for practicing this.

If you're bored as all hell (as I often find myself) there's a couple fun things you can do with your archer type characters;

Go out in the open, and shoot an arrow directly up. Try to catch it on it's way down. (By catch, I mean 'take' it, but while it's still in mid-air.)

An easier way, or for practice, you can shoot at a high wall, when it bounces off, catch it.

A more useful thing to do would be train Marksman, but this one is a little complicated, and you need Adoring Fan for it.

Things you will need: Hundreds of arrows, a bow, dozens of paintbrushes, Adoring Fan, wilderness.

What you must do:

1. Take all the items listed, as well as Adoring Fan, and go out into the wilderness. Maybe even a cave, somewhere a guard will never stop by. A place no one will ever stop by. If it's a cave, clear it of bandits or whatever.

2. Make Adoring Fan 'wait' in the middle of a large opening.

3. 'Drop' paintbrushes all around him in a circle. Unless you have the Unofficial Patch, they'll float. Make sure he's completely surrounded.

4. Turn up the difficulty slider all the way, and begin shooting him, he can't escape, as he's trapped in a bunch of floating paint brushes.

5. Heal him when his health gets too low.

You can do this for as long as you want, and become a Master of Marksman in a couple of hours.

As I'm currently doing, only use your bow and arrows to kill. No melee. No direct damage spells. Paralyze/command/frenzy ie spells that do not actually hurt your enemy. Poisons and enchantments allowed. It forces you to use a lot of strategy. Direct damage enchantments are allowed as the damage is still delivered via the arrow

Try marksman in 3rd person view.
You can lodge arrows into a Grey Fox wanted poster. Just be sure to collect them again before you shoot off more than 10 or so, less they start disappearing.

I once fired an arrow from http://obss.us/d/1312-1/Killed+Seridur+there.jpg and http://obss.us/d/1696-1/Seridead.jpg.

Use damage fatigue potions and a drain fatigue enchanted low end bow, shoot a foe, switch to h2h and watch them faint quickly as you biff them up.

1 - Enter sneak mode;
2 - Stand right in front of the wictim;
3 - Aim between the eyes; and...
4 - Watch the arrow go THRU the wictim's head, as if nothing happened.

And last, but not least...:
5 - Have your arrow 'ricochet' off a wall, a column and hit *you*.

The only time I did that was in the pre-sewers with Baurus. I opened inventory and saw that arrow sticking off my torso (none of the assassins nor Baurus nor anyone in the Tutorial shoots arrows...).

I like go deer hunting and shoot them from as far as physical possible, i have some very impressive shots from practicing that sport. Try it. Its quite fun if you have someone to challenge you. Send screens over FB or MSN with a friend that also like Oblivion. Funnzies
=) If you wanna try this. Ofc if you wanna up the ante you can ofc try it on a harder mob than a deer. I once hit a minotaur wihtout know it was nearby the deer i hunted so instead i had a mad cow chasing me while i emptied my quiver and died trying to flee.

Here's a fun thing to do, if you don't mind pissing off some guards.

Go up to a guard and face directly in front of him. Get close enough to where you're basically touching him. Make sure your crosshair is directly on the center of his head. Then, look all the way up while still facing him and fire off a shot without drawing the arrow fully back (in other words, don't hold the button, just tap it). If everything goes well, the arrow will go up a short distance and then will start to head back down and hit said guard right on the top of his head. Since there is no headshot system, all the guard will do is be pissed off and tell you that you violated the law.

I just think it's funny that the guard is more concerned with you breaking the law than he is with an arrow lodged in his brain. :poke:

You can do this with all other NPCs as well, but I recommend guards just because they're easier to predict (most don't move from their positions at all) and the reaction is just funnier, in my opinion.

For bonus points, use the Chameleon exploit to make yourself fully invisible when you do it. It usually causes the guard to flee to another guard, which is even funnier.

Pfft I prefer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJnYcXaAxv8.

Yeah, i see your point but we are all different i guess, i prefer the hardest way, you prefer the easy way. the vid made me giggle tho. first i thought the you agroed the ogre while you were deerhuntin'

Just simply sneak around in a fort and try to kill every single creature in it before they see you, using only a bow and arrows and no Chameleon/Invisibility. Try to hit youself with an arrow by shooting it straight up / making it ricoche off a wall.

Or just stand on top of a tall building in a town and shoot everyone in it, by jumping from rooftop to rooftop. Especially fun in Anvil, where you can technically get everywhere via the rooftops.

It's especially fun sniping from the lighthouse, if you're Journeyman of Marksman you can zoom in too.

Oh and, I found another way of training marksman. Although it is similar to the one I stated above, as you need almost the same requirements.

You need to be a fighter of the Arena, and you need a bow or two, with several hundreds of arrows and a couple repair hammers incase. It helps if you have a high Acrobatics skill, if you don't you'll need a couple paintbrushes too. You should take a couple health potions, just to be safe.

Here's what you do.

1. Turn difficulty slider all the way down.

2. Start an arena match, it can be any. As grand champion, fighting against three wild beasts is better, as you'll get more money out of it, although this trick works even at the first level of the arena.

3. Enter the arena, but do not attack anything yet.

4. Now, there are two things you can do. Either you can jump your way up to the ledges of the arena (where the spikes are) and jump from that to one of the columns in the middle of the arena or you can use paintbrushes to get yourself moderately high. Atleast high enough to be out of reach of the opponents'/beasts' attacks.

5. Now, turn the difficulty slider all the way up.

6. Begin firing at the opponent(s) or beast(s).

This should train your marksman up too, as is a lot easier than the other method. Only reason I thought up the other one is because I love torturing the adoring fan.

Enjoy!

And then you develop a points system, where you get 5 points for one-shot kills, 3 points for a headshot, etc and climb down after shooting everyone and tally up your points! And then proceed to the next town and see where you can score the highest.

... I so feel like playing right now. Or mindlessly slaughtering innocent townspeople. :whistling:

For maximum effect try shoot while hidden, you need a sigil stone with maximum detect life, the gray cowl or a similar spell or all of them
Now you can shoot at targets on the other side of a bridge or small hill, in sneak mode they will not detect you as you are to far away and hidden.

I hope you're still talking about the game here.. :ninja:

Sure sure! I mean... Oh yes, of course. :angel:

Paralysis and Invisibility would be funny enchantments for a bow, and kind of useful for mob sniping.

Kill the adoring fan Paralysis arrows preferred as you get to see him fall down the mountain and get killed by a bear.