Hello to all I'm probably a bit late to the party for this. but how do you guy's(an girl's) do it? dont get me wrong i have a pretty good imagination but certain parts kinda ruin any attempt of roleplaying i could make like it's begining being in prison having to go through the sewers etc i just want to make a character that live's in the woods as a huntsmen that finds a greater destiny as the unlikely hero of cyrodil i play on the 360. never RP'd before so any advice would be greatly apreciated.

Eat,drink,sleep.
Try to play to your characters personality(like and disslikes).
I allways play dead is dead so combat situations can get very exciting or nerveracking.
Are there other npc's your character is drawn to?Roleplay that there friends.
Along with countless other ways.

Start up with a general idea of your character (like a woodsman who lives off the land), and flesh out their personality as you play. Give them favorite foods and drinks, pet peeves, hobbies (such as hiking, for a woodsman), friends. Don't fast travel excessively: make that trip from the Imperial City to Chorrol a little journey, a small adventure in and of itself. Walking around Cyrodiil is very atmospheric, and I feel some players miss that immersion aspect of traveling because of fast travel. And as Angry Orc pointed out, try to have your character eat 2-3 times a day, sleep every night, drink wine or ale to wind down and celebrate a good day of adventuring. Make it so your character is living in Cyrodiil, not trying to beat a game.

This guide is a very helpful and interesting read: http://uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Roleplaying

Thank you guy's for the advice must say i play a White redguard (because there the best warrior race not because im racist lol) my usual towns that i walk to are chorrol bruma leyawin although its probably the most sterotypical type i've always wanted to paly a huntsmen who live's in the middle of nowhere hunting by bow and the land and i'll be sure to try your guys advice p.s is it necessary to start a new character?. as my current one has alot of money plenty of arrows and plenty of places to live and would prefer to atleast try my first RP with a character that already has a bit of a bak ground.

Haha, being a huntsman isn't stereotypical :tongue:. Those are my favorite types of characters to play, I love rangers and wilderness dwellers. As for starting a new character, you can if you want (I like doing that, makes an RP more unique), but there's no need to. Just start with your current character, and use the stuff you've done in game with him to try and define his personality and how its developed since he was level 1. Then camp out, hunt, and have fun filling the shoes of an badass woodsman. :foodndrink:

I will reprint what I wrote last week because I don't feel like writing it all over again. I find that my first time through a game I don't roleplay at all. My first time through a game I basically powergame. I'm getting used to controls, getting used the way developers think, getting to know the story, the lore, the landscape, all of it. I'm basically in 'gee whiz mode': admiring the landscape, meeting new NPCs, trying to figure out what the heck's going on.

When I feel I understand a game reasonably well I begin to feel comfortable roleplaying. I roleplay by finding little niches in the lore or in the story and fitting a character's story into that. It doesn't interest me to play a character with a pre-made back-story and just jump in. Also, I often use my roleplying to fill in gaps in the story or the lore of a game that I feel weren't well explained.

For instance, in Morrowind I played a Dark Brotherhood assassin who had left the organization on account of political infighting. The Dark Mother punished this insubordination by framing my character and getting her sent to jail. The Emperor foiled this scheme by releasing my character and sending her to Vvardenfell. This enraged the Dark Mother and she sent an assassin to kill my character. Eventually my character went back to headquarters for a showdown with her old boss.

One of my recent characters was the daughter of an NPC added by Shezrie's utterly astounding Pell's Gate mod. At the beginning of the game Uriele Astire lives with her Mom, who works in the gift shop of the Pell's Gate Museum (you really have to see this mod, it's amazing). One day Uriele wheedles the truth about her father out of her Mom: her Dad wasn't really the Imperial Watch Commander she had been led to believe. Her Dad was Uriel Septim. It seems that during her stint working in the kitchen at the Tibor Septim Helene Astire had caught the roving eye of Uriel Septim. Shaken by this knowledge, Uriele sets out from Pell's Gate for the Imperial City to confront her Dad. Unfamiliar with the big city, she talks to the wrong person and gets tossed in jail for the night. To her amazement she's woken up by Dad himself, walking right through her cell. Dad not only recognizes her (You...I've seen you...) but tells her he's been having dreams about her. He invites her to accompany him as he makes his exit. When he knows his time is up he entrusts the amulet to his daughter. As a Septim, Uriele is the most-qualified person to bring the amulet to Martin. At the end of the main quest Martin takes the amulet to save his half-sister.

I love shoehorning a character's story into nooks of the game like this. But I do need to know the game first. I don't think I could create characters like Uriele Astire or my ex-assassin on a first play-through.

I spend a lot of time thinking about each of my characters before I play them. In the past I've spent as long as three months and as little as two weeks. Never less than two weeks.

After getting the outline of a character the first thing I do is dump my old mod list and start a new one from scratch. I choose each new mod carefully. I look for mods that will help make my new character 'live.' The process of choosing mods helps me clarify who my character is.

I spend another week or two resolving any conflicts in my new mod list and tweaking my new mods to suit my character.

After that I build a house mod. I design a house in a style and in a location that reflects that character in some way. I refine my ideas about the character a little further as I finish the house (which, in turn, may lead me to go back and adjust my mod list a bit). I usually spend anywhere from a week to an entire month making my character's house.

By the time I've finished these steps I generally feel I know my new character inside and out. I 'feel' the character in my bones by then and I usually don't have too much problem staying in character for one or two or three hours at a time.

For further reading here are two excellent threads on the subject by mirocu:

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1082413-roleplaying/

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1185185-roleplaying-2/page__p__17595999__fromsearch__1#entry17595999