He SAYS that, but it's not by any means required. Some quest NPC's tell me to piss off for a day, but I just opened dialog again and let the ball continue rolling.

As for quest requirements, I never had to stop. I used what the guilds wanted me to use, and I leveled up in them.
And they only want your attributes up to 40, which are often already that at level 1. Sometimes you got to get a proper skill higher but again, never was an issue for me.

I assume jus roleplay and drop off the amulet and tell Jaufree that you want nothing to do with the crisis.

I find the key to roleplaying delaying the MQ is the reason you are in prison to begin with. My character is a criminal at the start, and after he leaves the sewer he's still a criminal despite getting pardoned by the Emperor. He decides to try and pawn off the amulet of kings to some svcker who can't use it anyway. After finding no buyers my character gets fed up, snaps and kills someone for money since he is broke thus starting his journey into the Dark Brotherhood. Also I personally do not get that much sense of urgency after leaving the sewer, as nothing much has changed yet except for the Emperor's assassination. There is only one gate open and few outside of Kvatch even knows about it yet and my character has no reason to show up at Kvatch anyway it's a boring town anyway.

Isn't that pretty much what I said?

It just doesn't make sense for Jauffre to trust the existence of the world to an unknown and unskilled low level escaped prisoner. And doing so at level 1 or so means that a bunch of Stunted Scamps has all the Guards and Legionaries scared skilly. Seriously.

Hmm, then I might not play this. RP:ed from day one, didn′t even hand over the amulet (now a Master in Thieves Guild btw), and currently have 1400hrs of gameplay. Sorry Beth :whistling:

The main-quest can be a little frustrating, because of it's pace, but i always get happy when through, so it's kinda enjoyable in the long run.

Who, exactly?

- Dark Elves would praise you because they mostly hate the Empire.
- Nords would totally ignore your assasination, then try to conquer Morrowind again.
- Redguards' major factions (one pro-Empire and one anti-Empire) would strife against each other.
- Argonians wouldn't give a crap about it.
- Khajiits wouldn't give a crap about it.
- High Elves: Refer to Dark Elves, then add even more fanatism.
- Wood Elves....who knows what they think (me not, certainly...my fault ).
- Bretons: again, no idea of what would they do.
- Orcs are supposed to be loyal, but they're too few to be even a dangerous threat.

Apart from the Imperials, you haven't to worry very much about the consequences.

Well if some guy just killed the Emperor ha dsent all of Cyrodil into disarray and to be completely owned by some badass Daedric God, then I would be pretty annoyed by that guy, no matter what race I was, and I'm sure that all other provinces would want to rally against the new Daedric-owned Cyrodil to protect themselves.

So, yeah, I think a hell of a lot of people would be pretty pee'd off.

Once Oblivion gates started opening all over their land, I think they might care.

This is actually one of my biggest problems with the way the main quest is implemented. It's kind of a doubled edged sword in that I hate time limits, but at the same time the idea that you're told of an immanent invasion only to discover that "Oh wait never mind. It's not so imminent that it can't wait for you to finish decorating your house." is really immersion breaking.

What it boils down to, in my opinion, is that the main quest was poorly written. Had they put some more thought/writing talent into it they could have made it epic and solved this issue of feeling rushed through it. Instead they focused on things like making every character in the game -- poorly -- voice acted and the main quest comes off as kind of, "Eh." and many gamers probably blew through it in about 10 hours and never played Oblivion again.