just interested in how many of you have done this.myself,i was very fond of my original female breton crusader lorien balimar.she just was perfect (to me) at how i enjoyed playing oblivion (going in swords drawn,destruction magic for backup e.t.c) i eventually got rid of her armour and just let her face off against the minions of oblivion with just her bare hands as i recently (last friday) bought 360 version 5th anniversary.have decided to create another character that's almost the same as lorien.this time i am going to keep her and explore the whole world of oblivion (inc the expansion missions).so who else has done the same/similar and your reasons please

Yes, I am definitely guilty of doing this. My first character Azreal was a level 30 Breton/Mage who excelled in conjuration leveraging invisibility. She was Arch Mage, Cyrodil Champion, KOTN commander and retired with 525 game play hours due to the A-bomb. She was my only character, and I had no desire to play another one. However, I missed playing Oblivion and created Sureal as a Breton/Atronach. They are almost identical in appearance, hence the relationship as cousins. I enjoy strategic, nuanced gameplay, particularly the ability to create your own custom spells and place your own signature on your offensive and defensive strategies. Azreal was so powerful, that I decided to tone Sureal down by using the Atronach sign. At level 15, she is developing a slightly different profile by becoming an expert alchemist to fortify her magicka. She does not toy with her enemies as much as Azreal did, and is much more serious in caves and Oblivion gates so that she does not waste her precious reserves. It is interesting that she is actually a more powerful mage than Azreal was in terms of base magicka, but feels weaker and has to play more cautiously due to the birth sign. The change from Mage to Atronach was enough to require the creation of new strategies and is creating a different personality for her character. I am not sure of her goals yet. She is also a Necromancer, and has no desire to complete the mage guild requirements since she owns the wizards tower. She has joined, but has been punished twice for abusing her membership and looting..., I mean borrowing equipment. She is currently complying by collecting flowers for her 2nd violation, but I sense that there may be problems with the guild going forward. I had hoped I could complete the FG and TG using her character. Not sure about DB, or which way she will decide to go. Just going to take it slow and watch and see.

My rationale for creating a similar character to the one I retired is simple. The retirement was involuntary. I was not finished with Azreal, and miss her game. Sureal is cool, but Azreal had so much more "personality". Sureal leverages all of Azreal's knowledge and is cold and calculated. She also seems a little pissed over her perceived weakness as an atronach and has an attitude. Actually, I am a little scare of what she may end up doing.

I only "retire" my characters if I can plan an awesome death for them, and they are never re-loaded.

I've only done this once or twice, but it's certainly enjoyable. Especially when experimenting with different classes

There have been several times where, due to either external complications like PC issues or just getting bored, I've had to restart and lose characters.

In this case, if possible, I simply add them in the CS as NPCs.

^Hey Witch Azreal, I remember you from last year I think

Yes I have made 2 characters similar to one another, but only 2. I've had 11 characters overall, so that still leaves 9 others who were uniquiely different from each other.

Renee Gade and Renee Gade II were similar so far as looks go; I was trying to make a clone of Xena. The main difference was RG1 was a jack-of-all-trades...me taking on as many quests as possible, not really roleplaying. RG2's game was limited to about 90% melee combat, 10% Restoration spells. Fighter's Guild, Knights of the Nine, and about half of the Arena questline.

RG2 was way more fleshed out than RG1. Learned some lessons over time, I did. *nods*

In my earlier days I only made Breton Warriors. I created one Breton Warrior after another, first in Morrowind, then in Oblivion. I couldn't count how many of them. They are still my favorite characters but I find it more fun nowadays to push myself out of my comfort zone, to try character ideas that don't sound right to me at first.

Rayn is loosely based on my first ever character Alynn. Breton, brown wind braids, sword and magic, mages guild, a little light fingered. That's about as far as the similarities go.


Fairly recently I made a khajiit I wasn't happy with, then she got killed in Chorrol and I let her die and deleted all her saves. A few days later, I regretted it and re-created her with one skill different. I don't play her much as my main two, but she's still with me.

Yes, I have.

Yes, I am guilty of this. I particularly like, in Oblivion especially, nature/ranger type characters. I find this type of character suits my likes of just wandering around, taking in the beauty of things. These characters have different personalities, but are built basically the same. Some may use more magic than others, but in essence, they are very much a like. Their views of the world around them though are very different.

Only recently do I have two very different characters that are not like this. A pure mage and a thiefy/bad girl type.

I've got one character, Echo, who is intentionally a "repeat." For reasons that she doesn't yet know (but I do ), she is cursed to be "reborn" over and over again, each time with a new randomly generated set of skills. "Echo" is played at maxed difficulty, dead-is-dead, with a mod I made that adds a new item (something relating to her previous life) to her world with each incarnation.

My only 'Retirement' was an old character that the saves corrupted on so I pretty much just remade her with a couple little differences.

the 'Retirement', the only way i can discribe it is going to do suicide in an epic way.

my favorite 1: cheydinhal claymore massacare
least favorite 1: falling of the imperial city's highest tower while 13 ebony daggers are falling above u, whith the pointy ends pointed at u.

I really tried to go in a different direction with my current character after retiring the previous one. I usually play a bosmer who hides in the shadows and shoots her victims from a distance and never passes up a chance to see what's behind a locked door.

But I've been hearing about how insanely over-powered illusion spells can be and that sounded fun. So I went with a different flavor of elf, a dunnmer, and chose the atronauch birthsign just for a little extra challenge, and have been investing heavily in buying spells, practicing spells and making potions that allow me to continue practicing spells. However the stunted magica thing has my character a little worried. She doesn't like to rely too heavily on it because she's afraid she's going to run out so despite the fact that she's got a very hefty stockpile of magica restoring potions she usually ends up falling back on her bow. The curiosity and kleptomania remain the same. Really, about the only difference between her and my usual character type is that she doesn't wear armor and she's got a bigger pool of magic to work with.

Yes, and still doing it.

I have made multiple start overs seeking the best most fun version of the character I want to play. Most got at least to entry into the Arcane University, and through much of the Dark Brotherhood line. Typically as far as level 7 or 8 before I'd find the desire to tweak one thing or another.

The problem I could now actually solve with some kind of leveling mod has been that there is an "ideal" set of major skills, favored attributes, and birthsign that fit the purpose of major skills being character defining ones. But it is not a practical choice when playing if I want to get +5's in attributes on level up. This is typical choose the real important skills as minors to avoid overleveling issue.

For the fun of it, I made that ideal character and wanted to try to run just the main quests through to the end. I had never in all my playthroughs done more in the main quest line than maybe the first Oblivion gate at Kvatch. I did the paintbrush thing to hop over the Temple of the One's wall and see the ending thing once, but always put off the actual main quest for the fun of playing everything else. As I suspected, the level ups came way, way too soon and I at first just went with the pathetic +2 and occasional +3 for like two levels. When the enemies outpaced me, I wound up doing what is not fun about choosing a frequently used or main skill as a major skill, quit using those a little before level up. It wasn't as bad, cause I finally got through it all at level 8.

If I had had the PC version then, I could have gotten one of those leveling mods, but it was fun and interesting to see the whole main line. Still haven't been to Shivering Isles at all and only did the Pilgrimage quest of Knights of the Nine recently for the greater power before earning infamy. The ideal version would have Blade, Illusion, Sneak, Alchemy, Restoration, Light Armor, Destruction and choose agility and speed as favored attributes with the specialty in magic. Best race was almost exclusively Breton, though I tried a Dunmer variety since this character is simply made to be a vampire.

A few wasted excess raises won't hurt early on and around mid levels, the skills used most seem to reach levels where they slow down in raising relative to their proportion of use. Because of that, the version I settled on that I feel balances the desire to play for 5/5/5 and yet doesn't require that I stop playing the skills I truly use was Armorer, Blade, Illusion, Mysticism, Restoration, Acrobatics, Marksman with endurance and luck as favored attributes stealth skill specialty. The one thing I went against a more efficient choice in for purely role play type reasons was sticking with Breton and female at that even if the Dunmer version would counter the vampire's weakness with fire. Female cause I'm just attached to the idea of a femme fatale kind of assassin character even if male Bretons start with 40 endurance instead of 30. Every version has had the thief birthsign and luck as a favored attribute. I can't make myself not take the only 30 points of attribute boost sign and the only one to knock ten levels of +1 luck raising out of your developement path.

I retired a Breton with the Wizard birthsign and Mage class for an Altmer with the Atronach birthsign and Mage class.

Two two are played a little differently, but they're similar enough to contribute to the thread.

Yup my character is almost always a noble warrior who enjoys the study of history and magic in his spare time.

Sadly, I tend to go for the same types of characters every time. And even when they're not that similar, they end up being so!

One of my characters is semi-retired, but only because she couldn’t buy the house in Skingrad, and I still play her occasionally. All of my characters, and there are a bunch of them, are Breton stealth archers, but their faces and hair are all different, they pursue different careers, live in different houses, and are not clones of each other. Some of them are lazy and see what they can accumulate without doing much, others are aggressive and ambitious and climb to the tops of their guilds. Don’t want to do too much of the same thing. Except for the bow - they all love the bow.

One character really, my khajit thief (second character) got to level 24 beat the thieves guild and dark brotherhood, well he was cool but i love swords so i remade him using the defualt assassin class, fairly badass and probably one of my all time favorite characters. Well i moved ob to the computer and i missed my morally gray (he was totally a [censored] but he did save the world) Cat-man so i remade him on the pc. Mostly made him to do the brotherhood reborn quest mod, he was still fun and my canon thieves guild character.

Oh i guess a name would be nice, Ma'roak the shadow step, scroll stealer, master archer, and omniscient hunter. Titles are funner to write than summaries of their stories

Yep, I've done this. I've even ported character names and conceptions over from Morrowind.

Where's Zak? This thread seems to have been made just for him.....

I've never quite wholly "retired" a character, or at least not in the way it seems it's intended in the OP. A couple of my characters are "retired." That is - they're living the easy life somewhere, "retired" from adventuring. But they still exist, and I might even visit them from time to time. And none of them are recreations of anyone else, or even close - they're all individuals. The closest I've come to recreating a character is restarting one, which I've done a couple of times when a build didn't work out. My Bosmer hunter Vorlin, for instance, ended up leveling far too quickly and with little to show for it other than disappointingly mediocre marksman skill, so I went all the way back to his sewer exit save, rearranged his build a bit, and started over.

Wow.