I've always had a tendency to play pure mage characters on max difficulty which often results in large amounts of cheesing . This time around I think I'm going to try and go for something a little bit more organic with more warrior based skills, minimal magic apart from restoration, minimal enchanting, lots of speechcraft/mercantile and zero alchemy. I think I'm going to start with difficulty on about +20 and then increase it in increments of +3 or +4 for each level I get to try and smooth things out as I find better equipment and things naturally become more easy to kill.
By the time I've reached +100 difficulty the idea is that I'll have good skills and good equipment to compensate for this, without having made the game stupidly frustrating in its early stages. I'm probably going to use medium armour as well just to gimp myself a little bit more, along with all of the modules from BTB's game improvements and Hot Fusion's Economy Adjuster.
I'll be using Galsiah's Character Development from the beginning to make levelling up more organic, though I had a thought - Do I really need to know the precise levels of my stats and skills while I'm playing the game? The only circumstance where the knowledge of any attribute is actually required is where you're running a service requirements mod and and you want to advance to a higher rank. Beyond that, who actually cares? Why do you precisely need to know what your skill ranks are or what your stats are? I think this might actually detract from the game experience and I'd like to experiment with a play through without these to see what sort of effect it has on how I (or other people) play the game.
If I hide my main character menu in the inventory screen, the only things that would ever give away what a precise skill or attribute level I have is when I level up and it appears in the text box at the bottom of the screen or reverse-engineering them from existing numerical values. I'd therefore like to enquire in to the possibility of three mods:
1. A mod that removes the numerical value from the notice that appears when a skill has levelled up.
2. A mod that hides all reference to numerical values in a character's burden capacity, health, magicka and fatigue
3. A modification to the current BTB's edited service requirements module that hides the numerical requirements on advancement in guild rankings.
Obviously re: 2 & 3 if a put a lot of thought in to it I'd be able to work backwards from my current inventory's weight or by keeping track of what my ranking level actually was in a guild, but if I consciously make an effort not to do this it I'd probably get the main effect of what I'm going for.
Thanks for any help/thoughts!