Hello!

Why is the werewolf so restrictive in terms of availability (unlike vampire)? If I want to become a werewolf, I HAVE to join the companions. But from an RP point of view, it's very restrictive.

Case in point, I'm playing an Assassin for the DB. The companions stand for everything I don't like - honorable frontal combat, raising mugs for my companions and glory on the battle field. The thieves guild is a nice complement to my character, while the mages college makes it very easy to join only to get your hands on the high-level tomes I require from them, without getting involved in their problems.

But in order to become a werewolf and reach my potential (totems of hircine), I don't just have to join the companions and do ridiculous errands for them, I have to finish the quest chain completely and become their leader, which would completely ruin the immersion of my character.

I doubt there is a mod that lets me do this but even if I could become a ww by other means I'd still miss out on the totems.

Yes, it is.

There's a trick to this. If you can stomach enough Companions until you get the wolf blood, when you wake up with Aela you can bypass the rest of the Companions. When you purge the fortress and find Skjor, do not talk to Aela. Just head outside and leave. That way you will not have any Companions quests active in your log, even the "talk to Companions for work" thing. Just never go to Jorrvaskr and you can forget that you ever hanged out with those fools.

My Altmer character got the wolf blood at about her third hour of play, and now with 75 hours I feel like I never set foot inside Jorrvaskr.

I find my playing through the Dawnguard questline (either side you pick on) will bland out and obliterate your ability to roleplay as a a werewolf anyways (at least how I play).

I played Dawnguard first as a werewolf and you begin to realize where an expansion becomes narrow and just decoheres with dynamics that should stand on an open world and roleplaying perspective. I can't even imagine how badly my pc wanted to rip the heart out of harkon from the very first meeting but then you somehow get magically "teleported", and become stuck with an essential bipolar Serana.

^If a lot of quest content dynamics were handled like this in the game (which a lot are anyways) I doubt RP'ng as a werewolf would even reach 30% of the fun coherent factor.

That may be so, but you're then left with no totems of hircine.

I think the questline is far too linear regardless if you're a ww or not (no choice whatsoever when you find serana, in a realistic scenario, if you were stupid enough to come back and tell them you handed out the most powerful vampires' daughter to him WITH an elder scroll they should realistically kill you on the spot for idiocy).

A necessary sacrifice in my opinion, given that we are stuck with what we have. You gotta choose between doing Companions and not getting the Totems.

There are a couple other places where you have to do something that just doesnt seem right.

-cant do companions storyline without becoming a werewolf

-cant adopt an orphan without doing the very first Dark Brotherhood kill quest (for the person in Windhelm)

-everyone knows you are associated with the thieves guild after only the second quest you do for them

I havent verified the orphan quest for myself, but there was a thread about this a while back. Also i have only ever received one letter inviting me to adopt an orphan and i'm almost certain this was on my first character that was doing the DB quests. None of my non-DB toons have that invitation letter yet. I understand that it is Bethesdas story to tell, but couldnt they have made things a bit more open? instead of the WW being a direct part of the companions quest chain, couldnt it have been added as a separate side quest for the companions?

A lot of things should have been otherwise, but Bethesda is not going to fix them anymore and we can only pray that they won't repeat it for TES6.

Can't adopt from the Orphanage without doing the first DB quest, but you can adopt others without that restriction. However, the worst offender is the TG, where you're railroaded into joining another faction AND have to do the first DB quest in order to complete a certain TG quest. I hope whoever thought this one up is never allowed to write for Beth again.