I'm not sure exactly how this topic is going to do, but I'm hoping some will bear with me.

How do you achieve an old-school rpg feeling/atmosphere/aesthetic in Skyrim?

When the promotional art and vids started coming out in 2011, I noticed right off that Skyrim seemed dark. Dangerous. It evoked the 'Conan' universe more than anything in its predecessor, Oblivion.

That was one of the things that got me excited about the game, in fact.

After playing a bit, Skyrim seemed rather less deadly (still plenty dark, though). Most of the dungeons have a great design, but sometimes the set-piece encounters make you feel like you're along for a ride rather than exploring, if that makes sense. There's also something about the quests, I think - the lack of meaningful alternatives to many of the questlines - that limits player agency.

It's hard to avoid this in a computer game, no doubt.

But lately I've been wondering how to inject some of the feeling of original RPGs into a playthrough of Skyrim. I think it's possible, somewhat, and I hope you have some thoughts.

What do I mean by "old-school RPG feeling"? Here are some ideas:

-character motivations tend to be simple, rather than complex. The focus is often on exploring dangerous ruins or unknown caverns in order to score some big loot, acquire powerful artifacts, or just explore for exploration's sake ("adventure!")

-given those morally ambiguous motivations, characters are not necessarily heroes. They tend not to be caught up in grand causes. (This is particularly difficult to avoid in Skyrim, if you plan on pursuing any of the major questlines.)

-characters tend not to be super-specialized. In early iterations of D&D, there were very few character classes, no skills, and no feats. In other words, there were few ways to mechanically distinguish one warrior from another. Instead, distinctions were a result of roleplaying (character attitude) or equipment choices ("I only use axes.").

-because characters couldn't increase their power through specialization, players instead had to rely on logistics, strategy and tactics to solve problems.

-oh, and they needed to plan so carefully in the first place because the world was a dangerous place. Characters were not walking demigods. Low-level play in particular required a careful approach.

Mods can address some of these issues. I'm currently running Requiem, which does a great deal to provide an old-school feeling in terms of difficulty.

But beyond mods, how do you play Skyrim to evoke the gritty, low-fantasy feeling of those old RPGs?

More specifically:

What sort of characters lend themselves best to this kind of play?

What quests do you do, and what quests do you avoid?

How do your characters approach "adventuring"? Do they have certain goals that guide their exploration of the world?

I really want to give an answer, but I can't, because my idea of "old school RPG" doesn't seem to match yours at all. Maybe because I played GURPS and Champions more than D&D...

I also can't see how the criteria you list are not satisfied (or at least satisfiable) in Skyrim. My first and longest running character matches nearly all those criteria really well - he's all about exploration and bounty hunting, and shies away from the "big" stories (except the Companion line). He's an archer first, but is a good all-round fighter with decent skills and perks in one-handed, block, and light armor. As for difficulty, well, he got owned by mudcrabs regularly at low levels, and there are some mob types that he knows he has to be careful with...

That said, I think it's more fun to play more specialized, tailored characters with RP goals that "make sense" in the world context - even if they can't be achieved in-game. My politically-oriented mage and my Batman-inspired thief/illusionist vampire have gotten much more game time lately. These characters hearken back to my old RPG experiences more than my mercenary archer ever did - but then again, I was never into the whole "you're adventurers and you meet in an inn" style of play.

Yeah, for sure 'old school' is a relative term, and I've never played GURPS or Champions.

I think some of those criteria *are* satisfiable by Skyrim. This thread was basically intended (I guess) to see how other people approach the game in the kind of style I outlined.

And I love specialized characters - most of the time. Sometimes, though, it's so relaxing to just kick back and get into a mindset of being a fragile, slightly greedy scrapper instead of a grim badass.

I remember in Oblivion, I got into roleplaying my characters pretty heavily. I'd think of these incredibly specialized characters, with strengths and weaknesses and backstories and goals, enemies and allies, quests chosen carefully to match the exact style I was looking for.

Then one day, while coming up with a new character, I noticed the generic title 'Adventurer' that the game gives you as a class title. I kept it. And I had a blast. This guy was probably the closest to a D&D 'fighter' that you could get, motivated by nothing more than a desire to explore dangerous places and see what he could find. The game almost seemed tailor-made for that kind of playstyle.

(That's one of the things I love about these games - the fact that so many playstyles are not only available, but once you start playing them you go, "Yes! Now this is how the game was meant to be played!")

So I was just wondering how others put a little of that kind of old-school into their playthroughs.

^^This^^

The first RPG I ever played was D&D back in the mid-1970s. I tried a lot of other RPGs over the years, but D&D (actually AD&D, by then) was the only one I kept coming back to...until I found Skyrim. Now I don't need to deal with other peoples' schedules when I want to RP. My XBox is my DM and I can RP any time I want (using some or all the things Nago said above, depending on the character). That is everything I need to achieve that "old school" feeling.

Honestly I don't think you have ever played old school rpgs.

Best way to experince old school is to uninstall skyrim and buy something from gog. New vegas is a pretty good option too.

I haven't played D&D that to be honest but some other old school RPGs I have played. As a Tolkien fan I started roleplaying with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth_Role_Playing. It stayed as my favorite but I played some other RPGs as well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_2000, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runequest, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_2020 just to mention few). Virtual roleplaying I started with Morrowind - that's the first one I heard about. It's sad I never heard about Arena or Daggerfall when they were new games. The main connection in all these RPGs is that you play as a character. That's what the roleplaying games are about - you take a role as another person. With both old school RPGs and virtual RPGs you need to use your imagination to break the limitations of the game and to make your character and world around him to be alive. You are writer of your story, actor of your play and dreamer of your dream.

Skyrim is all about using your imagination and letting the game bring out the visuals.

I started with tabletop D&D in the last 1970's as well as many many old school crpgs. None of the older games gave you the freedom that Skyrim does. You were forced along a path that you couldn't ignore if you wanted to progress. You can ignore anything you want in Skyrim. Anything except Helgen.

Create a character, create a story, and let it unfold as you play.

The 24 stones of Barrenziah (?), a series of books, the dragon walls, all can serve as a purpose for your explorations. Let the quest givers steer you in the right, or wrong direction. Add more to the conversation that's actually there (imagination),

Pay a ransom with 500 gold ingots...that you find....not buy. Or do the same with flawless gems.

Create your story. And have fun.

Being about as 'old-school' as you can get (D & D original three booklets in a box)...

Back then the main objective of playing was character improvement. Big treasures were nice, but complicated matters because wealth made it harder to imagine why the character would leave the safe town with the warm inn and go looking for a cold dangerous hle in the ground. A 'quest' with some sort of plot or objective that made sense was nice, but always ran to an end eventually. Ultimately we went into dungeons or stormed castles just so our characters improved so we could go into more difficult dungeons and storm bigger castles, and eventually had to come to grips with the fact it made no sense.

Jumping ahead a few decades I find that Skyrim is pretty close to completing the circle. It has good plots, but nothing horribly long or demanding. It has treasure, but plenty of sinks (and I've added some of my own) to bleed it out so the 'why leave town?' question isn't an obstacle. And the perk trees make the next level up a desirable goal in itself.

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I think a lot of people impose backstory and/or 'immersion' on RPGs, or vice versa. To me, you can get 'immersed' playing Halo, and you can apply all the backstory to it that you want, but that will never make it an RPG. The difference between this shooter and an RPG is the character improvement aspect, which is why at the end of the provided plot there's nothing to do but run the credits.

On the other side, the original pen and paper RPGs were certainly not 'immersive' and they didn't require any backstory (imagination was pretty much completely engaged in current story). Maybe a quick dash of 'starting from a shop or a house or a position as the Baron's butler, but it was how the character performed in those very early levels that shaped their persona, not some backstory limitation. Having first level skills was more than limiting enough that nobody worried much about 'my guy was a woodcutter so he wouldn't want to use a sword instead of an axe'...if you found a good sword that was the best route to surviving and reaching the next level you used it, backstory be damned...but if the first monster you had a near thing with was an ogre that character would likely be played as 'hates ogres with a fury' for as long as he 'lived', and if you found a very cool weapon early on or managed to luck into a decisive critical hit it would likely shape the preferences of the character for a long time.

None of those are crpgs.

In every game you play as a character but that doesn't make every game ever an rpg.

Pen and paper rpgs required imagination because the technology is a bit limited. With crpg it is not.

Josh Sayer said that "if you need to house rule something then clearly the game is broken" (I'm slightly paraphrasing).