One thing to consider in our overall discussion is that the community of dead-is-dead players is much larger than our thread here maintained by VATROU. We all share the one rule. We don’t all give ourselves the same exceptions. While one person may decide that something is a glitch and VATROU may agree that it is allowable in the thread, there will still be players who continue to hold themselves to their own standard and rely on their own judgment. Lots of people doing something doesn’t mean that everyone would, or that I should. The flip side of that of course is that just because I wouldn’t reload doesn’t mean that I’m saying someone else shouldn’t.

In your examples above, I would not have reloaded any of those times. Situation number 3 begs for a short discussion. In your example of getting stuck between rocks on a mountainside, like you I would consider that to be my fault as I was engaging in risky behavior. However there are other places such as walking along the edge of a path where getting stuck or suddenly falling through stairs and into the void would let me reload. Again, my judgement only applies to me, not to anyone else.

I sympathize completely with losing a long-term character who is important to you. Plenty of people have faced your situation and decided to simply carry on with the character in regular play, sometimes adding consequences for any further death experiences. (That’s been covered thoroughly in other threads, and I don’t want to derail Ulda’s trial by launching a death-with-consequences discussion here.) I have a bunch of characters whose games I would reload in an instant if they die. You won’t hear about them in the dead-is-dead thread, though. That’s not how I play them.

It seems to me that there is more than the fate of one incarnation of Ulda at stake here. If you create a character who is so powerful that a death by NPC archer should be considered a glitch, what is the point of continuing to play her in a dead-is-dead environment? Is it still dead-is-dead if falling off a cliff is the only way the numbers say she should be able to die, so other deaths don’t count? Or is that don’t-fall-off-a-cliff? For me the spirit of this playstyle is risk and consequences. Reducing the risks to the point where there should be no consequences would defeat my purpose.

Good luck with your decision. Whatever path you take, I hope you can move on without regrets and recapture all of the enjoyment that our characters in their flawed but marvelous world can provide.

Ah Grits esteemed colleague. I must give you a short reply. Ulda has never been so powerful as to be invincible......falling is an ever present danger and there are always combinations of top level nasties then can gang up to take her down. That's not an issue. But you know when an npc inexplicably gains well over double its normal kill power, that something is wrong or not working as expected.

In the wider picture even thats not the choker. It's that the game is telling me that I am practically not permitted to run a very long term char on Legendary and mechanisms may be being employed to ensure that is so. Glargg is right you know! The game is balanced for Adept and not configured to entertain DiD. But we know that with care and skill it can be done.......right up until this happened to Ulda and I have decided to expose it to critical anolysis on the public stage!

This could have wider ramifications than just Ulda......the game almost has an umbridge setting built in. It tried to kill you with every badass it can throw at you.....high level named Draugr.....tough bandit Chiefs.....three Marauders at once etc etc. but with tactical skill, patience and taking advantage of smithing, alchemy, enchanting and whatever else the vanilla game provides, you still doggedly survive......so the game has one final ace to play.....the random, unlabelled, Devastating npc. And on reload he miraculously reverts to standard thus removing any chance to explore his super powered capabilities.......I say foul play!

MFW it was that exact soul gem

Yer a fortune teller, neil.

This, of course, is the ultimate answer. And there's nobody else that one really needs to explain it to, either.

1. I didn't say that it wasn't allowable. I said that I would consider it my responsibility. My household is probably not like yours, so I can't really presume to speak for you. So I wasn't.

2. I wouldn't fast travel or reload if stuck, but I'm on PC, which means I can use a console command to toggle collision off, and extricate my stuck character. I was just pointing out one possible way of getting out of stuck without reloading, and possibly losing a great deal of progress. I don't think it falls under "despicable" to fast travel to a very nearby location for that purpose. But that's your call. In any event, I wasn't disagreeing with your argument on this one, just offering an alternate solution.

3. Well, you clearly understand that I was joking. The collision inconsistencies in the game bother me, too, but I usually live with them (or, in this case, die with them.) Your call, I'd say.

The "falling through bridge" would be a good example of a glitch where I definitely would reload. I've been bitten by that one a lot in Oblivion, where it randomly happens to the bridge leading to the Imperial City.

The main point I was getting to was my point #6 in my previous post. The game was designed with Master being the highest difficulty, and balanced around that. I'm pretty sure they didn't rebalance all of the possible damage events when they added the Legendary setting. And besides that, the game is not intended to be played DiD; the automatic reload-on-death is proof of that. You're playing beyond the boundaries of what was intended or conceived by the game developers, so at that point, it clearly falls on you to decide what's a "fair" death.

For myself, I decided long ago that characters I wanted to play to a high level would not be DiD, and if a DiD player-character should manage to survive through a lot of adventures, I consider it an accomplishment. I assume that a DiD character is going to die, sooner or later, and accept that truth because the risky playstyle gives me a greater sense of connection to the character.

Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance - the Kübler-Ross five-stage model for the Grieving Process. I'd say that your "Trial" represents "Bargaining."

In any event, I wish you well in this, and I'm not going to criticize you for whatever way this plays out.

What is the relevancy of failing to save? That would mean you lost progress if you reload, but isn't the issue whether to reload or not, rather than how much progress is lost if you reload?

Seriously? If you take a 30 second pee break and a small child or pet messes with your controller while you are away, you are not going to reload? I don't understand the logic behind that. Are you supposed to completely shut down your PC/Xbox and unplug it and take the plug into the bathroom with you every time you need to go? That would seem to be the logical implication of what you are saying.

I don't have kids in my house, but I have a dog. You can bet if I put down the controller to go to the bathroom and the dog stepped on it while I was afk, I am going to reload without thinking twice. On the other hand, if I fall asleep at the controller, then that's on me and I would not reload that. That would be a slippery slope because most of my DiD deaths are a result of playing tired and being half asleep with slowed reaction times and fuzzy decision making, so if I reloaded when I fell completely asleep, it would be a slippery slope to blaming death on me being tired.

So, I have a fairly bright line rule about these things, and falling asleep or any other issue that is the players fault is not grounds for a reload, but anything external factor that happens when I am afk is going to be cause for me to reload. I would not treat dog of child messing with the controller any differently than a power outage.

I mean really, if we are going to refuse to reload because a child messed with the controller while we are in the can, what about if the child loads up the game by himself while we are at work? What if the child is entitled to play the game but with their own characters but loads your character by mistake and the character dies before the child exits the game? What if the kid then realizes what has happened and shuts the game down and sneaks off. If you find out about that are you going to delete the character? What if you don't find out about it for a month and you have put in another 300 hours on the character since the "death"?

Quite a few people play on shared systems, so I personally don't think refusing to reload in such situations is terribly reasonable. And I don't see any material difference between someone booting up your system and messing with it vs picking up your controller while you are afk. Granted, its a single player game, so we can each decide what is reasonable for us, but I am not sure I see the logic behind refusing to reload because of something that happened as a result of external forces while you were afk.

Seriously. For me it’s simple: I was being careless? Then no reload. If I had little kids running around my house I would sure as heck not be gaming. Your expectations will be different, as your life will differ from mine. Like I said before, I only hold myself to my standards.

We do have a history of shenanigans in my household, though. During times of duress (when I have successfully pranked one of my children and am in fear for my belongings and wellbeing) I have been known to bring controllers, cell phone, wallet, sunglasses, Kindle, and keys into the bathroom with me. And sometimes forget and leave them in there.

Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't the big question here whether Sanctuary Guardians at level mid-fifties can do enough damage to one-shot a player character with 600 health and 500 armor at legendary difficulty?

Legendary means 300% damage to to the player, so 200 points of damage from an attacker would translate into a player health loss of 600. However, there is also the armor to consider. 500 armor is conservatively at least a 60% damage reduction, meaning the enemy would have to deal 500 damage before modifications.

Let's assume these guardians have maxed archery and are using daedric bows and daedric arrows. Daedric bow and arrow is 19 + 24 = 43 damage. Maxed archery gives +50% damage. The guardian archers appear to be based on forsworn ravager templates, and these in turn have both the x2.5 extra damage perk and critical shot 2 (15% for +25% critical hit). That's about all the damage info I can find.

So let's do some math. The base is 43 damage. Critical strike might add another 11 damage. Maxed archery presumably does not factor in critical strike but let us be conservative and assume that it does. That adds ((43 + 11) / 2 = ) 27 damage. The sum is now 81. Conservatively letting the extra damage perk apply to everything takes us to (81 * 2.5 = ) 202.5 ~203 damage. This should in principle be the peak amount of damage that guardian archers can do. Factor in difficulty and it becomes 609 damage. Factor in armor and Ulda suffers a health loss of 243,6 ~244. 244 is quite a bit less than 500 and just about half the damage required for a one shot kill, even under rather conservative assumptions.

All in all, I cannot make this math work out. There's no reason why a recolored forsworn ravager with daedric bow and arrow can one hit kill a character with 600 health and 500 armor, not even on legendary difficulty. Either the game glitched and triggered the hit twice or my knowledge of the combat mechanics in Skyrim is way, way off.

I've found no evidence one way or the other, but I wonder... is there ever an instance where the game awards sneak damage to the shot made by the NPC? It wouldn't/doesn't show up as a perk unless it was triple damage under "Deadly Aim", but double damage could be very borderline in this case, eh?

The Sanctuary Guardians are members of the Forsworn class and get their stats from the corresponding levelled lists. Found it on http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Sanctuary_Guardian and later confirmed it in the Creation Kit. Couldn't find any reference to their perks -will keep digging though, since this "case" caught my interest.

Update - Just found them:

Extra Damage025 (2.5x), Powershot, Ranger, CriticalShot60 (15% Critical Chance), Quickshot, CustomFit, FightingStance, Bladesman30, Bonebreaker30, Hack&Slash30, MagicResistance50 (20%), Regeneration, Respite and Recovery30 (Magicka Regen 25%).

Hmm there are damage AI perks in Fallout 3 that ignore armor,but honestly if you think that you will still have fun playing with her do it.But whenever I had something like that and continued I stopped playing shorty after because it feels like I was cheating.

Ps:They have the forsowrn class and some Forsworn archers have the Extra damage 2.5 Perk.Oh and can the AI do critical hits?

From what I've found above, they can.

Black Spider factored in critical hits in his calculation. Although... I'm not certain if he factored in the perked critical hits bonus with two slots (which is what they have).

You know, there's a bug with NPC arrow damage that squares some value instead of multiplying it, which is why one-shots are so ridiculously common.

Considering the unnoficial patches are not available to you as a console player, I'd say Ulda didn't have to die.

Due to recent research (thanks guys) the complexity of the evidence has increased. The discovery of the Forsworn build and 2.5x perk is troubling, but the defence will make good use of Black Spider's findings also, I'm sure. Neil's proposition of 'Sneak Damage' would provide a serious bonus attack for the Prosecution. However, npcs using sneak do actually crouch in sneak as the player char does. The Guardian in question was not crouched/sneaking.

In the light of these serious material findings the trial has been postponed until tomorrow to give the briefs more time to prepare their arguments (meaning in the real world I need to work it all out, understand it and think about it some more).

When I first began to argue a case for not simply accepting Ulda's demise as per my( and our) usual DiD practice, little did I realise the long reaching potential consequences of the in depth investigation. Killing this Ulda iteration is a pain and very sad......but not as sad as the realisation that perhaps NO Legendary DiD char can actually survive Skyrim in the end. If that should be so...my Legendary DiD over arching Raison D'être is destroyed.

Do you understand that? My Everest will transform from a difficult rewarding challenge to a statistical impossibility. Ruined! I will be relegated to the ranks of either 'easy play'. Or Reloader.....neither are acceptable to me.
My four year infatuation with this game will have crashed in spectacular style.
That doesn't leave anything else to say..................

Personally, I think that the defining concept here might boil down to "can" vs "will". the game of Skyrim is all about random events. Random enemies, random loot, random damage. You know for a fact that the archer who shot Ulda was randomly generated, and that the damage he dealt was also random, at least in the strictest sense, yes?

I don't believe it's possible given that chaotically random element to say that a character can't survive simply because there is no way to tell what realities will actually be in play. Even if Skyrim randomly places an NPC that is overpowered, that does not mean the NPC CAN'T be beaten. I've got the notion (based on my own experiences) that if you survive his first shot, things go to relative normal from that point on... until you happen (in the course of random generation) to run into the next overpowered cretin.

In my mind, it's rather like both surviving such an encounter or dying in such an encounter is rather like being hit by lightning. The odds of the same spot being hit being hit by lightning a second time are precisely the same as they were the first time. So, you made it through 55 levels before being hit by lightning, odds would say that sometime in the next 55 levels it will happen again. Combined, the odds of running into Superbad are then perhaps one in 55 levels. How many levels do you think you will have to pass before you have reached your goal? More than 110? More than 165 (is that even possible?)

Sah has demonstrated that DiD characters can realistically make it to level 90 in any case. Whether it was luck, skill, playstyle, or whatever, who knows... but that's not important. What's important is that it HAS been done, and therefore is not impossible. I tend to think if you can get to level 90 you can get as far as you want... with a lot of skill and a little luck. After all, the odds of winning Powerball (an American lottery for those not familiar with it) are approximately 1 in 18 million. Some people say "You can't win the powerball lottery, so why try, but the fact is that somebody wins it almost every week or two.

Trying to play Skyrim on Legendary as a DiD character seems to me to be a lot like playing the lottery from what I can see. Hard to do? YES! Is luck required? YES! is it impossible? Hell no.

Just my opinion, of course.