When I played through Morriwind (though still haven't finished the expansions) I got a little heavy into player developer addons, though most of them were simply additional houses for my character. With my Oblivion game, I think I went overboard on the wrong ones...

The two addons that I have (belatedly) come to realise have pretty much broken the game for me were the Bag of Holding and the Assassin's Underground.

I initially picked up the bag of holding mod because I quite often found in Morrowind that when I went into a given gave, ruin or dungeon that I just couldn't bring enough back with me, accounting for my consumables, gear, alchemy gatherings and scrolls. the bag of holding gave me an easy means of carting everything back with me. Perhaps far TOO easy, and now I wonder whether I should have just made multiple trips back and forth to sell stuff.

The Assassin's Underground was pretty interesting, adding in a one-stop shop for armour, weapons, & other supplies suitable to my Assassin character. The problem with this one ended up being I had a much higher armour rating in light armour than I probably should have, along with having some serious buffs to a number of the major skills for the class. some of those enchanted arrows may have been a bit overpowered as well.

on top of this, at some point or another, each of these addons ended up bugging out the odd quest. The bag of holding screwed up the final RP at the end of the Thieves' Guild chain, and the underground messed up the scripting on a late stage of the main quest in the Shivering Isles.

My question to you guys: shold I try replaying my assassin without ANY addons whatsoever or should I just wait until Skyrim comes out to do that?

Also, what sorts of addons do you guys find add more quality game time to the experience without making things too easy as I seem to have found?

If those are the choices I'd play Oblivion without any addons now.






Most mods I use are tailored to specific characters. But I have a short list of mods I tend use for every character.

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=OblivionMods.Detail&id=3953 by Oscuro, dev_akm, MadCat221.
Not just a 'creature-adding' mod, not just a 'difficulty' mod, not just a 'gameplay-tweaking' mod, Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul is actually one of the finest finest roleplaying mods around. http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=OblivionMods.Detail&id=1757 by Martigen, Corepc Dev_Akm Shadowborn is the perfect complement to Oscuro, adding much-needed spontaneity to Oscuro's static world. Crank Martigen's mod all the way up and Oblivion will feel as wonderfully unpredictable as an MMO. These mods are so inseparable to me I count them as one.

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=OblivionMods.Detail&id=2764 by, of course, DarN.
This essential mod goes a long way toward making Oblivion's consolized interface useable. Configurable from within the game via a menu. I modify it with one of Luchaire's re-colorings, either http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16387 or http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16897 I also use http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=14822 by WillieSea and http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=19063 by Badmagic to enliven the map with color and to replace what I consider to be ugly map markers with more aesthetically pleasing X's.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=14065 by tejon, or http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=13879 bu ABO.
Two excellent character-levelling mods that do away with stat management, allowing the player to concentrate on roleplaying. Realistic Leveling tends to be the better mod for the more jack-of-all-trades characters or for characters that change during the course of a game. nGCD tends to be the better mod for characters that fit conventional Dungeon-and-Dragons archetypes and never deviate from that during the course of a game.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=14304 by tejon.
This mod allows the player to control the speed of advancement of each skill. Easily configurable via an .ini.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=11237 by tejon. Willpower again has an affect on the player's vulnerability to magic, as in previous ES games.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=7484 by Deathless Aphrodite.
Makes the player lose fatigue when running. When the player's fatigue hits 0 he starts to walk. Also allows the player to sprint for a brief time.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=25078 by TheNiceOne.
Using this mod merchants' gold goes up and down with each trade. Also does away with the haggle slider (what a relief!) Allows the player to specify how much gold they recive from looting containers, enemies, as quest rewards, etc. All configurable via .ini.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=12149 by tejon. Attempts to expand on Bethesda's concept of Birthsigns and make them for interesting and fun, at all levels.

http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=35300 by ZenshinZenrei. Introduces three special advantages to each of the predefined Oblivion classes in order to make them more unique. Advantages are similar to special class traits from Arena and Daggerfall. Custom classes pick three Advantages manually.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2037 by Quarn and Dejunai.
Removes flowers from plants after you have picked them. This is a great little visual aid when picking many plants very close together.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1840 by Woodman, http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=OblivionMods.Detail&id=21 by Tandem, http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=5138 by Soor, http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=5919 by b3w4r3, http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=OblivionMods.Detail&id=129 by Talonhoff and http://morrowind4kids.com/pseronwyrd/PWRunSpeed.zip by Pseron Wyrd are a collection of small tweak mods that I cannot bear to play without. Chase Camera Mod is essential to me because I play exclusively in third person and will quickly become nauseous without it; Bethesda went to great lengths to create the illusion of a seamless worl when they made Oblivion and then went and ruined it by spamming messages onto the player's screen everytime they enter a new cell, and No Load gets rid of that; Initial Glow gets rid of what I consider to be a very ugly 'plastic wrap' enchantment effect; Sleep Rest Wait Any Time, because no game has any business telling me when I can sleep, or where; No Psychic Guards tones down guards' clairvoyance a little bit; Run Speed Tweak slows down the base running/walking speed of the game to Morrowind's running/walking speeds.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16005 by mmmpld'
A fun little 'immersion' mod that allows the player to see their character use the same getting-into and getting-out-of bed animations used by NPCs.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=11449 by RamyEnfant.
Adds a collection of new jump animations. The characters execute a cool Night-Elf-style forward roll with weapons sheathed and a variety of other jumps with different weapons drawn. I often jump just to watch these animations. I'm easily pleased.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4387 by CorePC.
Adds much-needed life to Cyrodiil's roads. The merchants are great if you like to spend extended time away from cities as I do. To this I add http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=20575 by LazyAltmer. These two mods do a lot to make Cyrodiil a lot less lonely when travelling the roads. They also help fight, too, which has saved my character's life more than once when playing all these overhaul mods.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16513 by Bananasplit, Wolfslady, Reckless, SilentResident, Nernie, Vorians and Ismelda.
The way the cities of Tamriel should have looked. Spend hours wandering around like a tourist, awestruck at how different (and gorgeous) everything looks. Comes in modular form - you can choose to redo all of Cyrodiil's cities or just one. It's your choice. When I'm not using Better Cities I use Arthmoor's http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1019807, which tranfers the vanilla cities into the Cyrodiil worldspace, ala Morrowind. Wonderful for those of us who love to ride horses through town.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2536 by Max Tael.
This is one of the plugins in Max Tael's Natural Environments suite of mods. It adds several non-hostile flying animals such as birds and butterflies.

http://morrowind4kids.com/pseronwyrd/PW_MorrowindFog.zip by Pseron Wyrd.
Oblivion's near-infinite view distance is ugly, in my opinion, and it also makes Cyrodiil feel much smaller than it ought to. This is my attempt to simulate Morrowind's fog. Combined with Run Speed Tweak, Cyrodiil feels as large and wonderfully mysterious as Vvardenfell once did.

http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=942911 by Arthmoor.
Adds Morrowind-style transport to the game. A nicely immersive touch.

http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=984109 by XMarksTheSpot, Brumbek & Ismelda.
Another mod I can't play without anymore. It adds windows that turn off and on in synch with day/night cycles and also, optionally, smoke from chimneys. Comes with a nice variety of window color tints too.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=28977 by Emma.
An Alchemist-oriented companion with a mind of her own (and, as a bonus, dialog voiced by Emma herself).

http://oblivion.brashendeavors.net/bows/ by Brash.
A wonderful mod for anyone who loves light, ranger-ish amror and slightly more natural, non-fantasy-type bows. I also love the ranger camp just outside Weye (conflicts with Weye TICS, but not AFK Weye).

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=22828 by afk_dwip - or - http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=9514 by TamaraVico.
I tend to alternate these two mods, as I love them both. I adore Tamara's Weye mod, but it does come with a framerate hit. I just love her cramped medieval-looking alleys and its attention to detail. It is quite possibly my favorite town expansion mod for either Morrowind or Oblivion. The area occupied by dwip's mod is smaller and, thus, conflicts with fewer mods and also does not hurt framerates quite as much (in my experience). It comes with some interesting quests though and is also nicely-laid out.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=35908 by Shezrie. A compilation of five of Shezrie's superb villages, all in the Tamriel worldspace. Lakeland Village (south of Imperial City), Ravenwood Village (north of Chorrol), Woodland Village straddling the road between Imperial City and Skingrad (my favorite up to now), Haven Bay (in Valenwood) and the centerpiece of the mod, a complete makeover and expansion of Pell's Gate. Shezrie has been an excellent house modder since the days of Morrowind and her villages for Oblivion are Bethesda-quality in my opinion.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=22401 by The Tamriel Rebuilt Team.
Stirk is a small but highly detailed island in the Abecean Sea west of Anvil. Those who are familiar with Tamriel Rebuilt's work for Morrowind will know that this is high-quality modding with an eye towards accuracy in matters of lore.

wow I don't even know where to begin with that list of addons! most of them do sound like they add a decent dynamic without breaking the gameplay. I'm curious about a couple though..

What exactly do those two mods do to "do away" with stat management? I'm a little confused as to what you mean here beyond the general statement that it allows you to focus more on roleplaying.

From your brief description of Enhanced Economy, there appears to me to be the potential to make the mercantile skill a bit irrelevant and making gold a bit too easy, which was one of the things that to me felt ruined with the Assassin's Underground. Not only were the items a little too overpowered, but the vendors had WAY more gold than any other in the game. I'm also a bit confused as to how well you can advance Mercantile with the removal of the Haggle slider. I may be misunderstood, but I thought that trying to push the haggle slider up more was a risk/reward tweaker (the more you try to haggle in your favour, the harder it is to trade succssfully, but the greater the benefit if you succeed). how does this addon adjust for removing that slider? I do like the idea of the vendor's gold increasing or decreasing as you trade with him/her sort of like how things worked in Fallout 3.

Would you necessarily use Crowded Roads Revisted and Tamriel Travellers together or interchangeably?

For No Psychic Guards I'm assuming that this cuts down or removes the problem of being arrested in one town for a crime commited, say, on the other side of the map, is that correct? Does this vary at all with proximity between the two hypothetical locations? i.e. assaulted someone in anvil, got away from anvil guards, and went to either Skingrad or (even farther) to Cheydinhal?

Do you have any top-of-your-head examples as to what kinds of advantages are added by Class Advantages? How significantly do they affect the gameplay?

With Running Revised, how does it affect the various perks from achieving each tier threshold of Athletics? The info in the game manual says, by default, that each stage just increases the fatigue regeneration rate, but I thougth that, at novice at least, running DID cause your fatigue to go down. I'm almost certain that's how it worked in Morrowind anyway, but then again it's been a while since I last played it.

Most of the rest looks to be more aesthetics than anything else which I may check out. Although I went heavy on the many different homes I had in Morrowind, I didnt have much else in the way of addons for that game so I'm actually quite curious to see the works of Shezrie and The Tamriel Rebuilt Team

I was also wondering whether any of the city/town addons alter the build of the houses you can buy. I didnt buy every house in the game (although with my current game where I'm one wealthy bugger I COULD buy them all and actually started doing so!) but the ones I did buy were all crappy little shacks. I purchased in the Imperial City, Bravil and Leyawin. The first two I would expect to be complete holes, given the waterfront location in the City and the general down-trodden shacks in Bravil. I was really disappointed with the one in Leyawin since that town was a bit better looking aside to this run down hut. I did also buy the more elaborately-quested home in Anvil, which is actually a nice looking place once you sort out the little problem it comes with, but from what I've actually looked at it's the only one that isn't a dirty little wood-plank shack.

thanks for your very thorough input thus far!

By "do away" I mean that they push number-crunching into the background. There are no menus to fiddle with. No bonues points to assign. You do not have to sleep to level up (you gain levels automatically, on-the-fly, sometimes right in the middle of combat). Skills contribute a small percentage to many Attributes at once (doing away with the whole business of picking a skill only because it raises a particular Attribute). You play your character and let the mod handle stats management silently, in the background.




Just the opposite, in fact. Merchants don't have infinite gold: they receive/lose gold when you buy/sell items. You can restrict the number of haggle attempts. Bartering is done at real values, not rounded up (an arrow worth 1 gold, sold at 30%, will net you 0.3 gold, not 1). Item prices varies depending on the city and the merchant (a Smith will pay well for swords, but not for clothes). You can change the base price of various item types. You can adjust how much gold you get from quests or from any other sources. You can reduce the number of enchanted items found in the game. You can gain more experience when you sell expensive items or group of items. You can reprice individual items by editing/importing text files with price data. You can reprice the buyable houses. You can reduce the high values of enchanted loot. You can reprice services. You can add taxes that need to be paid on any houses you own. If you do the main quest Merchants' prices and willingness to trade is affected by the Oblivion crisis.

As you can see, the mod does not necessarily make getting rich a walk in the park. Best of all, it is entirely configurable. You can enable or disable any of its features and change any of its number values at any time.






I have used them together in several games. I love seeing NPCs on the roads. It makes the game feel less lonely to me. Plus, they will help you fight! They have saved my butt on more than one occasion. Nowadays I tend to use Crowded Roads by itself. I found that I didn't barter with the merchants very often. But there are times I miss having them around. It's a great convenience to be able to buy a repair hammer out in the wilderness sometimes.

The downside to these mods is that the extra AI causes some slowdowns. How much depends on the computer. Older computers that barely run vanilla Oblivion might have a problem with NPC-adding mods.




No Psychic Guards just cuts down the distance guards perceive crimes. In my next game I will be experimenting with a mod called http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3138 RGO is more ambitious in scope than Psychic Guards. In RGO, if you attack a guard only that Guard will defend himself (no other Guards will attack unless they see the fighting). If you outrun the Guards, they will no longer chase you to the ends of Tamriel. If you are sent to jail, the guards will kill you rather than trying to put you back into your cell if you escape. If you manage to kill all the Guards that witnessed your crime, that crime gold will be removed. If a Guard notices that you are sneaking they will follow you until you stop sneaking.

Each city has its own crime gold. If you attack someone in Chorrol the guards in Cheydinhal will not attack you because they do not know about the crime in Chorrol. Different crimes will be remembered for different amounts of time (typically anywhere from one game day for stealing to seven game days for murder). If you hurt a guard badly enough and there are no other guards to back him up he will flee from you to avoid being killed. You are able to bribe Guards to leave their posts. If he sees you committing a crime, though, he will still come after you.

Guards will arrest NPCs if the NPC has committed a crime and cannot pay their crime gold. The NPC will be escorted to the nearest prison and incarcerated for a period of days depending upon the severity of their crime. If an NPC has the gold to pay for a crime, they will simply pay the fee and not go to jail.

If you're interested in the proximity thing you might like Reneer's mod better than Psychic Guards.





Class Advantages lets you pick three additional passive or active abilities (active abilities can only be activated under specific circumstances). Your character has to meet certain per-requisites to be eligible to select certain powers. The idea is to try to makes classes a little more individualized, as they were in Daggerfall.

I'm making a warrior-type character using the mod now. I will be choosing Endurance as a Favored Attribute with this character so that entitles me to pick "Regenration," which provides a 1 point Restore Health effect that activates every 10 seconds. My character's Endurance will be over 50 at level 1 so she will qualify for "Superior Robust Health," which adds a Health bonus equal to the character's base Endurance at level 1. My character will have both Endurance and Strength as Favored Attributes and Blade as a Major Skill so she will qualify for "Forceful Blow." This adds a 1% Critical hit chance per level, up to a maximum of 40%. Damage bonus is 3x damage/ 5x power attack. Also adds a chance on hit to apply a 75 point Disintegrate Armor effect: 25% on a regular attack, 45% on a power attack.

There are tons of advantages available. Each can only be used by certain classes. I play with OOO and MMM, which ratchet up the difficulty considerably during the early levels, so class advantages like these come in very handy.




I'm not entirely sure, but I believe Running Revised overhauls the vanilla Fatigue system. As you level Athletics you spend less time walking and more time running. You never rech a point when you aren't losing fatigue from running, the effect just gets less noticeable. The mod affects all actors in the game, not just the player. At level 1 you will probably find that you are walking more than a lot of the enemies around you. By the time you hit level 20 or 30 you will probably find that you have begun to out-run your enemies. You will turn around to find that they have begun to walk. I always feel a great sense of accomplishment when this happens.

With this late hour it took me a while to figure out what you meant here and then it suddenly clicked. You're talking about how in vanilla Oblivion the modifiers applied to the attribute point distributions on leveling depend on how many skill-ups for that level-up were skills based on that attribute, correct?



that is very robust. I may give it a shot after all. some of those houses did seem stupidly expensive (1,000g I think for the little one room shack in the waterfront of the Imerial city... that was kinda dumb). I'm not sure how much I'd want to fiddle with base prices aside to that one, and maybe the crappy shacks in Leyawin, Bravil & Bruma (see the question about city player housing near the end of my last post).




this shouldn't be a problem for me in oblivion. Skyrim is the one I'm concerned about with my current rig...



it does sound like it's even more realistic




This does sound very interesting. Should make a replay of my Assassin a lot more interesting. I'm assuming that Agility would be one of my favoured attributes in this case, but I wonder at how that affects my melee combat with melee weapon skills being strength based. Another thing I had a hard time getting into was fighting primarily with a dagger and without a shield. Most enemies (particularly warrior types and most especially Dremora) tend to have weapons with a much longer reach, I find, and my first assassin play-through had me going longsword & light board 95% of the time. Not sure how best to get around this.

One thing I'm really looking forward to in Skyrim is dual wielding weapons.

Correct.

I don't know much about mods, but I'd replay Oblivion without them again. Skyrim is still a few months away. Even if you don't play an assassin you could RP a different style of chartacter you wouldn't normally pick.