I feel like I have startover-itis. Sometimes when I'm playing I get an idea for a new character or a way new way to do things. Maybe I'm just being picky, or something about my current character just might stand out as odd or doesn't fit with how things should be. When you create characters that last a long time, do you take any steps to plan things ahead, what's the process like for creating someone you really like to play as?

*perfect build (no mistakes with leveling always +5 +5 +1)
*no quests ruined (no npc killing that I may need for a quest later even if it's just a side-quest)
*collecting a complete set of weapons and armour, (a collection in it's own right) for it, stored in my house.

so for me it's mostly about thinking about what I want to become statwise as a level 40, and make sure I pick race, birthsign, atributes and skills to suit it.
also I need to watch my leveling, pick skills that level not to much as mayors so I can manage the +5 boosts
for quests I use the wiki.. if I am thinking about killing an npc I always check if he/she is needed in a quest later BEFORE making that kill.
about the collecting gear, that takes little effort, just maintaining a sheat what I already have.. so I wont use up valueble inventory space for items I already have in my set.
(as it is impossible to remember it all on my own)

and when I feel something is missing for my char, anything, I try to downloand or make a mod, to fill that gap.

You'd think I would be a good one at answering this, having used the same decrepit avatar for both my plays-through....one circa 920+ hours, the other 1.5k hours and going strong. Alas, I can not. He is a fluke. A throw-away character created to learn game mechanics with, then delete in favor a custom-made character who would see me through the game. Only, my disposable avatar and I bonded and have been together ever since. If and when I began another lengthy play-through he will likely journey with me again. I've not yet discovered nearly all there is to know about him.

I at least had the sense to customize his face to my liking. I doubt I've have stuck with him otherwise.

-Decrepit-

I am probably the biggest re-starter in all of Elder Scrolls history. I have probably started hundreds of characters since Oblivion was released.

To me, it's not a problem to be overcome (I know, that's the disease talking ). It's possible to restart many times and enjoy the process. My favorite part of most games is the beginning. I sometimes do the tutorial dungeon just for the fun of it. It's relaxing to me. I love levels 1-10 in Oblivion. There's something optimistic about it for me. I feel like I have a chance to erase past mistakes, wipe the slate clean (something I wish I could do in real life).

Restarting is a problem only if we do not enjoy it. And here, I think some people do not enjoy it because they are told they are not supposed to enjoy it. They are told that the "proper way" to play a video game is to start at the beginning and proceed in an efficient manner to the end. If a person hears that enough times they might begin to think that maybe they're doing something wrong if they start a new character.

If you still want help here are some older threads on the topic that may give you some ideas about changing patterns:

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1153682-restartitis/

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1116923-re-starters-anonymous/page__p__16406202__fromsearch__1#entry16406202

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1115805-completely-random-character/page__view__findpost__p__16384187__fromsearch__1

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1123563-anybody-ever-play-as-a-character-which-is-counter-intuitive/page__view__findpost__p__16519583__fromsearch__1

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1121584-what-personal-rules-do-you-apply-to-your-characters/page__view__findpost__p__16501462__fromsearch__1

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1115709-self-imposed-rules-for-a-new-game/page__view__findpost__p__16390151__fromsearch__1

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1113643-an-interesting-new-way-to-play/page__view__findpost__p__16341241__fromsearch__1

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1117184-has-anyone-ever-just-played-as-the-unchanged-character/page__view__findpost__p__16411708__fromsearch__1

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1114533-how-do-you-limit-yourself-in-morrowind/page__view__findpost__p__16579862__fromsearch__1

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1121067-does-your-character-have-a-personal-mission/page__view__findpost__p__16494963__fromsearch__1

I have been playing since the Daggerfall days. For me, the hardest thing to accept was any perceived imperfection. I reloaded if I made some silly mistake such as touching something in a shop which triggered a 'STOP THIEF' response. I did a lot of reloading. The hardest thing in the game was to accept the consequences of my choices and actions. When I finally resolved to do just that, a whole new world opened up.

Nowadays, I only play one character at a time. When they die, I start a new character. Just like me, they are fragile and vulnerable. That makes them precious and their heroic moments are true heroism, their desperate escapes with a trail of bandits and creatures hot on their tail is often tragicomic. Watching a sunset over the Niban Basin from some mountain overlook is bittersweet, knowing that it could be their last.

When I start a new character, I have only a vague idea of who they are. The most well defined character for me was the custom class 'Alchemist' Severus Snape. I based him on the character from the Harry Potter movies. Edgy and talented, quirky and angry, and frustrated with his general lack of social acceptance. When I started to get bored around level 25, I asked Severus what would be exciting. His answer was to become a scholar and travel, and discover the whole map. What followed was an epic road trip involving hundreds of hours and some of the best times in the game.

When I created Angel, my current character, I had just lost Sarrah and was thinking about what to do next. Someone started a thread on the forum about there not being any children in the game. Just on a whim, I created Angel. I used the PC console to make her short, took a screenshot and started a thread titled "Discovered; a child in Cyrodil". I never meant to actually play her but then I got curious; What would a child, lost and alone, do?" I decided to play her for an hour just to see. What she did was steal my heart and become a legend.

After putting the game away for some time, I couldn't reconnect with Angel so I rerolled her as a late-teen / early-twenty-something. Unfortunately, I have been upgrading my system and that has resulted in several false-starts but I'm ready to try again.

Complete backstory and personality, Good name and Looks.

Decrepit, Lothran (mirocu’s character), Angel (bobg) and Buffy (my character) are among the most enduring characters that we regularly hear about here. As Decrepit reported, his avatar totals 2500 hours or so. Lothran has over 1500 while young Buffy has played over 700. Bobg has buried two long running characters but continues to travel with the wonderful mage called Angel.

I’m afraid that, like Decrepit, I can offer little insight in how to go about repeating what each of us has stumbled upon.

You might consider your roleplaying style. Do you try to ‘become’ your character? Do you prefer to magically ‘travel with’ your character? Or something different entirely? If you had less than desired results with one of these approaches, consider changing it to another. I know that mirocu, bobg and I have had better results thinking of our character as their own elf or person and travelling with them as perhaps a mentor.

Like any relationship, it is near impossible to put what will work into a formula. Here, however, are some things that I have found helpful:
- I create a basic background for my character, but once I meet her in the pixelated flesh, my influence is dramatically reduced. That is, she calls the shots once her game begins and does not march to my script. Obviously, this takes some trust on the part of both of us, for she does depend on me to help manage some silly controls and such. It is her will that drives what we do though.
- I don’t get wrapped up in stats and skills and gear; rather I focus on trying to listen to my character. If some of that mundane stat/skill junk slips awry a tad, I can fix that in progress. My character creation effort is more focused on things like race, six, birthsign, eye color etc – and those are chosen primarily for the image I want to create that my poor character will have to live with.
- I don’t push the character. If she wants to wrinkle her nose at any or all quests in the game, that is her prerogative.

I see Decrepit and bobg have checked in. I look forward to hearing mirocu’s insights into the longevity of the wonderful dark elf called Lothran.

He should look good.

I had start-overitis in Morrowind something AWFUL. Oblivion, not so much. My satisfaction NOW comes from just enjoy what's around me. I been through the "game" did quests and stuff so like Acadian and others, if my charcter doesn't want to do something, we just move on. Like Pseron, I really love the lower levels. To me that's where the best fun is. In light of that, I tend to hang with 2 characters. I typically have a main, which for me now is Muse. Then I have another one who likes to tread on the darker side of things. This gives me the beauty of both worlds and addresses my multiple personality problems . Both will be a very low level for a really long time because that's just how I play. Very little fighting, lots of travel and RP stuff going on. Heck Muse is still level 1 and I been with her for a couple of weeks now, a bit more maybe.

Any character who takes his/her first breath of the free air of cyrodiil is one that I am satisified with.

Basically I play the Tutorial with every character, and I can just tell by the end of that whether I want to stick with them for a while or not.

That being said most of my characters stories are vignettes rather than sagas, but that in no way makes them less worthwhile.

What usually happens is I'll spend a few weeks, or sometimes months thinking up a bunch of concepts. Like I'll have an idea of what I want my next character to be.

Rogue warrior? That would be Renee Gade II. Lawful Good Paladin? Dyan phor a'Cauz. I'll start with this concept, and for several weeks, I'll either get more and more psyched to start playing this character, or I won't.

Basically, all these ideas fill my head about what I want my next character to actually BE. From there on, I'll start get more and more excited to meet him or her.

1. Knowing what his or her name will be beforehand helps.

... I must have a name. It svcks trying to make this new character, and then getting stuck on what to name her or him WHILE I'm in the creation process. I have to have a clever name, since I'm planning to be with this character for a good long while. Also, Cyrodilic names like "Aerelius Avidus" just confuses me...the name has to be in English!

2. I must have a general idea of age, class (which is always custom), alignment, and abilities.

3. Looks! Sometimes, I'll cut a picture from a mag, or print a pic off the Internet, and try to create a face from this picture. It never looks the same as the pic, of course, but at least the pics give me a direction to go towards.

I guess I'm lucky. I have yet to spend all this time making a new character only to find myself saying Meh! after it's all done.

Thank you for letting me share. *sits down*

One issue I'm coming to terms with is that I've always played with custom races, and they don't always fit neatly into oblivion lore. I guess one thing is that the default races never looked very good to me and the custom races often have better looking heads to start with. Are there any recommended mods that make the vanilla races more tolerable, or maybe a facegen guide on how to get what you want from the sliders? I'm thinking a breton fits me best, I just often think that when you look hard enough at the face it looks like a monkey, and that bottom lip is massive.

You could try this .. http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=35487

Disclaimer: I have not used this so I have no idea what it all does. I had it bookmarked as a possible thing to try out but never did as of yet.

You could also take a look at the http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1213147-oblivion-the-beautiful/ thread. There are several recommendations for faces in the first section.

Try the face change button and then the reset button. I tried that once and it seemed to make one face I couldn't get pretty more attractive.

Would it be weird to tell you, I don't know?

I honestly don't, some characters feel just right and honestly i don't control that, it just is. While other character are like blah, I don't feel a connection to them.

I do the same as many others in this thread, in that I create a rough outline and go from there.

Characters that satisfy me are ones that "speak" to me. Helena, a Healer, is one such character (though vanilla Oblivion limits her somewhat).
I too restart a lot, I've been doing it loads lately trying to find a character to keep me going until I get this on PC where I will re-start Helena along with mods to help our experience. An idea I have at the moment is simply "Female Dunmer Sorceress, House Telvanni".

Bizarre as it sounds, that's actually my answer too.

I've made many characters that I was sure were going to "click." I put weeks and even months of work into some of them and brought them right up to the point where they were ready to hop into the game and then....it all seems to fall apart and I don't know why. I don't know whether I lost interest in them or they lost interest in me. They probably became impatient with me not starting the damn game already. I'm always fiddling with mods (I'm doing it right now. I've had a character ready to go for nearly two weeks, but I keep adding and subtracting mods from my mod list. Meanwhile my character is stuck in that prison cell, tapping her foot, sitting on the stool by the little desk, smoking a cigarette, looking at her watch...)

Other characters I've had serious doubts about, but once we're in the game bam! It's great. Everything feels perfect and I don't know why. The whole business is as mysterious and unpredictable as meeting new people in real life.

I've only ever been itching to restart and abandon a character once, with one that just didn't feel 'right'. Instead of just deleting her save I decided that if she died in the game I would delete her. She slipped up trying to murder someone in Chorrol and the city guards made that decision for me

I have two main characters now, http://www.flickr.com/photos/kellypurple/6158958565/in/photostream/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/kellypurple/5937510927/in/photostream/, neither of which yet have 100 + hours but which I really connect to. Arum in particular has major skills that are absolutely nothing like his character, but we've been through so much together I don't want to restart him. I intended to make a sneaky, evil assassin type with illusion magic backup, but when I started playing him he showed me a whole different personality. He's just recently cut his ties to the dark brotherhood and become a follower of the Nine! He also cannot cast magic- one spell uses up his entire magicka. So I don't even use his major skill of illusion. In fact, his major skills look all over the place, but I've grown to enjoy playing him exactly how he is, so I don't think I will restart his character.

EDIT- Even his name isn't actually 'Arum', it's 'Arumel'. I choose this originally then it really didn't suit him, but I'm on the console so no way of changing it.

I know exactly what you mean, OP. Usually, I'll have one character for each build/faction, and whenever I feel like doing a certain faction again, I'll save over the slot I previously had. I can't have one character be a part of - and especially not the head of - more than one faction, it just doesn't seem logical. That's fair, right?

I have a friend who told me about his character that's done the MQ and is the head of every guild, whose questlines he just slashed through with a typical warrior build. That just gets on my nerves, I don't think that's how TES should be played.

But yeah. To be satisfied with a character, I'd have to roleplay a bit in my head - just background, personality etc. It sort of gets me that much more attached to the character, I guess. And of course, they'd have to be true to their purpose - the Champion of Cyrodiil is just that, NOT the head of the Dark Brotherhood.

I have a hard time sticking with one character too. A lot of my problem is mods. It feels really odd to me when the world changes too much in the middle of a game. If I add too many mods I feel I need to start over.

My first character I imaginatively called Robert (strangely 'tis my name too) and he was the first out of the box...He was pretty much right except for the determination to make him a chatty Nord and have speechcraft as a major skill...Duh...Never worked out right that didn't...But...He did pretty much every quest in the game that wasn't Dark Brotherhood or Thieves Guild...And after I did the main quest, I put him in semi-retirement at his house in Bruma...Sadly I was hassled into sending him into the Shivering Isles by the family and there he is still...*shakes head sadly*...

After Nordy-Boy the characters were more designed...McTemplar (or Robert McBahbsson as I named him) one was designed to level up absurdly fast and he remains my fave character...He absolutely rocks as a warrior and totally deserves his statue in Bruma...

Then came J'Drell-Bank the Argonian who was designed to be a charming treasure hunter, always talking and smiling...He could do the necessary stuff, but he's not a warrior as such...And then, from somewhere came this little green ring and all of a sudden he was Green Lantern of Cyrodill!!...I mean seriously, that was never in the plan!!...Now he's decided he needs to go talk to that dude in Anvil and become a Knight!!...Then he wants to Save The World™...That wasn't in the plan either...*Holds head*...

Then came the ideas for the Skyrim build and I decided the first one was going to be a decendant of McTemplar...So he needed a wife...Cue Caroline McWylde...She's almost exactly the same build as Templar but she has restoration instead of destruction...Sadly I feel as if I didn't really play her as well as I could have, and simply played her as - Get to level 20-odd; Get Escutcheon; Get and enchant Ebony Longsword; Go do Knights of the Nine and leave her there...Just so she would be there to get married...*Shrug*...It was fun, but I'm still feeling like I should have done more with her...I only played her the brief hours I have to do this sort of thing over 10 days...So I really should do more...

Aaaand now, simply thinking how cool it would be for my merry band to have a spy...Along comes Galasafon the Wood Elf...Massively sneaky and now with added invisibility!!...It's a completely different way of playing for stealth fighting...And it's helped replenish my joy at the game...Bizzarely despite all the others jumping at the chance to make their own spells and enchanting...He's really for not doing all that stuff to get into the uni...I've told him he's gonna have to at some point...But then he just looks at me...He's scary...The name took a bit...I think it's the only time a name hasn't been totally obvious from the start...

What I think I'm trying to do is agree with everyone that you can design the characters so far...And each time you do a new face it'll look better than the last, but a character's only satisfying if it winds up genuinely taking on a life of it's own as opposed to forcing the "Oh, I have to play this differently"...

this is a good question ... and a question that has haunted many DEAD real life movie stars ... they just couldnt get that perfect character ... it was allways just not quite good enough ...

there are many things that are never full

1) the eyes, can never see enough to stop looking (ive seen enough! "then why do you keep looking?")
2) the tounge, never full of enough taste (IM Full! "then why do you keep eating?")
3) the ear, can allways hear new things (ive Heard enough! "then why do you keep listning?")
4) TES, can never have enough new characters ... (ok thats enough! no more characters! "then why are you starting over?")



UUUHHHGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

When I created my character I didn′t put too much into him tbt. Thankfully though I′m on PC and have tweaked him a few times to illustrate his growing experience; I gave him white hair and made him a little chubbier as a human would get over the years. Even though he is an elf and doesn′t age like a human I thought the illustration was quite nice

I wish I hadn′t gotten so many of his skills so high as that destroys his personality somewhat, but I have no immediate plans to change that. Like Heavy Armor that he′s an Expert in, he doesn′t even use that normally! Maybe sometime later I′ll change it, if he asks me too

It depends. If I've never played the game before, then I just try to cater toward what I think would be best for the character and I try to play the game as it's somewhat intended or even guidelined for (good karma, etc). If I've played it and beat it already, then I get a bit experimental. I go looking online for things and information. Character Building usually starts with a concept for me: What do I want the character to d0o? Or what is it that I'm setting out to accomplish with the character as a whole? Or am I simply trying to immerse myself into it with roleplaying and just trying to be imaginative and have fun? What would be the best way to go about doing that per the character's stats? I approach all character creation sorta like that.