Here’s my crew on the PS3. I didn’t know about capping levels until after Jerric. I have the folks from Jerric’s fic on the PC as well, but mostly for fooling around and screenshots. Except for Lildereth the Bosmer Hunter (custom class), she is so fun on the PC that I abandoned the PS3 version of her. Anyway, their levels don’t really mean anything.

Rowan the Imperial Spellsword, level 37 at 228 hours. She was my “me” character, and the first playthrough. Her game is developing problems. I weep to think of losing her. Of course the next Rowan is presently saving Skyrim and there is another version of her in Morrowind, so I guess I’ll get over it.

Bryvyn the Dunmer Agent, level 25 at 138 hours. She doesn’t get much play because we don’t get along. Right now she’s in the SI. I just haven’t been in the mood lately.

Jerric the Nord Battlemage, level 34 at 84 hours. I’m starting to play the PC Jerric more to conserve his “real” game for story quests. I really, really wish I kept an early save of him.

Darian the Redguard custom class “Darian” (sort of a Scout), level 3 at 16 hours. He should cap around level 20. I don’t have a goal in mind for him, other than no bandit armies decked out in full glass armor. That really bugs me.

Lothran visited the shrine but never talked to the daedra. Apparently he′s too pretty
But if he could he wouldn′t do the quest anyway, much like he never completed Molag Bal′s.

Ah! Yes, that makes much more sense If I was on PS3 or Xbox I′d probably do the same with Lothran, then it would be ok. Didn′t know there actually were people around here that didn′t play on PC *cough*Renee*cough*

Hey that's cool. I took a needed break from Skyrim, and rolled up a mage scholar adventurer who's only level 4. Always a blast to play Oblivion again.

Kira is now level 7.

She's a stealth archer, wears no armor (just wide black pants, dark shirt, and some magic accessories she found), slowly becoming adept with magic and spell-use.

You know, after all these years, this is my first character to make and use her own poisons. I never really got into alchemy before, but now I'm picking everything I find and experimenting with the combinations. It's very interesting! I also never really did much with magic before (aside from destruction and restoration), but I find myself using sense life and also a variety of alteration spells. It's a blast experimenting with aspects of the game I glossed over before. It's a very newish experience.

I went back to one of my early characters that was past level 50 (and boring) just because she had collected enough stuff to be effectively invulnerable (100% resist magic, 100% reflect damage). That makes her useful as a test subject. I can take her anywhere in a new mod and see how the monsters and NPCs behave, without using console commands. I'm alternating her with a newer character that only uses a couple of majors, and will cap before 20 without artificial use of the others. They make a good pair of test probes,as the second one lets me see how to play the scenario after the first has played scout.

Since I had never capped any of my characters before, I thought I would give it a try. Back on 9Nov2008 I coldheartedly abandoned my first Oblivion character, Tara, when I realized she was very poorly built. She is a Nord at level 21 that I left sitting at the dining room table at her Skingrad house. So I dug up her save file to see what I could find out.

Well, the first thing I had to do was run the Animation Fixer Mod to get things back to normal. Then, Wow!, was I surprised. After I got her a decent bow and enchanted it with fire at the Arcane U, she was master of the place (playing on PC on normal). With elf arrows, she was dropping most everything with one shot, even the Ogres went down with just two. Didn’t seem fair compared to my regular character, Baa at level 51.

The only problem with Tara that I couldn’t handle, other than her selection of skills, was that her Magicka was 120. I don’t normally mess with too much magic stuff, and most of my characters have been Bretons with some built-in magic that helps them out, but Tara couldn’t even heal herself without a prolonged ordeal.

Poor Tara didn’t even have a good Detect Life item, just a 20’ spell, so we looked for an Oblivion gate to enter to go get a Sigil Stone for Detect Life 180’. That was another shock. When she entered the gate there were some of those land mine things between her and where she wanted to go, so she shot one with an arrow to remove it. A bunch of ‘something’ came out of it and took her health down 50% in a flash. I’ve never seen that before. Then after about 5 minutes of recharging her health, she shot another one. Same thing all over again.
Enough of this, I say to myself, this could take all day. I loaded my 8 Heal Potions onto a Hot Key, put on her water walking boots, and went across the lava to the main tower. That worked ok, and after taking out a couple of things that objected to her being there, Tara stood in front of the Tower Portal pumping her Heal spell for another 5 minutes.

Then, up the tower she went, mowing down everything that confronted her with ease. She didn’t find the normal big guys that level 51 Baa finds, instead, there were lower level characters with not so much loot. Really easy to kill. She had no more problems with her lack of Magicka, except taking some extra time to heal when necessary. At the top, Tara got her Detect Life 180’ Sigil Stone and went back home.

Despite having a poor selection of skills, from my prospective, Tara later managed to advance by doing a little power training and dungeon diving to advance her skills and acquire enough gold to buy Grand Soul Gems to enhance stuff, buy some more houses and have a little fun. She has gone up to level 26 and now has a Magicka of 170 and she operates, more or less, normally for me, except she is over powered compared to the more advanced characters I’ve played since her.

It took very careful management to advance her shills. Almost all advances were 3x5. Tara could go up another couple of levels, but it would be tedious and time consuming. Therefore, as of now, she is going back into stasis.

Learned a lot from this experiment, particularly how much I’ve learned since starting the game.

I took my first char Jandaga a heavy armored Bosmer Battlemage to level 31 by the end of the MQ. At that time the load times were getting up to 20 minutes so without having any quest mods to hold his interest, I left him at the mage Academy, umm, chatting with this favorite apprentice. Manveru the Mystwalker, my current avatar is currently at lvl 25. With several big quest mods, OOO and MMM he is very busy right now. He will keep on going as long as his ladies Vilja, Viconia, Rianna, Kaleah the Succubus and the girls from the !st Alchemy Shop are willing to travel along.

Just got back in to OB a couple days ago (i realized I love OB so much more then Skyrim) and Cheza my Bosmer Archer is level 5 with 15 hours played.

Kira the Arcane Archer is now level 8.

I am really enjoying this character. I have never integrated magic this much into my game-play. It's subtle, and most of the time I use no magic at all, but for specific situations I am using magic in ways I never did before. I used to limit my magic use to restoration for the most part (healing after fights, cures) and destruction. Perhaps because that was the total scope of magic use in games I used to play (especially the Phantasy Star Online games, which I loved to death in the early 2000's). But now I find myself using mysticism and alteration, as well as destruction, and I can readily imagine great uses for conjuration and illusion. In addition, I'm really enjoying making my own potions and poisons, and using them to great effect. All, of course, while enjoying the play style of a stealthy archer with 30 strength and 30 endurance. It's a lot of fun, and almost the polar opposite style of my rock-solid paladin, Maia. Which is great, because if I want a break from the shadows, I have the perfect character ready to go.

Nenya is level 1 right now. She is still in prison! I bought the Deluxe Oblivion version on Steam yesterday with ALL the official DLC content! So, now I can retire my old 2006 Oblivion disc, plus I don't have to worry about patching the game, re-downloading all the DLC content, it's all right there, on my gaming PC (I can also uninstall the game on my other PC now LOL). OMG I'm so excited! I LOVE Oblivion!

http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/3166/nenyaindeadricarmorcv3.jpg I think she was around level 45ish there.

I just remembered I will have the Night Eye Spell again!!!!!!!! Woohoo

Renee! What level is Ann now?? *shout out*

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a160/MrDarkSim/5cc6d4db.jpg

My current character (Imperial) is at level 14.

WHATTT?????


Oh okay, that makes more sense. I've lost a couple PS3 games at 350-360 hours myself. That's not very fun.



Thank you. Ann is simply Level 1. All she's done so far is made her way from the Chestnut Handy Stables to the Waterfront. Real-life "concerns" interrupted my gameplay at that point. She's gonna have a couple Majors that'll level her up a bit quicker than any of my other characters: Blade and Destruction, both of which she'll use regularly.

Kate just made it to Level 6 the other day, by the way.

Oh man, I had no idea you could just walk across the lava this way! Learn something new every day. ....

Always interesting to know about people′s characters and where they are, both area-wise and level-wise, and your characters have become quite the talk of the town now, Renee

Jericho just made it to level 12, with only 29 hours in

You cheater

There must have been something wrong with the game when Sarrah tried to escape a lava flow; no Water Walking spell or enchantment got her up out of the lava and she tried them all. She used up every restore health potion and all her magicka trying to survive but the nearest shore was a bridge too far. She would have made it if she could run across the lava instead of swimming through it. I suspect it was the Unofficial Patch that buggered Water Walking on lava because Severus did this more than once.

bobg: could it be a vanilla versus mods thing? the lava-walking issue?

I think some folks may have missed the part where he said he loaded 8 Heal Potions onto his hot key...

oh duh....

Yes, I loaded the 8 Heal potions onto a hot key, but I didn’t use any of them going around the War Gate on the lava. But I did use a couple when I confronted one of those X dudes and a T-rex once I made it to dry ground in front of the Tower. I have lots of mods, but none concerning this aspect of the game. Occasionally, I use the Water Walk necklace to cross the lava when I draw one of the long, drawn out, Oblivion Gates and want to get on with it and not tour around collecting stuff for an hour.

If I use this technique, I scout out the narrowest point to cross, then just run across or around. Even on poor Tara, it doesn’t do much, maybe 25%. Once I made the duh decision to jump as far as I could, then run the rest of the way. That was exciting. When you jump, you go under the lava when you land, then float back to the surface. Wow, that hurt. Don’t do that.

I play on PC and have the GOTY edition. I don’t use the Unofficial Patch thing. I don’t know if this info is useful, but that’s the way I do it.

Thanks for the experienced-based insight on lava walking. I have had good luck hopping across the surface of water using the master acrobatics perk, but never tried it with lava. . . .

My breton mage is level 21, and I think i will try for level 40 or higher because I just found out how useful luck is after not increasing it until level 19-20.