There are no vampires in the Silver Hand. They carry vampire dust and other ingredients that have cure disease effects.

First I've heard of that. I've had to slay them many times and not once did I ever see a vampire, and it doesn't really seem 'in character' for them. Maybe you were getting random Dawnguard attacks while fighting them.

Perhaps I have been mistaken, and just assumed there were vampires because the silver hand corpses had vampire dust in them. In all my years playing Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, the only creatures that I have encountered having vampire dust in their corpse-inventory have been vampires. I suppose it is possible that The Silver Hand just carries the dust in inventory, without actually being vampires -- but that is a first in my experience. If that is the case, then I stand corrected. (Seems I read others thinking the same as me some time ago -- I'll have to go look up old forums again.)

Even so, I still don't think the Silver Hand seem like a good alternative to the Companions -- at least not without an overhaul/upgrade in their lore and dispositions. They still seem like little more than bandits to me.

They are also actually bandits, renamed and carrying silver weapons and the afore-mentioned potion and ingredients list.

Which leads to things like Silver Hand toll roads and poaching operations, in addition to torture. Evidently, they are not as sterling as their swords.

About the divines... I have done exactly ONE of their quests, Blessings of Nature. Why? Because I did know these others existed. Daedra quests? They get thrown at you every which way. You can not avoid finding them:

- Hit level 15, drink with Sam.

- Enter Markarth, help a Vigilant of Stendarr.

- Loot a "specific" gem, Merida calls.

- Hit level (10?), get an invite to visit the Danwstar Museum.

- Ask any innkeeper about rumors, BAM! Go see Azura's Shrine.

Blessings of Nature will be found if you ask at the Bannered Mare or happen to "overhear" Danica mumble near the Gildergreen.

I understand your own personal tastes designing quests. My tastes happen to differ. Skyrim is right up your alley

If I play a "good" character, let me play a "good" character instead making me play "your" way with lots of gray thrown in. Gray is easy. A little good here, a little evil there. No commitment. No choices. Evil and/or Good are harder. They require sacrifice, commitment, and consequences. Nearly everyone in real life is a shade of gray. Rarely are people totally good/evil, through and through.

Again, have gray area quests. But also have completely evil and good quests for those that desire that kind of roleplay. It is the contrast of all three that makes each one better, not the exclusion of 2 out of 3

I can justify playing a good character in with the Companions quest line after becoming a werewolf, because I see myself saving the guild.

Not really. Everyone has their standards. IMO someone who plays a "grey" character in the way you described it isn't really playing a character at all (unless they happen to be schizophrenic--which the absurd dialogue options your character is forced into choosing tends to lean towards, I'll admit). Grey characters require just as much sacrifice, commitment, and consequences as good/evil characters--just in different ways.

Which is why I find it unrealistic and uninteresting to play without some sort of subversion. Usually those types of characters tend to be "antagonists" of sorts when I play them.

It is the fault of twilight. I had to watch all the twilight movies with someone. Werewolves and Vampires are portrayed as some cuddly friends that only want to svck blood and play football and be fashionable. I had to explain to the woman that I saw the movie with that it was a nice movie, however Vampires are dangerous and require a stake.

This all comes down to the casualization of Skyrim. The majority of casuals(females are more likely to be casual gamers) like twilight and thus bethesda must have decided that we must transform into a werewolf to compete the companions quest and give us no choice, because the casuals might get upset if they miss the werewolf content.

Also I think they should bring back that scary message that displays after you whack a main quest character and remove all essential statuses. As an RPG player, I would rather pull up a wiki list of characters that I shouldn't whack then being handholded with immortal characters.

As for the dark the light and grey, they used to let you complete it the way you wanted or give you alternate venues, now its one path to the end on most quests.

Knights of the Nine was a whole DLC for Oblivion dedicated to the good path. If you stole in that DLC you couldn't wear holy armor until you made penance.

The standards is where the "fun" comes in. Are you truly "lawful", in that jaywakling (crossing a street not at a corner in a crosswalk) is still a crime, or is that OK in your (general you) case? Sticking to a good or evil path is much harder then "slipping up" now and again, traversing the gray. Gray, to me, means "doing whatever you feel like, whenever you feel like it." There are no standards involved. Or does "I refuse to choose." count as a path?

I want something in a video game I can not get in real life, thus the strictly good or evil choices appeal to me. I can not throw fireballs or go on killing sprees in real life. On the other hand, I am surrounded by "gray" in real life. Nearly everything is "acceptable" in today's "everything goes" world. I just want a video game to be different from the world I live in every day

I know... I am a strange one

So I have been thinking about this post for a while now. I wasn't sure what about it rubbed me wrong, so I did not just want to react, but to think on it a bit.

But here it is: the Nine Divines, and any good or evil leaning storylines, are as boring or interesting as the wirters and developers make them be. Skilled writers are able to go beyond their own points of view, and enter into the worlds and minds of different characters with different motivations, and make them all come to life. The kind of caricatured good/evil choice you provide only comes from a lack of genuine engagement in complex writing -- it is nothing I (or most gamers I know) would find interesting. But skilled writers should be (and usually are) able to do much better than that. They can imagine and enter into storylines -- "What would a good leaning charater do in a challenging situation? What would they find both challenging and satisfying in a quest and story?" Writers for centuries have been able to do just that, and many have done it quite well. I know I have read many books, and have seen many movies, and even played games, that have been able to provide good leaning storylines that are interesting, challenging, and satisfying. If the Divines are boring, it is only because writers have not put enough effort into making them interesting.

What we have in Skyrim now is not a balanced level of storytelling -- it developed well what the evil or grey leaning characters would enjoy; it left the good leaning characters with very little development. I think Bethesda has both the skill and the resources to do better than that.

No, they hunt vamps just as they hunt ww's.

Man, The Little Vampire was my favorite story when I was a kid, please don't stake them. And I don't even like Twilight.

Aimed at a casual audience? Yes, no doubt about it.
Aimed at women? Nope.

Skyrim's pervasive handholding doesn't have anything to do with the players' gender. It is designed this way to cater to people unlikely to go out of their way to find quests, people who feel lost and confused if the game doesn't clearly direct them to new objectives. Basically, people used to playing different, more linear kinds of video games - and this includes just as many men as women. To help these players, Bethesda made it so the first rumors we hear direct us to the College of Winterhold and the Dark Brotherhood. This is just one of many examples. Perhaps this is also the reason why werewolves are tied into one of the main questlines, but I honestly don't see the connection to Twilight or any particular appeal to women here. I'm not sure joining a warrior guild and becoming a savage beast is even what game developers typically associate with female players.

I also haven't noticed any significant overlap between the Twilight fanbase and casual video game players, considering that the majority of people I know who liked Twilight aren't gamers at all, but that's not terribly important.

Lawful and good aren't the same. A lawful will not wish to j-walk but a chaotic good is fine with it as long as doing so harms no one. I think lawful / chaotic isn't relevant to TES due to the law being poorly defined. However, good and evil are obvious in TES as in real life.

As to the Divine quests as mentioned earlier, I only ran into one of those -the Mara one. I did it to get married and had to make an effort by querying here how to trigger it. It turned out to be a boring FedEx quest. I can't see how one can say that that quest is as involving as TG or DB or other pure evil quests. It's clearly a throwaway or included just to add the marriage element to TES.

The Elder Scrolls are probably not a good choice, then. Especially considering the universe favors Chaotic Neutrals (i.e. your very interpretation of "grey").

Apparently shades of grey don't exist? Using the alignment chart as refference, wouldn't a chaotic good be considered a light shade of grey? A lawful evil a darker one? Again, I don't like absolutes, so I dislike the idea of pure black, white, or neutral grey.

Or coming across places that the game had previously made Silver Hand, but you beat the Companions questline before you got to them...therefore now fighting ordinary bandits that inexplicably have Silver Hand loot.

...and I'm just going to pretend I didn't hear the whole "Skyrim was casualized for women" crap.

Yea, bad example, that. I was using it more as a "failure to uphold one's beliefs, rather than a "good vs evil" example

Not many games are a "good" choice, all puns intended

Gray comes in many shades, itself. You have people (players) that strive to be gray in all ways. You have people (players) that "slip up" now and again in their expressed morals and get a touch of gray. The same goes for the evil intended person (player).

Gray, in it's most basic term is a failure to adhere to a set of morals, be they good or evil. The evil person that just can not bring themself to kill a child becomes gray. The same person that allows themself to love another becomes gray. A "good" person that can not bring themself to allow the death of one or two for the "greater good" and thus harms the "greater good" now has a splotch of gray.

The "gray choices" I enjoy are like the last example. Is my "not so good" choice (allowing one or a few to die) better, overall, in the long run and save more people then if I saved those few? Is a scientist "evil" if they put the research above human life, if it saves so many more in the long run? These are the kind of "gray dilemmas" I enjoy, not the "help here, be a thug there, indiscriminately kill over there" kind of thing Skyrim is (and most other RPGs I've played are) full of.

The gray choices should not amount to do a little evil here a little good there, in my mind. That is the game playing the players. Does that make sense?

That perfectly nails Buffy's response to the Dragonborn questline. She allowed herself to become slightly 'soiled' by HerMora, but completely balked and walked away when it came time to betray her Skaal pals. That's why I consider that DLC completely incompatible with the game's primary main quest. A noble hero is asked to push 'the ends justify the means' right off the charts in a way that no 'good' character of mine could ever accept. To me, that renders Dragonborn an epic fail as a DLC - made even worse by Bethesda's 'gift' of making the questline unavoidable if you simply want to visit Solstheim to the point that you can't even get a good night sleep there.

Edit: Now, to balance things, I'll readily admit that Dawnguard is a very good DLC. Not only did Bethesda make huge advances in follwer AI (Serana), but the questline fully supports a much wider range of character moralities and choices.

I meant "the book of love" which is by no stretch a bunch of FedEx quests but a bunch of linked matchmaker quests which I found kind of refreshing

Yes, and this I can totally agree with.

Though I have my doubts about how many of these instances where there is a lack of choice is due to desing. A lot of times it comes off as incompetence, tbh. (The FRICKING "Chorrol Recommendation" Quest for the Mages Guild comes to mind immediately, as does the "Destroy the Dark Brotherhood" like I mentioned before).

I think the OP is right that Skyrim seems unnecessarily dark at times - though another word might be 'dreary'. I sometimes feel that the game falls into the trap of thinking that dark=serious=more mature. It lacks light and shade, humour, fun.

The 'criminal' factions were dissappointing compared to Oblivion's, I felt. The Thieves guild quest in Oblivion was one of the best in the game - remember the Ancestor Moth Temple? The arrow of execration? Infiltrating the Imperial Library? - It felt like a proper adventure. In Skyrim, I spent the whole time being moaned at and trash-talked by a bunch of miserable, supercilious stereotypes, and at the end I was forced to sell my soul for some armour that I didn't even want. At the end of the DB quest I got to talk to a charred corpse while Naseem kicked it nonchalantly around the floor - grim.

That said, I liked the whole Thalmor/Empire/Nord thing, it injected a bit of intrigue and political depth to the game world, and the lack of clear goodies and baddies worked well. The whole design of the world was lovely too - bleak but beautiful. Hopefully future installments will strike a balance between Oblivion's occasionally dopey cloud-cuckoo-land feel, and Skyrim's slightly exhausting self-seriousness...

While I enjoyed the civil war and the Thalmor threat, and he idea that imperials vs. stormcloaks choice was not necessarily right or wrong, I was very disappointed in the thieves guild and dark brotherhood. While I understand that an assassins guild is not necessarily good, my impression of the Skyrim version of this guild is of a group of completely lawless homicidal maniacs that take pleasure in people suffering and dying, rather than being an organization that kills because it's their job and they happen to be good at it, or even have multiple reasons that may even seem justifiable. I have an assassin character (who has been an assassin in Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion) who went through the DB questline among other things, and I will be scrapping that character and starting him completely over. In his next incarnation, he will be destroying the DB rather than helping them. He's too much of an honorable Morag Tong assassin who respects life even as he takes it, and not some mindless bloodthirsty deranged person who kills because it's the evil thing to do. (insert evil laugh here) The fact that the Skyrim DB faction has practically tossed away what little lawfulness and faith they even had left (with the sole exception of Cicero who is still mentally deranged) doesn't help my lackluster opinion of them. They aren't worthy of being called assassins. They are just murderous beasts, worse than werewolves on a rampage.

As for the thieves guild, I have to ask, "What thieves guild?" It's like Morrowind's Cammona Tong has been transported to the seweres of Skyrim and Maven set up as the head, while the so-called thieves guild acts as her bullies, thugs, and toadies for Maven and the rest of her Riften 1%. While they don't necessarily need to go the Robin Hood route (though I enjoyed it in Oblivion more than being a member of the Skyrim mafia), they don't really feel like an organization of *thieves*. In Morrowind, the thieves guild actually felt like a thieves guild, and the Robin Hood type quests you can get later in the game were entirely optional, so if you just wanted to be a thief, then you still had that choice. In fact, many of the Morrowind thieves guild quests allowed a choice in how to do it. The very first quest of stealing the diamond...you could steal the diamond and turn it in, buy the diamond and turn it in, find a diamond in a dungeon and turn it in. As long as the khajit lady gets her diamond, she is happy and doesn't question where it comes from. In Skyrim, if there is a beggar who just has as his sole possession something the thieve's guild wants, then you have no choice but to take it from the beggar. You can't just choose who you want to rob to get the item because the questgiver who sent you really just wants the beggar to be robbed and harassed as a punishment rather than just wanting a particular item.

Overall, I really enjoy Skyrim and can work around most of these issues (and mods take care of a lot of other things), but good grief. Talk about being railroaded. You will be *this* kind of thief or nothing. You will be *this* kind of assassin or nothing. You *will* join the mage's guild even if you aren't a mage, and you most certainly *will* become a werewolf if you want to prove yourself as a fighter, etc. (Or you may as well just join the guards and get an arrow in the knee!)

I think Skyrim's "darkness" is primarily in response to all the people complaining over the past few years about how they want to be able to play evil and how there is "too much" black and white and how they can't be an anti-hero and how boring good is...blah, blah, blah, so now we get games catering to the behavior and less for those of us wanting to play more heroic characters that rarely exist in real life. Everything must be realistic and grim and gritty nowadays after all. (I even remember people ranting that they couldn't play an evil Avatar in the Ultima games...what was that about the 8 virtues again? Why don't we just toss out that idea...it's not grey enough!)

I'm actually pretty tired of the whole "grey character" concept. I"m more interested in the exceptional. One of the reasons Mjoll is one of my favorite characters in Skyrim is that she has values and sticks to them. She is truly a decent person and it would be an honor to know her. I'd love to be able to help her clean up Riften, but no go since doing so would be good, heroic, and boring.

Now that my rant is accomplished, I must get back to my game. My current character has an appointment with a priest of Boethiah and must not be delayed.

I also find it baffling that there is a spell for treebark like wooden skin, and spriggans have wooden claws, but you can't use a spell to get spriggan like claws, very similar to a bound weapon skill. Heck you could even have these claws do bonus poison damage to make up for less physical damage... Poison damage, another thing Skyrim threw out the window mostly btw. x_X It would be similar to a bound dagger spell, but much much cooler I think, and I don't see how it wouldn't be lore friendly, guess just something that was never implemented or thought of or something. With a mod that adds durability to weapons, it could even be used as a backup weapon!

As for the werewolf thing... To be brutally honest, I think Morrowind's werewolves are better than Skyrim's werewolves in virtually every single way. They look more wolflike, function much more like an animalistic predator, can sneak, and all sorts of other things. I admit the Skyrim WW animations are nice but that's all I can think of. Also in Morrowind they aren't tied to some fighters guild like faction.

Maybe this sounds backwards or confusing to some people, but I personally like to roleplay my were-characters as more mage or thief like outside of were-forms, and I prefer to play my warrior characters as vampires... And the companions guild ugh, totally throws a wrench in that.

Yes, exactly. And judging by the interest in this thread, you are not alone!

Yes, I the Morrowind werewolfs were better, I agree. What they could do was more wolf-like, and the consequences of being a werewolf were more realistic as well.

As for the druid thing -- I did see a mod on Nexus that creates a druid class for Skyrim. I have not checked it out myself yet, but it is there.