One of the funnier arguments for not using potions in game is because it's not realistic. So they only replenish health with food and waiting. Because THAT'S more realistic. Your arm gets cut off, just eat a head of cabbage and wait ten minutes and you'll be fine!

Eh. So, Rick likes being dramatic and emotionally invested in his games - let him have his fun in his own way. It's one thing for you to say you don't do it that way. It's quite another to tell him he shouldn't.

Back on topic - I don't balk at reloads when it suits me. And I don't do Dead is Dead. I die too much for that to be fun for me! But, I don't reload to save companions. I find that how long a companion lasts with me has a significant impact on experience of the game. I actually have more "fun" experiencing the loss of that companion than reloading to save them.

Scalycloud......well my friend that's the whole point of this thread.....we all do it differently. I have simply shown my preference.


You ask where's the fun in self punishing your gameplay........well who said it has to be fun....that's not a rule either! For me, Skyrim is my Everest to climb and it's an addiction. I don't think FUN comes into it for me ( though it often is fun too) Sometimes I hate Skyrim, but it doesn't mean I can put it down. I have " invested" in clear excess of 12 THOUSAND hours in this game over four years. Over 90% of that is DiD. If I played merely for Fun....it would probably have worn off by now.


BTW...the applicable term isn't sadism it's the opposite....maschism. But I'm not sure that fits my play style either......since I do not ENJOY losing DiD play hours and suffering as a result.


One day (never) I will have this game nailed.......that means using ONE special char.....who is NEVER seen to be killed. Doing all available quests, including Ebony Warrior and Karstagg on LEGENDARY (vanilla). When that day dawns.....I will ceremonially remove my Skyrim disc and NAIL it to my wall, under it I will write "Done"

Rick, if your math is correct, you have spent in excess of 8 hours every single day for 4 years playing Skyrim.

Is that true?

As an average.......yes


Sometimes I do upto 12 hours.....sometimes only 5 or 6.


Just Lately my average has dropped a fair bit due to writing in forum and PMs. Being on Xbox it is an estimate only.....but pretty close...it could easily be well over 12000.

I normally play every day....I hated family holidays away.....made my thumbs twitchy


Currently In the last six months I guess I'm down to around five hours per day.....I am TRYING to cut down honestly

Wow. I acquired the game in Nov 2012 and have 196 hours. That's an average of about an hour and ten minutes per week. Granted, I have three kids and live in an outreach community, but still... As Eddie Izzard says, "You must get up very early in the morning!"

EDIT: I also have averaged about an hour and forty minutes per week in Oblivion since 2009. And that number is weighted partly because I acquired the game before I was married and had kids.

I go to bed late.....very late....2am plus. I normally get well into my game around 7-8pm. This was true even when doing my full time job....then I had to go part time for a couple of years making it easier in gaming. Then for the last seven months I became a carer for my elderly mother leaving my poor wife to be the full timer. But on the plus side.....I get even more game time.......allowing me to enjoy chatting to my friends here in Beth's forums and still get in a good five or six hours in Skyrim......every day


It's a tough life.....but someone's got to do it

Outside of my need to have nice "fairy-tale" experiences in my games that are as far away from the miserable aspects of real life as possible, I'm seeing another possible difference between mine and someone like Rick's playstyles. Rick, it seems that Skyrim is the only game that you play and you spend hours and hours in it and don't really seem to see the need for that Skyrim experience to come to an end. It reminds me of some people who play a certain MMO and that's the only game they ever play.

For me though, I enjoy playing a variety of different games even if I might focus on one or two of them at a time. I want to get as much of the full experience of playing the very first time I play. Having to play up to some certain point and then toss my entire game away to start over from the beginning again...and doing it multiple times...seems counterproductive to me because that's less time for me to potentially spend on the multitudes of other games I also want to play in my backlog.

Reloading when things go "wrong" saves me that time because I'm not having to redo everything over and over, or having to start yet another game in order to play through a questline that I "ruined" by allowing an important NPC to die.

It's possible that if I focused only on Skyrim, I might play it a bit differently too. Still probably not as punishing as Rick because I don't want to recreate the unhappiness of real life consequences, but I might not feel under as much pressure from my other games to worry as much about repeating the same things time and time again.

Be careful not to assume that other players' situations match your own.

For example, I'm an old retired geezer, and I have two hobbies that keep me occupied and fulfilled: Music (I'm a composer/keyboardist) and Video Games. Some days I spend 8 or 10 hours fiddling around with my synthesizers and DAW, and other days I spend that much time running around hacking trolls and saving the world. It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it.

I didn't mean it as a rebuke. I think if you prefer to play that way, then by all means it really doesn't matter what I think about it. It's your game. I apologize if I came on strong that way. I don't have nearly the amount of hours logged into Skyrim, or the ability to play for as many hours you do, so I tend to play differently I guess. I also play a few different games, and while Skyrim is one of my obsessions, it's not my only one. So I transition back and forth between different games, sometimes going weeks or months (and sometimes years) between play throughs. I don't play DiD and only recently got into roleplaying. Maybe I shouldn't knock something before I try it.

I didn't take it as a rebuke and no offence was taken mate


I used to play a variety of games until about 2007 when I was told about Oblivion.....from that point until 11 Nov 2011, nothing else mattered anymore. Now it's Skyrim and nothing else matters anymore.........soon it will be TES VI and nothing else will matter anymore.


Yeah.....I'm probably hooked on TES

I remember when my brother told me about Oblivion. he said, "You can see a mountain in the distance, and you can start running toward it. And you can get there. It might take you an hour. But you can get anywhere you can see." I got the game for PC in June 2009. I already knew about mods. I'd first learned about modding games with Doom II. And I knew right away I wanted to change some stuff. So in July I made an account here and on Nexus.

And away I went...

Character wise? Yup, my characters tend to feel self-righteous about what they do or either don't care. It's rare for me to role with characters that end up remorseful for what they do.

And that is cool! Everyone has their own way of playing. Personally, I play single player because they have saves. If *I* played DiD, I would never move

Because of the limitations of video games, it is impossible for me to accept them as "real life." That's me, though. Plenty of other players have no troubles at all.

As always, to each their own

5:59am..........click ........6:00am.........SONG: "Then put your little hand in mine .......There ain't no hill or mountain we can't climb ......I got you babe ......I got you babe"

every one remembers the movie Groundhog Day ?...........every day Bill Murray would wake up to relive the same events over and over, he was stuck in this vicious cycle NOT of his choice, and it appears at first to be a curse until he discovers after all the self destruction that there was only one thing left to do & that was to learn about him self! ....every thing can be looked at in shades of black and white or the ends of the two extremes................YES RELOAD is good...............NO RELOADS ARE bad..........it is a habit of the mind to seek comfort on the ends of the spectrum, where a discussion is absolute & will not allow you to see the other end .............it is once we move our selves to the center that we suddenly discover infinite possibility for learning,.

in the center you can truly see the affects of your choices........every day in life we have to do this...........YOU hurt some one you love very bad because of something silly you said or did.....IF YOU could reload would you do so and relive the event and correct the problem? ...........yea that would be great ..........PAIN GONE............lesson learn...........that's fantastic...........BUT there is a problem..........by doing so you have denied the other party the experience & the opportunity to grow & learn.........your mind will like it or not will replay & reload the event over & over in your brain...........what if I did this or what if I did that ?...........or maybe I just should move to the center look at both points of view, accept the truth and take responsibility for my actions!?

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> it is when you run out of excuses......... then you know that you are ready to learn & grow

WHAT if you kill some one.........reload .....there alive.........bang there dead.........alive ..........dead..........who gives a fluff .............look no hands ...........bang bang your dead

PS...............on a personal note, this one uses the reload to learn .............reloaded the Ebony Warrior so many time(over 50 times back to back), so there was only one outcome possible..........after the lessons is learned the TOOL of reloading was not needed again, and the experience gained has passed to the rest of this ones game,

PS ............when you die in the game you will reload again (spawn at your last saved game) and you will have to do it all again...........OR you can simply away go and get better armors & weapons and go back and finish the JOB, what you do next is up to you..........its your game after all

I never never never ever ever EVER reload a previous save. To me that defeats the purpose of role playing. You're character should always be held accountable for his/her actions, just like we are in real life.

The same can be said for various encounters and random events such as dragon attacks and vampire attacks. If my favorite NPC shop owner happens to get killed then so be it. That's part of the game.

It should be like in real life, where sometimes when you try to start a conversation and accidentally steal their coffee cup....

The random vampire attacks in towns are plain and simple a bad game design choice that i'm sure Bethesda didn't test it enough in practice. Dead merchants means Skyrim transforming from an RPG to a loading screen simulator and having to quick travel around Skyrim to sell some gems isn't very fun. NPC's suicidal behavior doesn't help either.

This is mostly responding to SAH....


I have an.....ummmm......technique. Seldom used....seldom needed, but I HAVE used a test char once in a rare while.


For example the last one I still recall.....must be almost a year ago. Ulda was standing up at Bards Leap. I wanted her to try it out.....but it looked very dangerous to me.


I could not bring myself to do a reload if she died (of course)......so......I do this.....

Create a save of current progress call it save 1

Create a secondary save......call it save 2


LOAD save 2.......do the jump and practice not worrying about reloading because it is not her REAL play through, it is just a clone. When satisfied the jump is learned correctly......load up Save 1......her REAL game progress position.....if she dies now.....she is DEAD normal DiD rules apply. Fingers crossed and go for it.....she survived.....sigh of relief.


The important thing here is.....by creating a clone save to do the deed....I do not feel the same seeing the clone die. It could be taken a step further by using a completely DIFFERENT made up char to do the jump......but....problem.....I would need the same armour and health as Ulda really had because it might affect the outcome. So....only Ulda would do, to make the test jumps.


You might consider this unnecessarily complex to just "try out" a dangerous move. However, In my mind, if I saw her real play through version die....that is the same to me as any DiD death......I could not break my DiD "conditioning".


"Test clone" works for me.


I have done this maybe three times in four years.......it has to be a very serious reason to do it


So now you know Sah.....a Rick secret exposed.....and maybe an insight gained

So true! I have lost count of the times my characters have "mis-clicked" thanks to the ever-changing mouse cursor

Trapped chests are a great example. Try to click on the trap to disarm. WHAM! Dead from trap sprung. Jst like real life

I'm not trying to pick on you, rick, but what is the difference? Suddenly your "real life character" gets a doppleganger/twin/homoculous and everything is kosher? I don't see it, but I don't pretend to, either. I load saved games without regret or guilt

Yeah, me too. AND I'm unashamedly a god mode console user. I have fun my way, that's the whole point to playing SPMR games, after all - at least for me.

Good grief, this has gotten really, really ridiculous.

There is NO right way or wrong way to play Skyrim, or any other game!

It's a game, you buy it, you enjoy it. IN. ANY. WAY. YOU. WANT.

ALBQ and Serethil........ Simple....it's a mind set. You see....a save might just be a save and maybe TECHNICALLY it doesn't matter. But I have to live with the consequences of seeing my char get killed.


To me....and probably only to me......getting the "doppelg?nger" Killed still kinda hurts in a way.....but not like KNOWING the ACTUAL play through char likeness was seen to die.


It's easier to visualise if you consider like this........Maybe if I had a male char I had no interest in as a seldom used test dummy....I could load him up....try out god awful dangerous things and repeatedly reload him as an unashamed reloadable Char. That's a great way to see if a route or a jump etc is safe...ok?


But when I loaded up my Dead is Dead play through char.....she would be bound by DiD rules as usual. The poor test dummy gets to let me know if it's safe to put my main char in a particular situation.......easy yes?


However, the test dummy might be only low level and with poor equipment......so many scenarios he died in would not be the same for my highly developed main char.


How to get around that?........well, one way is to build up my test dummy at the same rate as my main char......a mirror image development.


But that would be stupidly impractical and double my required gaming time.


Soooo.......I create a test dummy OUT OF my main char without having to feel that it IS my main char.


Killing the clone is OK.......killing my char.....is not


See?


Bear in mind also.......I did say that for me to even do this.....is extremely rare ( three times in four years). Normally for me its just DiD plain and simple.


Edit.....Ah...but....the reason you both DON'T SEE IT is that your game playing is "Reloader" style

So to you....getting you char killed might be inconvenient, but it's not a show stopper.

Remember....for a die hard Dead is Dead player.....we lose EVERYTHING and live with that consequence.....it doesn't mean we want to lose it all....we don't, but we are prepared to. It is a different ethos and way of thinking. With maybe two hundred hours on a character would I want to just take pot luck that a jump was going to be ok? No! I could just walk away......but a test dummy can tell me if it's safe or not without the risk of losing all those invested play hours. Like I said though.....very very rare


Andra......no ones being ridiculous here. ALB and Serethil don't get me....so I explained it....that's all . If we can't discuss our different play styles and why we do what we do, then what's the point of coming onto Public Forum?

Eh, yah. While Rick thinks I don't get him, that's not really the point. The POINT IS - this is a single player machine resident game. What you do in that game STAYS in that game.

Rick, I do get your point. I'm not interested in your sort of fun. But I AM happy that your sort of fun can coexist with my sort of fun. And we don't have to worry about cross-contamination (always a good thing). I'm not at all dinging you for playing your way. I was simply agreeing with someone else who seems to be from my "generation" as well as my gaming mindset.