I started out playing with the Adept (default) setting for my first 6 or 7 characters. With Lord Haaf-Mersey and Mycharonna I switched to Apprentice, rationalizing that I wanted to see both of these characters grow and thrive, so I could continue their stories to completion.

At some point (somewhere around Level 30 or so) I switched both of these games up to Adept. Apprentice had become too easy; I get bored if I pwn everything all the time. But with my two latest games (Uber Kness and Master Baytor) I bumped it up to Adept from the very start. Uber died at about Level 12, but MB is still going strong, even after killing three dragons so far.

What about you?

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Ha ha sorry. Just wanted to get the text up WITH the poll this time.

I know, I just could not resist!

I always play at the default setting, which I think is Adept. I play Dead is Time to Reload.

I play adept, but that is usually pretty easy for me, so I make the game harder by not using any restore heath potions during battle. I reload when my characters die most of the time.

I usually play on Adept, occasionally on Expert if a character gets too powerful to be fun. I use followers in almost all of my games. The few times I’ve gone to Expert were with characters who were very combat-focused with little or no crafting and trading and little need for magicka, so they were strong for their level.

The characters who are a part of my fan fic are not played Dead-Is-Dead. They don’t get to die until I say so. I don’t actually remember any of them dying except for Jerric, and I think he’s mostly just fallen off of things. Jensa is not played DID, and she has died a lot over the years of playing her. She has been started over three times, and her original game is still playable. I don’t remember her dying lately, though, and the last time was when she fell off something in Markarth. She’s a bit of a drinker. Anyway my current characters Sir Magul 2, Nephiah Sarys, and the conjurer guy on the Xbox whose name I can never remember are DID. So were Achille, Asrael, Brynja, J’Shanji 1, Marco the Thief, Nivoniel, Selvyn, Shuvesse, and Zuuri. The others have retired, some because their games broke. And there were a few in the beginning while I was still learning the game who got reloaded. Now I know that if Farkas sends you after vampires at level 2, you should come back later. And I think any character would also know that. (Sorry, Brynja.)

I started playing the game on adept and found the difficulty ok, but afert about a month decided to move it up to master to have a go.

Failed miserably.

Put it down to expert and played on that ever since. Now I find adept way too easy, but still struggle with master.

Oh, and I always play Did. Which is funny cos I never did in oblivion or morrowind...

Adept, rarely change (only upwards when combat starts getting too easy as I get to higher levels), no DiD.

I play to have fun, I'm not a masochist.

So lately I've been bumping it up to Expert with Claire's game, maybe I'm getting too good at Skyrim or something. It helps that her game is not dead-is-DEAD, in the sense that in my DiD games, I'll have raised the bar enough with Claire that Adept + DiD will be a worthwhile challenge, but my t00ns won't just get pwned too easily or something

No way am I going for Master or Legendary though.

I play on Apprentice, the only exception is Sigfried's game which is on Adept. I apply the DiD rule to some characters but not to all. Currently I have two non DiD characters, namely Lucius & Aard, and one DiD - Sigfried.

I've never touched the difficulty slider in Oblivion nor Skyrim. They just don't do what I want when it comes to adjusting the games' challenge. I want weapons to be deadly - both Buffy's and her victims. Fights should be about not getting hit while managing to hit your foe. It should take but a very small number of successful hits (arrow or melee) to kill the player or their foe. The difficulty slider makes foe's more dangerous, but nerfs the player so it is not useful to me.

My solution has always been to limit Buffy's melee/arrow defense via a small health bar and crappy armor rating. I limit her foe's defense by 'capping' Buffy's character level at a point where foes have manageable health bars. Then I fine tune things by tweaking the damage Buffy's bow + arrows do until the challenge is exactly what I seek: A glass cannon that can strike like a dragon or crumple like a butterfly.

Regarding dead is dead. While I'm pleased that many enjoy this style of play for the intensity it can offer to some players, it is that very intensity that precludes it from my game. If I thought I could lose Buffy, two things would happen: First, I would never ever let her out of a walled city. Secondly, the very fact that I could lose her would cause me to build an emotional wall between she and I as 'protection' for the possibility of losing her. Key to my relationship with Buffy is that it transcends death. My profession exposed me to enough death, not to mention losing my first wife to death. As it is, when playing and Buffy takes some significant damage I do actually experience an unpleasant physical reaction. She may drop to the floor and cry after surviving a close call but, frankly, I need the pause as well. On a happier note however, we play cautiously enough that she only dies about once every 800 hours or so of play time. Call me odd, but I'm too old to care.

I'm with Acadian on not touching the difficulty slider. It's just not the right way to adjust the game balance.

Our choices of how to do it are similar, too. Impose a limitation on the character that compensates for the advantage the game gives you. No armour, no archery / archery only, no use of potions, whatever makes sense for the personality of the subject character. I note that the difficulty slider is often used by people who've exploited every glitch in the game to make their character overpowered, and need to get some challenge back. A "quirky build" is more entertaining than that, as it can change your strategy, not just make the fights last longer.

I'm with both Acadian and ghastley.

I have never played DiD - I don't learn to become a better player if I don't reload and try again from another angle or try to figure out what went wrong. True, IRL many fighters don't get that second chance. But I'm too much of a klutz with the controller.

I also tend to leave the game slider on default. I do slide it down a bit on certain battles (Battle of Bruma comes to mind) but for the most part it's left alone for both Oblivion and Skyrim.

Like Acadian and Buffy, I get to really know my characters. I've tried a few different characters in Oblivion, and only Julian had that really strong voice that drove me to write that long fan fic over three years. But Alise Sudmeri was nearly that kind of character in Oblivion, but she didn't really sing until I brought her to Skyrim.

And like ghastley, I love playing against type. Like Julian starting out as a warrior type but moving towards a mage/healer through the progression of the MQ. And Alise Sudmeri starting out as an homeless outcast searching for a home to settle and ending up with far, far more than she ever wished for.

I haven't felt the need to play Skyrim with a different character. Alise remains the only one for me.

I’ve gotten a lot more confident in the last year or so about distributing attributes evenly instead of dumping most into health. That plus keeping a low AR keeps Adept feeling about right for me most of the time, unless I have a character who I want to feel extremely vulnerable in combat. When a character has too much health at higher levels and has leveled up past most of their game world (Jensa), the only way I know to make enemies hit hard is to click the difficulty up, which is kind of like getting popcorn out from between your teeth using a hammer. Now in my laptop games I suppose I could redistribute attribute points with the console. Like floss, lol. *wanders off to brush teeth*

I agree with a lot of what Acadian, ghastley, and hautee have already said. I play on expert because adept seems too easy, yet master seems needlessly weighted against the player and I don't want to have to glitch/exploit to even the odds… especially early. All of my characters have been played did up until level 25. If they reach that level I figure they've earned their place in Skyrim and I remove the did restriction (yeah, that sounds better than saying that, like Acadian, i've developed an attachment to the character by then and I don't want to see them die ).

Perking one crafting skill is the only limitation I impose on my characters.

Ditto this, but I won't play DiD. I take way too much care in character creation to throw out all that work

The truth is, early on in my gaming I saw a friend play DiD; Bobg. He mourned that character deeply as if it was his own child. His pain over the loss of one of his characters was terrible, and he was so afraid of losing the next that he refused to play her - left her sitting in Anvil on the bench where she would be safe from harm.

Well, it ruined his enjoyment of the game and of his characters; if he loved them he couldn't play them. What fun is that?

Well, I have played Maxical through Oblivion over 30 games with only losing her once, probably never died due to how easy Oblivion was to play with the leveled enemies. That death was on my 360 game back in 2009; and it glitched my game for some reason. At the time Maxical was a vampire and had died in the sunlight while in combat with a bandit. But for some reason she didn't actually die.

The camera stayed stuck on the ground, I could still move her anywhere I wanted but it was her dead body moving around and all I could see was people's feet - even when I activated them to talk to them it would just zoom in on their feet.

I tried fast traveling with her to Skingrad Castle, she stayed laying on the ground and her dead body moved when I moved her - still laying on the ground. Going up the steps at Skingrad Castle was jamming her face into the concrete.

Many of you know that back then I was writing my Fic based on my game - so in my Fic Maxical had to die, but somehow stay alive incapacitated and be moved to Skingrad Castle. I put her inside the dungeon there while I worked on the issue.

The issue was eventually fixed, bringing Maxical back to life in the Fic (at the Old Life Festival). That was the last time she died in game, but twice now since I've been playing on the PC I have lost (I thought permanently) her mod files and thought I'd lost her. Truthfully, I did not want to play Oblivion without her.

But I have played Maxical in Fallout 3/New Vegas/Skyrim - in those games she must have died hundreds of times; none of those games was as easy to survive as Oblivion was. I would have spent a tremendous amount of time remaking characters.

So instead I decided to change the Roleplay for death. It could be just near death and pulled through, or it could be the magic of that realm and healing - but she survived it in my Roleplay, and that was a lot more satisfactory for me than changing toons every time one didn't survive a Sabre attack at level #1; because I'd rather not spend all my time making characters, it is my least fun time in gaming but if I don't get the character's face right I will not enjoy the game as much (hence why I spend so long making each character).

Dead is Dead is a separate issue. I don't do that because I don't think the game suits it. There's a thread on the Bethsoft forums about the times the game just rolls all the dice against you and makes it impossible to win, and I've found a few instances where you're almost guaranteed to lose, even without the random factor.

For example, Orchendor is immune to magic. 100% resistance, so a pure mage can't touch him. If Mellewen hadn't just done the Dawngaurd quests, and had Serana and Auriel's bow with her, she'd have been "without a paddle". But then again, if I played DiD, I'd never roll a pure mage, and a part of the game would be locked off. She gets one-shot killed by Draugr Deathlord archers even with triple Ebonyflesh active, just because she has little health. We've seen a few melee opponents who need to be dodged, too, as she can only drain their health so fast, and some of them can damage her faster than she gets it back.

Yes, I've noticed this in a few places, but the only time I've been able to consistently reproduce it has been in Fallout 3 with the Ant-Agonizer in trying to win the speech challenge. I have well over double the amount of speech needed, but it always takes numerous tries to get her to agree. (However, going to the Mechanist is the opposite, he agrees instantly every single time).

There is no doubt in my mind that there is a random percent condition on the Ant-Agonizer that isn't on the Mechanist in that quest.

True, that example isn't a life or death issue, but it does back up your point about the random selection of quest NPC's that don't follow the protocol, lol.

And just to prove the game just throws spit balls when it thinks the umpire isn't looking...

I was re-rerunning Diablita to make her a two-hander earlier than her first game, and she'd just reached level 30 when she gets an Ancient Dragon swooping down on her! They're not supposed to turn up for another 15 levels! After she died in one blast of frost breath, I turned the difficulty down to Novice (first time ever!) and she still got one-shot killed by his bite.

Eventually, after a couple more restarts, she managed to bring him down at a distance with Dragonrend and spam firebolts at him before he got close enough to bite her again. If she hadn't given her trusty companion all the staves she'd taken from Dragon Priests, he might still have won.

GAAAAAAH!!!


*mALX runs back into her rabbit hole ... *


I haven't fought even one dragon yet in Skyrim ... yet.

I've found that Expert is a good enough challenge for me, but sometimes I play on Adept. DiD most of the time!

I have played Dead is Dead a few times but generally don't so I voted no. I do allow reloads if a game glitch kills me though, such as falling through terrain to my death or getting flung 50 yards into the air by random game mechanics.

As far as difficulty I normally play on lower settings like Apprentice. I've found that it gets less and less rewarding to play on the harder settings in story based games as the years go by.

Yes, I do reload in this situation too. Glitches are not fair deaths.

Because I'm here, I just wanted to contribute to the discussion a little...

I'm currently playing on Legendary...However...I'm doing this because the mods I've gotten are so beautifully OP that there really isn't any point to playing on anything less...

The mod spells can pretty much level cities; Because of the level-ups, perks, smithing rings, the mod which allows you to wear as many rings and necklaces as you want, my IMPERIAL LIGHT ARMOUR is rated at 14 000+...And the weapons?...Well...If you upgrade a God Weapon™ - courtesy of Akatosh - to the max (well, the max I had at the time...) then it's giggle-inducingly overpowered indeed...

McBoy one-shotted the first Dragon you fight on Legendary...That's how OP these weapons are... ...

But that's just me...I'm quite willing to cheat my way to Level 81™...Over-power my spells, armour and weapons...And still find the whole remastered element - with added beautifying, courtesy of Project Hippie - of the game utterly wonderful and compelling...

Far from being a humdrum experience doing these quests again, the mods have really made it properly fun...I'm having a blast, truly...

Challenge?...Nah...Legendary... ...

McB!

You are mad I say! Mad!