Seriously—I declined the quest because I don't like the thuggish implications of it. Went a little something like this:

NPC: I need you to go be a thug for me.

Me: No thank you, I don't want to do that right now (paraphrased dialogue option)

NPC: Shame, you look like just the right type... (dialogue breaks)

Then...

QUEST STARTED: WE ARE FORCING THIS INTO YOUR (QUEST LIST) BECAUSE WE CAN.

No. Okay? No. My journal is bloated enough as it is. I don't need you to automatically add quests I don't want when I frigging DECLINED them in the first place. Don't hold my hand. I'm an advlt. I'm sure of my choices.

/end rant

The best alternative is to not go on with it.

Yes this really really svcks. Whats more i even had some incidents where the quest giver was a blacksmith, and im unable to trade with him unless i agree to the quest. The only options are (okay i'll do it) or (you can convince me to do it).
I can't ask him whats for sale without accepting his quest. Which is ridiculous.

Yes, that happened on my very first playthrough. I just wanted to sell my first heap of loot and this blacksmith gives me a quest to make iron daggers. This is called linearity, devs. TES is supposed to be about choice. Don't force me to make iron daggers so I can get a taste for blacksmithing and go OOOOH MAYBE I WANT TO BE A WARRIOR! No. Don't even.

If you want to make a linear RPG, make one. But don't turn your biggest series into one.

Eh , thats the smithing tutorial? Im quite sure you can skip that; the "what do you have for sale" option is still available. Still, an easy way for this would be to allow us to forfeit quests, they had that in oblivion(if i remember correctly ) no idea why they removed it.

There's no journal in Skyrim... you just have to remember the events transpired in that quest you started 30 hours ago.

I was about to ask what you mean by journal, as i wasn't aware we had one. Now i know you mean the quest screen.

Yes, this is one of my few annoyances with this excellent game. I like to personally keep a tidy journal and I hate it when some NPC runs up to you and forces a quest on you to visit some bloody museum or college somewhere.

Because of this, I quicksave every couple of minutes, then when I'm given useless quests, I quickload, then as soon as I see the bugger running towards me again, its down with the console, click on the offender ... 'DISABLE' and zapp!! ... he's gone forever.

Sorts them out every time.


Stannie

And it's a shame that it has come to this.

Yeah it's sad.

Even worse is that when you pick up quests and you have around 30 active quests the journal gives usually gives you no clue as to what the quest was about - usually it just says "search xxx for yyy".

Yes it's annoying. I've started to tab out of the dialog before getting that far.

OMG THANK YOU! And I must say that I unfortunately agree with your sig. The game also shoves factions down your throat too. WHAT HAPPENED TO CHOICE? WHAT HAPPENED TO CONSEQUENCE?

This is one of the most obvious annoyances for me, in Skyrim.
I'm like to Brynjolf in Riften "I like your voice and all, but I'm not a thief nor do I wish to serve the Black-Briars."
But nooo, my already jam-packed journal has a quest added that I never want to complete. Pfft.. Bethesda, really?

Was it "Lights out!"? If yes, do it and you'll have your revenge.

I gotta agree on this one. I looked at my quest tab recently on a character I haven't really played in a while and was surprised at how many tasks I had stacked in the miscellaneous section. Stuff that will never get done. Stuff that I never really actually accepted from people. Some that were never actually given to me by people.

I am very glad that I don't have a pathological need to keep these things neat and tidy, I'd probably be going nuts. But thankfully I'm lazy and slovenly in my attitudes toward these things and don't care if the list of unfinished unwanted chores keeps getting bigger. It gives me something to do when there's nothing pressing going on.

Sort of like chasing down dragons and acting like the hero. I got one character doing that. The rest are vagrants, murderers, thieves, and collectors who have a whole slew of quests that just don't have any meaning to them.

I guess there's a console command to mark them complete, but it just ain't worth the time to mark them all as done.

Is it possible Bethesda did this so that people who DO like to just hack and slash ... can do so? I imagine if you want to just hack and slash, you press 'E' as fast as you can until the dialogue options are all done, then go on your merry way to ... well, hack and slash.

Yeah, then they should have made an hack n slash and not turn the best RPG series ever into.. well.. Skyrim.

I'm on my 2nd playthrough and I'm trying hard to avoid all those quests. Looks like the only way to refuse a quest so it's not added to your quests log is to tab out of the dialogue, but a lot of entries are forced into your quests log regardless of what you do, like being forced to speak with either the Ralof sister or Hadvar uncle in Riverwood. Hopefully the CK will grant us a mean to fix the issue.

Boy! Do I ever agree with you! I don't like the thuggish (and/or morally questionable) quests either, and many of them are forced on you no matter how you try to avoid them. As a result, I'm left carrying around a mysterious gem stone that must be appraised, whether I want to do the under-handed actions that go along with getting it appraised or not. Seems I'll have a whole game of carrying that thing around as a curse for choosing to be a "Goody-goody".

This. I don't even bother finishing dialogue once I've decided that I'm just not interested - I just exit out of the conversation.

Yeah thats really annoying. I find that if I have a quest in my quest list, then I have to complete it. Very annoying.

LOL, is that really what it's come to? Bethesda owes the console players a console!

Like I said in my post, a lot of people are crying over spilled milk, it just stays in your journal, nobody is forcing anyone to finish it and you can turn it off unlike Oblivion or Fallout 3 where you can't do that. You don't have to agree to do any of those quests with Bryndolf, or Orethos, Molag Bal, Varemina, Arentis arantino, etc nor do you have to do any quest in this game besides the tutorial, try telling that to a Bioware game where it basically forces you to do the main quest. This is certainly the lesser evil and it's crying over spilled milk.

I am one of the many who suffer from a type of OCD that causes a cluttered quest log/journal to drive me nuts. When I started playing Skyrim for the first time I was super excited about the RPG aspect and getting to do whatever I want, but not even an hour into the game my journal had dozens of quests that I never intended to do and I ended up spending my whole Skyrim game doing all of the misc. and other quests just to rid my log/journal of them! This isn't what the game is supposed to be about!

I think what the issue is not that we HAVE to do them, but that we feel we HAVE to do them, or else suffer the feeling of being overwhelmingly overwhelmed whenever we push "tab" and open up the quest log window, at least that's how I feel when I look at it. My eyes glaze over and my motivation to do any of them plummets replaced by the motivation to hold my head and cry. So yeah, to remedy that I've devoted my Skyrim game playing time to completing the quests just to get rid of them. I SO can't wait for a mod that hides them or allows you to delete them temporarily!

Give us the option to hide quests we have no intention of ever doing.