okay mai'q is essential? wow they went over-f'ing-board with this crap. ive never tried to kill him but come on! unnessesary... that list is rediculous.

Keep making assumptions about how I play my game, it's amusing....
Roleplaying is about taking on the role of someone that is not who you are i.e. a pirate / mage / doctor / murderer / theif / ninja.
Maybe you should define how you interpret the use of roleplaying

But seriously are you going to contribute anything relevant or just throw flamebait around?

Why would you run into the marketplace where everyone can see you and the guy screaming theif - that's stupid.
The game isn't based on anything remotely modern in RL, but as for back in the medevil times, yes, you probably would have killed the merchant if he caught you

Another example : , even though wiping them out would definitely fit in with a 'good guy' roleplay. It's not murder for the jollies, it's a public service.

should be like morrowind. you can kill every one but get a message and chanse to reload if you kill a essential npc, if you don't than it's your own fault you can't compleet the quest


But i do not think for example a dragon on the other side of the map should be able to kill essential npc since you cant stop it. But if your in the same place as the dragon than sure it should be able to kill essential npc, your own fault if it does

and what if you RP a werewolf thats goes feral in a town?

There should be a option in the game menu ''disable essential characters (MQ essentials not effected)''. Everyone would be happy.

That's the problem, and the cause, right there. Some people complained "oh, no, I've killed an npc essential to the plot, and my last save was hours ago. My game is ruined, and it's all the game's fault."
As for the dragon on the other side of the map, they told us before launch there were killable, essential, and protected, able to be killed only by the player-character. More of the third, and less of the second, would be very welcome.

Thats what I was thinking along the lines of, since obviously some people need to survive in order to finish the game.

there are auto saves for pretty much every thing you do in this game

Ok I'll give you a real example of why it's stupid, this happened to me in game the other day. I made myself a thief /assassin and I play all my characters without the use of a HUD, potions, healing spells, conjuration, or companion and I keep the difficulty on master. I got to riften at around level 6 and saw a blood dragon so I saved the game, it was attacking the farm and also Vilkas and Ria from the companions was on top of the little cliff near the ritual stone and I didn't know they were up there for a long time during the fight and also being level 6 I couldn't really do anything to kill this dragon myself.

If essential characters were killable that means the whole companions questline is now screwed for me, probably everyone at the farm would've died too because I couldn't stop the dragon killing everyone, is that fair on me?

Oh, yes, I was more referring to their inclusion in Oblivion in the first place, as well as their proliferation here.
[Though to be fair, some have reported performance improvements, especially as regards lag, if the auto saves are disabled, so the old advice, "save often" still applies.]

true

You have a save, you've also on purpose limited yourself and made the dragon fight harder than it should be. Yes it's fair, the game world should be tailored to suit those who make everything more difficult than necessary, you limited yourself, you now have consequences to that. It would be part of the experience and the role play - if you were actually role playing and knew nothing of these people before hand you shouldn't care that they died IMO.

- And you know, you could always lower the difficulty and give yourself back that which your limiting from yourself like the HUD, potions etc until the Dragon is defeated and then go back. Simple.

Saving doesn't mean anything, important people could die without you knowing in this game, and how are you ever going to find the save file. It's not practical to allow the game to completely mess someones playthrough up just to allow you to kill a few people.

As much as I agree with you, based on the sandboxy feel Skyrim has, what if an essential was killed by a pack of wolves whilst you were miles away somewhere else?

Refer to my previous post regarding 'protected npcs'. Anyone involved with a quest, or providing a service is essential as far as enemies and the environment is concerned, but killable by the player 'at your own risk'. Not difficult to do, they already do it with followers.

Now you are being totally unreasonable, why shouldn't I be allowed to make the game harder for myself? Worrying about whether important people are going to die all the time while I'm playing does not make the game any harder for me, it's a major inconvenience which doesn't need to be there in the first place.

This thread already exists... j/s

As for being in towns miles away being killed without your knowing; I'd rather the game loads chunks of the area during run time when you get close to them/should see them. So a dragon appearing in Riften while you're in Riverwood would never happen because it's not in the same loading chunk.

How has the same argument that comes to every thread like this not shown up yet?

Two problems arise. Problem A is there are too many unkillable characters. Problem B is that too many characters would die from random creature attacks.

Solutions:

Make appropriate characters flee from attacks, rather than charge straight at them. Nazeem, you are a farmer. Don't go after the Blood Dragon, let the guards handle it. Just go hide in your farm or the nearest open building. Guards and Soldiers should attack dragons, civilians and common riffraff should not.

Make the needed essential characters essential to everyone but the player. That prevents them from being killed in any random attack, but still lets the player kill them. Maybe with some kind of added safety cap like needing to hit them an extra 3 times when they are yielding. Sneak attacks that would be one shot kills bypass this rule as it is hard to accidentally assassinate someone.

If you combine these things the odds of an essential NPC dying is extremely low, considering a dragon would have to run them down, get their health down, and then you would accidentally have to hit them after that, possibly more than once if there was an additional amount of hits needed. All before they flee into a house.

Problem solved if you ask me.

Followers can still die to enemies, it's not impossible.

no but you pretty much wants them to die if that happens

That's not unreasonable, you're complaining that because you made it hard that you can't save a few NPCs, I simply suggested an option to get round it. I also just posted about "chunk" loading so that dragons from miles away won't appear. Inconveniences are all over Skyrim and happen to everyone (PC/NPC) why should you're character be the one who brings immortality to a great number of worthless people.
- Put it this way; If you had done the Companion questline and then decided to kill them, for whatever reason, would you not be pissed that they remain essential even after they have served their main questline?

What happened to "if you kill a quest giver, their relatives might pop up and offer the same quests"? Did Bethesda decide "[censored] it, no time!" and just make everybody essential?

You can't even tell if they're essential, so my murder characters stealthily shoot a target, only for them to start screaming and calling the guards because they can't frigging die.

We even have the protected system ingame, it would be ideal for necessary characters whilst still giving the player freedom of action.