Hi, so as you can tell by my post count, I am totally new to these forums, and I am also at the moment totally new to Skyrim. I just bought it on New Years Eve as an xbox download for $30 (thanks xbox ). I've spent roughly 150 hours with Oblivion, and that was my first video RPG. I'm considering the following rules to keep my first play through as real and immersive as possible. I understand that I will not be able to do most (possibly all) of the Mages quests, and I am ok with that... I was planning on not even attempting them. There will be other characters in my future.

My rules:
- No fast travel - carts are allowed
- No magic (period). - no restoration, no destruction, no enchanting, nothing that I couldn't do or learn to do IRL
- Buying/finding/using enchanted weapons/armor is allowed
- Staves and scrolls are not allowed
- Buying/finding/using potions are allowed - maybe I'm splitting a hair here, but these are my rules after all.
- Alchemy is not allowed.
- Map is allowed, but not the navigation indicator.
- I may consume no more than Three potions per in game hour.
- Food needs to fit the context -- portable food allowed wherever prepared food only where it was cooked and no food during fights.
- Saving before attempting something risky is not allowed.

So far I've been playing (what I believe is) the main quest for about two hours, and I've been following these rules. I assume dragon shouts will be necessary. To this point the skills I've used the most have been sneak and a combination of archery and one hand.

The reason I'm posting is to ask two questions:

Will/can this work?
And, are there any suggestions you all would like to make to make my first play through more immersive/realistic? ... When I say realistic I like to think of it as me inserted into a fantasy world...

If it matters, I'm playing on the xbox with no DLC (at the moment I plan on getting the DLC once I've played the vanilla game).

Thanks in advance.

Just save alot if you won't save before something risky

Well, yeah, there's that. To be honest, I'm still trying to decide how much I should let myself save, and whether or not I should use the auto saves. I mean yeah, it's all kinds of frustrating to get killed and then find out that your last save so an hour (real time) old, but knowing that's a possibility made me much more careful. That's seriously something that I'm torn about. I've heard save early, save often, but I don't know if I like that. IMHO it kills some of the immersion if I know that I can just reload should something I don't like happen.

What difficulty are you playing on?