Y

That makes it worse. you'd think the mage's guild questline would be all about magic and stuff. but you can hack and slash your way through it and still end up as an archmage who's crap at magic. At least the TG involves some activities that really need a bit of the relevant skill set.

Yeeeesssss!!!! Character goal!
i have decided the goal for my orc is to hit at least level 40 withour using ANY magic, join the college and try to become archmage without using any magic. if memory serves you have to use at least one basic spell that i can recall OTTOMH, but my character mission is to become the most magically inept archmage in history with no skill in any school a single point higher than an orc starts with. For the irony.

As for the stone in the DB sanctuary, the same applies. I doubt there's an easy way into it, but then it's not exactly a hardship to join under false pretenses. Hell, one of the guys you have to kill deserves it anyway, so what's the problem?

Well, as I recall, you need to know three spells to get through the College quest line. A ward, a fire and an ice spell.

I'm all for as much freedom as they'll give me. As long as it makes sense.

So I have no problem with them letting me join any guild. I do, however, have a problem with the fact that a pure warrior (or nearly pure) can become Archmage of the College of Winterhold. Why the other mages would allow that makes no sense to me at all.

Well, as I recall, you need to know three spells to get through the College quest line. A ward, a fire and an ice spell.

I feel like Bethesda was so terrified that the player might actually miss something that they specifically designed quests to lead you straight towards other, usually entirely unrelated, quests. This is why you can only refuse a quest 0.01 percent of the time, this is why you can find undroppable quest items for quests you've never even received, this is why your journal becomes so cluttered with stuff you don't even intend to do and you aren't even given the option of hiding those undesired entries, this is why you're practically drafted into every guild you overhear someone mumbling about. It's as though the magic compass highlighting every point of interest wasn't enough. They also had to build in what was effectively a quest arrow leading you by the nose to each and every yet undiscovered quest.

Look at Markarth: Jewelry stand lady sends you to deliver a ring to Calcelmo. This is an utterly worthless quest. You walk thirty seconds up the street and give some guy a random item. But this essentially ropes you into Calcelmo's spider killing/dwemer ruin mission. In Morthal: Idgrod has you deliver a letter to Whiterun's Danica Pure-Spring. Another worthless quest (though there's some distance at least), but it draws you into the Blessings of Nature quest. Skyrim is filled with these tiny, useless, boring quests whose only purpose seems to direct you to the real quests.

I really wonder just how many quests Skyrim would actually have if you ignored all these miscelaneous funneling quests.

I have a friend who has played Oblivion, FO3, and Skyrim, with a single character in each game. She does not roleplay. To her the game is little different from Doom, Half Life, or any other shooter. Kill bad guy, take its stuff, get stronger, repeat. She sees no reason why her character should not be the head of every guild and do every quest. She is also much more used to playing linear games like the Mass Effect series, where you do everything the developer puts in the game. So she takes that attitude to ES games. If the developer made a quest, she should do it. Otherwise she cannot 'beat' the game.

I think Todd Howard (or someone else at Bethesda) is the same kind of gamer, because I do get the impression that the devs expect everyone to play that way. It is true you do not have to, and I certainly do not, but I do feel that is the mind set Bethesda has when it comes to their main quest lines.

You don't have to join the Brotherhood, you can just kill everybody in there. There's even a quest for that!

You want less freedom?

The quest line isnt about magic really, though. at no point do you need to actually use any magic other then the ward spell. And not knowing any magic is hardly a setback. Look at any real world university. How many of the deans could pass every class offered? None. So is it unreasonable that the archmage doesn't know much magic? Yes. You don't need to know and do magic to manage a school dedicated to teaching it.

Stereotypically, yes, that's not how things usually work in typical fantasy mage colleges, but this isn't a typical fantasy we are talking about.

And on the flip side, one could argue, how could a mage become leader of the companions? How does someone backing the empire join the dark brotherhood or thieves guild? All you need to do is use your imagination and make a reason for it.

With the quest mentioned above, and the fact that you can access the college through the Midden, I'd say this thread should end because in my opinion any further complaints about being forced to do something you don't want to do is pointless given the fact that you don't have to do the prerequisite activities to gain access to either of the premises.

Khajit in the streets of Solitude says "Hey, sabotage the lighthouse for me!" Uh, NO. Pretty simple.

Stereotypically, yes, that's not how things usually work in typical fantasy mage colleges, but this isn't a typical fantasy we are talking about.

The main complaint with this thread is the roleplay aspect. This is a roleplaying game, yes?

You don't have to join the Brotherhood, you can just kill everybody in there. There's even a quest for that!

Completely unknown, maybe, but that's why there is such a thing called recon.

As for the DB, I mentioned the official way to get into the sanctuary and, well...

I would like the freedom to make important choices. Skyrim only gives me the freedom to make meaningless ones. When there comes a point where one should be able to make meaningful choices (support or resist the companions werewolfism, support or resist selling your soul to Nocturnal, turn criminals in to the law instead of just ignoring they tried recruiting you) it largely fails to deliver. Even in the quests where you are afforded some degree of choice (Markarth's forsworn and cannibalism quests, Paarthurnax, Civil War), the results are so shallow and/or meaningless that they might as well have never provided the option in the first place.

You don't have to officially join them, though you need to go trough some parts of the initiation.

Like you need to kill one not-brotherhood related person at least.

As I said, you're not supposed to get to the trap door from the back. You can only do it by glitching the game's physics. That's not recon, that's metagaming.

How do you do it without completing Aventus's quest?

Look at Markarth: Jewelry stand lady sends you to deliver a ring to Calcelmo. This is an utterly worthless quest. You walk thirty seconds up the street and give some guy a random item. But this essentially ropes you into Calcelmo's spider killing/dwemer ruin mission.

(He has a conversation option where you can ask to get into some ruins, but I've not tried that one.)

Completely unknown, maybe, but that's why there is such a thing called recon. I know that's such a hard concept for people who want to be spoonfed and complain about it to comprehend, but they should add it to their vocabulary and habits.

As I'm not playing a thief any more than I am a magi why would I be doing that kind of (metagaming) recon? That is a glaring flaw in your argument.

My Nord fighter wants nothing to do with magic, but to get to the end of the main quest I have to if nothing else enter the college grounds and go theu the first day of classes. Sorry, makes no sense. Yes you can get to Septimus w/o entering the college at all, but again that is severe metagaming on the players part.

My old character got to this place up north... I'll skip the college and go straight there... That is metagaming. No less than your insistance that anyone can get in the college thru the sewer.

That would be the one. He's involved to various degrees in a handful of other quests, but these are the two that are handled directly through him.

Hmm. That doesn't seem particularly "in your face". It's not like he forces the topic on you. And as the court wizard for the city, he seems like a reasonable "quest hub" to have.

push you into it.