...You can reach the armour cap without a helmet, players who choose not to use a helmet aren't disadvantaged in any way.

The only small complaint I could see people making would be wasting perks on those set bonus perks, in order to reach the higher up perks. But every skill tree has useless perks which must be paid for as stepping stones. And besides, you only need very few well placed perks to turn your character into a horribly overpowered munchkin, a few wasted ones is definitely not a problem when you have 81 to spend.

It's a bit of a shame there's no helmets for beast races. I'm playing an Argonian (yes, peer pressure forced me to get Steam >.>) and of course I can't wear a helmet as I couldn't logically explain where my horns would go if I wore one. So... I don't.

But for all other races and as far as logic is concerned: The helmet is the most important piece of armour. NO sane warrior would fight without a helmet. For most medieval fighters, the helmet would be the only piece of metal (except for the bit at the end of their weapons) they'd equip for battle. Much less expensive than a full suit of maille (or, in very late periods, plate, but that wasn't commonly around until the very late medieval times). The thing is, the head is the most vulnerable part of the body, and easy to hit in melee. It's what you need to protect FIRST before thinking about chest armour or anything. Only protecting the chest is a very recent invention that came with modern firearms; the torso is simply the largest target, most shooters these days are trained to aim for the center of mass, so yes, police usually only wear ballistic armour to protect the chest. But this isn't a modern scenario, melee threats are common, and the head needs to be protected (don't forget that even today, soldiers always carry a helmet, while their body armour isn't always the best, depending on the deployment zone and nation of origin, of course; but if you can, the first piece of equipment you'd get, as a fighter, now and back in the middle ages, was a helmet... Well, after the weapon, that is).

So yes, not wearing a helmet should come with massive disadvantages in combat. It should be stupid. Only true problem is, as I said, beast races who'd need helmets that work for them.

In bold. Is what I tried summing up in my last post. Like ex. Fists of Steel*. If your not a H2H kinda guy... this perk is immediately a wasted point.

Also Tower of Strength in Heavy. It's the only one truly worthy of getting on the right side, but you have to get an "ALL armor" perk just to get it.

And again, my main point b/c I'm using Light Armor finally is that you MUST* get Custom Fit JUST to open up the rest of the tree. Does that seem fair to the again said people who don't like wearing helmets? No.

I think for all the people who would rather not have their helmet on there should be an option like in Guild Wars where you can simply choose not to display your helmet... I almost never display my headgear in that game but I've always got it on and still gain all the bonuses out of it... I don't think that would be too hard to implement into the options menu...

Even if you play in 3rd person, aren't you just looking at the back of your characters' head all the time? How pretty can that be that you don't want it covered by a helmet? You could wear a helmet when you're out in the wilderness and likely to get into a fight and take it off when you're in a town or something. I personally am wearing Krosis and I think it looks badass (along with the stats boost).

Being Dragonborn, is also forced on the player.... Man Bethesda is taking all our choices away from us!

No it's not. You don't have to continue the main quest.

No it's not. You don't have to start the main quest.

There, fixed it for ya.

He's right, you don't.

you never start it if you bypass the intro.

Is this possible in the vanilla version? Did I miss something when I clicked "New Game" after my game was installed? Or is this one of those alternate start point mods that you're referring to?

Yes, you just never added 'SStartingCell=' to the [General] section of your Skyrim.ini file. You can even go back and see Helgen before the dragon attacked using this. The main quest never starts, you have to start it manually later if you want to do it.

I see. I was thinking in fairness to the XBox and PS3 users who's reading this thread. For them, they obviously don't have the option of skipping the intro.