I am leaning towards the companions guild but I may want to join the speech guild. I check the wiki and it was not explicit as to whether I must be exclusive to one guild or can join more than one, or even all the guilds.

If i can join all the guilds, is it beneficial to do so?

Yes, but I recommend to focus on quest for one at the time.

Yes, you can join them all. Whether or not it is beneficial though, is dependent on your play style. If you are a warrior, don't join the mages guild and vice versa.

You can join any guild. The Companions, Mages and Thieves quests are mostly dungeon-crawls so you can play them as just a generic adventurer rather than fighter-mage-thief if you like. Although the Thieves one is better played with the stealth skill, rather than rushing into locations with weapons blazing.

cool thanks

don't listen to these guys, join whichever guilds sound interesting to you. it may decrease replay value, but games are about fun, and taking our advice over what you think is right isn't all that fun lol.

anyway, have fun in any guild(s) you join!!

Also if you want to complete Gaulders (or balders something like that) legend (which can be picked up in 4 locations) you will need to join the Mage guild and do the 1st quest.

You can join everything if you wish.

You must choose Stormcloaks or Imperials on the civil war quest.

what's a speech guild

Yes, you can, but for the best experience I suggest you don't.

I play as a battlemage. My style is heavy armour, right hand sword, left hand destruction/restoration spell. So I've joined the Companions and the College of Winterhold. Actually, I've also joined the Bards College as a kind of hobby my character has.

I've tried my best to wipe out the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood on this character.

Yep you can, if you really want too.

It's gotta be the Bard's College he is talking about. However I do have a question since we are talking about Guilds and whatnot, I have seen or heard references to the School of Restoration and the School of Destruction;are they talking about the magic itself or are they referring to an actual school that exists in the Empire?

You can join all guilds regardless of whether you have joined another. The only exception to this is you haver to make a choice between the Stormcloaks and the Thalmor Puppets *clears throat* sorry Imperial Legion

wth is the speech guild?

Geez, I guess the guilds will take anyone in. I joined the College of Winterhold and even became the Archmage after I was already an accomplished Assassin in the DB. That is my only real gripe with the guilds is that regardless of previous allegiances, you can still go and join any one of them. For example, in FO3 you could not join the Regulators and the Talon Merc Company. But apparently in Skyrim accomplished thieves and murderers can go and join any guild and still end up the head of that one too.

This called freedom and if it was the other way around there would be tons of threads whining about "oh noes, I want to join guild x but I can't because I joined guild y and I don't want to restart the game. Damn you Bethesda."

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All skills in The Mage playstyle are divided into schools, like the School of Destruction and School of Alteration. They are no actual stand-alone schools, it's just the name of the skill.

OT: You can join whatever guild you want, whenever you want. The only thing in which you can only pick one faction is the civil war.

That's what I thought but since I am a TES noob, I figured no harm in asking. Thanks for the info.

Not really...I didn't complain about it in Fallout. Some things just make sense and that all to it. I cannot imagine a thief or murderer being too highly looked upon in a mage guild or even the companions. Elements like this cause one to think hard when making choices about their character. I don't think that is a bad thing. In fact, I like it when choices are tough, makes me think that much harder about what I actually want in my character...