Now my stealth/thief focused character is fighting blood dragons that he cannot solo :/

Yeah, that pissed me off to no end. It's so transparent and pointless. I didn't WANT to be dragonborn.

To bad, Bethesda wants you to do what they want.

Wait, you can't start the Civil War without starting the MQ?

EDIT: Can't you just do the MQ up until the point where the court wizard sends you on the errand to get the stone, but not go out and get it and start the Civil War quest chain instead? Although I imagine this would probably make the MQ undo-able..

In order to get past the second civil war quest, you have to kill your first dragon. And suffer through Bleak Falls Barrow again.

That is total BS.

You can start the civil war questline without doing the main quest but unless there's a flashy way to hoodwink the jarl of Whiterun then yeah you'll have to start the main quest. eventually. It's a big fail on Beth's part.

Just don't go see the old fellas up in high Hrothgar. Leave them waiting and get on with the war.

Once you fight that first dragon, it's all dragons all the time :/ regular ones are ok for my character but blood dragons, which I see at this level, own me.

Same here, that's one of the things that really annoyed me :/

You can do the empire side?

You don't choose your destiny, your destiny chooses you.

I seem to remember being able to do the Stormcloak quests without ever doing Bleak Falls barrow. I know for a fact that you can do the empire questline without doing Bleak Falls, I just did this with my orc.

What do you have to do Bleak Falls for?

Are you on PC?

Then look for a variable named MQ106TurnOffRandomDragons and set it to 1. This variable controls the random spawning of dragons both before and after the quest MQ106. This will not permanently disable all the dragons. Each Dragon Altar/wall in the wild will still have a dragon guarding it (and attacking everything nearby) and several Dragon burial sites will also have a Dragon (not a generic one but named).

On the bright side, no more random dragons spawning in towns killing NPCs nor random dragons constantly ambushing you as you stroll through the country.

That's what most video games are about, isn't it?

I don't see why the civil war quest should be related to the main quest and depend on it, but I also don't understand why we must be part of the College of Winterhold to complete the Gauldur legend quest either ... I'll have to try the civil war before the main quest.

Well, the Civil War only exists because of previous dragonborn. Might as well make the new one involved. First, it's a war over Talos obviously. Secondly, Martin. Martin left a void in the empire after his death - he warded off one crisis, only to accidently create a new one. In the form of Titus Mede. Titus Mede was a random warlord who saw how weakened the imperial city was after Oblivion and took it over with a measly 1000 troops. And started playing "pretend dragonborn emperor". His grandson Titus Mede II inherited his throne, and now has helped outlaw Talos. And now a new dragonborn appears. Do you really think they should be unconnected with their predeccesors? Or worse yet, playing the part of a random subservient soldier (on either side). Or even funnier than that, "roleplaying" as some lumberjack or cook. This world should definitely end, if that's the case. Alduin and the Thalmor should succeed, if the one person left on the planet to rectify the situation wants to be a nobody.

Maybe, but it just came into my memory that the civil war and the dragonborn are part of a prophecy: nothing political or religious in this, although a prophecy can be religion related.

Anyway, the civil war has already begun when the dragonborn shows on the scene, so there's no real reason to bind the civil war quests to the dragonborn ones.

That's where my MQ/Civil War questline abruptly ended. I was supposed to deliver the axe, capture the dragon and make peace treaty all at the same time.

The elder scroll is supposedto be about exploration and the story, its not like fallout where you make your own story. TES = cannon story , FO = your own story, with a hint of cannon.

Agreed, a HUGE oversight. I was really annoyed at this... however, it did set the scene for some truly epic battles. The battle of fort sungard had me storming an imperial keep on a mountaintop, all the while a dragon was flying overhead.

I've only done the civil war on my dragonborn character, but I was always under the impression that you could just get the quest from the court wizard, ignore it and carry on? You really have to kill the dragon first?

Yea I was recently let down by this too. I didn't want to the start the MQ until after I had finished the Civil War. There a few limitations like this, for example the quest to find the three pieces of an amulet.

Last time I played New Vegas I was the courier who had to track down a guy who shot me in the head. Own story ? Naah.
Skyrim ? I'm the dragonborn and there's no escape from it. And I'd really loved to buy that house in Whiterun without having trouble from the dragons.

Point is that TES and FO are the same with different gameplay and choises. In the end it's all the same to put it blunt. The good thing in FO is that it doesn't really force you to do stuff that might get you annoyed. But we are talking about different game developers so...

(( When half the quests have no political or social effect after completion, tieing them in together in such ways seems like a half arsed attempt at making it feel like someone thought about it, when in-fact most of what they probably concentrated on was the MQ, adding the civil-war second and then throwing in the remaining quests as they were finished. ))

(( The same can be said for Blood on the Ice, I completely missed one of the clues, which after making my assumptions, showed me blatantly that I was wrong, I had been pushed into a decision that, at the time made no sense but I went with it as I has no other choice. Now I know that one of the clues solves the entire case, yet has actually nothing pointing towards it. Now I have to wait 3 days and let the quest pick itself back up, dumb. ))