I have had this feeling since the moment I laid eyes on Skyrim. It is the same feeling I get with any game that I am looking forward to sinking hundreds of hours into and most certainly occurs with almost every roleplaying style game that I play. It is a feeling that I should not do something for fear that I will ruin it for later characters. See this fear doesnt really make sense, but it is my strict devotion to roleplaying that causes it. Thus I always end up starting games off as the most generic class possible, in NV I was a NCR Ranger type, in Skyrim I am a Nord who has fully accepted his role as Dragonborn and does not yet wish to involve himself with the Civil War. I often find myself avoiding dungeons, quests, towns, gear and whole skills entirely for fear that I will repeat it on another character. Sometimes this results in me never reaching content because I grow tired of the game before I even start a 2nd playthrough( looking at you Fable II, Fable III, Mass Effect, Dragons Age)

You see I started out Oblivion without a clue of what a roleplaying game was, my Redguard became a master of all, reaching pinnacles in the Mages Guild, Fighters Guild, completing half of the Dark Brotherhood, owning the Mages Tower, Thieves Den, ( didnt do the Thieves Guild because I couldnt bring myself to enter a crypt) . I became Champion of Cyrodil, Knight of the Nine, and even Madgod. My playtime was up in the 200 hr range and I felt completed with the game. However months later a few outstanding acheivements and a broken Xbox HD brought me back. This time I created characters based on what I had not completed in my first playthrough, using styles of play that I had ignored. I loved playing as a cooky Wood Elf who used Archery and spent weeks in the wilds hunting animals before falling upon a strange door and becoming a hero of the Shivering Isles. My mage who used conjuration,illusion and alteration to device and kill the undead creatures of Ayleid ruins which I had always been too afraid to explore. The Orc assasin who bested the arena and ran a faction of knights out of his Battlehorn home and fought for Kvatch when the legion offered him some coin. And even my Khajit theif who suffered a corrupted game moments after becoming the Grey Fox. All of these playthroughs lasted about 25-40 hours before running out of steam and things to do. I was on the console then and has used my imagination to create a wonderful experience.

Around this time I had built a gaming rig and went to work installing mods to create the greatest Oblivion playthrough ever. I downloaded,installed, tested hundreds of mods and finally got a nice FCOM install going. I ignored combat mods that made me crash but I had come to despise the current combat system and minor glitches that may or may not have been the result of mods often took my focus off of the gameplay and into the technical side. It got to the point where I spent more time in Wrye Bash than I did playing the game. All of those great mods went to waste as the core game behind It all had come to bore me. All of the things my imagination had created when I played on console were now possible but I didnt want any of it...

So essentially my fear is this ; that I will exhaust the games vanilla content to the point that I can, a) not create a second playthrough using different styles and achieving new content , and in doing render mods down the road unplayable due to overplaying the vanilla game.This fear has caused a relatively mundane 1st playthrough( not saying I dont enjoy it but my characters story, combat style and content matter is very limited) and a fear of playing the game any further on the console before switching to PC and mods. I find it hard to enjoy the game when I am tiptoeing around hoping I do not accidentally trip a spoiler for another character. Its this idea that I must keep the game fresh for subsquent playthroughs.

Don't take this too seriously, just wondering if anyone else ever feels the same way.

There is so much to do in Skyrim that you can make several different characters, each doing something uniquely different and without spoiling surprises. I've put over 200 hours in and I still haven't created a magic character or joined any Guilds (except the Thieves Guild, but I just wanted to see their hideout).

Just don't rush your gameplay or try to do everything at once, you'll end up frustrating yourself.