Playing this again. Actually another Breton woman, but sword-and-board auxiliary of the Empire rather than a soulless blaster-thief. (Alternate Start: Live Another Life is still essential and continues to impress). Took Breton for the spell resistance, which is niiiice. My experience has always been that melee attackers can be trivially confounded with tactics (or simply backing up at the right time), while spellcasters are just "You will be dead in this many seconds". Ironic since Destruction was so heavily nerfed for players. (Enemy archers are somewhere in the middle. Moderate damage, somewhat avoidable)
Regular melee still feels nerf-batty, but actual combat seems to encourage power moves which do stun appropriately. Feels pretty alright. Using a mace and shield, planning to eventually get the mace of Molag Bal.
Main goal is to join the Dark Brotherhood and see their quest through to the end, finally. In previous runs, my personal admiration for Oblivion's Thieves Guild has made it hard to support the Brotherhood.
Also made it hard to appreciate Skyrim's "petty gangster" guild, though I'm glad I saw it through to the end eventually. It's *supposed* to be bad, and get better.
Bonus points if you visit Farengar first, deliver his frost salts, then clean out half of Arcadia's stock for free since you're her 'friend'.
Hehe, I wasn't going to focus on alchemy, but it's so good I couldn't resist. But buying out her "stock" apparently didn't include, like, *most* of her display items. Which is weird because the display items of the bosmer hunter just outside were part of his stock, disappearing as I bought them.
So when she wandered off to bed as I did alchemy, I took the opportunity to rob the shop blind. Probably bad conduct for A Soldier Of The Imperial Legion, but uh... technically the city is semi-rebellious... That totally justifies me robbing a racially-Imperial citizen, right...?
Anyway next time I visited, three brigands spawned in her room and started screaming at me. A few minutes later they managed to path down and assault me. Arcadia: "You need to leave."
I kited them outside, of course (and now there's a Whiterun Guard who may never despawn, he's outlasting the brigands). Kinda funny feature, but a little disappointing in that Arcadia is annoyingly friendly and kind before and after. Bit of a disconnect.
Also, vampires killed the smith woman during the Dawnguard "intro" ): I should have re-enabled run-for-your-lives, but I'm trying to keep the mods low this time. Had to not only redownload the game, but then delete the entire folder and download again, to get it actually working. Guess there were some glitchy extra files, somehow.
OH RIGHT, I found some Silvenar lore! I've always loved Bosmer. Sadly, I mostly recognize the Silvenar from my 2 days of TESO during the free week. Seems like a cool position, though, and reinforces my love of Bosmer culture.