Gabe,
Love this guide! Very concise and contains good ideas for new RPers.
I have a suggestion for fellow RPers on PC: mods can REALLY help the thief experience. There are a number that change the thief-ish perk trees entirely to remove some of the issues you mentioned but that's not what I'm talking about here.
I found two mods that lent weight to my thieving (pun intended): Banks of Skyrim and any mod that adds weight to gold (I use this one but there are many). It's not just having one or the other - I found that having both was really beneficial. The combination really makes it more immersive and challenging to manage a large fortune in Skyrim:
1. In general, the game incentivizes you to steal things with a high value for their weight - so you naturally go after jewelry and such things, vice most lower tier weapons. But weighted gold comes in when you SELL the stuff - it gives you a reason to stash your gold somewhere...giving your character an immersive reason to set up a home base to store stuff in, cache gold somewhere in the game world, or find some way to make it lighter...
2. ...which is the first of three things Banks of Skyrim does for a thief. It lets you trade heavy gold for a light paper note in various denominations at a banker added to the Jarl's castle at each major city in the game. So you now have something "legitimate" for your alter ego to do and a cover to maintain as a legitimate businessman/mer and an in game reason that you want to do it (to make your wealth portable). The mod lets merchants accept your bank notes as money...but only at a fraction of their total value...so if you want full value for the note you need to go to the nearest hold capital and get that money as gold again.
3. Banks of Skyrim also lets you invest your gold in the hold. If you do that, it not only gets you the interest (over time) but it improves the local economy (also over time) so that local merchants have more barter gold. Not so important at low levels...but immersive for the alter ego of my high level thief maybe finally trying to "go legit" or establish a cover business in the hold in question...
4. You can also take out a loan...and you can fail to pay on time on it...so then big nasty people come try to collect. This is a cool way for a lower level thief to RP getting in trouble with a loan shark or some such.
Anyway - I found these mods made my thief playthrus even more fun and I loved your two guides.
Gabe,
Love this guide! Very concise and contains good ideas for new RPers.
I have a suggestion for fellow RPers on PC: mods can REALLY help the thief experience. There are a number that change the thief-ish perk trees entirely to remove some of the issues you mentioned but that's not what I'm talking about here.
I found two mods that lent weight to my thieving (pun intended): Banks of Skyrim and any mod that adds weight to gold (I use this one but there are many). It's not just having one or the other - I found that having both was really beneficial. The combination really makes it more immersive and challenging to manage a large fortune in Skyrim:
1. In general, the game incentivizes you to steal things with a high value for their weight - so you naturally go after jewelry and such things, vice most lower tier weapons. But weighted gold comes in when you SELL the stuff - it gives you a reason to stash your gold somewhere...giving your character an immersive reason to set up a home base to store stuff in, cache gold somewhere in the game world, or find some way to make it lighter...
2. ...which is the first of three things Banks of Skyrim does for a thief. It lets you trade heavy gold for a light paper note in various denominations at a banker added to the Jarl's castle at each major city in the game. So you now have something "legitimate" for your alter ego to do and a cover to maintain as a legitimate businessman/mer and an in game reason that you want to do it (to make your wealth portable). The mod lets merchants accept your bank notes as money...but only at a fraction of their total value...so if you want full value for the note you need to go to the nearest hold capital and get that money as gold again.
3. Banks of Skyrim also lets you invest your gold in the hold. If you do that, it not only gets you the interest (over time) but it improves the local economy (also over time) so that local merchants have more barter gold. Not so important at low levels...but immersive for the alter ego of my high level thief maybe finally trying to "go legit" or establish a cover business in the hold in question...
4. You can also take out a loan...and you can fail to pay on time on it...so then big nasty people come try to collect. This is a cool way for a lower level thief to RP getting in trouble with a loan shark or some such.
Anyway - I found these mods made my thief playthrus even more fun and I loved your two guides.
