Speaking of armor and smithing mods, my next character will be going back to heavy armor but most likely joining the Stormcloaks ASAP after escaping Helgen since I'd like to stretch the Civil War stuff out a bit more. Felt weird this time around, killing the Emperor and then joining the Legion almost immediately and, hey, barely a week later if that and we're already taking Windhelm.
Part of it is due to having timescale set to '2' which has the advantage of making time pass more realistically but the disadvantage of making the playing world incredibly small because even on foot you can cut a pretty wide swathe of adventure and mayhem in the course of one Skyrim day. Maybe I should try to find a happy medium somewhere. And I really should set a self-imposed time restriction on some stuff, like RPing that whatever orders I got specify a day for an attack that is several days off, instead of just "oh hey the party starts when I get there."
Ideally I think it would be cool to locate Ulfric and whatever dudes are with him after they escape Helgen and start making their way back to Windhelm, and then just follow along. I've heard tales of people running across Tullius and Elenwen on the roads out of there, making their way back towards Solitude, but never seen it mentioned about any other major NPCs that were present in the opening sequence. Maybe the game just teleports Ulfric & Co. back to Windhelm, if so, boo. OTOH even if they actually walk back, they'd surely be heading in a completely opposite direction than I am when I emerge from the cave leading out from the keep... that would be a lot of backtracking without Ralof/Hadvar to help out and in gear that isn't that great... I don't suppose there's any way to play out the opening without following through the whole tutorial that puts you on the road to Riverwood? I mean, if you don't follow either Hadvar or Ralof out of Helgen, does the game just "hang" there with Alduin continuing to attack and nothing progressing with any other NPCs?
Anyhoo regarding armor, I'm bummed that the basic Stormcloak armor all appears to be light, except maybe the officer's stuff that you get near the end but I never wore any of it before so it didn't matter. I'll probably want to wear it next time like I did the Imperial stuff on the current playthrough... but I really, really, don't want to wear light armor if only because it wastes leveling opportunities on that skill that I would rather devote to heavy armor, which is what I'm gonna end up wearing over the long haul.
So I guess I need to start looking around for mods that make it possible to play as a Stormcloak grunt in armor that's tagged as heavy instead of light.
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