K, I got Oblivion, tell me what mods I need.

horse armor.
you NEED it

Did you get the GoY edition? That already has the horse armour.

If you got it on pc then don't bother buying any mods, just get the user-made ones

obLOLvion.

get the animes and the animes companion mods and then have dialogue tree sex with all of the animes companions. also get the sephiroth race and the halo mod b/c

Female eye-candy body replacer by Exnem You probably want the mods for leveled creatures and items so it's more like Morrowind, otherwise the game is kind of lame. Obscura's Oblivion Overhaul is supposed to be good, but I haven't tried it. I know a bunch of mods that change the environment and weather, to make it look more pretty or natural or whatever, if you're into that kind of thing. Also Open Cities Complete is awesome - it removes the loading zones into cities so you can just walk straight in to the city without having to go through a loading screen.

Oscuro's looks really interesting by the readme.
But I was hoping for something that changed the way -you- level.
Previously the best way to level was to put your focus skills in skills you'd rarely use, that way when they do increase you will have raised your other stats decently.
Otherwise if you specialised in skills you'd actually use, you'd level up fast but level up 'poorly'
That's how I remember it working anyway, I might be off as I have barely played the game since the release (severely disappointed by this game). But I remember reading around and finding that was the best way, which I found to be poor levelling design.

There's something akin to GCD for Morrowind for Oblivion, and that makes your stats dependant on your skills.

And you level automatically.

Yeah I know why it does it, I just wanna level in a better way.
It seems very *** about to me.

I meant that if you e.g. hit things with a sword, your strength goes up. If you make potions and eat every living thing under the sun you get smarter. If you get hit a lot you get tougher. You can't pick stats to choose. It's kind of more a traditional RPG like that.

Although it does mean that some stats are hell to level unless you get training.

These are the ones recommended by some guy on GameFAQs when I started playing a couple of weeks ago.

Attack and Hide - makes it slightly less impossible to successfully hide from a person after sniping them.
Dude Where's My Horse - When you get a horse, it adds a quest to your list. If you select it, your horse is labelled on the map with the quest marker.
Illumination Within/Without - Prettifies the cities and towns by changing how lights are shown through windows.
Keychain - All the keys you pick up or are given are put into one item, rather than cluttering up your inventory.
More Arrows Recovered - Self explanatory, really. Ups the rate of reusable arrows.
Natural Faces - Improves the textures used for faces so they look less pasty.
No Psychic Guards - Reduces the crime alert radius to something more realistic. Basically, guards have to be within hearing distance of your crime to be alerted to it, rather than being anywhere on, say, Cyrodiil.

The Oblivion Mod Manager will be a useful download, too. You might also need to install the Oblivion Script Extender to get some mods to run. I'm not sure if any of these need it, but it's a small installation and better to be safe than sorry. I know for sure that all those mods are available at [url=www.tesnexus.com]TES Nexus[/url], but you might have to Google for the Mod Manager and Script Extender.

But does it actually have Yoda's Ghost?

The Intelligence Overhaul mod is pretty neat, in that it makes the Intelligence attribute more important than just 'click me for more magicka'. It makes intelligence determine how, well, intelligent your character is by making it so you can learn skills faster if you're smarter, and so on. You can also up your intelligence by reading books.

Not quite.
At the start of the game you pick stats/skills to 'focus' on. Those ones level faster, and, once the focused abilities have risen enough you go to sleep to level up, problem is, once they've gone up enough to level you can't (if I remember right) increase the skills you don't want to level.
So you're better off focusing on skills you don't lose, that way you can upgrade all your stats at once instead of just certain skills.

The leveling system encourages jumping around everywhere you go.

So anyway, I just got Qarl's Texture Pack III, DarNified UI, OOO, and the unofficial Oblivion Patch. I'm not really looking to change the game much, just make it a little more accessable. I might get a magic mod though... I like magic.

Oscuro's is pissing me off... everywhere I go I get owned.

I don't think we're talking about the same thing.

Vinny, try the Oblivion Mod Wiki. Look at the recommended mods. Go through category by a time and pick out anything you like and think is important enough. You'll want to use a mod manager (I forget what the popular one is these days). There are quite a few that fix gameplay issues (such as removing guards' psychic abilities, making sneaking and stealth useful, etc), and also many that vastly improve the game's visual appearance. There are ones that improve the world's textures and bumpmaps, and it makes a huge difference. Particularly I remember a few environment mods that changed the sky and weather to be much more realistic and much more immersive.

I should play Oblivion again. It never ran well on my 9700 or my X1650XT but my new HD4850 should eat it alive.

What kind of dude did you make? I never finished the game, but it took me a while to realize that the bow and arrow guy isn't really for fighting.

I liked Oscuro's a lot, but it seemed to conflict with the downloadable content I was using at the time.

Particularly, I like how it doesn't take 15 slashes from a longsword to kill a rat. :downs:

You have to get the unofficial oblivion patch as well as the script extenders. I have FCOM (Which is a ***** to install, but once you do, it's fantastic,) All of the Unique Landscapes mods, deadly reflexes, Ren's Guard Overhaul (lets you pick up bodies, kill people without guards half way across the map knowing you did, let's you have separate bounties in different townships), horse combat, streamline, and auto-book-placer.

Auto book placer? What does that do?

It places your books about cars.

It automatically places your carried books on any bookshelf. Use it an a non-respawning room (like your skinkrad house) and start a little library with all of your books. Now there just needs to be placers for other stuff.

I'm an efficient leveler. The leveling system is unique in the game for sure.

Basically, I have one of each skill attributes as a main skill, and some that is not leveled easily. Alchemy for INT, armorer for END, etc.

Then I level up 9 or 10 of each skill in the minor skills list (for INT that would be CON and ALT, for END it would be BLT and HVY), and then level 8 of a major skill, because it takes 10 major skill point increases to level. When I level, I get +5 to three given skills I chose to work on. This isn't perfect (acrobats, restoration, athletics, and etc are harder to control leveling, and sometimes cause overleveling, but oh well).

I recommend leveling heavy armor, blocking, and armorer first. That powers Endurance, and the higher endurance you have at the start of the game, the more health you get per level. I'm level 16 and have more health than my step brother's level 24.

I picked the wrong skills.

Finally, Anovis' post reflects what I was talking about.
For a while there I though I might have been thinking of the wrong game or something, but that's definitely it.

I got a mod that changes the way you level up, and I'm happier now.