Oblivion--NPCs that travel the roads end up dead when you ..

NPCs that travel from city to city, or ones that just hang out in the
wildnerness, etc. When you get to a high level and the overpowered enemies
start showing up, like Ogres, Goblin Shamans, Mauraders decked out in full
daedric armor, etc., these poor NPCs are doomed. I have come across a few
dead people. Named NPCs, that is, the ones that don't respawn when they're
killed. I think this is an atrocious oversight, but since there's no
avoiding it unless you want to beat the game at level 1, is it something you
can live with? Does anyone have a list of all the NPCs that can die outside
the cities? Are they important? Don't be enigmatic like the people in the
official forums?

On Sun, 15 Jul 2007 04:02:21 GMT, "Sand-Eating Glass-Crapper"
<sand.TakeThisOut@toglass.spammerseatfeces.net> wrote:

>Yeah... I read up on that wiki, but I can't find anything about how NPCs
>fall to leveled enemies. The trainers don't bother me since I like to build
>my skills up myself. The way I run around outside it's only a matter of time
>before every NPC who *can* die outside the cities will all be dead. It's
>kind of depressing.

There are a number of real head-scratcher things that the devs did in
the game, but the static-leveled NPC's are one of the biggest. When I
first started playing the game, my first eye-opener on this front was
when I got my woodelf hunter to level 20, and decided it was time to
stop lollygagging around and continue the questline to close the first
Oblivion gate, save Kvatch, and rescue Martin. Hah. Total disaster. Of
course, the monsters were now all high-leveled badasses, and the
soldiers I had to keep alive to succeed, were still wimpy lowbie
losers who rapidly died like helpless screaming little girls.

As anyone who has played the game for very long figures out, if you
don't do those type of quests before level 10, you're going to find it
difficult if not impossible to *ever* comlete them. Without using
cheats, of course. I hear there are 'autokill' commands and the like,
but those kind of god commands totally ruin a solo game for me.

So, this of course begs the question... why didn't the game devs
anticipate this, and make the friendly npc's level up comparitive to
the enemies in the game? Could it have been that difficult to do? They
seem to have done a bangup job of programming the baddies to keep pace
with you most of the way, should have been no problem at all doing the
same with friendlies. ::shrug:: go figure.

It just seems really dumb that you have to do all of the main
questline really, really early in the game, or not be able to do it at
all... since you can (officially) get a character all the way to level
50, you should be able to wait unti later in the game if you want to,
to finish (or even begin) any questline. Poor programming choice, IMO.

If I wanted to wait until my char was 45 before going to close the
first Oblivion gate and save the world, then I should bloody well be
able to. Without cheats.