I’ve been playing Skyrim a lot, and I’m loving the game. My character is level 39 at present, and my sneak skill is already at 99 – I hope to max it out the next time I play and then work harder at maxxing out my archery, enchantment, and alchemy.

But my favorite part of any Elder Scrolls game has always been the emergent gameplay moments – those moments that weren’t specifically scripted by the programmers that somehow end up being the best thing about the game. In this article, I’d like to share a few of my favorite moments.

Taking out an entire keep of bandits Garret style

I really enjoy stealth games, so I was really excited to find that the stealth mechanics in Skyrim were way better than in Oblivion. I now sneak up on enemies regularly and slit their throats before they know I’m there. When I cleared one particular keep full of bandits recently, I did so without letting any of its inhabitants know I was ever there. They were dead before they knew they were in a fight. Skyrim’s cutscene-like final blow animations make it even more fun.

Backstabbing a snowy sabrecat

That four-word description really doesn’t do my story justice. Here’s the long version: I was coming over a snowy mountain rise and looked down to see a keep. Far away, near the keep, were two snowy sabrecats fighting an ice wraith. I watched for a while, and the sabrecats killed the ice wraith. I thought it’d be nice to get the ice wraith’s teeth since at the time they were fairly valuable to me. I hid and started firing arrows at the sabrecats, but they were so far away that I missed 80% of my shots. After 5-10 minutes of firing arrows, I’d hit a few times and they were wandering closer. One eventually charged up the mountain, and by the time he’d reached me I had him down to about 50% health. Still, I barely survived the encounter. I’d gone through all my healing potions.

I snuck down the mountain, thinking that if I could get up onto the keep’s walls, I could shoot down at the second sabrecat from safety. When it saw me, I started sprinting for a wall where it looked like I could jump up. My luck, I found that I couldn’t jump that high. So I ran. I ended up trapped in a V between one of the keep’s walls and a sheer cliff – if I fell, I knew I’d be dead. So I hid. And somehow, the sabrecat lost me. It came down towards the V and decided that I wasn’t there, then turned away and sat down. Its back was to me, and I’d just gotten the x15 backstab perk. So I snuck up very slowly and BAM. One-hit kill. It was so nice.

Arrows shouldn’t hurt skeletons – should they?

Archery is another skill I’m loving. The game’s bows take some getting used to – they have a lot less drop than you’d expect. But when you get a decent bow and your archery skill is good enough, a bow can be devastating. I entered one crypt and a number of skeletons began rising from their sacrophagi. As they rushed me, I took them out all one by one, one-shotting most of them. None of them were even able to enter melee. There were probably twelve or fifteen in all, and my bow pwned them, so to speak.

Mountain goat, Meet Waterfall

A small thing, really, but I stood and watched while a goat forded across a river and was swept downstream. When he reached the end, near a waterfall, he began struggling mightily. He fought it quite a lot, but in the end the goat went over and fell to his death.

You done with that?

This is the only thing on the list that actually is scripted, but I was shocked that it happened. During multiple runs back and forth from a store to an enchantment table, I found at one point that I was overburdened, so I dropped a shield and some boots on the ground. A passing woman stopped me and asked if she could have the things I’d dropped. Wow.

Picking Flowers during an Invasion

At the risk of spoilers, I was at one point involved in an armed conflict: the Invasion of Whiterun. While soldiers were locked in heated bloody battle, I kept sidetracking to pick flowers. I found the whole situation so utterly ludicrous that I felt obliged to mention it here.

Since Steam makes screenshots so easy, I’ve started trying to screenshot as many of these moments as I can, but they can be fleeting – you don’t realize a moment until it’s passed. You can see the screenshots I’ve collected so far here.