I enjoy role-playing, a lot. I was the type that used to get together with a group of friends in high school and college and spend whole nights rolling dice in a cramped room, either being a Dungeon Master, or taking a break and playing my favorite half elven ranger character (the poor guy that rolled a 6 in int, and I decided to give him a go anyway and damn was he fun to roleplay!)
For this game, I read over the classes and I was having a hard time to choose what to play or create, but that was while installing it and reading the manual. Once I started playing though, I went with what I felt most comfortable with, choosing a wood elf male. Then for the actual character creation, I was really glad of the questions way to choose your class. Got me nice memories of Ultima. So I answered them and my class ended up a Spellsword. After finding out that my Magicka was limited by my Intelligence on a 1 to 1 basis (I chose the sign of the Stallion because I visualised my character to be fast and agile thus the speed boost fit him), instead of giving up and restarting, I played upon that weakness and strongly developed his Alchemy and Enchant skills, and I'm glad I did that else I would have probably overlooked them.
Everything else has come as I play, always trying to find a middle ground persuading people to avoid conflicts (as I am in real life, and what I wanted to do when I found out you could do that instead of solve everything fighting), so my speechcraft is pretty high. But when a fight breaks out, I am not afraid to use my long sword skills and my shield (never could stand a 2 handed weapon) if I must.
I only reload if I die, and if that does happen I usually play another character for a while (playing around with a female dark elven assassin character for the dark side *grin) before going back to my main Spellsword. Oh and I also used a bound Longsword spell for the longest time (until I got that nice looking Glass Longsword I enchanted myself) because I always thought it was cool for a "Spellsword" to be able to summon his own sword from his own Mystical powers

.