First, a note on companions: Blackwood introduced two followers who, after doing an initial recruitment quest, you can have tag along and beat people up for you. Bastian's quest requires combat, but with a bit of savvy it's entirely optional in Mirri's. I did some brief testing on a new character, and as far as I can tell a companion kill doesn't count as yours in the tracker -- so it's hypothetically viable to play a character who sits back and lets their companion do their dirty work.

But for the most part that's a different challenge than I intended to set myself, so I've decided to avoid companion outsourcing as an extension of the "No grouping up with killers" rule. Companion rapport seems to be a slow burner already, so I'm not sure how doable it'll be to bring up Mirri's opinion of me without combat. I'll see how it goes.

The Champion System got a rework to our favour. This and the above prompted me to start writing the post, although I've realised I've still little to say about them! I'm still messing about with the system, and in some ways it's a bit of a mixed blessing since previously this character had the freedom of just moreorless ignoring the Champion System. Craft is the most 'non-combat' focused tree, and I haven't experimented properly with stealth and Out of Sight + Khajiit + Equipment Bonuses. But other trees are nonetheless still worth dropping points in; increasing your Max Magicka, Healing Done and Health while reducing Damage Taken is, unsurprisingly, generally useful.

Otherwise, most of the chapter DLC is a similar experience to the base game. Whether it be Orsinium or Blackwood, new areas with a focus on questing are your main source of content and XP. And, like the base game, that means despite almost always losing out on moreorless the entire main story of a zone, there's still plenty of adventuring to be done.

Your stomach for this might depend on your playstyle and penchant for wandering. When I'm on my other characters, I tend to start off a zone by following its Zone Story, doing sidequests as I run into them. On this character, I tend to enter an area, pick a direction, then ride around until I run into quests or find new locations. A bit more incentive to engage with the spirit of exploration. (Either way, eventually I'll wrap things up by just looking up where anything I might've missed might be.)

Obviously there's stuff you can't do. The Dark Brotherhood, for instance, is an assassin's guild. They employ assassins. Yes, yes, unsurprisingly it's a poor fit. While you can go to the Gold Coast and complete about three quests there, that's about it; the Dark Brotherhood DLC was pretty focused on the Dark Brotherhood! You're similarly a bad fit for raid DLCs and the like. This is all mostly obvious. Don't build your non-combat character for intense group-aimed combat, guys.

The Thieves Guild is worth a look. You'd think this would be right up a stealthy no-kill character's alley, and it almost is. The initial Thieves Guild quests are all about stealthy infiltration, albeit stealthy infiltration that, truth be told, I turned into an absolute farce through incompetence. For once, this is a DLC whose main story you can get about halfway into. Alas, then they'll expect you to defeat some animated armour, which is a no-go. The Yokudans worked hard on those!

You can still do most sidecontent, though, with the exception of a few personal quests. Since the Dailies are all about stealth and not getting into combat, you might be particularly interested in them, but the attempt to turn ESO's stealth into a proper challenge in its own right was an interesting experiment, but in my view not an entirely successful one. Ah well.