A group of mods that I used for my first playthrough, they work well and don't seem to change too much so you still get a fairly base experience. You can install these all at once by pressing "Subscribe to all." They work together well. Removing mods should be fine, generally, though I wouldn't remove Unity, Ninja or any of the "patch" mods. Add more mods at your own discretion but as long as you read the mod description pages you should be OK.

If you do nothing else, just don't forget to cap framerate at 60fps (or force vsync on a 60hz display); see below.

After installing the mods, go to <path to game>\Data and rename or delete textures_bikini.VDF to remove some censorship. If you don't want nudity in your game, then just leave it alone. (A character occasionally bathes throughout the day, by deleting the texture it restores the nudity, later versions of the game added this bikini texture to cover her up.)

These ini files are located in the <path to game>\system. You can right click the game in Steam and select "Manage>Browse Local Files" to get there fast.

In GOTHIC.ini I changed:

Default is 4, this is the fog distance, setting it 14 is 300% (max) view distance. Preference but I like seeing the land stretch out before me.
Default 0.5, this is the LOD setting for models so I set it to max because why not.
Default is 1, I found it annoying to see the date and time in-game but if you want to I'd suggest using ShowGameTime=1 instead as it looks better.
Default is 5, this is how many minutes must pass before a red timer with a save icon pops up reminding you to save, I felt 5 was too soon but up to you honestly, -1 disables this setting entirely.

In SystemPack.ini, I changed:

Default is 0.1, this is how fast your character can rotate on the spot by moving your mouse sideways, 0.1 was too slow at 60fps so 0.3, the max, is what I prefer.
Default is 1, which means you only see mana when you have magic equipped, setting it to 2 makes it visible at all times.
Default is 0, disables LOD models, always high quality models, may not matter with the modelDetail setting.
Default is 0, being unlimited, if you want to cap your framerate another way you can leave it at 0, or if you feel the need to play a game at 500fps for some reason, though be aware that there are FPS related bugs in this game so 60 is probably where you want to cap it.
It says default is 2000, I don't know if I actually changed this or if that's wrong, but either way without this monsters and beasts, etc., will run at a lower framerate when they are far away from you.
Default is 0, enables a mouse cursor in the pause menu.

The in-game plug-in settings are generally self-explanatory, many of them are in German but a translation app on your phone should do the job. Ja and Ein are yes/on, Aus and Nein are no/off.

If I really need to I will fill out this section with my preferred settings but there was only a few changes so I'm sure you can figure out what you like.

By default, Unity enables Gothic 2 style controls which allows you to ready your weapon with LMB and also interact with the world with LMB (instead of Ctrl+Up/W) If you want to play the game the original, non-mouse driven way, well... go for it. Change Gothic2_Control= 0 in SystemPack.ini to get back that glorious multi-key interaction. I also changed the general controls a bit, F for Weapons (instead of Space), Space for Jump (instead of Alt) and then I moved the first person and look around camera to other buttons.