Character Creation and Levelling Up

One of the most unique aspects of Oblivion is the way it handles experience and levels. While in most RPGs, you want to level up as quickly as possible to gain an advantage over your enemies, that's not always going to be the case in Oblivion. In fact, the game can become quite difficult if you simply attempt to level up as quickly as possible, because of one simple fact: as you level up, so do your enemies.

Levelling Effects

Here's a small list of things that are affected when you level up. There are probably more effects than these, but these are the important ones.

  • Enemies increase in level. You'll run into harder enemies the higher level you are, with better spells and equipment and more health. Their skills will increase as well, so Sneaking and Speechcraft will become more difficult if you don't consistently improve these skills between levels.
  • Loot and treasure is better quality. At level one, it'll be difficult to find magical items, but they become more common as you level up.
  • Quest rewards are increased in quality. If you complete a quest at level five in one game, then play again and complete it at level 15, you'll get better quest rewards for the same quest. (Although some quests, like the Daedric quests, have rewards that are always the same.)
  • Locks on chests and doors become more difficult. A door that had a two-tumbler lock at level five might wind up having five at level fifteen.

The biggest effect, though, is the effect that levelling has on your foes. If you charge through the game's main storyline and attempt to gain levels as quickly as possible, you'll probably start encountering enemies that are going to be very tough to beat. You can still level up quickly if you wish, but it's more important to level up smartly.

How Levelling Works

When you create a character in Oblivion, you choose a class (or create one) that has seven skills as Major Skills. These skills, when improved, cause your character to gain levels. You can contrast this to the system in most games, where you have to run around and kill monsters to gain experience, which then causes you to level up; in Oblivion, it's not who you kill that matters, it's what you do. (Although what you do will probably still involve killing a whole mess of enemies.)

Constant use of your Major Skills, such as Blunt and Heavy Armor, which are about to get a workout in this screenshot, will cause you to level more quickly.

Anyway, so you have these seven Major Skills. In order to gain one level, you need to increase them by ten points total, spread out through any number of the skills. Let's say that you're a warrior character, and thus you have Heavy Armor, Blunt, and Block as Major Skills, along with a few others. If you increase Heavy Armor by ten points, then you'll gain a level; if you increase Blunt and Block five points each, then you'll also gain a level, and so on. Note that, unlike Morrowind, your Minor Skills have no impact on the rate at which you level, no matter how much you raise them between levels.

The crux of the matter here is that increasing your skills also allows you to raise your attributes when you level up. When you rest and level, you'll be given the opportunity to raise your attributes by anything from one to five points. The number of points by which you can increase an attribute depends on how many points you increased the skills that relate to that attribute.

Skill Points Gained in Skills Related to an AttributeNumber of Points You Can Raise the Attribute At Level-Up
0-11
2-42
5-73
8-94
10+5

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