If you haven't yet read http://www.pcgamer.com/tag/an-illusionist-in-skyrim/: Nerevar have mercy upon you.

It's gotten me thinking about the efficacy of playing highly, highly specialised characters. Some are obviously more practical than others, but I'm particularly thinking of a Restoration specialist. Block is another one: how would it work to only use shields to block, and bash? I don't know how damaging powerbashing can be, but I do know that some equipment can make it more damaging.

There is a shield that you get from DG that is pretty menacing, both in appearance and abilities. Even still, I don't see a pure blocking character getting to far. Maybe it's just not my cup of tea, doesn't sound to fun to me.

A few times I've ended up going "extreme specialist" for one-handed dual-wield; not really an intentional thing, but more that it just suits my playstyle-- get in, keep on the offensive, and hope for the best I'm actually trying to move away from that sort of thing, and focus more on the actual skill sets now, if I can.

Some skills are definitely easier than others-- I've heard people say pure-Destruction is pretty hard, but pure-offensive skills has always worked decently for me.

My characters always seem better the more narrow and focussed their skillset is. I never spread myself too thin but even dabbling in archery when I'm a two hander for example seems to come at a cost. I'll stop flowing fluidly through the game from skull crack to decapitation like a god of war and start having struggles and clumsy less than impressive moments.

I've played three characters who only leveled three skills. One leveled up only 2-Handed, Light Armor and Smithing. The second leveled only 2-Handed, Heavy Armor and Alchemy. The third leveled only 1-Handed, Light Armor and Sneak. I put perk points only into the skill trees the characters used.

Speech leveled up occasionally on two of the characters, due to bartering. One of the characters did no bartering at all, so that character did not even level Speech occasionally. The other two gained probably four or five levels in Speech over the course of the games, which didn't affect leveling much.

I thought all three were very interesting characters to play. I plan to do something like this again in the future.

I agree, there has to be at least some basic means of attack. I read in another thread about someone wanting to do a monk character, which is a cool idea but they were focusing on restoration, alteration and i think that's it. At least use a dagger or something.

Check out http://theskyrimblog.ning.com/group/character-building/forum/topics/the-character-build-archive page. Be sure to follow the links--they're not just generic archetypes, but categories of characters, some quite inventive.