im starting a female bosmer and want to stop her leveling at 20 sign is the mage majors im thinking illusion light armor marksman mysticism restoration with hand to han and blunt as skills to stunt the growth because she wont be using them at all.

she'll be using restoration for not only healing if need be but also for offense with the absorb health and magic in case anything gets up to close. and the illusion to go all sneaky sneak awhile leveling sneak at the same time.


so my question is would that stunt the growth at 20? or would it actually go over a bit?

Just make your character a mage specialization, make your primary skills a comibination of really easy to level things --like alchemy, and things this character will never use -- like heavy armor, and then you don't have to worry about it. You will always be able to dicatate what your level remains.

It's simple math.

Major skills start at a minimum of 25. Of the three skills you mentioned - restortion, illusion and sneak - a Bosmer gets a 10 point bonus for sneak and no bonus for the other two, so she'd start with at least 35 sneak and 25 restoration and illusion. Specialization grants an extra 5 points to all the related skills, so a magic specialization would raise her restoration and illusion to 30 each and a stealth specialization would raise her sneak to 40.

Just for an example then, I'll presume her spec is magic, so restoration and illusion would be 30 and sneak would be 35. And for the time being at least, I'm going to assume that she's not going to use any of her other major skills at all, ever.

Maximum for any skill is 100. Since she'll be starting at 30 on each of her magic skills, she'll be able to gain 70 skill increases on each one (100 - 30). Her 35 for sneak means that she'll be able to gain 65 in it (100 - 35). 70 + 70 + 65 = 205. Every time she gets 10 major skill increases, she'll qualify to level up. Since she'll be able to get 205 total major skill increases, she'll be able to level up 20 times (205 / 10). Leveling up 20 times will make her level 21.

she will actually be using alchemy for poisons and such

Majors are the only thing that matter in this. If Alchemy's a major, then you'll have to calculate for it. If it's not, then it doesn't matter.

i still want her to lv as we with out having stop and train different stuff unrelated to what she'd doing. grinding gets a bit boring

20 is an awkward spot to nail. If you max 2 and ignore 5 skills that will get you about level 15, causing you to do some significant grinding of those other majors to get to 20. If you max 3 and ignore 4 majors, it will generally push you to slightly above 20. If you're happy to cap somewhere between 21-23, then you can pick about any three skills you want to max. To nail 20 using this method, you might consider this:

Bosmer with Marksman, Restoration and Acrobatics and a stealth specialization. Assuming you never touch your other 4 majors and minimize undesired skill book skill raises to unused majors, that will get you to exactly 20. Marksman and resto are great choices. Although Acro was chosen simply because it will start at 35, it is not at all hard to live with as a major.

Other methods of capping at 20 could be:

- Selecting some skills to only use early in the game (like security until you transition to spells to unlock) and only partially leveling them. Plenty of possible combinations.
- Pick whatever you want and level however you want. When you get to 20, stop sleeping. Not for me, but it works.
- If you are on PC, the command console can limit your level (or help tweak it) very simply and elegantly.

Employing several 'never use' skills and capping your level has a couple of impacts on attributes you may want to plan for. Since you have less levels to get your desired attribute gains, one might consider efficiently leveling or simply ignoring non critical attributes. Also, if you pick all three melee skills as 'never use' majors, obviously your character will never be a high strength character. I tend to ignore several attributes. My current character for example completely ignores endurance and strength; it helps define her as a no melee glass cannon. My point is that if you select some major skills to 'never use', consider how that will affect attribute gains through the lens of what your objectives for the character are.

wow this game was definitly made to take you way over twenty. i had a level 15 warrior with alteration mys. and res. for magic and i started doing the mages guild quests i walked into a necromancer lair and way more then once did i almost die because my char had almost no magic protection i even had a reflect spell that i made just so i could put it on armor but for some reason the game wouldnt let me.

Don't Sleep? O.o

Just ran across this mod today and thought about this thread:

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1888

Of particular interest there: "Set your maximum Level up to 255 or as low as your current Level."



Hopefully that helps and the rest of the changes in the mod work out for you too.

im running oblivion on the 360 at the moment because i cant find my disc for the pc version