Hello. So I've always played TES games for the adventure and experience, but occasionally I get into this "zone" where I get very hungry for power. Power means levels, money, and ultimate badassery. Things that shouldn't matter amidst all the awesomeness of TES. On these occasions I fast travel everywhere instead of embarking on journeys manually, sell stuff like crazy, bunnyhop everywhere to level my restoration, summon skeletons and let them hit me to level my light armor, and just generally forget what's really important.

Does anyone else have these episodes. Mine end, btw, by me getting tired.

I have always played on console, so I don't have the power that PC players have to control their game or their characters. So, yes, I have done things like go to the bridge in bravil and jumped really fast under the bridge hitting my head and moving around so acrobatics will level insanely quickly. I've cast repeated spells to level a spell school quickly. I've kept track of numbers to get plus 5 attribute bonuses. I've gone to a certain daedra shrine and wailed on the unconcious followers to increase melee/hand to hand skills. I've enticed archers to attack me with their daggers to level block and armor skills. I have used a drain skill spell and training to level acrobatics to 245. Heck, I have even gotten addicted to felldew to raise certain attributes over 100.

I am not at all ashamed to admit to those things. However, I have not done quite what you are describing. I have never used fast travel indescriminately. I have gone after Azura's Star, but other than that, I never gone around just trying to get the best items. When I have powerleveled a character, it was to get the character's skills/attributes to a certain point so I could have the character I wanted, but from there I would just play it naturally.

In general, however, I prefer to just play the game. The more I play, the less I find myself doing the whole powerleveling thing. Plus, weaker characters are typically more fun to play than overpowered ones.

I’ve done all of that at one time or other, but not with the intensity you suggest, and certainly not for power. My main character is rich, powerful, and owns everything, but it took four and a half years to get there the hard way. Badassery has never appeared in her game, except when she had too much wine and led an army to successfully kill all the guards in Cyrodiil. Her excursions into your “zone” always occur after some particularly snarky and rude comments come her way on these forums. It’s just a way to let off steam and it is never saved. So in that respect, your zone is different than my zone. Oh, on the power leveling of armor thing, three or four Mud Crabs in a group do wonders and they go on for ever.

But mud crabs carry diseases. It sounds silly but I have never felt comfortable letting disease carrying creatures repeatedly attack my character.

I've just been through an odd "reversal" of that. My present character, Phoebe, is a rebellious thing, and she doesn't care about my sense of "story." We were passing through the Arena district, having just put down a small pile of money for a Waterfront shack and furnishings, when she heard the roar of the crowd, and said "I can win some of it back." After losing one bet and winning another, she took a look at the contestants, and decided that the winner "down there" was making more money than she was "up here."

So she went downstairs, endured Owyn's insults, and signed up. She fought one match, and then another, it being early in the day. And another... I suddenly realized that Phoebe had taken over, and logic and "story-telling" be damned, she was going to keep tilting away in the arena until she was killed or ran out of daylight. Most of her opponents she killed in seconds. (She's a crazy Breton Nightblade/Archer who combines poison, deadly enchantment, and destruction castings.) Some of them never even got a hit in on Phoebe.

It was glorious fun.

We finally got out of there when she advanced from Myrmidon to Warrior. Twelve fights in one day. Totally illogical for a character doing the Arena quest line, right? Then I realized that it was a vacation for Phoebe, who had been slogging through Necromancer caves and Oblivion gates for the last few weeks.