If you get a Major Skill to 100, will it continue to level you up? For instance, if I have Sneak as a Major Skill and it is at 100, will sneaking continue to advance for the purposes of leveling? If not, how do you continue to level up after all your Major Skills reach 100?

You don't. unless you find some way to lower them again

Character levelling stops under 2 conditions:

1) if all major skills reach 100

OR

2) if all attributes reach 100

Serving jail time can lower skills and thus allow you to contiue to level. You don't lose character levels, only skill levels. There is no way of lowering attributes for levelling purposes aside from using the console to adjust them.

There is no reason to level past 30 aside from "because you can". Gear upgrades stop at that level. Characters and enemies continue to gain health each level but that's it.

Major skills cap naturally between levels 47 and 53, depending on your build/race. Attributes can be capped much sooner, depending on how you level them.

There's a hard cap on level at 255.

Mara

I beg to differ about no need to level past 30. There's a very big need... skill perks. You will not get all your skill perks from major skills at level 30, so it can be very good to level further.

Oh and also... derived stat benefits. Sure, enemies get more health, too, but I want to maximize characters and play them somewhat realistically, and it isn't realistic that they just stop development cold.

But to each their own, anyway. It is your choice. ("The choice is yours." wait, that's Morrowind...)

I think this falls under the "because you can" category. But I really do not grasp what "somewhat realistically" has to do with a fantasy crpg. Nothing, nothing, nothing about it is "realistic". Unless you're maybe 10 years old? At that point in your life you do equate getting older with gaining power. Trust me, in reality that's just not so. Maybe from that point of view Oblvion's system IS realistic in that after a certain point your character begins to lose the arms race.

Mara, losing the arms race for quite awhile now...

Sneak can't be lowered that way. It's one of the two which, if randomly picked, will raise instead of lower after a stint in jail, the other being lockpick.

Leveling up feels somewhat unnecessary in Oblivion because the enemies lvl with you. To me the whole point of leveling up in a game is to get stronger than your foes, and if they also get stronger I don′t see the point. Other than to unlock items :shrug:

Hmm, so correct me if I'm wrong here...

You can get all your skills to 100 and all but one attribute to 100, then continue to level up all the way to 255 by continually going to jail?

I'm sort of interested in getting my Orc's Endurance and Health to the absolute max possible. Not for RP purposes, but just for nerdy numbers fun

Not quite to 255, since you have to raise your attributes at level up.

once all your attributes are at 100 you will also be unable to level further, though there is an http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Increasing_Attributes#Attribute_Bonuses you can use to temporarily lower your attributes, then you can level some more, before you restore those and end up with them all over 100.

to maximize health, raising endurance quickly is necessary, so to get your health to the absolute maximum, you will not be able to get your level to its highest value, but high levels are not particularly good anyway.

Athletics and Acrobatics keep getting better and better up to skill level 255, so these WOULD make excellent choices for Drain-and-train past level 53. ...Except that I don't know of a legit way to permanently damage skills. Is this possible, by chance?

Realistically most certainly applies to any RPG, including fantasy, sci-fi, or any other environment. No one, anywhere, any character, in any story ever told, simply stops developing... unless they are dead, of course. That is unrealistic. RPGs generally do not deal with aging, but they almost always deal with developing characters. Development is ongoing as long as a character, and we, are alive, no matter what environment any of us may exist within.

And fyi, I am in my upper 40s, thanks.

One more thing... there is another reason to level at least to 35. The leveled quest rewards top out at that level. If you want to get the best quest rewards possible for various quests, simply complete the quests after you get to level 35.


Frankly, I think it's pointless to play if you will stop leveling at 30 or anything else. In fact, many people seem to feel this way about RPGs as ArenaNet discovered when they put a level 20 cap in Guild Wars (and other MMO makers have discovered this, as well... that people want to keep leveling their characters, or it feels pointless to play the characters).

Not everyone, of course... but a good many people seem to feel this way, or there would not be so much effort to offer leveling beyond caps in games.

Well.... if we're going to go for realism, then many of your attributes should decrease over time, after peaking at an age equivalent to about the late teens or early 20s. That's certainly the case with endurance and arguably with strength and even intelligence. Granted some attributes and many skills should continue to increase beyond that point, and potentially for a while beyond it, but virtually all of them will peak at a given point, which point is probably nothing even close to "100%." That's reality, and I would think that someone in their upper 40s (as I am as well), couldn't help but recognize that. I know for a fact that I have less endurance and less strength than I had years ago, and that I never had either the endurance or the strength of, for instance, a professional athlete, so I never had anything that might be even close to a "100" in either one, and there really was never a chance that I would, no matter how much I worked at it-- I just don't have the genes for that. I probably had something close to a "100" in intelligence in my prime, but even that has passed. My mind is a bit slower and a bit more "porous" than it used to be. That's okay-- it's just a part of aging. That's the reality. So certainly if we're going for "realism" in a game, the reality is that one character should maybe be able to reach something close to 100 in one or two or maybe three attributes and maybe a handful of skills, and that's it. Anything more than that is superhuman, and not by any stretch "realistic."

Just saying is all....


Broadly, with the proviso that dichotomies are insufficient at best, there seems to be two broad approaches to RPGs-- to ignore or limit character progression and just make one's way through the world, dealing with or even reveling in faults and flaws and quirks and shortcomings, or to shoot for perfection and set maximization as the goal toward which to strive. It seems to be two entirely different psychologies at play, and I sincerely doubt that anyone of either group will ever entirely understand the motivations of those of the other group.

As a side note, I would be willing to bet that this is a thing of which game developers are aware, and that part of the strategy to makig a successful game is to try to find a way to balance it so that both groups are pleased with the result. And some compromise is certainly necessary to do that, which compromise might well be the source of some of the issues that those of either group end up having with a particular game......

Just a stray thought, running through my porous mind......

Good seepage. :wink_smile:

I designed my character so that her top level is 20. We simply have 4 major skill we never use.

In determining her top level, we considereed several things. My character is a glass cannon with no interest in developing endurance or strength (or luck) above base, so developing the attributes we consider important is easier. She can max her lethality by level 20 easily and we see no need to allow foes to gain hit points beyond that. We looked at the below list and considered what we wanted in our game. Since we don't care a bit about leveled items and prefer a daedric bow over a perfect amber/madness bow, we found level 20 to be the 'sweet spot' for us.

Some data points we considered based on character level:
17: Top alchemy gear and sigils
19: Top leveled Hatred's Soul
20: Lots. Daedric items, all quests, all monsters...
23: Perfect amber/madness (SI)
25: Lots of top leveled quest rewards.
30: Everything, including all remaining top leveled quest rewards.

The only downside is that with only 20 levels, we have to pay a little more attention to attribute gains, but since we are ignoring several, it is not hard. Not everyone's cup of tea for sure, but this works beautifully for my character and I.