I've been playing Oblivion and Morrovind for many years, but I wasn't active in the community. I'm planning to play Oblivion again with a 200+ mod setup, so I was thinking about the character I'll play. Was thinking about power leveling, when I got the following idea (I'm not sure I'm right):

It would seem as inverse power leveling at first glance.

Make a character that has as low attributes as possible.
When you start playing, alwas level up +1+1+1 until you max out your skills. Go to jail and reduce your skills, so you could level up again. This is just because you can degrade your skills but not your attributes. This would lead to a situation that you have many levels because the +1+1+1 level ups. So, once you get to the 100 for all attributes, you should be at a much higher level than through +5+5+5 leveling (actually 5x higher level).

One thing to consider is that it is MUCH harder to play, when you're leveling your attributes like a snail.

On the other hand, the +5+5+5 power leveling would never give you this much health.

I didn't do any calculations, but I guess this way you could reach much higher levels. But I guess the price of doing it is a torture. You should spend at least two thirds of level through skill decreasing through jail.

Please, don't flame, just because this is my first post. Try to understand what I'm trying to say.

Again, didn't make calculations, but maybe it would be better to do +1+1+5 leveling at start while increasing endurance (for the health gain), and later switching to +1+1+1.

Greets,
kutya

It depends what your goal is. If you're trying to create a powerful character, this method is highly ineffective because there are many creatures that scale with your level. Ogres for example have both health and damage based on your level. At level 250 an Ogre would have 6422 Health and do 145 damage per hit. Meanwhile you'd only be able to do 25 or so damage with your weapon (+ enchantment) and you'd have less than 2700 Health.

Long story short, leveling up in Oblivion actually makes you weaker and the trick to making strong character is to have high minor skills and low major skills.

Probably I didn't describe well what I meant.

This method would be hard as hell, but the final character would be tough as nails. At the end you would have all skills at 100 and all attributes at 100, but since you would max the attributes as slow as possible, your level wouldn't be capped at 45-53 but at, I dunno, 150?

I don't know how the creature statistics calculated, but if it's what you say, then yes, the whole thing is pointless.

Anyway, I need to mention that I intended to describe all of this while using OOO, where creature leveling is different than vanilla. AFAIK there are level caps for all creatures.

edit: typo