I've done many restarts, as I found new things, and one of the notions I am exploring with my recent playthrough is what effect minor skills really do have.

From what I could see - when minor skills are advanced before levelling up, the ATTRIBUTES that control them are given bonuses depending on how much the minor skills have been forwarded - and possibly also the major skills too - but the minor skills seem to be the key.

Now, each attribute (strength, intelligence, willpower, etc...) controls three (3) skills, except for luck - which has an affect on all skills.

There are 21 skills in all, three for each attribute except luck as noted above. It seemed to me that if I selected as minor skills two out of the three for each associated attribute that it could have an even, across the board effect on gaining the maximum bonus for each attribute when levels were made.

Also- some skills are much more difficult or time consuming than others to build up. Acrobatics is improved by jumping for example, and comes under the attribute speed. Also under speed are athletics, and light armor. (stay with me on this, its fairly straightforward)

Light armor can be built up rapidly by letting something attack you while wearing light armor and casting healing spells on yourself.

Athletics can be built up by swimming.

I chose athletics as the major skill of the three, since jumping (not to mention a cheat I read about) advance acrobatics well, and then there is the light armor trick above. But the thing I decided to do above all was to AVOID ADVANCING ATHLETICS if I could help it until I made progress with the minor skills... You follow me?

~ I reasoned that athletics would take the longest to build up.

Similarly, I picked one of each of the other six attributes three skills as the major. Restoration is one I picked to be a major, since destruction and alteration are much easier to build up than restoration - and so on.

I have some levels I can go up by resting/sleeping but am avoiding it even though the guy is at a very unenviably low level at this point.

I think that I can work on various skills (minor ones) so as to bring about at least three bonuses at a time to a bonus of five before levelling up, and also it seems that when you have a lot of minor skills built up the bonuses carry over to the next level up. In other words, if you have more than five bonus points earned, say ten or twelve for example, you will get five bonus the next level up and so on.

The reason I have launched this project is to see if it is possible to max out all of the attributes - a thing that I have not managed to do so far, by "One Hundred Percenting" all of those minor skills before running up the major skills. Make no mistake, this is turning out to be a very intense and difficult way to go about it. BUT!

If this works as expected, it may result in a character/hero the like of which I wondered if was even possible in the game...

Has anyone else ever attempted to explore this in this way before?

~Wolfie