I am so frightened(to emphasize anyways) by the level up system, I've read about it a lot and understand as you use skills you get points, but the whole 'careful not to waste skill points, careful to watch what you raise' seems awful hard to get into.

I've read horror stories of people unable to play their character at a higher level because of mobs being to strong.

Any tips? I really liked Fallout 3 and wanted to play a fantasy based open world (I realize this game is older btw) but I'm not sure if I want to try this if I have to constantly watch how many times I swing my sword, or cast a spell.

There are a number of workarounds for the levelling system. A few of them are:

- Efficient levelling. Basically the premise of this is to ensure you get 10 skill increases in skills that are governed by the same attribute you're trying to level. For example, raising Conjuration or Alchemy 10 times will grant you a +5 bonus to Intelligence on level up. You want these +5's. However, this isn't the system I use, so someone else will be able to give more in depth advice on this.

- Majors as minors. This is the method I use. It works on the basis of you picking your majors skills with 3 or 4 skills you're actually going to use, and filling the rest up with controllable skills that you won't use. This will cap your level at around level 20/25, and enables you to easily achieve the "only using one skill from each attribute as a major" you kind of need to level efficiently enough.

Don't let the horror stories get to you. Plenty of people have gone in without much or any knowledge of how things worked and their character turned out fine. If you're really obsessive compulsive about having a hyper-efficient character, then yeah, it's not really going to happen your first time through.

As mentioned above, you don't HAVE to get +5s and there's no harm in using a +2 or +3 or anything like that. Just don't concern yourself too much with it and have fun. You'll be fine. The game does not require you to be hyper-efficient. I've been playing for years and it's never bothered me.

Don't let the levelling system put off this is a truly tremendous game and you will have hours up on hours of gaming fun with this

Don't let the leveling system stop you, It may take a long time to master but that's what will keep you coming back. there's always the difficulty slider if your build "fall behind" during leveling. I didn't attempt efficient leveling until my 4th or 5th character.

I see efficient leveling as more of a personal challenge. For your first play through, just enjoy the game.

Still on my first, and still enjoying it

And I for one never cared for two secs about leveling

If you make sure that you always have an "offensive" skill in your Major skills (which is what levels you up) then you won't go wrong
Normally I used all the skills for a Warrior, so like heavy armour, armourer, blade, block etc, but now I've built up a Mage character (which I was scared to do before because I thought I could be easily killed), but as long as you have a decent restoration spell and a shield and summon spell, you can't go wrong

Every single problem fixed using efficient leveling can be fixed using the difficulty slider.

Have fun.

Don't believe the hype. Pick the skills you want to use, and use them. Done. Efficient leveling is for the birds. Because if you mess up, everything and everyone will own you. Just play. As soyuz said, change the difficulty if you are having problems. If something is too hard to kill, perhaps you are just not doing it right. The game gives you everything you need to succeed. Try a different tactic.

I maxed all my attributes except Luck(70) and Endurance(88) and that was without trying to efficiently level.

A wise man said this once apon a time.

"Rise up this mourning ...
smile with the rising sun.

Three little birds...
Pitch buy my door step.

Singing sweet songs...
of melodies pure and true..

Saying,this is the message to you whoo whoo

Singing don't worrry...
bout a thing
cause every little thing...
is gonna be all right."

Just learn alchemy or adjust the difficulty slider.

Are you on the PC?
if so there are some mods available to help with this.

JUST USE ALCHEMY

Fine advice (and alchemy). Remember: if you are overcome jump on a rock.

The amount of people saying take Alchemy as a Major skill I don't understand where you are coming from? Yes so it is maybe the easyist skill to level through out the whole game but for someone that is already daunted by the leveling system it will be a big problem. You will find that you are forever picking up ingredients and crafting new potions and if anyone else plays like I do I have a nice habit of hoarding my potion ingredients. This means that if I had Alchemy as a Major skill when I come round to making potions I would go up about 2-4 levels quite easily.

If you are daunted by the leveling system then I suggest NOT taking Alchemy. You will level quite quick and there is a very good chance that creatures will become to hard for you to kill, mainly due to the fact that you have not in turn leveled any of your offensive skills. Yes so you can always move the slider so that things get easier for you but I have seen people (Although they are indeed bad gamers) move the slider down to easy after leveling 4 straight levels off Alchemy and still have problems.

Don't be daunted by the game's leveling system. Guides nowadays tend to exaggerate, telling you that you have to do THIS in order to accomplish THIS and avoid THAT other thing. Well, just like most everyone else who fired up the game up on the day it was released, I picked a race, sign, specialty and set of skills out of my backside. I ended up with a sneaky Nord. I played that character for 250+ hours; she wasn't "optimal", but she succeeded, for the most part.

Efficient leveling may be for the birds, as Mpls Big Daddy states. That's really up to the individual, but I'll say that it certainly isn't for the newcomer to the game. It's a meta-gaming method, and requires some familiarity with how the system works before you can implement it really well. For now, just pick stuff you think you'll like, and play. You don't have to get it "right" the first time. You probably won't, anyway. You'll probably need to mess around with all of the skills before you really get a feel for what type of hero you enjoy playing ther most, which probably means restarting a few times with different races, skills, etc.

Just jump into the pool. The water's fine. We can't really tell you what's "best" before you have any familiarity with anything, and you wouldn't want us to tell you afterwards, because you may have your own ideas about what works best by that time.

However, I *would* avoid Alchemy and Conjuration as Major skills to start out. They do fly up way too quickly, and may deprive you of increases to other important stats.

I'll just leave it at that.

Jump in, and have fun.

If you're on the PC, then if you really want to get the best out of it you *can* use a levelling mod. ie. S.P.A.M. Takes all the pressure off trying to make a character, and lets you just play instead.

Anyway, try it normally first and if you don't like it then try a different way.

Just reached level 23, some skills over 100 (fort), others left at 5. Yet my character is almost unkillable, and very playable.

Yes, Use S.P.A.M.. but also throw in the OOO mod.

This works. I try to pick Majors that don't get used as often, but do wind up gettting used here and there. Acrobatics is an example. It takes A LOT of jumping around to level Acrobatics. The game winds up leveling up very slowly. My wizard character is only at level 6 after about 150 hours of play.

I play Dead is Dead-style too, which means if my character dies fairly, he's dead and I must start all over. This balances the game for me, keeps it challenging.

Very good advice here, so I'll only add I started playing Oblivion a few years ago, play it all the time, and am only just beginning to understand the efficient levelling concepts which dear colleagues have gone into above... so ignorance is bliss, and yes there have been rare times when I've been amazed at how feeble my character is, but the simple thing to do is change tactics (i.e. RUN!) or go invisible etc - Oblivion is such a great game, you'll love it - come play!!

I have made characters that survive off alchemy and nothing more. The skill is game-breaking if you use it to its full potential. Its so good that it makes everything else obsolete.

I never bothered with any leveling system myself and created somewhere between 20-30 characters and had fun with all of them.
There was only one I ran into trouble with and that was my second character, which I leveled up to around 34 and got owned by
most everything so I just lowered the difficulty for that one. Just have fun playing and enjoy the game for what it is!

I hate to bring this simple point late: Even with the leveling system you don't love, play it for the rest of the content. Its absolutely worth it.