Welcome to our Oblivion Character Creation & Leveling Guide!

This guide endeavors to explain in plain language the character creation and leveling system used in Oblivion. Its main aim is to make you aware of and overcome any potential difficulty problems you may experience if you play the game the way it encourages you to do.

Introduction

When you play Oblivion, you'll have not one but two chances to customize your character before you're committed to it, so don't sweat your initial decisions - just use them as an opportunity to experiment through the tutorial. During the tutorial, you'll create your character gradually as the story unfolds. Then, when you hit the last door of the sewers and attempt to exit out into the big dangerous world, a menu pops up and all the changes you made can be redone! This is a great place to save for future playings, so exit the menu that appears and save your game so that the next time you go through the game, you can skip the tutorial and use this save as a permanent template, jumpstarting your quest.

Anatomy of an Oblivion Character

Each of your seven attributes (Strength, Intelligence, etc.) and each of your 21 skills have a base maximum rank of 100, however they can go beyond this using magical effects. The following are the overall categories affecting your character in some way:

Appearance: includes gender, hair, skin color, face, etc. Outward appearance has no tangible effect in game, but there are small gender differences regarding starting attributes. These have little to no effect by game's end

Race: choose from Argonian, Breton, Dark Elf, High Elf, Imperial, Khajiit, Nord, Orc, Redguard, and Wood Elf, each with their own set of skill bonuses and racial abilities.

Attributes: Every character has 8 attributes: Strength, Intelligence, Willpower, Agility, Speed, Endurance, Personality, and Luck. These are initially determined by both your Race, possibly Birthsign, and Favored Attributes (see below). Each attribute can go to 100, or higher with magic effects. It's very beneficial to increase attributes tied to skills that you use.

Skills: 21 Skills (such as Alchemy, Security, or Blade) that are each tied to one of the 7 attributes other than Luck, at three per attribute. The attribute governs in part their effectiveness (along with its own rank). Each skill (regardless of minor or major) can reach 100, or higher with magic effects.

Birthsign: choose one of 13 distinct and permanent bonuses. For example, the Lady gives +10 to both Willpower and Endurance.

Class: choose from one of 21 premade classes, seven for each specialization (Combat, Magic, or Stealth), or customize your own including a unique name. Premade classes have built-in Birthsigns, Specializations, Favored Attributes, and Major Skills. Before customizing your own class, take a look at some of the premade classes for an idea of what a typical setup might be. I would recommend creating your own if you feel up to it (guaranteed it will not be worse than a premade class).

Specialization: choose what category of skills (or style of play) you plan to specialize in: Combat, Magic, or Stealth. The 7 skills tied to this category would then each get an initial +5 bonus and gain ranks faster.

Favored Attributes: choose two of the 7 main attributes to get a +5 stat bonus to each at the beginning of the game. The three skills tied to each attribute also gain ranks faster. I recommend Luck and Endurance. Now is the only time you'll permanently be able to add this much to Luck all at once, and probably will be focusing on more tangible attributes later. As for Endurance, it continues to add to your health each level forward, so building it from an early level benefits you in the end.

Major Skills: choose 7 of the 21 skills you plan to use to level your character with. These skills begin at 25 before any racial or specialization bonuses kick in, and also gain ranks faster.

Minor Skills: after choosing your 7 major skills, the remaining 14 become minor skills, and start at rank 5, unless they're in your Specialization or you have a racial bonus (which happens often). Minor skills increase more slowly, but help contribute to your overall power in a major way (as described below).

Health: the higher this number (the red bar), the better; it's the amount of points enemies can take off before you die, and begins at 2x your Endurance attribute. Every time you put points into Endurance, your new health added will be equal to that new rank in Endurance x 10%.

Magicka: in other games described as "mana", this is how many points you have to cast spells with (the blue bar). It starts and is always equal to 2x your Intelligence attribute. Obviously, Bretons and High Elfs have a maximum magicka advantage due to their racial bonuses.

Fatigue: when you engage in battle with a weapon, your fatigue (the green bar) drops, and determines your effectiveness with the weapon. If it reaches zero, you become temporarily unconscous. Hand-to-hand fighting drains fatigue first, then does real damage.

Skills Explained

Your attributes and skills are the foundation of your character in Oblivion. The higher the attribute, the more effective the skill tied to it will be, and the more you use the three skills tied to it, the higher you can raise it at level up. More on that later. As mentioned, there are 21 skills in the game, 7 in each the Magic, Stealth, and Combat specialties, and each of them is tied to one of the 7 main attributes.

In Oblivion, you use your skills to increase them, and when you gain levels, you'll get to put points into your main attributes. Some skills, mainly your 7 chosen major skills, will go up faster than others, also due in part due to the specialization you chose, or by being tied to a favored attribute.

Leveling Explained

Given that you'll choose 7 major skills (we'll talk about which ones soon), I'll now talk about how leveling works. As you use your skills, say "Block" by deflecting attacks with your shield, they'll automatically increase in rank with use. You can check their progress in the skills tab on the user interface. When a major skill increases (and they have a tendency to do so fast), it counts toward your level up. When any of your major skills increase a combined total of 10 times, you get a notification that you must rest using an available bed. Of course it is possible to continue playing and gaining levels before sleeping so that you can gain as many levels as you've accumulated, but it's easier to keep track of your progress if you don't let yourself get too far behind. When you wake up, you'll find the level up screen and get to assign points to three of your main attributes.

Effectively increasing your attibutes is the whole key, actually, to creating a powerful character in Oblivion, because your skills rely on them for effectiveness. The amount of points you can assign range from 1 to 5. You can imagine that, at level 20, if you've been putting just 1 point into three different attributes, say that began at rank 40, and stuck with them, then they'd now all be at 60. While that's somewhat significant, imagine if you would have been putting in 5 points into each through character level 20, or even 3 points. At 3 per attribute, each of them would now be at 100, and with 5, you'd have some left over to start building others you find important.

So the big question is, how do you get more points to assign (called the attribute bonus)? And this is the non-intuitive part of Oblivion, and why this guide sparked into existence. You see, while adventuring, your major skills are not the only thing contributing to getting more of an attribute bonus, but so too do your minor skills! As you recall, each attribute is tied to three skills. So if Intelligence is tied to Alchemy, Conjuration, and Mysticism, and you have two or all three set as minor skills and have only been concentrating on your major skills (as most people tend to want to do since they picked 'em), you'll lose out on much of any intelligence attribute bonus. Heck, I began doing this too, and had to find out the hard way. The exact formula is simple. For every 2 points of skill increases tied to the attribute (say you've increased Mysticism and Conjuration both once), you'll get one point to add to the attribute at level up, with a max of 5. That means it takes 10 skill increases related to the attribute to get the full 5 bonus.

Stop right there. It takes 10 skill increases to get the full +5 bonus to one attribute. But it takes 10 skill increases in any of your major skills combined to level up, and you'll likely be using many of them at once. So you might be thinking, won't I level too quickly to get a good bonus for all three? That's right, and there's only one solution: use your minor skills.

The way the game usually plays out is that characters choose as their major skills the ones that suit their style of play, and even the game encourages this with its classes and in the manual. For example, a warrior type would choose Blade or Blunt, Armorer, Heavy or Light Armor, Block, etc. This works just fine, except as you're out there adventuring, you tend to gain levels very quickly because you're out there actively using all of your major skills and the minor ones are not as needed! The problem with this is that enemies in Oblivion scale up to your level, gaining sufficient attributes in the meantime, and as you gain levels quickly without beefing up your attributes which influence everything from your health and fatigue, to how quickly your magicka regenerates and overall magicka. Therefore, you continue to make them tougher and yourself weaker by comparison, possibly (and I'd lean toward probably) leading to some added difficulty later.

What you'll want to do then, is this. So that you don't outlevel your power, when you first make a character consider how you want to play the game: stealth, magic, combat, hybrid. Now, when you're choosing your major skills, simply choose the ones that you intend to use absolutely the least, or whichever ones you can actively control, such as Alchemy, Marksman, Hand-to-Hand... This way when you're ready to level up, it's likely you've increased your minor skills significantly and can feel good about taking the steps to increase your major skills and level up, while getting a decent attribute bonus.

Now, if it's later on in your character's career for you and, like me, you're already level 15 with nowhere near maxed stats, and a set of major skills that exactly suits how you want to play, the good news is that it's not too late to begin. What you'll need to do is at the beginning of every level, determine which of your 3 stats you want to increase (and this goes for those from the beginning too if you really want to control it), then look and see which three skills each of those govern, and finally which of those skills are your major skills, and which are your minor. As soon as possible, begin doing what's necessary to increase the minor related ones first, and only after you're at an acceptable attribute bonus, do what it takes to increase the remaining major skills.

A simulated example:

Timon, a level 10 Breton Battlemage, likes to use both brains and brawn. Up to this point he's leveled extremely quickly through use mainly of his major skills and therefore hasn't had all the bonuses he could have and his stats are not going up rapidly enough he feels in relation to his enemies. He decides to take action about this problem now.

For this level, he decides to concentrate on bringing up his Strength, Endurance, and Intelligence. For major skills in those attributes, he's got Blade (Strength), Block (Endurance), Heavy Armor (also Endurance) , and Mysticism (Intelligence). The problem is that by fighting enemies using Blade, Heavy Armor, and Block (as he usually does), he's been leveling too quickly to get much of an attribute bonus. This time he's going to do something better.

For Strength, he has just Blade for his major skills, while Hand-to-Hand and Blunt are his minor related skills. Let's assume he's already bought one of the most basic of Conjuration spells from a mages guild, Summon Ghost (important to raise melee skills if you don't yet have it). He then goes to the weapon shop and buys himself a basic iron or steel mace (Blunt), which does nearly no damage to magical creatures and is a good thing. Equipping the mace, he summons the Ghost (which also, by using magic attacks, doesn't wreck your armor, thereby using up your Heavy Armor skill points). He attacks the Ghost 3 times and then it turns on him, while he whacks away at it for 30 seconds until it vanishes. During this time, his Blunt skill being so low it gains one skill point and half another before he's ready to summon another Ghost. He does this (and it doesn't take long) until he gains 4 or 5 ranks.

Then he unequips the mace and uses his bare hands with the Ghost. In no time flat he's got another 4 skill ranks for 9 total, and figures his Blade on typical adventuring is going to go up another on its own, for the full 5 point bonus at level up to Strength.

Now he wants to work on Endurance, which is the tough one in his situation. You see, he's only got 10 skill ups before a level up, and during normal adventuring he's prone to level up at least a few other skills besides Heavy Armor and Block, and therefore his Endurance bonus on level up has been low. He's only got Armorer left for his minor skills, so in order to make the most of it he buys up a bunch (20) of Repair Hammers, and this time summons a Scamp (if he can) or any non-magical creature. He uses his mace or sword on it a few times to gain its attention, and then stands there like a punching dummy while he takes a few hits, and then runs away (so as not to increase Heavy Armor until he's ready or out adventuring. Then afterward, he uses his repair hammer on his armor and weapon and then repeats. In not too long he's got 3 or 4 level ups, and decides that he's going to concentrate on Blocking for a few skill ups and then on his magic.

Meanwhile, when he conjures up the creatures, being a minor skill, every conjuration increase influences his Int bonus. He can practice that as much as he wishes. For Alchemy (also a minor skill) he goes out and collects a ton of herbs, and then combines them for a few ranks in order to max his intelligence bonus.

It's only Endurance that may (after normal adventuring) have a +4 or possibly +3 modifier, and the rest should have a +5.

Creating Your Character and Major Skills

So in essense, to get the most from your character statistic wise, here's what you ought to do:

1. Think about how you'd like to play the game: magic, combat, stealth, or a combination

2. Think about or write down which main attributes go with your way of playing. For example, if you want Warrior/Mage hybrid with more a focus on combat than magic, you'd prefer Strength, Endurance, and perhaps Willpower and/or Intelligence (which influence your magicka regen rate and max magicka respectively).

3. For each of those attributes, write down what the related skills are to the attribute.

4. When choosing your major skills, use a *maximum* of just one of the related skills for each of the attributes you think you'll by the end of the game, and furthermore let your major skills be controllable by you while normal adventuring. For example, if you wanted Intelligence, choose one that is not crucial to you while adventuring, such as Alchemy. In other words, it won't raise by itself as you play the game and therefore level you up before you're ready... you have to actively choose to increase it. For Endurance, you might choose Block, since Heavy Armor and Armorer are needed skills as you adventure, unless you want to spend a fortune on repairs. For Strength, you might choose Hand-to-Hand if you prefer to do battle with a Blade. And for Willpower, you might choose Alteration (if you don't think the spells in this school are crucial and that you'd be using them too much). The exception to this is Restoration. It increases very slowly in the game, and should be more benefit than a hindrance as your major skill.

The point is to choose major skills that you can control while you do normal adventuring so that you don't level quicker than you have a chance to raise those minor skills and get your maximum or near max attribute bonus when you level.

5. After you level up, write down the ranks of the skills related to the attributes you want to raise, so that you can make sure to increase them 8 or 10 combined times during the level.

As you can see from that example, it's taking it more to the extreme than the usual player might wish to do. If you'd prefer rather to play your own pace and take what the game gives you, I merely suggest you take #4's advice and choose major skills that do *not* suit your style of play so that during normal adventuring, you'll have a chance to increase those minor skills related to how you play, thereby increasing your attributes by more than you would have the other way around.

The only negative to that is that the related skills will go up more slowly, but as this is a huge game and they all can reach 100 (especially if you pay for training when you have enough money *hint hint*), that shouldn't matter very much.

Hope you found this guide useful, albeit admittedly lengthy. For the next Elder Scrolls game, let's hope they come up with a system that does not penalize the player for choosing major skills related to how they choose to play (i.e. the creature auto-leveling system).