Given that one has raised his relevant skills to a desired level, is it better to be at a high or low level overall? If the difficulty of all opponents scaled up with the player's level, and if his ability to dispatch them scaled up at a lesser rate, then a lower player-level would be advantageous. On the other hand, if the worst opponents were of fixed difficulty, then any increase in level that added to the player's strength would be desirable.
The answer to this question would affect game-play. For example, suppose that your minor skills included several that had little effect on your chosen mode of play, but that you could easily train up. By training them up simultaneously, they have a minimum effect on level, whereas training one up per level-advance gives them maximum effect. To be concrete, suppose there were 3 magic skills that could be trained via cantrip. By training all three up together by 15 skill-levels, one advances a single overall level, but advancing just one at a time would permit one to gain three. In the latter case, one might want to defer increasing them until other sources of advance had been exhausted and then train them up individually to gain the levels.
A Question of Strategy
Re: A Question of Strategy
I think it's more complex than just increasing any of the player character's skills up by 15 points. The Wiki here provides the following information:
Another consideration is that high-level monsters are in most cases no match for low-level player characters. This is the reason why some of the guild and NPC quests also have a level requirement. However, the game seems not to be shy of randomly generating monsters in a dungeon that are clearly outside the player's current skills range.
That said, many pre-defined classes have a weird selection of skills that are not as easy to train at all (like Etiquette or Streetwise), so I guess playing as a custom class is a good option if you don't want to get stuck levelling your character because of hard-to-train, useless skills.
There's also this consideration that certain main storyline quests are only activated upon advancing to a certain level, so you have to level up if you want to progress through the plot.Level is determined by the equation
L = floor((S − S0 + 28)/15),
where S equals the sum of your three primary skills, two highest major skills, and highest minor skill, and S0 equals the sum of the starting values of each of those skills. In simpler terms, you must raise the total of these skills by 15 points in order to get a level increase.
Any combination of skill increases will work as long as they total to 15 points. Increases in Miscellaneous skills do not count toward level increases, although the character will still be better at doing those things. Note that the formula counts only the highest Minor skill and the two highest Major skills, so any increases of the other Major/Minor skills do not count toward a level increase until the lower skills reach the same value as the highest.
[source] [emphasis added]
Another consideration is that high-level monsters are in most cases no match for low-level player characters. This is the reason why some of the guild and NPC quests also have a level requirement. However, the game seems not to be shy of randomly generating monsters in a dungeon that are clearly outside the player's current skills range.
That said, many pre-defined classes have a weird selection of skills that are not as easy to train at all (like Etiquette or Streetwise), so I guess playing as a custom class is a good option if you don't want to get stuck levelling your character because of hard-to-train, useless skills.