The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Character Building Guide: Imperials

Now that we have covered some of the basics of the game together with some useful tips which will help you during your journey, it’s time to cover another important element of Skyrim: character building. Skyirm offers a lot of freedom in creating characters to your likings: players will be able to choose the race of their character, race that will ultimately influence how good their character will be in some fields. Each race has unique abilities and stats, making each race excellent only in specific fields: obviously not all races are good at magic or physical attacks so you’d better know beforehand about each race’s traits. And you better make your choice carefully since, unlike Oblivion, you won’t have a second chance and once you’ve picked a race, you’ll be stuck with it.

At the beginning of the game, if you experiment with multiple race choices, you’ll notice that the base value for each skill is 15. At the same time you’ll notice how not all skills start with 15: this means that that specific race comes with a bonus for that particular skill. All races come with either a +5 bonus or +10 bonus: skills they’re not too good at won’t be getting any bonus. As you can see while all races can become decent at everything, you’ll need to put in some extra work if those skills you want to invest in come with no bonus.

As we already said, each class comes with some special innate abilities: some are always active, some are weaker versions of skills that can be learned during the game and others can only be activated once per day. These skills, while incredibly useful at the beginning, don’t really influence the game later on so don’t make your choices just by looking at the innate abilities of each class: these abilities should only complement your fighting style, rather than becoming the basis for it.

• Imperials

Imperials come from the Cyrodill region, carrying the voice of the emperor even though their empire is going through a major crisis. Gameplay wise, the Imperials are suited in becoming a hybrid magical class: they are quite good at magic but not as good as High Elves. At the same time they’re decent at physical attacks so you may want to give them a one handed weapon together with the spells. Making them slightly better at magic makes them work better during the game.

Innate Abilities:

Voice of the Emperor : Calms nearby people for 60 seconds.
Imperial Luck : Anywhere gold coins might be found, Imperials always seem to find a few more.

Skill Bonuses

Block: +5
Destruction: +5
Enchanting: +5
Heavy Armor: +5
Restoration: +10
One-Handed: +5