A big part of Skyrim’s appeal is its variety. Whether it’s through mods or roleplaying, every playthrough is different, and there’s no wrong way to play the game. Well, that’s the case for most people, but not for one player who discovered they had been playing the game wrong for a decade, all because they didn’t understand the levelling system.

A few weeks ago, a Reddit post from u/Ok_Objective_5025 appeared on the Skyrim subreddit explaining that, while they loved the game as a whole, they could not stand the combat. “I always dreaded doing anything related to combat.”, they explained. “After all, combat in Skyrim was way too difficult and fights could drag on for actual real-life hours.”

If you’ve played Skyrim before, the idea that fights could take hours is likely pretty baffling. Most enemies can be dispatched with a few hits, and even the toughest of bosses probably wouldn’t take you more than a few minutes, right? Well, as it turns out, because of how the levelling system works in Skyrim, the way Ok_Objective_5025 was playing the game was inadvertently making the game significantly harder than it should have been. 

In Skyrim, enemies become stronger the more you level up your skill, and this doesn’t just mean your combat skills; your lockpicking levels contribute just as much to enemy strength as your archery levels. Ok_Objective_5025, who professed to be a big fan of stealth in any game, would always begin their playthroughs by joining the thieves guild, looting a few houses, and generally levelling up their stealth, lockpicking, pickpocketing and more—you can probably see the problem by now.

By the time they were finished with their early game exploits and started getting into combat situations, they were up against high-level enemies, all the while having the combat stats of a new character. “Killing a mammoth used to take me an actual 20 minutes, because I’d have to shoot one arrow, run away until it lost interest, shoot another arrow, run away again, etc.” they explained.

Thankfully, having finally realised their error, they’ve recently begun a playthrough in which they’ve banned the use of stealth and pickpocketing, and it looks like that’s done the trick, declaring “I can only ever use a sword and light armor, and it’s crazy. Like what do you mean I can just walk up to a mammoth and kill it?”

So, if during any of your Skyrim playthroughs, you found that the enemies were a lot stronger than you were expecting them to be, maybe you should consider cooling it a bit on the pickpocketing and spend a bit more time smacking your local mudcrabs around with a sword.

If you’re looking to avoid your own Skyrim mishaps, check out our everything you need to know guide.