Another quirk of the levelling system in Skyrim that didn't make it into the article (because it was in danger of turning into an article about issues with Skyrim) relates to crafting.

In Skyrim you have skill points that denote ability to use different types of weapons and the weapons themselves have stats. These influence the amount of damage you deal with them.

Your character also has an overall "level" that goes up as you defeat enemies and complete quests.

This level also determines what sort of random encounters you have / how difficult they are, although it does not impact how hard the main quest line encounters are (these are balanced differently).

The trouble is that there is also a crafting system, and crafting also increases your characters level.

The upshot of this is that if you decide to play the game by focusing on main quests and spending some time crafting your own weapons and amour - easy enough to do by using your gold to buy supplies from a blacksmith and making use of their forge - you can end up having completing the main quest line, vanishing the antagonist but finding yourself killed in one hit by every bandit who jumps out from behind a bush once you step outside a village.