User blog comment:Zelron/Helgen Hometown (Dragons bring down my property values!)/@comment-4057437-20121129044717/@comment-3492791-20121201062314

Again, nearly all enemies are leveled, so regardless if you do a quest at level 1 or level 30, the enemies will almost certainly be leveled to your difficulty and won't be more difficult to defeat either way.

For enemies that are not leveled, well Draugr already went over that. You can take your chances of defeating them before you're ready, and if you're lucky you might be able to, but it would be much more sensible to come back later when you're stronger. A good example of this would be Krosis. Krosis can be challenged at any time, but if you attempt it at a low level he will fucking destroy you (not to mention you'd be fighting a dragon at the same time). So you run like hell, then come back several levels later when you stand a better chance. They could have locked him in some dungeon that you had to be X level to enter to make it so the player was already a level that they stood a fair chance of beating him, but they didn't, and it made him a more interesting enemy because he was one we could not just blow away at first sight.

One such example would be when I did Siege on the Dragon Cult with my fairly low level Orc (I don't remember exactly what but it was under 20). I had a hard time fighting through the temple, and when I reached Rahgot he crushed me. I reloaded the save and this time used Berserker Rage and rushed strait at Rahgot. I forced him into a corner and smashed his head in until he disintegrated. He was an enemy that was too strong to defeat using conventional means at the time, but I was able to use strategy (if you can call what I did a legitimate "strategy") to defeat him, and was rewarded with a powerful item beyond what I should have at the time.

Level caps don't "protect" low level players from high level enemies, as any intelligent person can tell after getting into a fight they can't win not to immediately do it again. All they serve to do is forcibly lengthen gameplay by forcing the player to have played X amount of the game first.