I've been playing Oblivion recently, and it's been fun, but I was slightly irritated with the leveling system, so I fixed it.
Here's an overview of how (power?) leveling works in Oblivion:
You select 7 "major skills" and the rest become "minor". Skills advance as you use them. Major skills are no different from minor except for an initial bonus and every 10 major skillpoints gained is a new level, at which point you must sleep in a bed to level up and continue gaining skillpoints. Leveling up has you select three of your stats to increase by respective bonuses, but here's the catch: the bonus depends on your advancement in the three skills related to the stat.
This leads to a sort of reversal of priorities. Your "major skills" are more of the opposite, as you postpone them, and thus leveling, to achieve the necessary gains in "minor" skills to maximize the stat bonus when you do finally level. Selecting your least naturally used skills as major skills is in fact to your advantage. A bit strange, but not a dampener on the fun - you can, after all, go all out in the 14 other skills without fear of accidentally leveling and botching your stat bonuses.
There is quite an annoyance with this approach though. Once you reach the maximum +5 bonus in a stat, skillgain in that area is no longer worth your time until you level up (you'd only be advancing a skill, instead of a skill and a stat) - and aside from gratuitous number keeping, there's no way to see exactly how close you are aside from leveling up, noting the advancement screen, and then restoring to an earlier saved game. Something which becomes extremely tedious considering you must advance to just prior to leveling, save, travel to a bed, use a skill to reach the level point, sleep, level up, pick 3 stats and confirm so you can get to open the main menu, and then restore to your saved game.
An annoyance until now anyways! Enter: Oblivion Leveling Assistant.
Utilizing the ever helpful and entertaining Cheat Engine, I put together a little AutoHotkey program which displays the current points you have towards a stat since your last level. It takes 2 skillpoints for a +1 stat bonus, and +5 is the maximum, so all you need to do is focus on reaching a value of 10 (or more, but don't waste too many) in the three stats you would like to apply the bonuses to before you gain that last major skillpoint, and that's it. Be sure to put those 10 required major skillpoints towards the stats you'll be selecting as well, or you'll be doing extra work!
This was a tricky update, so if clarification is needed ask me in the comments.
5-08-08 There's also at least a few mods for Oblivion which overhaul the system to something more acceptable, these might be a lot more useful so you should check them out. (Especially if you play fullscreen and/or use a single display.) Take a look at other mods as well, there's sure to be some you'll consider essential.
I also only just discovered the UESPWiki and its wealth of Oblivion and Elder Scrolls information (including much more in-depth leveling guides), so hopefully I've learned GameFAQs is no longer the one-stop-shop in this new wiki world. />