Damn Oblivion to HELL!!!

[Lehesu]

What bothers me about auto-leveling is that you have no point of comparison for your own growth. Being able to kill everything around with a little effort should not be the case when you are low-level. Likewise, when you become an uber-warrior and can kill those tough enemies, the average joe-shmoe guys should not be magically getting tougher. They had this in Gladius and I hated it; your levels don't give you a huge advantage because they maintain parity with EVERYONE in the world. For me, that would really kill the realism.

[Somebody Else]

Hence some of these mods... For instance, the one I mentioned, a random highwayman will initially be a problem, later... not so. At the beginning if you wander into the woods - you might just stumble on something really nasty... that later would be worth fighting (rather than running away from). Of course, there's enough big beasties out there to keep you going for a very long way - the toughest creatures are level 40 or so, but you won't run across them too often (and there's a little bit of levelling of course - but only so that it's not insanely difficult).

[Rosacrux redux]

Bah, I like the leveling. It gives a more realistic feeling to the game - you don't become the most powerful being in the world in 40 days, you just finetune your srengths and augment them to become more and more effective against creatures/foes that do not become a breeze to take out with one strike.
Anyway, it's not that the random highwayman will be a huge problem when you are lvl 40, methinks... or so I assume, I haven't gone past lvl 5 yet, but isn't the lvl of several creatrues, troop types etc. capped at some point? So that you progress after that point but they don't?

[Somebody Else]

There are level-caps in the original yes, but they're a bit iffy - and equipment isn't really capped at all. I mean, just how many bandits would you expect to find fully kitted out in daedric or glass armour?

Plus (and I'm lifting fromt he mod description here pretty much). If the city guards are capable of going toe-to-toe to you at high levels... what exactly makes you the only person who can save the world?

[Steppe Merc]

I don't mind the leveling, but I dislike the huge number of super armor I was starting to find (Darius is around level... 20 I think). So I downloaded a mod that decreased the commoness of good armor, while keeping in the level system more or less. As well as multiple others, like better horses, new weapons, improved quests, etc.

But I also started a new character Timur-i-Lenk, and the most annoying thing I found was my extreme difficulty in creating a Turco Mongol face... Especially with the lack of beards (stubble doesn't cut it).

[Keba]

The game had me glued for the vast majority of my free time until I finished it. I'm still playing (with some mods that solve the whole random NPC #3767 brigand with armor that costs more than an average small country), but it loses some of it's charm, not in the gaming sense, but on the level where you think that doing random quests is beneat the honor of the guy who saved the world, is a boss in three guilds and runs around with weapons and equipment that would make a small army run away in fear.