Just Beat Them to Death

[Aldeth the Foppish Idiot]

Oh how funny. I'm having a blast with my latest character - I'm doing it just for laughs. It's an unarmed build. The requirements for this are pretty simple - all you need to do to make an unarmed character is visit the Ratway in Riften, and have a heavy armor skill of 30.

All you need to do is head to the Riften Ratway and find Gain the Fist. After you fight the two bandits when you first come in, head onward until you get to the part where the draw bridge isn't lowered. Typically you pick the lock on the door there, head up the stairs, and presto, you're in the thieves guild. If instead you take a right after you drop down and follow that path, you'll find Gain. He drops Gloves of the Pugilist, which is the only required item for this build. You also need a heavy armor skill of 30, because you'll need the hitherto useless perk, Fists of Steel. This allows the gauntlets' armor rating to be added to the amount of damage your fists do.

OK, you're almost done. Since you're going to want to be able to deal out more than 10 damage per fist strike, you need to disenchant the Gloves of the Pugilist to learn the "Fortify Unarmed" enchantment. This enchantment can be placed on both gloves and rings (but strangely, not amulets). So you want to wear the heaviest set of gauntlets you can get your hands on, and of course enchant a ring as well.

All that is left is to go beat pepople to death with your fists.

But there are a few recommendations I have that will make your life a bit easier.

1. Khajiit get a 15 point bonus to unarmed attacks. (Agronians get 5, every other race gets nothing.) This 15 point bonus stacks with fists of steel and fortify unarmed. So pick a Khajiit.

2. The highest base armor you can acquire on gauntlets will be from daedric gauntlets, so you might want to spend some smithing perks to get to that, as daedric items aren't exactly common drops.

3. The enchantment improves the higher your enchanting skill, so working on enchanting simultaneously with Smithing is highly recommended. (Do the Vex and Delvin special thieves guild missions to fund your work.)

4. This is not a build to use if you like to play on Master difficulty. I'm doing it on Adept, and even then it's no walk in the park.

My best accomplishment thus far is killing the dragon you fight after acquisition of the dragonstone - with my fists of course. (I did a whole lot of other stuff to raise my enchanting and smithing skill along the way. I was level 39 when I fought the dragon.)

Again I must stress this is not a build for the faint of heart, and is probably impossible on anything above standard difficulty. Just sayin' - it's a hell of a lot of fun.

EDIT: Oh, one more plus - there are a ton of unarmed finishing moves that are only performed if you are ... well... unarmed. And not just punches to the face. They go all WWE - like suplexes, back breakers, all sorts of fun stuff.

[Rawgrim]

I have been asking the same thing for years, aldeth. Why only punches in unarmed combat? Why not strangleholds, throws, the list goes on. Picture tossing a boss off a high cliff in Skyrim. That would have been so epic.

[henkie]

There's plenty of games that allow you to punch, throw and kick opponents, but not many have combined this with an open world. Unfortunately the implementation in Skyrim only allows for finishing moves.

Every game - and especially every game with a physics engine - should have a mechanic that you can kick people off of things or into things. Dark Messiah of Might and Magic was not necessarily a good game, but kicking people into ravines or into spiked walls was a great deal of fun.

[Aldeth the Foppish Idiot]

You only get the super moves as finishing moves - that much is true. However, it is totally possible to knock a boss off a cliff (assuming such a cliff is around) - just use unrelenting force. And it WILL kill him. Potential drawbacks to this however is you may have a hell of a hard time reaching/finding the body if you want to loot the corpse. That can be especially problematic if said boss was carrying a quest-necessary item.