Started playing Skyrim a few days ago and my assassin is quite weak. I'm level 11, joined the Dark Brotherhood... but have difficulty killing things with the weapons I'm supposed to use (One-hander/Daggers). If I find myself in situations to one-shot assassinate, all goes good and I get the kill. But if they see me first or there is more than one, I have to equip my 2-handed weapon to kill them, or use fire magic that I never put one skill-point into. I find myself running away from mobs rather than fighting them, which is odd. I'm thinking of just making a new class or something because my assassin doesn't seem too viable.

One way is to train pickpoketing and put poisons in their pocket. Though this is just a method I've heard of and have used on random NPC's. I've never done the DB missions but it apparently works well in them.

The entire thing is that you are playing as an assasin, and especially with a dagger and low stealth it can be very hard to be stealthy all the time.
If you want a slightly easier time use a bow, they can be very effective if used in stealth while presenting less risks trying to get close to targets.

Still, playing what you play now can be quite fun and very rewarding, but it's pretty hard and a lot of reloads might be required and if you are not up to the task you might want to change your play style a bit.

You're an assassin. They're not meant to be tanks, and can be overwhelmed fairly easily. Run away, come back later. Train your sneak up so you can get closer. Use poisons. Possibly invest in conjuration to distract enemies when you're escaping, or in illusion to calm or frenzy your enemies into attacking eachother.

If all you're doing is trying to cut throats then you're bound to have a hard time.

Work on your stealth. Once you get the Assassin's Blade perk it'll be worth having daggers.

Once you get the perk for 3x sneak attack criticals with bows, they are incredibly useful. You can shoot enemies and, if you don't kill them, hide until you become hidden again. Then just rinse and repeat.

As suggested above I'd either re-roll if your wanting to go toe to toe or grab a bow and kite more.The thing with going purely daggers is loss of aggro control as soon as your stealth drops and your pretty weak for the first 20-25 levels so it's slow going, grabbing a kill...losing aggro...grabbing another kill,etc, and highly dependent on target prioritization and set up.You also have to observe mob path finding and try to wait till you can single out one or a small group which takes patience.

Personally I found integrating some form of CC into the build to be pretty much compulsory if you want to really enjoy yourself, else it's a pretty slow grind.The dragon shout Throw Voice is probably your best weapon.Using it to separate groups makes things a LOT easier.

Good luck to you.

It's going to boil down to this from my experience.

You're going to take archery or illusion in the beginning.

Archery- Will allow you to deal sneak attacks from a distance, levelling your sneak skill so you can backstab better later. To me, this is tedious and I would rather backstab from the get go.

Illusion- Will allow you to backstab right out of the gate, within 30min of the game all the time. Backstabbing also levels your sneak extremely fast. I like fast. 2hrs into the game and I have 50 Illusion and 60 sneak....level 13 at the moment and backstabbed everything, except the boss in bleakfalls barrow.

Illusion allows you to do this because of the spell calm and muffle, and soon, invisiblity. Invisiblity allows me to backstab anything and everything no matter if it is daylight, night time, 50 bandits around a campfire, 50 forsworn armed with grenade launchers, it doesn't matter.

Play around with calm. Always cast muffle, it doesn't hurt to just cast it to level illusion. The faster you get invisiblity the better. Get some magic and magic regen and you're set.

My 2 cents.

Also make sure you're using the dual wield power attack with daggers to get your sneak attacks in, especially in the beginning. Will level sneak even faster if it takes more than one hit to kill something and you make sure you don't have to run away because that draugr is still alive after the first hit.

What kind of assassin gets detected anyway? The dead one! I had to do quite a lot of reloads with my assassin at low levels, because I didn't use bows (they don't seem like assassin weapons to me). But once I leveled up sneak (before level 20) I could be right under their nose and they wouldn't notice me. The letdown? Most random NPCs I tried to assassinate turned out to be essential.

It's not unusual to find yourself sometimes be running away from the enemy once they saw you. Usually what I do when I run away is simply to find a place to hide until they stop searching for me. Then I'd sneak attack them to get extra damages (then maybe run away and hide again). Just make sure you have high enough sneak skill (you could train or go into sneak mode a lot -- break into places and steal stuff, etc.) Also, if you really can't run away from them to hide, you could add some conjuration skill to help you fight while you run away to hide again or something.

Oh and you should pick up those perks of extra sneak attack damages in both bows and daggers as soon as possible. They are very useful and help you clear out enemies faster.

I assure you that being an assassin in this game is completely viable. I'm currently in level 27 with 86 sneak skill and I feel like everything is under my control as long as I'm in the shadows. It may just take a bit more time to level up sneak skill in the beginning so hang in there!

Personally I found invisibility to be way too OP.

Each to their own though.

I'd say that's right.

You're an assassin, not a warrior, you need to use your wits and stealth to get kills.

Fighting multiple enemies should be off of the cards for you, devide and conquer.

2 hander? thats doing it wrong. - assassin-wise anyways

Make a noise somewhere to draw off the mobs from your target.

Use long range.

Kill your target and escape - why kill everyone else anyways? I know of no assassin in fiction or reality who sticks around after killing a target to take on everyone else present.