so i've restarted... not on purpose and i'm going for an all around character that when the time arise's can get up close for a stealth assassination, but i can't figure out how to do the back stab with a dagger. i've got really clsoe to a bandit, while being hidden behind him so close that i'm pretty much touching him and still he just swings. so how do i do it?

Are you in stealth mode when you do it? o.O

That's how it's done. If you don't do enough damage to kill a person - no fancy animations for you.

I think the thing is you have to do enough damage to kill him in one hit.. you have to put a few perks on the right side of the sneak tree first. at least thats my experience

yes i'm in stealth mode, and that makes a lot of sense Komodo... thanks but my friend does it all the time with a fine iron dagger to targets for the Dark Brotherhood, and he still gets the animation...

That's probably because his damage output is better than yours because he took a combination of Stealth damage perks and has Dark Brotherhood armor.

With both of those, a dagger backstab does 30x damage.

You will engage in a finishing move if your next attack will deal enough damage to kill them (might still happen if it leaves them with less than ~5 hp but not certain). Even then, there are other criteria that needs to be met for certain finishers to happen. Such as facing them, being behind them, moving toward them, standing power attack, charging (sprinting), have a one handed or two handed, etc.

When my sneak attack from the back will instant kill, I am almost guaranteed a throat slicing if I am physically moving forward when I do the one hand attack (making it a power attack helps ensure it) from sneak. I had originally thought that this finisher was limited to daggers but I have slit throats with a sword recently.

All back stab does is boost the sneak attack multiplier of one handed weapons to x6 just like the deadly aim simply boosts the sneak attack multiplier of bows to x3 and assassin's blade increases the sneak attack multiplier of daggers to x15.

You can get one set of gloves that doubles the effect of assassin's blade and another pair of gloves that simply doubles the sneak attack multiplier of one handed weapons. The first only works for daggers and the x15 while the other works for the x6 of other one handers making them x12 but will still double the assassin's blade perk of daggers.

Also, if you duel wield daggers and you swing both at once, you can do x30 per dagger. If you do the double power attack from sneak, and your sneak is high enough, you can effectively hit the enemy up to 4 times each at x30 per hit which I think alternates between daggers.

I have yet to get a finisher by using both blades at once when doing sneak attacks.