15 damage race perk.
10 damage gloves (From the ratways in Riften)
Heavy armor perk.

15 damage race ability + heavy armor perk + enchanted with unarmed = An interesting, hard yet viable challenge?

You can disenchant the gloves and put them on 2 items at 14 damage each, so 15 + 28 + heavy armor perk

Thats easily over 100 damage punches with exploited smithing.

do they get sneak double dmg bonus?

Upgrades and skill level don't affect the damage from heavy gauntlets. The best you can get is 18 damage from Daedric Gauntlets, which puts you at 61 damage max. Although I only get +12 unarmed bonus with maxed enchanting ...

Doesn't the Khajiit race passive give 25+ DMG not 15+ DMG?

Nupe 15

Seems powerful at first, but drops off big time. Especially with the broken perk.

I'm trying to do this now but I am unable to figure out how to key bind unarmed. I'm only about an hour so in, do I need gauntlets? can they be bound to a key?

Doesn't sound viable to me, but keep updating this thread, Sneezlee: seems like an interesting thing to mess around with.

I'm doing this too. With pickpocket and alchemy for "drug dealer" kills

It may not work well, but thats the challenge isnt it?

its working pretty good up ton ow. Though im only lvl 7.

interesting.
why can we not make skooma in this game?

I tried this play through on master; but eventually took forever to kill anything;
sure punching dragons and giants to death might seem fun, but when it started to take several minutes to kill draugr deathlords that were spawning everywhere in dungeons it got really boring.
Then tried a master level run with shield bashing only; still did way more damage than hand-to-hand.