I wanted to try someones advice here on the forums and leave the big questlines and fast travell and just explore a little, but it didn't take long before I had tangelled myself into a situation with certain death. I found myself reloading more and more to avoid certain forts and dungeons. Is this how it works? Is the main quests easier and if you stray from it you can find the very hard oponents?

Depends where you end up during your journey. Yes, chances are you will end up encountering things with much high skill levels than yourself, but that makes it even more fun, at least to me. It made me find out where and who to see to help me skill faster.

you find hard opponents everywhere in the game.

i lower the level of difficulty in the beginning for that reason.

go out explore and as your character gets stronger raise the difficulity

some of the best things in the game are found exploring.

The opponents kinda' level with you, but some are a little more difficult at lower levels. I suspect that Bethesda doesn't mind you exploring everywhere, but they would prefer that you stay on track.

No, they just wanted to feel like the player got more powerful as he leveled without making the game excrusiatingly hard at low levels but laughably easy at high levels. Honestly, remember oblivion, where everyone was the same difficulty no matter what level you were.

I haven't played it (Skyrim is my first TES), but I'm definitely about to get the GOTY edition.

Freddyfear, are you on PC? If so, there's a GREAT mod which tells you on the map and as you discover places whether they're quest related - and not only the MQ either. I don't know how I did any exploring without it! It's this one:

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=9720

Oh well, in Oblivion, they had this system where everything would level up with you. This had 2 problems. 1. Enemies never got tougher, only bigger as you level up, as a result, you never feel any more powerful than a level one. 2. One you hit a certain level, all the equipment changes immediatly. For example, once you hit level 8, caves, bandits, shopkeepers suddenly have an abundence of dwarven armour.

Do the enemies ever hit a cap that the player can LVL past?

Not really. Some players like to stay at level 1 for this purpose, although this does have its drawbacks.

Damn.