The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a fantasy action role-playing game, playable from either a first- or third-person perspective. The player may freely roam over the land of Skyrim, an open world environment consisting of wilderness expanses, dungeons, caves, cities, towns, fortresses, and villages. Players may navigate the game world more quickly by riding horses, paying for a ride from a city's stable, or utilizing a fast-travel system that allows them to move their character immediately to a previously discovered location. 
At the beginning of the game, players select their character's sex and race, with 10 choices for the latter including races of humans and fantasy races such as elves and orcs. The player chooses the character's appearance; this is not necessarily permanent, however, as an in-game mechanic allows for changing the appearance later. Characters have three primary attributes: health is how much damage the character can take before dying, magicka is depleted to cast spells, and stamina allows the character to perform heavy "power attacks" or sprint. A status bar for each attribute appears onscreen when the attribute falls below its maximum value. Attributes regenerate over time and can be refilled faster by drinking potions, casting regenerative spells, or through various enchantments. Characters gain experience indirectly, via leveling up skills. The 18 skills are divided evenly among the three schools of combat, magic, and stealth. Each skill has its own experience bar, which increases when the character performs an action in-game related to the skill. For example, crafting a dagger increases the Smithing skill, and dealing damage with a bow increases the Archery skill. When a skill's experience bar fills, the skill levels up and the bar is reset. After enough skills level up, the character levels up, enabling the player to increase the maximum value of one of the three attributes and providing a perk point. Perk points can be spent immediately on a skill-specific perk or stored for later use. 
The player's character engages in combat with monsters while exploring a dungeon. The player may dual-wield weapons and magic at the same time in order to be more effective against enemies. Players may also dualcast a spell to increase its potency.
Non-player characters (NPCs) populate the world; the player may engage them in conversation (potentially leading to new quests or map locations), marry predetermined ones, or engage them in lethal or nonlethal combat. As in previous games in the series, killing certain individuals can make some quests or items unobtainable. Certain NPCs essential to the narrative cannot be killed by the player, and will survive attacks of any magnitude. Committing a crime like murder or theft accrues the player a bounty if the crime is witnessed, leading to confrontations with guards. Depending on some factors, including how serious the crime was, the player can choose to go to jail, pay the guard off, persuade the witness to forget about it, declare that one is a thane of a certain hold (which leads the guard to pardon the player), 'pacify' the guard or silence witnesses through killing them.