Seeing her keep writing numbers on the paper while playing the game reminds me of Morrowind and Oblivion. In those games you could maximise the level up attribute (like strength, intelligence, personality) bonuses if you developed your skills meticulously in a pre-planned manner. It meant a difficult early game because you basically had to create a character where most of the useful/favourite skills had the lowest starting values, so that you could develop them in a controlled manner to achieve the max level up bonuses. It was a weird style of playing, keeping tabs on every single skill increase per level and usually needing to adapt your playing style so that you could increase the specific skills you needed for the bonuses. Already by mid game, this resulted in an übermench character that punched well above the expected level: In normal gameplay you'd receive bonuses randomly, not max bonuses every single level up, so the difference was quite huge.
In Skyrim this mechanism was totally removed. I wasn't too sad to see it go.