There are two issues:
- It doesn't look like skill points are properly granted by answers to Background questions. From testing, I would guess that only one skill is allowed to gain a bonus, but behavior may be even stranger than that.
- Under rare circumstances, it's possible to start with lower skill points than was previously documented.
The first issue is easily tested. Create any custom character you like, and answer Background questions such that a variety of skill bonuses should be granted. You may find this easiest as an acrobat-skilled character (running, jumping, swimming, climbing, dodging, backstabbling, critical strike, stealth, etc.) as there are many questions that add to these skills.
When you reach the "Add Bonus Points" screen of character creation, it's been documented that primary skills range from 28 to 31, major skills range from 18 to 21, and minor skills range from 13 to 16. You will notice that most of the skills you should have bonuses in based on your Background answers are still just within these default ranges, but there may be one that did receive a bonus. In particular, if you gamed the questions to get four +6 boosts to climbing, you may see that it received about +18 points (still less than expected).
For the second issue I mentioned, it may be difficult to trigger. As I was messing around with various builds trying to figure out how this bug works, several times I ended up with skills below what's said to be the minimum values. Look at this example, where running, dodging and jumping are all 1 point less than they should be able to be:
I don't know if this is just exceedingly rare behavior, or certain skill configurations can trigger this, or what. I assume the original minimums and maximums were collected experimentally, since it's quite easy to end up in those ranges (28 to 31 etc.).
Daggerfall Unity has none of these issues, as far as I can tell from testing. BIOG files are parsed properly (so good job team ).
All of this has strong implications for long-term gameplay, since the lower your skills at character creation, the more points you're able to gain, which can mean a higher level cap. Every 15 points gained in character creation among the three primary/two highest major/highest minor skills means one fewer level you can gain. In fact it's likely that most characters made in Daggerfall Unity have a one-level-lower cap due to properly increasing these values.
It is very possible that in development of Daggerfall Unity, no one even needed to observe the underlying code of classic to determine how it worked, since the base skill values and contents of the BIOG files are well-documented.
I know this is beyond the scope of your project, but I am here to humbly ask if you code experts would be able to take a look at what's happening in character creation and see if you can replicate my issues, find out what causes this in classic Daggerfall, and how a fix might be implemented. This could even have implications for base skill point rolls in Unity as well.