Things to keep in mind:
Morrowind: It's a beautiful game for it's time. It's a bit aged, and a graphical boost can help, but you won't ever have difficulty telling what things are. Same thing for sound, you will never find sounds out of place, though depending on your settings you might decide there's an imbalance.
Size: This is a big game. Expect to get lost more than once. There's no quick-travel feature minus boats and Silt Striders (the creatures look like giant fleas, you'll see the first at the edges of your starting town), and several spells that you can learn (And you learn spells whenever you want to, it's just a question of if you have the mana, money and talent for it) or several one-time-use scrolls that you'll find, though you may not find the destination to your liking since there's very few targets for the teleportation.
Glitches: There are a LOT of hills in this game, with a lot of rocks. The wrong kind of jump can get you stuck without any way to get out. Because of this, try to keep an extra save file. Also, note that all indoor areas are built over an endless chasm. The wrong kind of jump can make you fall right through the floor. You'll respawn where you jumped through, but you sometimes take damage. There's one city as well where this is really bad, and it's built over water infested with mean fish, so you'll fall through quite a bit. Go online and get a couple of overhaul mods that help with these glitches.
Playing: Weapons and spells hit based on two things, first off being your actual attack relative to your opponent (Also known as AIMING) and on a random invisible roll that determines if you hit or not. Weapon skills level up by hitting the foe, which is much harder at lower levels, but at the same time gives you a faster pace of leveling. Archery is the worst in this regard because you have both a weapon and ammo to manage. To make this easier, go to a mage guild in one of the places you go to (If you follow the story, it's Balmora that you'll find a guild first) and purchase "Conjure Bow". This gives you a weapon for 60 seconds and a small boost to your weapon skill, so you only have to worry about arrows. This will make leveling the ability easier and cheaper than hiring a skill trainer, though because of the increased skill level it will also be slower than usual. Magics are not subject to rolls, but some are ranged, and some are melee range, and given that some foes move around quite a bit, especially if you're trying to dodge, can make hitting somewhat harder. Stealth is very difficult in this game to level, and difficult to use, look up a guide if you want to be serious about it. Lockpicking is also difficult to level as there's a finite number of locked objects in the game, if you want to improve it learn a magic skill that lets you lock doors. Acrobatics and Athletics (Jumping and Running) level really quickly, but avoid choosing them as major/minor abilities or you'll be missing out on a lot of levels. It also helps to look up a guide if you're looking to understand the leveling system, but the basics is that out of around 27 skills, each one is based upon a character stat. You have to increase a major/minor stat 10 times to level, but can level anything and everything otherwise. Depending on the skills raised, it increases a multiplier that attaches to your character stat, so that when you level, you can increase a character stat up by 5 points. Luck can only ever be increased by 1 as no other skills are attached to it. To get the most out of leveling, that means you'll have to raise 3-5 skill levels together to get the most bonuses, and because your levels are tied to major and minor stats, once you max all of those you've hit your max level, which depending on your choices could be as low as 25 to as high as 60.
Exploration: Stick to the roads as much as you can if you can't afford fast-travel and you're weak on health. Avoid male NPC characters early on that you meet on the roads since there's quite a few of them that may attack you. I'll give you some quick advice for a very nice item that can help out though early on. When you leave the first town of the game, stay near the water on the western coast. You'll come across a small doorway leading into a catacomb. Depending on your luck there will be either a skeleton or a ghost or both. Skeletons can be hit by all weapons, ghosts require a silver weapon or better to hit, or magic. Also make sure you have the lockpick and probe that you can get by doing the missions in the starting town. In the back of the catacomb is a ring that adds a small bonus to your character stats (As opposed to your skill levels), and an item "Lord Brine's Ashes". Haven't ever figured out what to do with the ashes. A good point to start talking to NPC's out in the wild is about level 4, when you've gotten used to the combat system and hopefully made enough money to get a couple of nice spells to compliment your play style. Because your leveling is based on your skills, XP doesn't exist. Leveling is based on success with your abilities, be it jumping, making potions, casting a spell, hitting with a weapon, or getting hit yourself to name the basics. Make a chart in the background to help measure how you're improving skills and what your bonuses will be when you level.
Money: There's not much wild money lying about. Most of it will come from stealing from bodies, or stealing. Make sure you know who and where you steal from though, the game remembers locations and items, and if you try to sell a shop owner something that was once in his store, you'll alert the guards, even if you stole it 3 years ago. (That happened to me once). If you want to get a lot of money really fast, look into the first of Morrowind's Expansions, Tribunal. You'll be attacked by an assassin when you rest or sleep out in the wild away from town, when you kill him talk to a guard, you'll be led to a city in the far western corner of the map where you can teleport to a massive city. The equipment on the assassins is worth a ton of money, but of course that means you have to kill them. They have a hideout underground and will continually respawn when you exit and leave the underground area. Selling the equipment with a decent mercentile skill can net you around 3000 gold or more per kill, and the equipment is so light that you can carry the equipment of 10 people at a time early on depending on your strength skill and whether or not you take the weapons too (If they have glass weapons, take them). If you make one of your major or minor skills light armor, keep a set to use yourself, this is one of the best suits of armor in the game and saves you about 30 pounds over higher level suits of armor.
Story: If you care about the story and want to be accurate to how the story is told between the multiple games, you have to pick a Dark Elf here. The benefit of a dark elf is high early stats, resistance to fire magic, an early summon, and a high starting level in most skill levels and character traits. As for the best character to choose in the game though is based on your preference. Norse and Orcs are more focused towards melee and armor abilities, wood elves (Bosmer) are focused towards stealth classes, High Elves are focused to magic, while Redguard and Imperial are a bit more balanced. The two other classes, Kahjiit and the Argonians, are geared gently towards more basic playstyles, without weapons or armor and a little more towards stealth styles. Also note that there's a heavy racism in this game against non-dark elves, so don't be surprised at how people react to you, in some cases a little worse than others. Also keep in mind that there are some areas of the game that are tied heavily to the story, so killing the wrong person will make the story impossible to complete. This can be fixed with the script menu if you are willing to look it up, but to be safe just be very wary in the northeastern corner of the map as it's where the importance of the last half of the story is focused, especially if you stay around the mainland rather than the beaches and small islands.
Post edited January 21, 2013 by QC
