Really? Maybe I remember this wrong, but I had a thought that 90% of the people said exactly the same thing about the same things. And I didn't feel any urge to ask different people about the same issues. But maybe I did this wrong...

Tagwords were ok, though.

That depended on the filtering, but yes, in unmodded Morrowind there's a lot of generic dialogue responses. I still liked it though; for me, the possibility of asking every scout in the game about several regional landscape features, or of asking every priest in the game about all of his gods, and actually getting meaningful replies, was already great. It didn't bother me that they mostly gave identical answers. Also, many answers _were_ different, and reflected the status of the different factions towards each other.

Also, it has been years since I played without the LGNPC mods, which expand and improve the dialogue a lot. :)

You've asked that several times. You have been answered several times. By now you just don't want to understand.
It'll take longer and higher level for you to get trough the expansions, but level and stats of pretty much all monsters are fixed in Morrowind (altho some new ones start spawning at certain levels.) Long story short: You can completely ignore the system and you'll get trough the game. It'll just be slightly harder and take a bit longer.

Hmm... I don't personally like mods that change the main game content. Many of them just "break the immersion" (hehe) or just feel like they don't belong in a game. They break consistency.

While this is true for many mods, the LGNPC mods are written specifically to blend into the game as if they had been put there by the original developers. They are written by a team of skilled writers with an extensive editing and quality assurance process, and I regularly recommend them even to people who are skeptical about mods.

You can start two games, one with LGNPC Seyda Neen active and one without, and check it for yourself. The difference should be fairly obvious. Note that LGNPC Seyda Neen was the first mod of the series and is a bit less refined than the ones that followed, so if you think that it enhances your experience, you can be pretty sure that the other mods of the series will do so even more.

Thanks for the tip. When I start my next Morrowind playthrough I will definitely search for these mods, added the name of it to my notes.

Thanks!

I beat the first Geneforge as the warrior type (forget the actual class name.) It wasn't THAT hard - depending on how you play and which plot choices you make of course. I'd imagine it hard to be the truly noble warrior - take out the two bosses without powering up via the Geneforge. I basically used the thief/conman approach to get to the Geneforge, and then smited all the opposition with my newfound powers. Had to save/reload a lot of course.

Not just *any* story the writers wrote - PS:T's story, having a blank slate character and a world nominally incomparably full of possibilities, has very particular problems that cannot be settled by an implicit genre compact, even if it *had* been a satisfactory solution in the first place.

It's fine to have thematic restrictions, but those restrictions should make sense internally. Geralt hunts monsters, Garrett steals stuff, 47 kills people. In tabletop D&D, people are supposed to create characters who want to become rich and powerful and who believe that inter-party collaboration is the best way to solve problems. In tabletop Shadowrun, people are supposed to create characters who want all that and additionally believe that engaging in corporate espionage is the best thing in life - there's nothing to prevent your character from becoming a CEO, but then he or she is supposed to retire as a player character because such plots are not supported by the game. In those games, a player gets handed an established character or is supposed to create a believable character according to known constraints.

See, Planescape: Torment's story sold itself as a sandbox without constraints. The multiverse has literally everything people have ever imagined and will ever imagine, and the main character can have a whole spectrum of attitudes to everything. You can have him be noble, or treacherous, or penitent, or coldly calculating, or paranoid, or cautiously undecided, and the game *supports* all that. His personality is clearly shown to be absolutely blanked with each new life. But no matter who you choose to be, the deathwish is mandatory. And it wasn't even in the initial player-game compact. You do not play an amnesiac who starts out with a deathwish. You play an amnesiac who is supposed to form his personality in the course of the adventure *and* acquire a deathwish. *This* part of supposedly your own philosophizing is decided for you. The world is interesting, wonderful, and, to the player, original - no classic fantasy to be potentially sick of. But the story mandates: if you're immortal, you *will* want to die. That is an established fact in the game's world, because you can change everything else about the character and it will *still* hold true. And that is preachy and forced, even though the result is a very good game.

I don't say PS:T would've been better if it had had more soylent green doorknobs and erinyes ass. I don't know how to improve this particular story - the flaws are too ingrained - but I can still point at them. I *agree* with you - barring artificial intelligence, it *is* next to impossible to create a sandboxey game with a meaningful story. But the conclusion I draw from that is that the RPG genre, when advertised as "play your own character", is fundamentally flawed, and in no other game it is shown as clearly as in Planescape: Torment.

In this case, you can use "credibility" instead. It makes little sense that a common bandit would wear oh-so-rare-and-powerful daedric armor, or that the arena champion can be defeated by a fresh completely untrained character. Stuff like that seems really out of place.

So ummm.... Which platform does support serious storytelling? You're complaining about not enough options, but there is no platform that would have more of them.

My favorite RPGs on GOG have been Anachronox and The Witcher 2.

Have you tried those?

I love Morrowind myself, but I can see how you hate it since at one point I got it and hated it when I initially tried it. It wasn't until sometime earlier this year I gave it a shot and got used to how it worked to see it as a good game. It is one of those games where it takes a lot of patience and possibly some trial and error to get it just right, at least that I see it as.

Adventures, of course. I do not complain about not enough options, I complain about arbitrary restrictions on too many options, to the point that these restrictions are portrayed as an inevitable outcome or even universal truth.

If an established character does something, or encounters a hardcoded restriction, this is part of his/her personality. If you imagined Cute Hermit Dude as someone who *will* destroy others' property and he flat out refuses to do it, then you amend your vision of the character, simple as that.

And yes, if Elothar, Warrior of Bladereach, has just slaughtered thousands of orcs and now offers forgiveness and redemption to their villainous commander Irenia the Hound because he feels he has no right to take a life (aww, how noble! ♥.♥), then you're perfectly within your right to pronounce the game stupid and the devs moronic; there's no way in hell you can empathize with a character this unrealistic and contradictory.

Now, most CRPGs imply certain default constraints: your character is one of the IRL-rare adventurers, who thinks power through quadratic advancement is worth striving for. You start the game knowing you won't probably be able to buy a farm and raise children instead. Many games have only one side of the conflict available, and even that is not too much of a problem depending on interpretation. Champions of Krynn is a 1990 dungeon-crawler where you play a party of six zealots conscripted by Solamnic Knights (more zealots) out to slay draconians (corrupted irredeemable baby angels). That's the premise, and it's fine as premises go. You do not get an option to defect because that's who you signed up to play; what you *can* do is muse why stories of the sort attract people, but otherwise the war party is going on their merry way unless they get wiped or you get tired of the game.

PS:T does not have this luxury. It is a game nominally about a completely blank slate person making sense and forming his opinion of the world, but it's linear enough that the only way to see more of the plot is to want to die. In a world filled with literally everything imaginable (as opposed to, idunno, a desert with radioactive waste, acid rain, and nothing besides) it is very railroady - it is railroady exactly because of the blank slate character and the many supported viewpoints mandated by the amnesia plot device.

(I have some non-nice things to say about persistent personality memory wipes, too, but that's because the concept of a persistently good or persistently evil human is too Calvinist/newage by itself, rather than because of any structural flaw of the medium.)

Yes I will say that Ive gotten into those games. I beat eschalon book 1 in january of this year. It was actually a fairly good game. Combat is fun, but the story not so much. I keep playing book 2 up to port kudad and getting bored with it up to that point. The story pretty much dies at that point in the game. That was one of the problems with those Eschalon series, it has fun combat in the game, but the story is severely lacking.

Im actually starting one of the expansion packs to the Quest, another game with similar things as the Eschalon series such as you creating one character to solve everything. One of the reasons I get bored with Book 2, is because I like the Quest 5 times more due to its awesome story and cool setting.

Adventures support serious storytelling. Huh. Except vast majority of adventure games use exactly zero of potential that videogame storytelling has - player involvement. RPGs are not perfect in this department, but at the very least they're trying, and they're more and more successful at creating a coherent story. What adventure games do is what movies and books have done before them, and thus not really interesting in any way whatsoever by itself. And... Yeah, you've pulled 'letting an orc live' example. If you think it's stupid, why don't you kill him? I'm fairly sure I could come up with quite a few examples of stupid storytelling in adventure games, but guess what - in those, there was no other option to pick.