What a hilarious game. I had forgotten. The following is a snapshot of only a tiny portion of the starting dungeon. No cinematic sequences with 'fights' against mange ridden rats. So far I've faced rats, giant bats, Warriors, skeleton warriors, archers, imps, and magic imps in only my starting frock, able only to cast a single spell before needing a rest.

I find the exit only by the most blind miracle of luck (having revisited the void once already!) and hit Daggerfall as the first town. The very first person I find right inside the gate, the welcoming committe as it were, and I share this wonderful bit of dialog:

Me: Greetings, good stranger. I am seeking information on Lady Brisienna (the queen I think?)

Peryctor Woodcroft: I don't understand. Is that supposed to mean something to me?

I don't know how long this experiment is going to last, but there are some neurons that haven't seen any action in 13 years just ripping it up right now.

Apparently I would only have suffered some reputation loss, and likely would have had a chance to recover by doing more quests. No matter in the end, as I stumbled upon a hidden door in the middle of miles of nowhere and lo! There was the little bugger. I offed him quick and got back with a day to spare.

No crashes so far and my dungeon luck has been better too. I think I'm falling for this game :o, although the main quest remains invitation only and I without.

I hear you on the invisible messenger front. Often, you are notified that someone of stealth has delivered a message and run off mutely (although why we wouldn't beat the answer out of them given we're level 8 remains to be explained) but not always, and a regular poll of inventory items is a very good thing. One thing that made me very happy is being able to deposit all my assorted letters of credit to the bank, and then withdraw a whopping single letter of credit afterwards.

The mini-game of worth/weight quickly becomes effortless and I enjoy only picking the cream out of each dungeon. The notion of a physical weight for gold in my inventory also was really refreshing. Is gold more valuable per kilo than other things?

I also really like the way the stores work. In Oblivion, finding stuff in dungeons was the only way as the stores were always helpless. In Daggerfall, in the early levels, the good stores can offer up to dwarven level booty without much effort. There is a transition where the stores don't seem to stock items of a given material until you've dragged some home and sold them. And then you will find other items of the same material appearing on the shelves. I really really like this. It gives me the incentive to go explore the most dangerous dungeons I can, so that my endless realms of money can be used on the (originally very expensive) cool new kits of gear that can be made now that the new (eg.Admantium) materials have been found.

I'm a level 8 'hurtful man', my own category created in an attempt to get primary skills diverse. I've succeeded in creating a being who seemingly cannot cast destruction spells despite an intelligence of 90 (only 44 spellpoints). The documentation and wiki say that casting spells should get easier as the attribute governing the spell type increase, but I haven't seen that. Anyone?

I'm definitely cheating, although not by stealing. It's simply not worth the effort to steal stuff. There's 10x more crap in every dungeon than I can carry, I've 100,000 dollars in the bank simply by dragging crap home, and nothing to buy with it. Ships and houses excluded.

I'm cheating firstly by a program that shows the direction and distance to the quest item. I save a game just inside the dungeon and this program reads the savegame file and displays the distance/direction/elevation change required to get to the goal. Often, even this isn't enough, as locations within the maze space separated by only meters are often hours apart by some physical pathway. I try negotiating the mazes for 1 hour in an effort to pseudo honestly find the quest item (to fill up with loot more like it), then secondly, I use a cheat to teleport through various quest locations. This generally progresses very quickly and once I find the item or kill the baddy I try for another hour to find the way out. If I can't find the way out, I use a separate cheat to find the exit. These dungeons are simply unbelievable in their size and general worthlessness. It is entirely a mistake to think, when the architecture or design gets interesting, that the goal must be at hand. it's just a randomly generated bit of fluff. I took so long to understand that.

The game has crashed a bit more frequently lately. I have the standard save pattern well rehearsed and so far have had no corrupt save games, which is the worst. 

- Save before getting a quest

- Save after getting a quest

- Save before all commerce attempts

- Save after all satisfactory commerce attempts

You get the idea. Makes me seem like  I have quite the problem with commitment. If I'm not going to get the quest I want I'm going home.

But the reality is that if you think you're going to send me on a 2000 mile journey to kill some asstard mage in 10 days there and back with a 2500 acre/ 14 level deep dungeon to suss, of course I'm going to want some backout plan. Or all'y'all can just go find another hero.

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Steerpike has it nailed there I think. After the hand crafted goodness of Ultima (and others) Daggerfall completely ignored the ground rules for dungeon layout with the autogenerated stuff. Instead of leading to the quest items or characters of meaning, rooms of architectural interest were just randomly placed in the middle of bland sections. Quest items were often very close to the entrance of large time wasting dungeons and some of the most trivial quest items were located in the largest dungeons of all. With the cheats I'm using, this isn't any hindrance anymore. I have a quest item locator that tells me distance and elevation to the quest item and if that doesn't work there's a developer cheat for stepping through all the interesting places in the dungeon, and another glitch that lets you escape quickly without casting recall. No more 2 day dungeon crawls for me!

I agree with the notion of simplicity. I'm enjoying playing older games on dosbox. They startup fast and as long as they don't crash, the gameplay can be simple and quick allowing 20 minute gaming days. I'm finding true uninterrupted immersion time impossible to find.