In my early days when I explored caves and ruins and such, I always sneaked up on foes before I attacked, killed and of course looted them, and if there were more around it quickly developed into an open fight. That was my way of life and a good way to secure funds, plus it was fun to fight.
Nowadays I don′t like fighting so much anymore having done it for years and I don′t need the money gained from cave bandits, but I still like sneaking around and looting chests. However I only take what′s in them if it′s a rare item or otherwise something special, like flawless gems.

I wrote this from my perspective mainly but I realize it′s also from Lothran′s, maybe more than I initially thought. So I guess my question is, do(es) your character(s) fight in the open, fight from the shadows or stay hidden all the time while exploring dungeons, avoiding all confrontation?

Niamh prefers to keep as much distance between herself and her enemies as is possible, and so fights from the shadows. She'll only use close-in weaponry as a last resort if she's cornered or if there is no other option at that point.
More often than not she will run and hide in the hopes of being able to pick off her attacker once he/she/it has lost interest.

Buffy doesn’t care a whit about loot but she is insatiably curious so she checks every corpse and looks in every container. Normally she only picks up scrolls and lockpicks to sell (mostly to keep her slow-moving mercantile moving along).

She's quite addicted to hunting and killing baddies, so dungeons are perfect hunting grounds. Her goal is to clear a dungeon and never be seen – usually she is successful. Normal tactics are to start a fight among groups using command spells, then hiding and repeating if necessary. She’s even been known to invisibly ‘lead’ a commanded baddie some distance so he can fight another one for her. In any case, she congratulates the lone wounded survivor with a lethal arrow. Single foes are simply sniped off. She is adept at poisons and even stripping those who resist poison of their immunity first. That allows her to, for example, kill a normally poison-resistant storm atronach with a prep spell followed by a single poisoned arrow. She goes to great lengths to prepare for her sniper shots and gets pissed when sometimes a foe requires more than one arrow. Only on very rare occasions does Buffy get ‘caught’ and cornered. In those cases, she simultaneously disappears and summons a distraction. Underwater combat is via a touch spell that both immobilizes and draws the life from her foe.

Oddly enough, she will actively try to bypass fellow forest predators (like lions and bears) both inside dungeons and while traveling. Her primary prey move on two legs. 360 feet of detect life via 2 rings is very helpful for both engaging and avoiding foes.