I've just started my first playthrough of Morrowind. I rolled an Imperial male; basically a Spellsword, but I changed two of his minor skills. I swapped out Medium Armor for Light Armor, and Blunt for Sneak. Took the Steed birthsign to get the speed boost, as I figured I'll be spending a lot of time in the early game running away from enemies who are too strong for me to handle.

Anyway, I'm just poking around Seyda Neen for the time being, getting familiar with the gameplay and picking up quests from the locals. I've got a couple of dumb questions about the gameplay, though, and would appreciate some help.

First, is there any way to control the number of items I want to sell to a merchant, if I have more than one of the same item and don't want to sell all of them? I couldn't figure out how to reduce the number of items I wanted to sell to Arrille; some were alchemy ingredients of which I had several of the same thing, and I wanted to keep a couple of them to make potions.

Second, as a Spellsword, Block is one of my major skills. I bought a Netch Leather shield from Arrnille so I could start training the skill, but so far it doesn't seem to be leveling up when I use it in my fights against the local vermin. According to UESP I just need to have it equipped, and I do, but so far the skill hasn't budged. Am I missing something here?

Thanks for any help - I'm sure I'll be back with yet more dumb questions as I play some more.

Good to see new Morrowind player!

First - if you click on a stack with more that one item, a pop-up window will appear, where you can choose how many items you want to "pick". You can also hold Shift while clicking on taht item to select whole stack without pop-ups, or Ctrl, to select just one. If you are on PC and have MCP (Morrowind Code Patch) installed, check if you have "Shortcut key improvements", as it changes how the quantity pop-up works.

Second - shields work automatically based on your Block skill level. Early in the game, when you are unskilled with shield, most attacks will hit you more often than your shield, so you just have to be patient, or spend some cash for a training.

Good post, Minamir, but I feel like clarifying this. Your character blocks hardly at all on a low block skill. Even if you have it as a major skill, it's more like 1/50 than 1/5 occasion to succeed...

Eventually Gator Country will ask about sneaking, too. Same answer: you pretty much can't get it to work even if you have the skill of 15-30 in it. You pretty much have to find a Sneak trainer and let him/her teach you a bit. Then practice it with something like rats, scribs and who you imagine are low-leveled NPCs.

These two skills, Block and Sneak, are some of the toughest to start developing in Morrowind. Luckily most skills develop just fine, but there are a couple of these that are pain in the butt in the beginning. Also pretty much every school of magicka is hardish to cast at first, and they take much time to develop.