I decided to make a more serious attempt at playing DF, seeing how it's supposed to be even better at what made Morrowind a great game. My previous attempts at playing it (which I had all but forgotten after more than a decade) never got any farther than escaping the starting dungeon. This time, I set my sights on actually doing a couple of missions or quests before making the decision to keep playing or quit. After loading up and configuring DOSBOX, I fired up DAGGER and set myself to making a fresh character.

I had forgotten how clunky and unintuitive the control layout was. The movement keys and mouse take your hands away from the main body of the keyboard, so every key command requires a complete shift of hand position. Then came the first combat with some rodent, and I died. It's not that I couldn't HIT the animal, I couldn't even swing the sword. After about 8-10 sweeps of the mouse, I finally got the sword to cross the screen and miss....once in three reloads. I tried dragging the cursor to the extreme edge of the screen, I tried fast swipes, slow methodical sweeps, all with no consistent result. Every so often as if to taunt me, the sword would move, and then I couldn't repeat it.

What's the trick to getting the weapon to activate? Is it a DOSBOX control issue, or was the game's combat always that difficult to trigger?

Did ya try changing the control to fit any style ya use (assuming WASD)?

Also don't change ya attack key or "Swing Weapon" key, which lead to the next point. To properly use a melee weapon, hold down the "Swing Weapon" button and move ya mouse around.

And lastly, maybe ya Speed attribute is kind of low and ya weapon swinging is sluggish because of that. Same with Agility ie actually hitting ya target or not.

Also look at the DosBox configuration file to make sure your cycle setting is "Auto" or manually set it to a value that gives you good speed in the game. (20,000 - 30,000 for me)