Thanks to the creepy dreams being instigated by Dagoth Ur, most of the residents are probably afraid to sleep. That's why they stand around looking half dead, pace back and forth, or launch into murderous attacks at very little provocation: severe sleep deprivation. Of course they're upset and call the guards if they see you getting a good night's rest in their bed, while they can't.

Mechanically speaking, killing every single person in the game one-by-one through taunting would take you eighty bajillion years... and reward you with a mountenous stack of pants, crappy weapons, and various doodads that all-together wouldn't provide you with a year's worth of Rent money in the "Indybank", "Apartments", and "Homes for Let" mods. Even if you just endlessly tormented the respawning guards, pawning off the swords and armor for forty hours wouldn't earn you half as much cool loot (and it sure as hell isn't anywhere nearly as rewarding) as actually playing the game and doing the quests.

What you've found isn't a flaw in the mechanics, it's a flaw in your ability to determine what's an ideal expenditure of your time playing a game. Spending hours tediously clicking 'Taunt' in the hopes of getting that 'free' piece of kit doesn't trump spending that same amount of time prowling through the ruins of Arkngthand, or working your way up through the ranks of the Mages Guild, or fulfilling your lifelong goal of becoming an Ash Yam farmer.

There's nothing 'ideal' about wasting your time doing something stupid... and the inability to creatively come up with a way to spend your time doesn't suddenly mean that the laws of Morrowind need to be rewritten to include punishing a man for defending himself against an enraged (frenzied/taunted) town full of murderous psychopaths.

frenzy probably should've had the same aggression as paralyze -- why they left illusion magic as non-aggressive is odd. you'd think from a gameplay perspective, charming, calming, demoralizing, frenzying, should all be considered an attack on a peaceful NPC (passive roleplayers would obviously use fortify personality on themselves instead) since you're manipulating someone against their free will. at least you'd need to be unseen to not draw attention to the fact you're manipulating someone.

perhaps it was due to them never really balancing taunting either, that and fights are always to the death unless scripted.

I like the fences in oblivion - the idea was good though the execution was a bit dry. merchants would be wary of buying stolen goods as they'd be losing money when caught.

Honestly I didn't even use taunt in my latest play attempt and I was still killing NPCs in their homes with no consequence, stealing the houses of NPCs who didn't happen to be home and sleeping in the beds of shop owners who were just down the stairs. This is mostly an early game issue, I think, but some mechanic preventing this behavior that shows how static the world really is would have been nice. I guess at the time it didn't matter so much.

There's an problem with that metaphor. The comparison you're drawing is based on what those games all allow you to do, when the main issue being presented here is how the game reacts to your actions. A shooter and a strategy game will both allow you to shoot and strategise, and an Elder Scrolls game will allow you to roleplay, but while shooting and strategising both have real, tangible consequences in those genres - if you don't do them, you will almost certainly fail - the worlds of Elder Scrolls games are so static that roleplaying rarely has actual consequence, and it makes it much less easy to believe in the world. That leads to situations like that described in the OP, where given the lack of any game systems that react in interesting ways to your actions, it's only logical to start looking for other systems that do - and then the game becomes about 'winning', and the best route to take in that regard is distinctly jarring.

I get that you want to be defensive of Morrowind - writing this is honestly a little painful, it's my favourite game - but denying the flaws doesn't really lead to productive discussion. Fact is, there are plenty of games that give your choices far more weight - BioWare and Telltale games significantly change how characters react to you depending on the choices you take, Fallout: New Vegas gives you many options during questlines that are supported by a sprawling faction system, and Undertale reacts to a lot of small actions you make, changing the ending completely depending on how violent you are. These are all examples of systems that The Elder Scrolls would be more interesting and reactive seeming for taking under its wing, and that should be treated as things to be striven for - not ignored just to blindly defend a game you like. There are plenty of things you can point to that really do make Morrowind amazing - the intrigue of exploration, the world, the lore - and lauding flawed mechanics over those truly amazing ones only does the game a disservice.

Going to end on a tangent related to one of the games I mentioned in my examples, Undertale. One thing that comes up a lot in discussions of Elder Scrolls games is how Morrowind is better because it lets you kill any random NPC, regardless of how essential they are - and if you really dwell on that point, it starts to feel a little psychopathic. Why would you want to kill random NPCs? I certainly don't do it in my playthroughs, but I still feel like I appreciate it as a mechanic. The reason for that is that due to the nature of the game systems in Elder Scrolls (and plenty of other RPGs in a similar vein) the non-violent options feel empty and non-responsive, being, as they are, limited to their painfully rudimentary conversation systems. Violence, however, is an entirely different axis of interaction, and it lets you leave an active mark on the game world in a way that talking simply doesn't. And it doesn't have to be that way - coming back to Undertale, one of the most genius design decisions it takes is combining the conversation, combat and general interaction systems into one. This leads to a form of gameplay where talking or hugging it out with a foe feels just as interesting and reactive as attacking them, wonderfully sidestepping the underlying problem with other games where it feels like all of the interesting content and gameplay is in the combat systems that they constantly encourage you towards with the promise of meaningful consequence. That is, ultimately, why I feel like situations mentioned in the OP are often so violent, and understanding that and seeing what lessons we can learn from games like Undertale brings us one step closer to solving that problem.

As for not having realistic consequences for unrealistic behavior, I agree that Morrowind, and TES in general, is rather weak. It doesn't necessarily reward good RP, but at least it doesn't usually punish it, which is more than I can say for a lot of games. Unfortunately, "not as bad as most" is hardly a glowing recommendation.


A few of the suggestions here sound good, where merchants have a CHANCE of thinking that something is stolen, and your skills at speechcraft to convince them otherwise, or your skills at hiding or removing any telltale markings, would affect the odds. Making it automatic either way would be a mistake, as Morrowind's chance of failure was one of the aspects I liked most about the game.