So Skyrim made me wanna play the old pre-Morrowind ES games. So I picked up Daggerfall and started it up. Char creation was new I didn't understand some of the skills [Daedric, Dragonish, Orcish...huh?] but I did my normal toons Long Blade, Restoration etc. Started up the game and was in the tutorial cave, killed a rat...a bat...got like half my health taken away [The weapon attack mechanics seem funky to me], opened a door and this Imp [Guessing it was an imp] attacked me..and my weapon couldn't hurt him, so I ran with a sliver of health, turned a corner...Rat 1-shots me. Am I doing something wrong or was Daggerfall always like this?

This isn't your children games.

That said, lets start with the basic. If ya haven't already done so, one can change their view to mouse view and change the control to fit to that of a WASD control. Oh, and 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.

Skill wise, the Daedric, Dragonish, Orcish, etc are Language skills. Basically, the higher the number, the less chance the monster will go hostile if ya did not draw ya weapon. Mainly for roleplaying purposes.

In a way, it is that hard, in the beginning, but once one get use to the game, it get easier and easier as it goes on.

Oh, and that imp (and any magical creatures) can only be harm with Silver, Ebony and any material higher then Ebony. One can get a silver staff or Ebony dagger in the questionnaire in the character creation. Or ya can just run.

Daggerfall is brutal and unforgiving. If it's your first time, it would probably be best to find a walk-through for the first dungeon and just run through it or you'll probably die a lot. Also, set the game to fullscreen and view based mouse controls. But yeah the little green guy is an imp, and like many monster in DF requires a certain level of material to be hit (except magic has no such limit). And as far as Orcish (etc) they're language skills, if the skill is very high there's a chance you can passify a monster (such as an orc, if it's orcish) so that they won't attack you, though the odds are not very high.

Oh I went into this game knowing it was nothing like Morrowiind and later games [More true to RPG elements] I just wanted to make sure I wasn't doing anything wrong.

Also, is it because its an old game that I'm having a hard time reading the text? Cause some of the tutorial stuff that popped up was hard to read.

I haven't played Daggerfall on DOSbox, so I don't know if the text issue is due to that. I don't remember having any trouble reading the text back in the day.

By the way, in case you don't know of it, the http://www.tesguides.com/tes2/ is extremely helpful.