Morrowind

When does this get good? I have probably played 12+ hours cumulatively, right now I am investigating the dark brotherhood quest in Mournehold which I am starting to think is an expansion. I go to a new city and spend another 3 hours "sprinting" around npc to npc reading text, for them to send me to another npc to read more text. I finally encountered Thrud initiating his quest in the sewer, but after dying to the first enemies in the sewers from missing all of my hits with a dagger, even with 60 skilled with shortblade and full stamina, I am considering dropping here because it feels like a grind

That's why you should've disabled the expansion files in the launcher before you finished the main quest in vanilla. Or installed the mods that fix expansion triggering events.

What do I do now? I already have Thrud as a companion, I probably can't turn it off without at least completing his quest and leaving

>I probably can't turn it off without at least completing his quest and leaving
Well, try doing just that. If it doesn't work - you'll just have to deal with it. Can't really help you there, mate. I completely forgot what side quests in Tribunal even were about.

Join the Temple and start reading books, n'wah

>When does this get good
When you do

You started playing the expansion before the base game. You're going to want to start over again. and either uninstall it or downloading the tribunal delay fix

>uninstall
No need. Also, I don't think you can do that with the GOTY edition. You just untick the resource file in the launcher before starting a new game.

Drop that garbage and play Oblivion.

>a grind

its an rpg game
an actual rpg game, not oblivion or skyrim so you need to grind to an extent

basically how you play the game legit is
>silt strider to balmora
>join mages guild
>take balmora mages guild charter to caldera mages guild
>go upstairs in caldera mages guild
>steal alchemy set
>abuse alchemy to make a ton of gold selling potions to the creeper in caldera while buying the respawning ingredients from the cat in balmora mages guild
>go on uesp.net and see where your major skill trainers are at
>spend 500k on training for the ten major skills to level up
>get done training
>level 50 god and now that your governing attributes are maxed out you can just go and train everything under the sun

after that you do all of the side guild quests before starting the main quest, then go and do the mournhold/assassin quest, then finish bloodmoon in solstheim

if you pick major skills that have master trainers near by or accessible by mark/recall and charters then you can min max the game in like 5 hours and its a smooth ride from then on

honestly the game becomes too easy and broken when you understand how to play it

you can play the game without abusing alchemy, but in the end you will just be wasting time, in fact when you start doing this you will probably just wonder why you didnt cheat from the start

my honest advice is to just use the console to become a god and enjoy the games story
use uesp.net to search for anything you cant find or quests you get stuck on