Having seen the OSR, this 'money for XP' thing now makes total sense. So I just accumulated money and ground out levels. Spending money on leveling was immersion-breaking, incompatible with my 3E-flavored understanding of fantasy worlds. There's hardly anything worth buying in terms of equipment - there are a few vendors in out-of-the-way places that carry high-quality items (the glass armor guy, the grandmaster alchemist), but all the good weapons can only be found by adventuring.
When I was a kid, coming from a 3rd Edition D&D background, Morrowind's economy made no sense.
I stopped and thought about that for a moment, and everything kind of clicked. I started a new game and one of the first things the first questgiver in the game does is give you some cash and tell you to get some training or gear. I went and did other things for a month and came back to it. When I finished, I was way overpowered and had a tremendous amount of cash. Returning to Morrowind via OpenMW as an adult, I re-downloaded and re-created a couple of simple mods that I had used, and played through the game.
So I downloaded mods that changed how it worked and it was fine. When I was a kid playing Morrowind, I thought its leveling system was horribly slow and convoluted.
