Classic tabletop games did not have real-time combat. Which again, goes to show that Morrowind's implementation of it was bullshit, since they tried to mix it with real-time combat. Whereas in KOTOR, since the combat is turn-based and you don't aim at your enemies, you just toggle the cursor at them and press the button to choose an attack, it worked well. There's a reason why I don't call bullshit on KOTOR's dice-roll combat, while I do on Morrowind: because KOTOR keeps the dice-roll combat in its proper context as a system in the Dungeons and Dragons-style gameplay, by making it a turn-based game where you roll the die and see if you hit or miss. Morrowind tries to mix real-time combat where you have to aim at the enemy with dice-roll combat that determines whether or not you hit or miss based on the dice-roll, which is bullshit.
As I've already said beforehand, a real-time first person system means that hit chance should be dictated by your skill as a human with a controller/keyboard & mouse. With this system, YOU are the character. Whether or not you hit the enemy is based on your aim with the controller or the keyboard/mouse. A stats and dice-roll based combat system is designed primarily to compensate for limited control and a total lack of visual cues. It's a layer of abstraction between you and the player character. Your character's aim is not your aim, you could have shit aim in real life, but since you put so much XP on the right stat, your character will hit the enemy nine times out of then. Mixing them both is what makes the design of the Morrowind combat system objectively bad as they are two diametrically opposing systems. It's like mixing oil and water, it doesn't work.
And? Again, you seem to think RPG elements are good just by themselves, when in reality, that is not the case. RPG elements exist to enhance the game, they are not the only things that make the game good or bad. Oblivion and Skyrim have watered-down RPG elements compared to Morrowind, yet they're better games, more fun and more well-loved.
Not to mention the fact that you fail to get at the bottom of what makes an RPG: PLAYING A ROLE. Hence the acronym, RPG, which stands for ROLE-PLAYING GAME. It's not about dice-roll combat or stats, it's how well you play a role, and Mass Effect 2 stuck to that well, because there are certain attacks, weapons or fighting styles that you can only use with certain classes, whereas Morrowind (and every subsequent Elder Scrolls game) just lets you grind all skills, meaning that you're no longer playing a role, you're just mastering all stats. Even in Mass Effect 2, where the stats are toned down, you still play the role of a biotic, an engineer, or a soldier. A biotic will mix up weapons with biotic attacks, an engineer relies primarily on technological attacks against the enemy. A soldier is a master of weapons and relies mostly on gunplay to blow through hordes of bad guys. You pick a role, and you have to stick by it THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE GAME. So by that metric, Mass Effect 2 sticks to the ROLE-PLAYING aspect moreso than Morrowind does, making it the superior RPG since you're given a role, and you stick with it.
Shit, even the much-maligned Final Fantasy XIII does the role-playing stuff better, since characters are given roles that they are good at, and finding the right combination for your team is your key to victory. Each party member comes right off the bat better at one skill or another, and using their different skill sets to create a team that can handle each enemy is how you win in that game, which means that yes, it's better at the role-playing aspect than Morrowind is.
You people seem to idolize the concept of what a true RPG is, without looking at what the acronym even means.
