I am interested in playing Morrowind as a magic oriented character, and it looks like a Breton with the Apprentice sign should give me a character with good Magicka and no net downside. Is this the sort of setup that you would recommend to a new player?

(In particular, would there be any serious difficulty getting to the point where I can rip the game apart in half with Alchemy?)

Breton Apprentice is one of the classic mage setups, giving you a decently size magicka pool and no special downside. Any character can get to that point without any kind of trouble. You basically just need to take the Silt Strider from Seyda Neen to Balmora, visit the Mages Guild and build up a trading arrangement with Ajira.

Actually if you want to mix-max, you better go for race, which has bonuses to all the skills, which you don't want to choose as Major/Minor.

Also from powergaming point of view, Apprentice if wasted sign, as it will count toward stat cap of 100 (just like all other birthsigns which increase attributes). Warrior, Thief and Atronach (considered to be most powerful sign, but it might be a bit difficult for new player), are those effects, which won't get diminished over time with leveling.

Personally, I don't like to play non-human, so I choose whatever looks the most human-like, hence I chose Imperial in Morrowind.

I'd recommend choosing Warrior birthsign. You will have to rely on melee weapons, and that direct 10% chance to hit (for any kind of physical attack) is extremely valuable and it won't be diminished by leveling. Thief is direct 10% chance to avoid any physical attack.

Edit: Morrowind isn't that hard when you increase all your skills to 100 (no obstacles to that). My advice is advice of powergamer, who isn't satisfied just with facerolling over enemies, but who wants to do it in most efficient and overkilling way :)

From what I have read, even if all my skills are at 100, I can level up further by draining a Major skill 100 points and then training it while it is drained, therefore making min/maxing level ups unnecessary in the long run.

Also, potions of Fortify Stat million+ for million+ can be made, I believe, making the difference between 0 and 100 seem rather puny.

Another thing, I want to play a spellcaster, but I don't want to deal with Stunted Magicka (at least until a second playthrough when I know how to get my magic back and make Restore Magicka potions) and (for now) I don't want to risk a net weakness to magic.

(Then again, weakness to magic might be useful when intentionally draining myself.)

You may be able to get 4 or 5 levels more by doing that. But at that point you're talking about the difference between level 73 and 78 as your cap, when just about every enemy type becomes insignificant around level 30ish. I'm not sure what game you're thinking of, but in Morrowind the Apprentice offers a 150% bonus Magicka and a 50% Weakness to Magicka (negated by the Breton innate 50% Resistance to Magicka).

The three attribute boosting birthsigns in Morrowind are The Lady, The Steed and The Lover.

As I wrote, I an mot usually satisfied just with overpowering the strongest enemies, but also overkilling them in most efficient way there is :) 5 more levels give more efficiency :)) I have read it wrong way, you are right on that one.

Couldn't you just use the Super Potion exploit (use Fortify Intelligence potions to improve your ability to make potions) to raise your stats into the millions? 5 more levels is nothing compared to the stat gains you can get that way.

In fact, that exploit can raise your stats so high that it exposes bugs in the game's code. For example, you can go so fast that the game crashes, and I suspect you might have to worry about 32 bit integers overflowing if you go too high.

5 levels is nothing compared to what you can get with exploits in this game.

Can you? I remember cheating up my character back in time, for super-speed and super jumps. he could jump over any mountains and get from one point of map to the other in under a minute. It was on quite old PC. Of course, if to make it EVEN FASTER, it could crash, but such high speed wouldn't be practical anyway.

It made me remember cheating in Daggerfall back in time as well. I thought that the maps outside cities and dungeons are just infinitely looped landscape. Seems that you can actually traverse map by foot and end up somewhere, but it will take very, very, very long time, as my position on map was changing, when I was super-speed running through landscape. True powergamer avoids exploits :) Especially those which deal with overflows.

Probably one thing that turns a lot of people off from Morrowind is that there is simply an endless amount of min/maxing to do. My suggestion for a first character is to front-load most of your min-maxing effort, then mostly relax.

Creation guidelines:
* Take precisely one armor skill (unarmored is an armor skill) and one weapon skill (not hand to hand, leave that for a challenge run) as major or minor skills
* If your chosen armor skill is not unarmored, take armorer as a major/minor skill
* Take mercantile as a major or minor skill
* Take the rest of your major/minor skills from spell schools, security, sneak, alchemy, speechcraft, athletics, acrobatics.
* Choose The Atronach or The Lady for your starsign. The Lady is great if you don't plan to be especially careful in your levelling. 50 attribute points for a careful leveller is just a little over three levels worth. 50 attribute points for a careless leveller is more like 5-6 or even as much as 16 levels worth. Important to note: Being a careful leveller is BORING. Even for a careless leveller, Atronach might be the better sign, depending on play style. IF you're taking Atronach, you might also stick Conjuration in a major slot so as to gain immediate access to a summonable creature you can aggravate to cast spells at you & thereby recharge your magicka. Other than absorbing hostile spells, you're relying on potions for magicka recharge with the atronach sign.

Playing guidelines
* Within reason, try to never increase an attribute at a level unless you're getting a multiplier to the increase (with the exception of luck, which can't take a multiplier because no skills are governed by it.) This means you want to increase skills governed by a stat you plan to increase at least once before resting for your level up. 5 times is even better. 10 times is as best you can do and further increases don't improve your level-up bonus.
* Focus on Endurance early on. The sooner & higher you increase your endurance, the more health you will have. Everybody needs health. This is why taking The Lady (+25 endurance) is a good idea. A player who waits until level 15 to start taking points in endurance has elected the way of pain. Endurance is the only stat a max level player would prefer to have increased early rather than late.

What to do if you're about to level up but you haven't increased any skills governed by an attribute you'd really like to increase: Find a trainer before you rest & level up. Training skills in which you have little skill (such as those you didn't take as major/minor skills) is pretty inexpensive, but contributes just as much to attribute multiplier on levelling as increasing a high-level skill does. Example: You've let a mud crab pinch you until you levelled up from heavy armor skill increases alone. That's 10 points of endurance-governed skill increases and 0 for everything else. When you level you'll be able to get a +5 to your endurance attribute, but only +1 for any other attribute. But if you go train restoration from 10 to 20 at a mage's guild it'll set you back ~1000-2000 GP and you'll be able to claim a +5 for your willpower attribute, also. (Or +2, still double, if you only train it from 10 to 11!)

If you're a bookkeeper at heart and would rather min-max your stats than actually play a game, the UESP wiki has all the info you'll ever need. It might be worth a peek even if you plan to be moderate in your pursuit of bonuses. [url=http://uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Level]http://uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Level[/url]

No, you won't really gain any efficiency with those 5 levels. You get 3 benefits from leveling up: Monster/loot scaling which caps out in the early 20s, bonus Health and stat ups.

If you maximize your level up bonuses you'll only be able to reach level 44 or so due to stats capping out.

You have 8 stats, each stats caps at 100 without buffs. Characters start with aproximately 330 stat points in total (without counting the three birthsigns that adds stats), this means you can gain 470 more stat points through level ups. A maximized level up would be 2 at x5 + Luck x1 until you cap out Luck, that's 11 stat points per level. To cap Luck you'd need 50 level ups (if you selected Luck as a primary stat), which would give you 550 stat points with maximized levelling. Or 80 points that you can't allocate.

As far as I remember it's possible to level up even with capped stats. You just don't allocate any point in the menu then.

Exactly, after scaling stops you start gaining efficiency. Till that point you participate in scaling race. Scaling is questionable "benefit".

Even after you cap out stats, you still get HP (quite noticeable bonuses), and some mechanics rely on level difference (Speechcraft comes to mind).

As long as you have decent Intelligence, and have Alchemy as one of your major skills, this should be possible with ANY character. Even warriors would benefit from getting 1000+ boost from a potion to their Agility and Strength to hit often and hit hard, and those buffs can last several minutes (I think I can push it to about 20 minutes) if you use Intelligence potions to boost yourself to 40,000+ intelligence before brewing up your other potions. It's literally something any character can do. To make things even easier, make a spell that boosts your Intelligence and Luck by 100 for about 2 seconds. Time freezes when you're in menus and that little push can help this thing along. In Gnisis there's a temple with two NPCs that sell Ash Yams and Netch Leather. Manage your carry weight and buy their stocks of these two items, as they're the cheapest for brewing Intelligence potions. You can also get free Master alchemy equipment by joining the Mages Guild and going to the Caldera branch. There's a room with all the equipment unattended and you can just take them for free. There you go, that's all you need to know.

From my point if you like to sling spells you should rather go for Mage instead Apprentice because Mage comes without drawbacks. Additionally I would rather go for Dunmer as it fit from boni and immersion better for the Morrowind world but if you really like Breton than go for Breton.