When an enemy hits my party in World of Xeen, why are there no messages telling me which monster hits, which party member they hit, and for how much damage? I've noticed that a party member's portrait flashes briefly when they are hit, but it happens so quickly that it seems unintuitive. It's even worse when multiple portraits seem to flash, or when multiple enemies attack in a row.

Even worse, the only way I've seen to check the damage dealt is to open up that party member's character sheet and look at their hit points. Very confusing and very unintuitive. It may seem minor, but it's kept me from playing the game.

Any solutions? Am I missing something here?

thanks.

You are not missing anything. That portrait 'flash' is a blood splatter that marks which character was hit and there is no combat feedback in M&M.

When a monster attacks a party member for a short time a symbol is displayed on his/her face depending on the kind of attack (blood splatter for physical, green cloud for poison/acid, ...).
It's long enough to see what happened, but you can try if reducing the cycles in dosbox will slow down this kind of feedback if you want.
Below the faces is a status bar, the color shows how wounded your party members are, gree for healthy, yellow for hurt, red for severly wounded, blue for unconscious.

Unlike in older games there is no number display during the battles, but one mouse-click (keys are even faster) is enough to see the exact hitpoints or go back to battle.
Works much faster and more immersive than always having to read texts like "monster 1 hits member 1 for x damage" or "monster 2 breathes acid, member 1 is hit for x damage, member 2 is hit for y damage, member 3 ... ".

I wonder if your copy of the game is running too fast. My memory is that when a character is hit, the "blood splat" graphic displays over their portrait for at least a half-second, maybe even a full second. You can tell which enemy attacked becuase they will go through an attack animation. If all you're seeing is a quick flash, you may have some game speed problems.

One thing to try is simply upgrading to the latest version of DOSBox. I'm not sure if the version that comes with the MM pack on GOG is the latest... there has been at least one version update to DOSBox since the MM pack was released on GOG. You can get it from www.dosbox.com. The other thing to try, as kmonster suggested, is lowering the cycles in DOSBox which will make the emulation run more slowly. You can do this with certain shortcut keys while playing or you can pre-set the cycles in the configuration file. If you need help with any of that just post again and I can give a more detailed explanation.

Most people did not seem to have any game speed issues with the Xeen games though so I wonder if there's something else going on. What is your OS and system specs? Anything unusual that could be affecting the game speed?