I was fighting an "Old Miser" when I realized, is there any limit to who won't fight me?

I've been savagely attacked by friars, beggers, peasants, monks... I just find it kind of funny that apparently all these townspeople are trying to kill me for no reason whatsoever.

That's common enough in RPGs to be its own trope. "Everything is trying to kill you"

i dont think there are any babies that wanna fight you though i could be wrong

MM2 is a rather abstract game. I miss those kinds of "gamey" games.
Anyway, once you are higher level enemies will start fleeing at the sight of your party. Also, you can try to bribe them, IIRC.

You can! It's actually tied into your party's alignment to some degree (or at least it was in MM1), so if you always attack and never bribe you will slowly shift towards evil. Unfortunately bribing usually involves the enemies taking ALL of your gold or gems, which is way too high a price to pay.

You can even surrender to enemies, although I'm not sure I ever tried it. I wonder what happens if you surrender to some old misers?

I remember one bar fight with, IIRC, a bunch of beggars. This particular fight is easy enough for a fresh party of level 1 characters to win, and you get to hire a Sorcerer after the fight.

This is actually one way to start to break the game apart, as now you have a character who, with the help of a fountain, can cast any Sorcerer spell in the game. (Limitations apply, like the fact that the effect of the fountain goes away after one battle, but you can still do a lot, including recruiting Mr. Wizard without any other encounter, as the encounter to recruit Mr. Wizard happens to be conveniently located by a SL + SP fountain.)

Then again, there is one critical plot item (which isn't necessary to beat the game) that you can only keep if you do something that most players, I believe, would consider an exploit.

Cripples fleeing is pretty funny too.

There's so many funny/silly things in MM2. One of my favourites is the consequence of ordering Roast Peasant in a tavern.

You'd be amazed at what you can do when properly motivated.

Reminds of of when in MMIV I went to River City and it was full of rabid lepers. Yet most of them were in the Temple. It wasn't until I killed them all that they were in there for a reason. Wow, my heroes are jerks.

Ah, Might and Magic, always attack on sight and ask questions later.

I played the MM series (1-5) as they were released, back in the 80s-90s. MM2 definitely took a turn for the sillier, after MM1....now that I think about it, I'd say it was similar to how Fallout 2 took a silly turn after the success of Fallout 1.

Some will like the silliness of MM2, others may find it distracting if they don't "get" some of the humor (if it weren't for the recent Peabody & Sherman movie, I don't many younger players would know the reference in MM2).

I'd say there's just as much silliness in MM1, the main difference being, they expanded the amount of actual narrative there is in-game (and in the game manual, to be precise: everything counts, as printed manuals were an inherent part of a game back then) so it's more apparent in MM2. Expanded, as in from 'extremely vague' to 'a bit less vague', that is (by today's standards).

Part of the charm of these old games, filling the blanks with imagination BTW.