I'll confess that this is one thing that I actually dislike about Ultima VII: For me, its primary effect is to make NPCs harder to find, and in some cases harder to click on, a nuisance that really isn't worth the added verisimilitude.

In all fairness, combat in Ultia VII is pretty bad, too! Worse, I'd say--at least one has a bit more control in Ultima IX.

I've... seldom really had much trouble with using my spells, I think. I like magic, and tend to play as a caster, and so tend to use my spells anyway!

I do see two situations under which I might not use my spells:
1) The spells are too awkward to get at under certain circumstances (e.g. combat-casting in Ultima VII)
and
2) The spells have some difficult-to-recoup cost involved in their use (e.g. reagent-based single-use spells in Ultima VIII)

And in both of those cases I can see solutions that don't encourage grinding!

And indeed, in both of those cases I don't think that a spell-growth system would actually help much.

That might ameliorate the problem--but not as much as just not having the system at all, I feel.

By the way, since you do like the mechanic in question, have you played the Quest for Glory series? That features just such a system, as I recall.

(It's also one of my favourite series.)

No, but I do own the series on GOG, and I've toyed a little bit with QfG1. *picks nose*

Congratulations! Your nose is now open! ;P

If you do pick up the series in earnest, I might suggest for the second game going to the VGA fan-remake: it's remarkably faithful (and does successfully import character files from the first game and export them to be used in the third), and has some nice quality-of-life updates (like an optional simplified city-layout).

Don't misunderstand me: the original version of the second game is great! I just think that the VGA remake is overall an improvement.

Just consider turning down the combat difficulty: combat in the remake is rather more difficult than in the original, as I recall.

Returning to the original point of bringing it up, Quest for Glory advances all of the player's traits through use, I believe. (As long as they have a starting score above zero, and aside from initial point-assignment and, I think, some cases of once-off increases.)

Except that I thought my lockpicking skill wasn't good enough to succeed at that task.

It's true that NPCs would sometimes go walkabout and you'd have to track them down (or sleep in their bed until you wake up at 2am and they're patiently standing in front of it waiting to sleep), but I found this an enjoyable bit of (neo)realism.

The second issue is made much easier with the 'T' hotkey, introduced in Serpent Isle and backported to the Forge of Virtue add-on for the Black Gate. It pauses the game and gives you a targeting cursor for double-clicking on things that might be moving.

Hmm, I wouldn't say "bad"; I enjoyed the strategic aspect of it much more than the "just click repeatedly until they die" combat mode of Ultima IX. The choice of different weapons and different types of weapon felt meaningful, including that giving everyone triple crossbows could sometimes backfire horribly. In theory, there was flanking and a few other interesting strategies. It was surprisingly tough really; unless your whole party is kitted out with magical armour and weapons, you can easily be killed with a few hits from a strong enemy (or walking through caltrops, poison gas etc). Healing items were relatively hard to come by, especially earlier in the game, and would only heal a small amount (especially if using bandages).

One major problem with the Ultima VII combat system was that your party members would often flee (unless set to berserk mode, which meant they would die almost constantly). This would have been okay if they didn't drop random items, including their entire backpack containing critical quest items. A few times I had to reload saves after a battle because Iolo dropped something important behind a wall such that it couldn't be seen or clicked on and was therefore lost forever.

I did appreciate the physical item mechanics of Ultima IX -- it's worth trying the ridiculous tower-of-bread trick from "Ocean Travel Without a Boat", just for laughs.

Oh dear. That results in a... less pleasant outcome, as I recall! XD;

That's fair! We each have different perceptions of such things, after all. ^_^

I'm currently replaying UVII, with Forge of Virtue, and someone mentioned this hotkey to me. I tried it, but couldn't quite figure out how to use it. (Unless it's bugged under DOSBox, which seems plausible.)

Either way, my preferred solution remains "just not having that feature"! XD;

I very much would! XD

That's fair.

What I don't like in Ultima VII's combat, I think, is that there's so little control over it. And when one does take direct control over the Avatar, the pacing of the combat (and perhaps the frame-rate and perspective) make the result an awkward, difficult-to-read mess.

That is fair.

Although conversely, the lack of party control means that the party-members can end up doing some really annoying things at times, which can be frustrating. (For me, at least.)

I think that I could find this rather engaging, indeed--if the player just had more control over character-actions. Having things turn out badly because the AI companions decided to do something silly gets to be a nuisance, I feel.

Oh wow, I didn't realise that this happened. That's awful! D:

That sort of thing was neat, indeed!

Let me add another point of appreciation for Ultima IX: I maintain that it's perhaps the best implementation that I've yet seen of an "open world". It's densely packed with things to stumble upon, and surprisingly varied things in places. A tower with a flying mage here; great carven faces there; a village of giants in another place.

Looked at conversely, it lacks the broad empty spaces or vacuous procedurally-generated features of some other open worlds.