I definitely understand the tediousness of Skyrim, personally I like the side quests more. My daughter enjoys it and likes it better that Oblivion so maybe it made for a younger crowd, she's 15. I still think Daggerfall was the best of the Elderscrolls series.
If I had and RPG wish, it would be that someone would go back to the older games like Daggerfall and just update the graphics and leave everything else alone - we'll fix that thing were the guards are godlike.
I tried running Rome Total War last night on 9 AMD64, using both packages from here
http://people.freebsd.org/~ivoras/wine/ and had no luck. I used to play that Caesar III/IV using wine on 32bit FreeBSD...I try messing around more later and see if I can get them working.