Originally Posted by
Fifteen Dollar Eagle
They're basically first-person RPGs set in a massive world, and I do mean massive - the world in Oblivion is about 16 square miles, and the one in Daggerfall is the standard by which all huge game worlds are set; it's about twice the size of Great Britain and takes two weeks (real-time) to cross on foot.
Anyway, they're kind of a cross between RPGs (get quest, kill monsters, use skills, gain levels, etc.) and first person shooters (point at whatever you want to die and then click on it). It's all in real-time, there's no party (in other words it's just you and maybe a horse), there are dozens of towns, hundreds of dungeons, tens of thousands of NPCs... I dunno, they're just such huge games that they're hard to sum up in a couple of paragraphs. If you're interested the series I'd suggest starting with Oblivion, it's pretty beginner-friendly and great fun. But be prepared to spend several hundred hours playing if you want to do everything - it's all too easy to get distracted from the main quest, and it's much more fun that way.