Some ideas for improving tutorials and the new player experience:
Give the player a nearly-mandatory basic tutorial, covering items, commands, and movement. Then, dump them in the newbie area of Scorn, with several short tutorial quests in the vicinity. These could range from using shops, to melee combat, or even to using the postal system. They would likely need heavy Python scripting, since it's hard to walk a player through doing stuff like shopping, without their mistakes draining all their money in an instant.
Further building on the above idea:
If the player has been given anything besides a set of basic melee gear, give them an option of choosing additional tutorials. If they're a magic caster, offer a tutorial for their spell school, giving them one or two spellbooks along the way. (Presumably, make the spellbooks guarantee to successfully learn the spell.) This can take the place of the normal spellbooks that are placed in the characters inventory. The same concepts can be applied for more exotic combat skills like archery.
If they have crafting skills, give them a dedicated tutorial for each crafting skill they start with. As part of the tutorial, they can not only be given some basic ingredients, but also sent on some light fetch quests or combat quests to gather more reagents. A good crafting tutorial will not only get them started with the basic mechanics, but also gives them one or two useful starter recipes (like buffing or combat consumables), as well as teach them how some common reagents can be gathered.
Even more ideas building on the above:
Whether a “universal” crafting skill is introduced or not, it might be helpful to give players some more indepth choice of skills. For example, all players get their choice of one crafting skill at new player creation time. As a result, they're given a skillscroll that is guaranteed to give that skill, and then they can follow an appropriate tutorial quest to learn how to use it. This lets players choose a starter crafting skill that suits their playstyle (or their role-playing method), whether it's crafting weapons and armor for power and profit, concocting potions to hurl and quaff in the heat of battle, or just making a good homestyle meal for long-term buffs. Of course, some additional variety can be achieved by letting certain races or classes choose more than one bonus skill, like humans (since they're “generalists.”)
