Adventurers Hostel (CSR) (WIP) (NPC) (TTTNMP)

[GIVEMETHEDAMNFILE]

Now with 100% less misdirection!

 

A) What's all this about?

B) What's all this REALLY about?

C) Well, let's see it!

D) What do you want from me? http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y116/TheSharpshooter/Smilies/emot-words.gif

E) What else needs to be done?

 

What's all this about?

 

As an extremily avid fan of Oblivion, one of my favorite mods is TalkyToaster's excellent Companion-Share-Recruit, and given how many people have downloaded and rated it, one can saftly say that it's one of the outright best mods for the game, turning lonely slogs through dungeons and caves into grand D&D-esque escapades as you and your fellow packmulesadventurers carve out a name for yourselves in Tamriel.

 

Unfortunetily, as great as CSR is, it's hindered by two different factors:

 

A) Sometimes it can be a pain in the rear to find suitable folks from the stock NPC population: inbetween NPC restrictions (level ranges, poor class benifits, changes made by major mods like Obscuro's) and population skews (My kingdom! My kingdom for a spellsword that DOESN'T SUCK!) it's a wonder if you can assemble a team to your liking that isn't crippled in some way or another in your eyes.

B) The all-but-complete-majority of NPC or "companion" mods tend to only give you one or two people, so getting someone who can fill a role on your team can be a crapshoot unless you go picking through each and every mod - and what happens when you need a different skillset? Even when the mods DO add in tons of people (City Life, for example, also highly reccomended) they tend to be spread out all over the place and you've got to go running all over - never mind that they might have their own flaws as well (static levels, poor class/skill choices, etc)

 

What I (and I'm betting a good number of you folks as well) want is a nice and concise NPC mod built around CSR, giving players a variety of different characters that aren't limited by poor characteristics or designer choices and who are able to work alongside the player from just about the start of the game to the very end, like one of those one-to-epic D&D teams.

 

And so I decided to make one.

 

What's all this REALLY about?

 

Exactly what it says on the tin: the Adventurers Hostel is a hostel for adventurers. More elaborately, it's a high-capacity cosmopolitin-styled resting station for free spirits travelling across Cyrodil, offering long-term accomodations of room and board as well as on-site trading services.

 

In reality, it's an excuse to gather a bunch of CSR-oriented NPCs who don't do much of anything else in one easy-to-search area, but let's not let that ruin the sense of immersion, shall we? http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y116/TheSharpshooter/Smilies/emot-ssh.gif

 

Whatever the case, the goal of the Adventurer's Hostel is to gather in one place a good number of NPCs (the current goal of which, not including merchents and the hostelmeister, is 32) from whom a person with partying aspirations can select fellow adventurers from, all of whom are scaled alongside the player so that particular favorites that a player may develop will not eventually become too weak to use due to hitting a low level cap. In addition, said NPCs will match the player's potential capabilities with their own: they will have their own birthsigns, plus (hopefully, depending on whether I or someone else can figure one out) a specialized script to make up for some of the hard-coded weaknesses NPCs suffer from, like endurance-independent health gain and high-level class skill maximization failure.

 

TL;DR: A buncha' CSR-oriented NPCs that don't suck and who aren't gimped by Oblivion's NPC stat calculations.

 

Well, let's see it!

 

Well, I was gonna' post some pics, but the forum apparently has an image-per-post limit, so you're getting a bunch of hyperlinks instead.

 

The outside of the hostel, which is located near the road junction west of Cheydenhall.

 

The hostel courtyard, featuring front and center the Gate House. Pay no attention to the mook in of you, he's only the hostelmeister.

 

Obligatory artsy aerial shot of the courtyard.

 

An interior shot of the Gate House. Asides from housing and trading services, the hostel has a number of portal gates spread along the roads of Cyrodil which can be used freely after purchasing a gate key. Useful for folks who refuse to use Fast Travel for whatever reason and RPers who're out in the wilderness and need a place to crash for the night.

 

The main hall of one of the hostel houses, each of which is designed to house and feed eight boarders at any given time.

 

One of the house bedrooms. Notice the lack of anything not related to lighting, sleeping, or securing. Notice the bad taste in interior decoration in general.

 

The basement, while sparse, offers more-than-adequate equipment for boarders wishing to keep their skills sharp. (Yes, I want to give the NPCs schedules and behaviors)

 

And one of the shops, currently bare save for the essential furniture.

 

This is all, however, quite secondary to the true purpose of this mod - and that's where you folks will hopefully come in.

 

What do you want from me?

 

As the thread sub-title implies, I've got the hostel: what I need are the adventurers to fill it. I COULD do it myself, but I've got a great sneaking suspiscion that the results would be...less than satisfactory. with 33 recruitable NPCs all made by the same person for the same purpose, you might start to pick up a hint of sameness amongst them. Having other people come up with them, however, means that characters have a far better chance of having some unique characteristics about them (not to mention saves me a great load of work).

 

Basically, if you've got a particularly-favorite character that you've played in Morrowind and/or Oblivion, I'd like you to submit them - so long as you don't mind following a few basic rules regarding submission:

 

A) One character per race per submitter: One thing I want to put extra emphesis on with the Adventurers Hostel is variety: I want a player to be able to assemble a party as colorful as they choose. Life isn't all about cute elves in armored thongs and bras: sometimes it's about some big Nord or Orc barbarian splitting skulls and splattering heads, or some whirling Redguard/Khajiit/Argonian who cuts a swath of destruction through his enemies like a tornado, or some Bosmer who has this look that makes you want to punch him so hard but you refrain because nobody can pick a lock like he can.

 

Look, what I'm basically saying is "don't just submit a buncha' female Imperials/Bretons/High Elves", as there are more than enough mods to cover them already. The Empire's got ten races in it, and it'd be nice to see more than three of them.[/tirade]

 

B) Conform to minimal standards: What does this mean? Basically, all I'm asking for is that you folks just make sure that your character/s fit within the "general" characteristics of their race and profession. This isn't to say you can only have characters that fit their race stereotype - far from it, really - but just make sure that they sound, you know, all right. Having an Orc Noble is fine: having an Orc Noble whose name is Lord Henceforth Ponstlebottom Goonheim III, Esquire is not.

 

C) No Vampires, Dremora, or general bastards: A continuation of the above, because I just know someone is going to pop one of these up. Vampires aren't going to work because they're going to be surrounded by people who're likely to fight them on a regular basis and thus know the tell-tale signs of vampirism, Dremora are considered either the bound servents of mages or enemies of all of Tamriel (especially with the events of the main quest) and evil characters usually don't work very well with non-evil characters - words are going to be exchanged, someone's going to draw a weapon, and things are going to end in a lot of tears and blood and someone making off like a bandit with the loot. No, non-supernatural neutrals and do-gooders are the best way to go here.

 

D) No unreasonable foolishness: This is simple enough, just don't tack on some extra silly things that don't make sense or are impossible. You can be a part of guilds, though not in any positions of power (guards are an exception, however, if one of you wished to make a crusading guard character http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y116/TheSharpshooter/Smilies/emot-hist101.gif), you can't be the Nerevarine or the guys/gals from Arena and Daggerfall, no famous NPCs from previous games, nothin' like that.

 

Those having been said, a few things to take note of:

 

A) Design around NPC development and CSR functionality: To state the obvious, NPCs don't work like PCs do, and certain skills are simply useless for them: Speechcraft and Mercantile, for example, are downright useless, and Illusion has very few NPC benifits (namely Chameleon and Paralyse) whose development offers little benifit since Personality is a fixed NPC value (and a useless one, anyway). You can view a full list of PC>NPC differences here if you aren't aware of them. In general, though, you really just need to know the following:

 

*Pure mages are BAD mages. Asides from having two NPC-useless skills (Illusion and Mysticism) the lack of Endurance and Strength skills means that they are going to be fragile as all get (229 HP at level 55 versus a Spellsword's 316 and a Guard Battlemage's 370) and even with Conjuration the lack of appropriate armor and weapon skills means that they give only a minimal offense/defense boost. This is why NPC mages are so easy to bully around.

*For the stat whores and powergamers amongst us (yours truly included) who love a string of 100s in all possible stats, it IS possible to do so provided the player can achieve level 50 or thereabouts and your character is tooled JUST the right way. However, take note that by padding out your class skill list with stat-fillers that (A) you're missing out on valuable CSR abilities or possesses abilities that another NPC has superiority with, and (B) your skills are far less likely to hit 100, which can have serious ramifications - no master-level spells, no master-level disarms, untapped weapon damage/armor protection, no AC bypass on sneak attacks - though, naturally, some masteries are worth less than others. And if nothing else, sometimes Mary Sues and Gary Stus are just not fun.

 

B) You're S.P.E.C.I.A.L.: Just because you're creating an NPC doesn't mean they have to be JUST another NPC: if nothing else I'm expecting anyone who submits a character to be using a custom class, in part because of how Oblivion builds NPCs and in part because that's how most Oblivion players roll. The NPCs of this mod are supposed to be the ascended ones, the folks who rise up above all others and carve out a name for themselves in history. So go ahead and make your character whatever you want them to be - if you want them to be a stock Warrior, that's fine, but it's just as fine if they want to be a Sellsword, Mercenary, Drifter, Oracle, Jack of All Trades, Tomb Raider, Treasure Hunter, Bounty Hunter - well, you get the idea.

 

C) Design around the identity: This is the obligatory "just have fun" rule. Your character doesn't have to be a god incarnate, they don't have to be a specimin of their race in peak condition, they don't have to fulfill every role on the team that's possible, they just have to be. If your character is a treasure hunter who's an ace at dealing with what's guarding said treasure but tends to fumble a bit with the lock, then that's OK; if your character's a crusader who heals, shields, roasts, repairs, skewers, tenderizes, and runs like hell when nessecary than that's OK as well: and if your character wakes up in the morning for no other purpose than to beat someone with a warhammer the size of a child until their head explodes, then that's all right.

 

Now, are you ready to make submit a character? I hope so. Now, there are two ways that this can be done: the "Player's Choice" way, and the "make a dude in Oblivion, post the autosave after race generation, and make me do extra work for no good reason" way.

 

Player's Choice: Start a new game in Oblivion. Make the character like you normall would. When you finish the race generation bit, quit. Open up the Construction Set (You DO have it, right? You should) and open up the basic Oblivion ESM. Save a new ESP called "AH(YourCharacter'sNameHere)", like "AHRolftheUber.esp". Once you've got the ESP, boot up or get Wrye Bash (you'll have it if you use FCOM), right-click the new ESP, select "import face" and double-click the auto-save: a message will pop up telling you the editor ID of the new NPC. In the CS.

 

Boot up the CS and make ACTIVE the new .esp. If you're (likely) using a custom class, before you go to the character, open up the Classes window in the menu and create a new class: give the editor ID the name of AH(YourCharacter'sNameHere)(YourCharacter'sClassNameHere), then give it the appropriate details in the window of the right (since these are NPC classes, don't worry about the picture and don't check "playable". Hit OK, then save the mod.

 

In the CS, find the NPC Wrye Bash made (it'll be something like sg(CharacterName), rename the in-editor ID (F2 it) to AH(Your Character'sNameHere) like AHRolftheUber, then open them up. Check "PC Level Offset" because we want these guys to be functional for their whole lives, use an offset of 0, and a level range of 10 to 55. DO NOT check Essential (because that takes a bit of the fun out of things) nor Respawn (ditto) and UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES check No Rumors (since that's the NPC trigger for CSR's functionality).

 

From here on in, make adjustments as you see fit: give the NPC equipment suitable for their character/istics, either from a levelled list (if they're just an ordinary adventurer in general) or specific items as fitting them (Imperial Steel Armor for a guard, for example) keeping in mind that they'll be around level 10 when players first meet them. Make sure to give 'em some clothes for downtime, unless they're one of those folks that sleeps nakedhttp://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y116/TheSharpshooter/Smilies/emot-creepygrin.gif. Give 'em some spells, random or otherwise, and a nice birthsign to compliment their abilities (though since NPCs already get a nice boost to their magicka the Mage, Apprentice, and Atronatch aren't really the best choices). Make any last-minute changes to the NPC's appearance you want. Save it, attach the .esp to a post, make sure you make your submission well-known so I don't skim over it (using a method that ISN'T a giant screen-stretching image, thank you very much) and I'll merge the .esp into the central mod.

 

The lazy male without a father way: Start up a new game like in the Player's Choice. Attach the autosave to a post containing your class information, any specific items that you want your character to be using, junk like that. I'll have to download it, import the NPC into the central mod, and add the items and spells and class data by hand, while you get to choose whether or not to read the torrent of bitching about your laziness.

 

Tell you what: let's not use the lazy male without a father way, m'kay?

 

Beautiful People Add-on Mod: One thing I'd like to do is, in addition to the basic vanilla-oriented Adventurers Hostel mod, is make a nice plugin designed to take advantage of all the stuff that the Beautiful People mod adds in - you know, the big compilation that makes Dremora playable, and also has those Mystic Elves that everybody and their lesbian grandmother has the hots for, and Skyrim Khajiit, and Tang-Mo for whatever damn reason, and all that other stuff. If you want to make a character that uses Beautiful People 2.7 for whatever purpose, then here's what you do: make a character like outlined above. When you've got the final .esp that's ready to be shipped out, open up that ESP in the CS (OPEN, not ACTIVATE) alongside BP and apply whatever little BP things you want, and save a NEW Esp using the same name as the vanilla AH submission with the addition of BP27 - for example, AHRolftheUberBP27.esp. Submit that alongside the baseline version or zip 'em both up and put up the archive, and I'll blend all the BP additions I get into a single BP add-on.

 

What else needs to be done?

 

Asides from the NPCs, one thing I'd really like to get a hand on is a nice script to try and boost NPC Major Skills in a way that emulates the requirements of PCs to level up. I only started serious hand-placed modding when I started this mod up, and I've got enough trouble making my buildings look like only PARTIAL trash: scripting is beyond me at this point.

 

Basically, I need a script (we'll make it an additional birthsign: The Gifted) that does the following:

 

A) Checks the major skills of an NPC who has the birthsign/script

B) Determine which major skills are NOT specialization skills

C) Give these non-specialized major skills an additional .4 skillpoints per level of the NPC until the skill in question hits 100.

 

I'm not sure if I really want to give an additional bonus to health as well for these NPCs (we could say our additional bonus health is a hero's perk) but that might change once some testing is done and we see how NPCs in this mod fare in combat.

 

I also probably need some help with interior decoration and landscaping - not so much that it's beyond me, but that I probably have all the design sense of a cow. If you see in the above screenshots that I did something stupid, let me know and I'll see if I can make it any less so (want a quick notice? Use a post title of "STUPID! YOU'RE SO STUPID!" sans the quottation marks).

 

While a great consumer of mods, I've anything but an encyclopedic knowledge of them, so I need to know if my mod conflicts with anything major: I'm not going to care if Chucklebuck69's Fantasy Flamingo Flophouse happens to share the same chunk/s of land the mod uses (we're in competition for users, after all: this is war, son!) but something on the scale of The Lost Spires is another matter entirely, as the developers put a crapload of hard work into making it and it IS one of the best mods out there: they've got priority over the land. This, of course, can only really come into play once a beta comes out, but currently the area east of Fort Urasek is the area in question, cells 17-17, 17-18, 18-17, and 18-18 IIRC.

 

And that's really all there is. If you read through all of this, then I sincerily thank you; if you just skipped right to the end, then go back up and read through the post, you lazy bum; and if you read through this and the first thought in your head was "is this going to be compatable with Exnem's?", then GET OFF MY LAWN.

[ihateregisteringeverywhere]

Firstly: Great nickname, it's strangely reminiscent for some reason.

 

Secondly: The idea sort of sounds familiar as well, but I can't put my finger on it - other than that: I like it. Did you have a whack at the mercs yourself, or are you leaving all of that up to others?

[GIVEMETHEDAMNFILE]

Firstly: Great nickname, it's strangely reminiscent for some reason.

Like someone who was annoyed to no end at having to make one largely-unnessecary registration after another?

 

Secondly: The idea sort of sounds familiar as well, but I can't put my finger on it - other than that: I like it. Did you have a whack at the mercs yourself, or are you leaving all of that up to others?

Asides from the hostel host (obligatory character insertion, ho!) and the two merchents that I've got to impliment, no: partially because as already stated they might wind up getting samey after a while, partially because I'm two-thirds as blind as a bat and thus not the best of judges for the vanity factor, and partially because inbetween the designing and construction of the hostel and implimenting my three PCs and their AI routines and making sure that placed items don't start flying around like cheap horror-film props and that all the doorways connect to one another and don't send the player to some interdimensional polka-fest I'm kinda' getting tired. Besides, if people actually do wind up contributing to this thing I get a ton more exposure than if I'd random'd up a bunch of NPCs and called it a day.

 

As for it sounding familier, I cannot say outside of the base-level comparisons to, say, City Life or Crowded Roads, which have a similar premise but as noted in the OP can be flawed for various reasons. CM Partners Mod Basic does this too and boasts the whole "adds tons of NPCs" thing, but the problem is that it apparently uses its own set of scripts for controlling companion behavior which might interfere with CSR. And as for the rest of the Companions catagory - well, I think it's obvious what can be said about that.