New Modder Advice - Adding spells/abilities to enemies

[zipzod]

I've had some ideas for mods for a while now, but I am now trying to get into the modding process. This is more of asking for help and advice about to where to start.

 

My goal is to add leveled spells to dragons, without having to manually edit each dragon, so that they can use some dragon shouts, in addition to their vanilla fire/ice breath attack. I think that the game generates dragons based on the player's level, and so ideally my mod would add the modified ability at this point. When generated, the dragon would get 1-2 shouts from a subset of shouts, which I already picked. Then, player level and random variables would determine exactly which ones they get; that is, which type of shout, and how many words of that shout.

 

I want to minimize possible conflicts with other mods. The last mod I made was for Morrowind, and it used a script to change world variables, but I am not sure if this is a smart idea.

 

Anyway, I am stuck at the drawing board for this latest one. Please advise me about where to start and what tools/strategies I should use. I'm not asking anyone to hold my hand through the process, since I want to make this mod on my own, although currently I know very little and I appreciate any suggestions.

[ripple]

Random dragon actors use templates for stats, if you edit the templates, all dragon actors using those templates will have the ability, which means there would be no need to edit individual dragon actors (except the unique ones that do not recycle their stats from templates). This will obviously conflict with any mod that make the same edits to those templates, which is pretty much all the popular dragon mods like 'Deadly Dragons' or 'Mighty Dragons.'

Edited June 27, 2013 by ripple

[SeraphimKensai]

also a big thing if you want to avoid conflicts with other mods are naming conventions of spells, items and such that you make. For example, I always use z(year)mjh(name) as my convention as it allows me to sort my stuff to the bottom of the list, gives me a rough idea of when I made it as far as a year goes, my initials, and then the name of the ID.

 

Doing something similar as opposed to just editing say a spell and replacing it, will allow you to ensure it can be as compatible as possible and also allows you to tweak the intensity of the spell the dragon would use as opposed to blanket adjusting it, which then might make a vindictive chicken battlemage that casts the same spell accidentally kill you when it was originally just a tickle.

 

so modding the templates like ripple said will work, although then you have compatibility issues with other mods, so another way albeit more complex would be if I'm not mistaken by compiling a script effect which adds your spells to the dragons as they are enabled or such. That would in theory keep the templates clean, but ultimately it still runs the risk of having dragons with duplicate spells in the event someone has a mod that does the same thing.

Ultimately, there's about 1000 ways to skin a cat, you just have to experiment by trial and error and keep a sharp knife. Goodluck.

[zipzod]

Thanks for the quick replies. One of the issues I wanted to avoid was the manipulation of templates, which would probably cause conflicts with a majority of the popular mods out there. SeraphimKensai's scripting idea seems like a creative workaround, so once I figure out how to attach scripts to dragon spawn events, I will test it and see what happens. Also, are dragon shouts classified under spells? I can't find them.