LE Mod Request: RN&D and Frostfall: Follower Edition

[stebbinsd]

WARNING: LONG POST AHEAD.

 

While playing with Realistic Needs & Diseases (or RN&D for short) and Frostfall, I'm noticing a very glaring, immersion-breaking problem with the game:

 

I'm the only one who needs to eat, drink, sleep, and stay warm and dry. I'm the only one affected by these mods.

 

Now, with most NPCs, this isn't a very glaring problem; the implication can simply be that they fill their needs when your not around. After all, that girl who's checking you out at the grocery store in the real world... just because you never SEE her eat or sleep doesn't mean she doesn't do it!

 

However, with followers, their lack of needs is apparent, full-force. They're with you 24/7, and so, when they don't need to eat or sleep, it starts to feel awkward. I'm supposed to be the leader of this troop, but when I'm the only one among them who has to eat or stay warm, it just makes me feel frail and weak in comparison.

 

 

Someone, please make a mod that causes your followers (though only your followers, and only while they're following you, in order to save on processing and scripting) to lose stats, attributes, and combat effectiveness the same as the player.

 

Meanwhile, make it so that the followers will automatically eat any food they may have in their inventory once they become "hungry," enough to take from hungry to peckish to full. When they go from "slightly thirsty" to "thirsty," they will automatically drink any beverage they have in their inventory... enough to bring them up to "quenched," and so on and so forth. When in the wilderness, they will automatically equip the best exposure protection they have in their inventory (ties are broken by base armor rating, just like in the vanilla game).

 

However, if you hoard all the food and water, then once the followers become "very hungry," they will run up and loot all the barrels and corpses before you have a chance to, instantly eating all the food and drinking all the water inside before you have a chance to trade their inventories.

 

And finally, if they ever become "starving," "dehydrated," "exhausted" or "freezing to death," they will abandon their post by your side and return home in search of food and warmth. You won't be able to recruit them as a follower until they have fully recuperated and you give a hundred gold as an apology for letting them almost die. They may even sell some of the loot you gave them (the loot you spit so much blood to acquire) so they can pay for the food! Yeah, imagine defeating the Champion of Boethiah, all by yourself, and your very hungry follower runs up and loots his corpse before you can. Since there's no food, he goes to "starving" a mere second later, and leaves your service... and sells the Ebony Mail so he can get something to eat! OUCH! And, since he won't talk to you, that means that your only way of getting the ebony mail back is to either (A) follow him back to his hometown and buy the ebony mail back, (B) kill him and loot it off his corpse. Friends to the end, eh?

 

The only ones who won't leave you are your spouse (because she took a vow to stay by your side "now and forever") and your housecarls (since they are sworn "to protect you and all you own with [their] life"). However, even if you plan on just adventuring with your 9 housecarls and your spouse, they will suffer the stat and attribute losses from hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and cold. Also, if the followers are set to be killable, they could end up just dropping dead for no apparent reason if their starvation or cold gets too high, so it would still be a good idea to keep them fed.

 

Along with making the game more immersive, like these extra mods were intended, these additions would also add a whole new degree of strategy to the game. You want to have 15 followers under your Ultimate Follower Overhaul? Well, you'd better make sure you have enough rations to go around! With sixteen people in your party, you'll certainly mow through every dungeon like butter, but you'll have eight times as many mouths to feed as if you only had one follower.

 

So, any takers?

[NinjaWarriorPoet]

I'd take a little different take on it. RN&D would work pretty much the same, you'd have to keep them in food and water and they'd eat with you, or you can set it so that they always eat and drink with you (so you don't have to micromanage). You could set it so you take turns watching the camp, a good reason to use a multiple follower mod, and you'd never be surprised, eg. you'd never start the Dark Brotherhood until you slept at an inn or home, or forgot to set a watch. For Frostfall, I'd like to see it set up where if your followers succumb to the cold you need to set up camp and revive them or they die, and if you succumb first there are a few options which you could run randomly or based on skills and resistances of the follower, 1. you die, with a message that your follower didn't make it back, or didn't make it at all, 2. if you are close to a town the follower goes for help and you wake up with a nice bill at an inn, 3. if you have all the equipment, e.g. firewood and camping gear, the follower sets up camp and revives you, 4. If you don't have all the equipment your follower uses your horse to keep you warm while he collects firewood, starts the fire and all that, as in The Empire Strikes Back, 5. A patrol finds you, and you might wake up in a camp, trapped by bandits, in jail (if you have a bounty and are found by a town).

[gyrofalcon]

I would love to see this come through :)

 

And if only my Follower(s) just eat and drink (on the go?) and sleep when Player sleep, that would be a big enhancement of the gameplay. Not because its nice to see and so on, but if they don't, it has consequences. (Suffer the stat and attribute losses from hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and cold.)

 

Then stage 2 of the Project would be more close connection between FrostFall (or alike), RD&N (or alike) and Follower Mod (UFO etc)

As the OP, I find it strange, that "a deadly blizzard is killing you", and you can leave horses and Followers outside the Inn / Tent etc, without any consequence. They are all eager and happy the next morning, even if the blizzard is still raging.

Things I would have ingame:

• The critical need of sheltering the Follower group. Player needs to have shelter with them to build camp, or check in to an Inn, sleep on bedroll in Player Home etc. Specially if the is bad weather. If not you loose "respect points" and they would leave you and go back to where you met them the first time. (the Jarl etc)
• The critical need to feed the Follower group. The NPC need to have food and water in inventory so, they eat and drink when they like. A bonus of this is that if Player only give them alcohol, they would drink that too :p. And/or if no basic food/water are presence, they would start nagging the Player, even "poke" the Player with their weapons (?). If not you loose "respect points" and they would leave you and go back to where you met them the first time. (the Jarl etc). Or loots the kill (?). The hand over of food from Player to Follower, could be controlled by a dialogue menu. (The NPC nages, Player answers with "yes, here you go for 1 meal", "yes, here you go for 1 week" and "no, sorry" Or uses the ordinary inventory system to hand over) If you have several Followers, they can have a "spokesperson" so Player gives it to that NPC and all of them gets it.
• Basic care of the Follower group. Envy, jealousy, traitors, conflict of interest, conflicting believes, etc All this can be a part of the group dynamics, if you have 2 or more Followers. Dialogue and gifts / money would hold the peace in the Group. The Player can be a Leader, and make decisions (Food to NPC A, and not to NPC B, Guard duty, paycheck, bonuses, or if Gamer has an more adult angle of the game; adult favours and services)
• Even the Horse need care. In North part of Skyrim and in highlands, it needs food and shelter (specially in bad weather) So place a NPC inside every Inn (where its no stable nearby) and Player pays that NPC for caretaker of your horse(s). The stable in towns would otherwise care for the horses. If Thane, it could be free of charges? Farms could maybe also be a place for leaving the horses?

On the side: If an NPC is with you for a long time, Player earns a bunch of "Respect-points". But if this trust is broken (by various reasons), the NPC leaves and start roaming Skyrim. Player can search for the NPC by tracking him/her down, by asking other NPC of they have seen your former Follower. Pick up clues, what the NPC likes to do etc, The Innkeepers would be a great source of intel in this kind of quests.

 

All this is not for every Gamer, for sure. So an MCM menu would be great.

[UnmeiX]

Unfortunately, guys, Frostfall and RND use a lot of scripting just to track the effects on the player. There's a reason Chesko didn't have hypothermia tracking on other NPCs, and also why perseid9 didn't have needs tracked on followers. Script usage that way gets out of hand really fast. The best I can offer as far as immersion is that -your followers probably freeze at the same rate you do- and they must eat while you're asleep or something (or just get a follower mod that has autorelax like AFT, they'll eat/drink on their own automatically, so it won't be immersion breaking.)

 

I hate to be the one to say it, but what ya'll seek will probably never exist.

 

Edit: Reread the original post. That is insanely complex. I highly doubt most of that (the follower looting behavior specifically) could even be scripted in a manner that wouldn't disrupt Frostfall's main script (runs every 8 seconds or so) because it all sounds ridiculously script intensive. (If you've never written script, you probably wouldn't understand.)

 

If someone were to make a mod like you want, it'd probably be a -plugin- for a follower overhaul like AFT or EFF that added RND/Frostfall effects to followers, but even still, I don't see it being feasible.

Edited February 15, 2014 by UnmeiX

[gyrofalcon]

Well, the truth never hurts (that much)

 

I could only imagine the complexity of it all, but it would be the next step of challenge for the modding community. :)

 

Lets look forward towards TES 6, and hope Bethesda will make it easer for the modders to also include NPC in such mods.

[NinjaWarriorPoet]

You could have it check the difference in your expose rating when ever it changes or drops to x% (like at every 10% under x), then perhaps randomly, or based on the follower, they say or do different things.

Edited February 17, 2014 by NinjaWarriorPoet