LE Generic NPC responses... is there a shortcut?

[nerdofprey]

Without spoiling the surprise too much: I have a pretty extensive mod in the works that overhauls an existing quest location, in mostly aesthetic ways. No changes to the actual quests. It's pretty much done, and I'm in the "finishing touches" phase right now.

 

One of the things I did was to add a ton of new NPC's, pretty much just for flavor. Two of them are generic followers, and the rest are decoration. The twist is I don't want the players to know which is which. The idea is that you're looking for allies... You don't know who's on your side, so you go around trying to chat up these background characters, with mixed results. A couple of them are willing to help, most are not.

 

This works fine as-is; the followers will follow you, the other NPC's just give generic "what do you want?" responses when activated, and go back to what they were doing. No actual conversation, but it gets the job done.

 

I had this idea that it would be a lot cooler if you could actually ASK each NPC for help. You click on them, they go "huh?", and you say "can you help me out?" and 9 out of 10 tell you to f--- off. But you ask the followers the exact same question, and they turn into followers.

 

I realize this involves creating a quest for the dialogue, which I have never done or really wanted to do. I'd be willing to try, but this incredibly simple yes or no question suddenly becomes really complicated when it's 17 different NPC's with different generic voice types.

 

I'm wondering if there's some kind of shortcut to get each one to give a simple canned response. Sort of like you can ask any generic innkeeper for work and they'll give some variation of "check this out" and hand you a letter. Different NPC's with different voices give you different canned responses to the same question.

 

How do I get different NPC's to tell me to f--- off in different ways?

 

All the tutorials I can find seem to focus on custom dialogue and often pretty complex quest stage stuff. I don't want to make this more complicated than it has to be!

 

Any suggestions?

[nerdofprey]

By the way, I have an idea of the "long way" to do this, which is probably the only way, but I figured I'd ask. Here's the process in a nutshell:

 

- Make note of the NPC's voice set

- Look up that voice set with Voice File Reference Tool

- Find a good response and note the file name

- Extract the file with BSA browser so the CK can find it

- Set up a dialogue branch for the NPC where you ask your question, use the extracted sound file for their answer

 

...and repeat 17x

 

I'm wondering if there's a better way to do it OR if there's something wrong with this approach to begin with...

[nerdofprey]

OK, I more or less figured this out. The solution is not perfect but it's enough.

 

I'll say what it is, cause I hate when I'm searching for a solution and I find a thread like this that just says "edit, never mind, I figured it out"

 

In the quest dealie, under Topic Info, there is an option to share response data from: and then you can pick from a long list of canned responses. Frustratingly, not every situation or common voice type is supported here, but I'd rather change certain characters' voice types than try to work around this in a more complicated way. There are some decent dialogue choices though, and it saves a lot of trouble dealing with loose files.