LE Random positioning of imported followers

[backslash33]

The idea is simple and a response to a nasty follower modding trap: followers are mostly placed at Riverwood/Whiterun at the start of the adventure. On top of that, if you are using some alternate start MOD you won't see one of your useful followers until long unless you go back explicitely. It breaks your immersion and fun a bit, isn't it? Never wanted to have a different experience on every new game? Well that's the purpose of this MOD proposal.

 

So, now, what if there was a MOD with the purpose of randomly positioning these followers accross Skyrim world? Here you have the main idea for the mod exposed. It is basically a variant of this MOD . However, it is probably better to limit the sites for follower placement to well known places such as cities and forts.

Now are the requirements for the MOD. Most are related to how a follower can be placed efficiently depending of his own characteristics. That's also what would make this MOD even more attractive.

 

First of all, this MOD is to affect only custom followers that is everything that is not in the DLC / add-ons (so likely custom follower MODs)

One of these options is mandatory:

• followers should be placed at random at the beging of a new game, preferably after the player has created is character (to reduce the impact of MODs such as Alternate start)
• followers could be placed randomly by a spell of some sort or SKSE command (so a feature invoked by the player)

Now about what would make the random placement really efficient:

1. mandatory: engaged followers are not affected by this MOD (in case of summonable feature - see below)
2. greatly recommended: MOD will move only followers which has been placed before the MOD in the load order. That way a player can exclude followers from the randomization and have them where they were designed to be very easilly.
3. if possible, the place candidates would not be predefined but discovered by the MOD itself when started. It would help making the MOD operational with additional locations (Wirmsthooth...) by itself. By default, the possible location would be scripted and patches would be needed for popular locations releases.
4. followers would be more often placed according to the compatibility between their race and the site candidate. It means a Norld follower would be found in nothern cities (c.f. factions), Kajhit are more common at Falkraath... you get the figure.
5. if the follower is not leveled, it would be placed at a distance from the player (quite arbitrary though)
6. avoid placing followers of same classes at the same area (recognizion of principal perks to identity the class of the follower if has to)
7. more locally, any singular place of a city would be a candidate for a random positioning (the exact location is yet to be defined, maybe they can be given order to go and relax at this place so the follower would end-up correctly seated where we intend him/her to be), even prisons (would be fun to have the follower out of prison for him to accompagny us)
8. the follower should not be placed in an hostile location (especially if not essential)

We could actually add many more criteria for the placement algorithm and this part is just about the continuation of the first release so it is not necessary to add more to this now.

Edited December 31, 2014 by backslash33