Playing as a Child

[Darkboy5846]

An image on tesnexus.com has led me to believe that there is a mod which allows you to create a child character. If this mod exists, could I be linked to it?

[Guardianl]

.x117 race it's called. You will have to google it.

[Telyn]

Here is one called Improved Child Race:

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=OblivionMods.Detail&id=3577

 

I don't think it is being updated since the team that made it seems to be doing kids for Fallout now instead. Also, it looks like there are clothes for the girls but there might not be any clothes for the boys other than the underwear they come in (which they say can't be removed, good!). There is a file on here that uses this race for some npcs. You can search on Improved Child Race for that. You would need that file linked above.

 

The children I have seen are all adults shrunk to child size. So they won't look exactly like children, but if you really want to play a kid like in the Harry Potter adventures, they can pass as adolescents, maybe 11-15 depending on which of those mods you use. I don't think you're going to ever see any 6 year olds in platemail because there would be all kinds of clipping and the weapons would probably float midair or something. Some of the mods that make kids, hobbits, fairies, and other small creatures do not have hair. I have a character that is a hobbit race, again shrunk down from a human. Depending on what body replacer you used, you might be able to use one of the hobbit races for this. There are a lot of body replacers here. Look for a skinny one.

 

This isn't the hobbit race I have tried, but it's skinnier than the one I am using and might make an ok child judging from the picture of relative size. It's called Hobbit Race by Bamul.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=23752

[csgators]

nevermind Edited February 13, 2011 by csgators

[Ferryt]

It would appear that the Children of Cyrodiil project has completely abandoned Oblivion and jumped totally on the Fallout bandwagon, since all the links to Children of Cyrodiil have been disabled on their site and the only working links are to their Children of the Wasteland (i.e. Fallout) project.

 

I'm not personally interested in playing a child character in Oblivion, but I've long wanted to see kids in the game -- real families with mothers, fathers, children, even pets. It's immersion-breaking for me to not see these things. As Telyn said, attempts, so far, to introduce children into this game have involved re-sized adult figures and these "children" look like midgets, instead of kids, who have completely different proportions. That's even more immersion-breaking for me than having no children at all in the game.

 

Unfortunately, the game engine doesn't allow for multiple skeletons -- a serious oversight in my opinion, and that's why we don't have digitigrade Khajiit, for instance. Every race uses the stock human form, and, in fact, before body replacement mods came along, female characters used the male body, which looks pretty funky on a woman. I really hope that Skyrim solves this (and other issues). Maybe if I live long enough, and if it does, I'll see something like Oblivion where everyone isn't just an adult human, perhaps wearing a mask, because that's pretty much what we have in Oblivion right now.

 

At this point, creating a physically-believable child "race" is going to be pretty difficult. Body proportions need to be different and you'd need a completely different head-mesh. Existing clothing won't work, so all clothing would have to be custom made for them. Hair won't fit, either -- again, you have to custom make it. This is further complicated by the fact that a four-year-old has different proportions than a seven-year-old, and he has different proportions than an eleven-year-old. So to effectively support children you'd need several different "child races" and would then have to tweak each of those to the stock Oblivion races. You'd also need separate head meshes for Argonian and Khajiit children. I'm not sure there's really enough demand for something like this to convince a team of modders to spend the effort to do it.

 

Oh, and don't pursue the .x117 thing. The last topic that dealt with that got locked. I'm not sure why, but I get the impression we're not supposed to be discussing that mod.

[Telyn]

There are several mods that do add families with children. The children talk in one of them, but all they say is that they are not allowed to talk to strangers. I think we both know why the modder chose to do that, and I am ok with it. I did enjoy seeing actual families walking around together and a beggar mother trying to raise her child in a little campsite. It always bothered me when the beggars tell you they need money to feed their kids, because it reminds me that there aren't any kids. Defies that suspension of disbelief bigtime. Unfortunately, the main mod that creates families will drop your FPS bigtime, and if you add it to an existing game, it can cause crashes. I have compromised by making one clean game that doesn't use most of my other mods, but does run that one. MoDem's City Life. There are several variants. The original Life no hair shows up for me but the npcs have a lot of interesting AI compared to later versions which had to drop some of it. City Life removes some of the features I like, but the modder who took it over fixed a lot of bugs, and those kids do have hairstyles and look kind of Harry Potter age in game. There is a new skeleton available since then that allows for all sorts of creatures that wouldn't have been possible before, but I haven't tried making a better hobbit with it because I don't have the skills. I'm not interested in playing a child myself but I stray from lore enough to be interested in some of the classic races from other fantasy works and fairytales.

 

It's very unrealistic that households with young wives do not have a cradle and a few kids running around unless there is some kind of herb the game isn't telling us about. There must be something very bad in the water in Tamriel. It's harder to worry about saving the world when you get the feeling there is no new generation to replace the NPCs anyway.

 

I believe the kids in City Life are still marked as essential so they can't be slaughtered, but I am not sure. They were in the original mod all these variants descend from. When I get more skills I might be willing to try making a child that isn't a shrunken adult, but only if I could think of some way to prevent people from making it playable and doing something sick to it. I think the only way to do it might be to make windows that play scenes "outdoors" or in the next room that aren't really happening in the game. :( I saw a baby object here somewhere in a screenshot awhile back. It looked like it's just a sort of doll the mother can carry around. It may be a pose or idle. If you can find it, better than nothing, and would probably not drop the fps. There's a maternity dress made by an Italian modder in case the suggestion of future kids helps your immersion a bit. For some reason it offended some people. Funny how a pregnancy dress created for use in quest stories is offensive and looks "gross" and "fat" but there are people that want bouncing Z cups as replacers.

 

I think there is a special child head mesh for the Fallout mod but I didn't really look at the site much because I don't play that game. It's possible it could be ported with permission. If it weren't for the strong potential of misuse of child characters, I think the game would have had realistic kids and families long ago.

[Ferryt]

I suspect that one reason, other than developer laziness, for not having children in the vanilla game was the potential for abuse of children in-game, and how that would result in bad PR for Bethesda. I happen to disagree with that stance, since making the children essential would solve that issue, although it would take a modder only a few minutes to create a mod which would set children to non-essential. Again, though, you can't rate a game on the basis of available (or potentially available) mods. If that were the case then almost every modern video game in existence should have an "A" rating and teens and younger might just as well find the latest version of PacMan and be happy with it (although there's an x-rated version of that game, too -- go figure).

 

My take on a mod that introduces children is to treat them no differently than any other mod-introduced NPCs. Don't make them essential unless there's an overriding reason to make a particular child essential. What a gamer does with his own single-player game in the privacy of his own home and on his own computer is his business. It's not the job of the modding community to make moral decisions for the people who play this game.

 

And if you're going to introduce children into the game then let them be a playable race for those players who might want to do it, with logical restrictions. A child PC isn't going to be terribly efficient at anything and there is gear they simply will not be able to use. A child adventurer isn't going to be taken very seriously by anyone (no doing the Main Quest or any of the guild quests, for instance). Frankly, I think it would be boring, but modders shouldn't be making arbitrary decisions like that on how their mods can be used.

[Telyn]

I understand your point but I think individual modders do have the right not to create or release something if they worry it might be misused. There's an interesting exchange going on about this in the Mod Detectives thread. A modder does not want to release a race because she doesn't want it to be altered to have gigantic breasts or be used in hentai scenarios. My take on that is, it doesn't really matter whether a user agrees or disagrees with her. It's her work. Just because she made it doesn't mean she has to share it. I do agree with you that what modders do with mods they download in private is their business. If you as an author choose to share a mod, people are going to do what they want with it in their own private game, and that's how it goes. They have no rights over the author's creation process, and the author has no rights over the user's gameplay. However I also think it's a modder's business whether they want to release a mod or not, and if someone releases and shares a hacked version of someone else's mod which goes againt the author's ethics, it would be impossible for the author/creator to do anything about it. Bethesda could go to court.

 

Good points about how npcs would realistically treat a child PC. I can't imagine Uriel Septim giving a kid the amulet to take to Jauffre, or explaining that he has a natural son to a child.

[Ferryt]

Well, Telyn, we may have to just agree to disagree on this point. My stance is a very simple one. If you have to go out of your way to restrict something in a way which isn't required for that something to exist/function, then this is an "arbitrary restriction" and I am 100% against any arbitrary restriction in anything, including in the Real World.

 

I don't read the Mod Detectives thread, simply because it's a thread and not a separate forum with individual threads for each request, which is the way it should be to avoid discussions getting hopelessly interleaved and requests lost in the resulting tangle. However, I dug back into it for the relevant post. Here's the important excerpt from it:

 

... I worked too hard on this race to see characters with big boobs and very hentai outfits.

 

Now, I happen to agree with the modder, here. Hentai makeovers and using HGEC to give any character an H cup size and XL lower body (I think those are the biggest of both that the mod has to offer) is something I just find inappropriate, ugly, and almost pathological. When I was active in Second Life you'd see a lot of characters built and dressed like that, and the predictable thing was that nearly all of them were being played by guys. Speaks for itself, I think.

 

However, even though I agree with Kjkirimi that this would be an inappropriate use of her mod, I disagree with that as a reason not to release it. The salient phrase is "I worked too hard on this race to see ..." and we can stop right there. She won't "see" anything. She won't even know if anyone does this to her character race. Oblivion is a one-player game. It's not a multiplayer online game. If it was, then I'd support her stance completely. As I said, what a player does with her mod in the privacy of his own home and on his own computer is not, regardless of how he "abuses" the mod, going to affect the mod's author in any way, shape, fashion, or form.

 

Let me use a reductio ad absurdum argument to make my point. I make a new player house mod. Unbeknown to the player I have the entry door scripted. Upon "activate" I have it set to check the player's factions and other attributes. If one of those is the Dark Brotherhood or if the player has a single murder tallied, the mod disables the house (permanently) and notifies the player that no murderers are allowed inside. I could get even nastier and then teleport the player to the inside of the Imperial Guard lounge after reducing all his stats and skills to "1" and setting a 1,000,000 Gold bounty on his head. Why? Because, in real life, I hate murderers. So that gives me a right to enforce my own personal morality upon anyone who uses my mod. Yes?

 

Absolutely not! IRL, if I saw someone abusing a child in public I'd intervene, and probably quite violently. I'm that dead-set against things like that. However, if I were to release an Oblivion mod that created a child race I wouldn't make them essential or take any other steps to protect them from "abuse" by a player. I simply don't feel that I have the right to do so. I'm certainly not being harmed if they do, so I can't act like a victim. Indeed, I won't even know it happens. What's more, to make such restrictions I would have to actively "do" something, rather than just "not do" something. I consider that as inappropriate as someone using the children in my mod for target practice -- but that little bit of immorality is between them and any creator in which they may believe.

 

Now, in spite of all this, Kjkirimi chose not to release her mod. I don't have to agree with her private reason not to do so (she had some additional reasons involving permissions, but those were quite secondary). We all know why she really didn't release it. I do, however, support her decision not to release it. If, however, she had released it with some way that it would disable HGEC if it detected that mod to be present or had some other way to prevent the player from using his chosen body replacer and clothing, I would be very critical, and I'm someone who used to use HGEC, but only for the "B" and "C" cups and I don't use it, now, and never will, again, since Robert's female body replacer is so much better for those of us who prefer our female characters to look "normal".

 

Now, as for your argument that Bethesda could go to court over a third-party modification of their game, I don't think there's a snowball's chance in Hell that's ever going to happen. Bethesda cannot be held responsible for add-ons to Oblivion that are made by people they don't know and have no control over. The courts would laugh at any attempt to bring a suit against Bethesda over a user-created mod. On the other hand, my guess is that mods to the game are governed, at least in the United States, by copyright laws, so any unauthorized copying and modification of a mod could have legal consequences, although the original modder would have to file charges and take the offending modder to court.

[Telyn]

I think she might very well see altered versions of her race, because just as there are people who have ripped the work of others and been banned for uploading it here, I am pretty sure the same thing happens on sites that are less vigilant about copyright. It's more than likely someone would alter that mod and upload it. It is the kind of thing that gets stolen. H isn't the biggest. I believe the biggest I have seen references to is JJ, which I don't think even exists in real life. The sizes are actually pretty arbitrary though from what I have seen. JJ might not be any bigger than someone else's DD.

 

People do sue game companies for 3rd party mods, and whether or not they can win doesn't really matter because lawyers generally advise the company to settle because of the publicity issues. The reason Oblivion changed to the new rating and all of us have to give birthdates to even download it from Steam is because someone didn't like a 3rd party mod that unlocked the female template which had, gasp, a realistic chest and because it was a Bethesda file (although locked) they blamed Bethesda. Companies do threaten legal action over mods, too. It happened with Sims II, but the modder in question took the mod down, so I although I doubt the suit would have been successful, the threat of one did accomplish what they wanted to accomplish. Sure, if a modder here asks for their altered files to be removed, they would be. However that might not be the case on all sites worldwide. She has a decent reason to worry it wouldn't be. How do I know she would probably find out? Because when a porn site decided to use some textures from my old blog, several people I probably knew under some other name notified me anonymously and sent me screenshots of...various things on top of my textures. People do tell you. At one point most of the people I knew who did textures had discovered their textures were being sold on commercial CDs and DVDs, and yes a lot of them had attempted to protect themselves legally against that kind of thing. You need money to back it up though, and most artists do not have the resources. I didn't really care that much, but I knew one person on my blog community who tried to go after them for royalties. She was a professional artist who sold her own material digitally, so it competed with her.

 

I am unaware of any mod for any game that disables itself or other mods if the user uses other mods the creator dislikes, although obviously some cosmetic mods are not going to be compatible with HGEC if the creator or another person doesn't adjust them, hopefully with permission of the original creator. I do think it would probably be possible with scripting that checks hash #s, and if people continue to steal mods from others, alter them, and upload them uncredited, that's where modding will inevitably end up and we will all be the poorer for it. We have copy protection because people pirated games from the very beginning, when pirating a game involved using a tape casette. Oblivion doesn't have pay mods. Sims II did, If you're interested in this kind of thing, there was a pay site that did put some kind of wrapper on files they made available, so that the files would not work or not work properly if posted for download by anyone but themselves, and they could trace who shared it via unique IDs of some kind that were added to the files without their paying members even knowing. It was pretty controversial in the community. I unsubscribed from there, despite that I disapproved of the fact that the people who were sharing had literally downloaded almost every file on there and released them on a site that called itself a pirate site. That pay site was officially sponsored by the game, so their argument that it was illegal to sell mods didn't hold up very well, but I felt and feel that the "protection" the site came up with was incredibly inappropriate and probably illegal in some countries, certainly a massive privacy violation.