[WIP] Dovahheim -- A Player-Owned Town!

[RandomlyAwesome]

OK

Lol'd at the night club comment maybe add a disco ball at the top :tongue:

BTW Paarthnax''s brother is actually Alduin so...*silence*

Ideas here:

-When you complete a guild quest line/get high rank you should be able to make them set up a guild house or something in Dovahheim.

-As a side quest you could make the grand liberian tell you to fetch like 10-20 books about a subject.

Edited February 20, 2012 by RandomlyAwesome

[kromey]

Ooh, I like that! Dovahheim becomes the new capital of the Thieves Guild, the home of the first satellite campus of the College of Winterhold, the location of the reborn Dark Brotherhood's newest sanctuary, a brand new Blades temple...

 

Yeah, I like that idea! Will take a fair bit of work to make it happen, but it would be awesome!

[RandomlyAwesome]

Idea:

-A Random event could be a sickness/outbreak going around and you would have to find a doctor/alchemist.

Edited February 20, 2012 by RandomlyAwesome

[kromey]

Heh, I'll try to make my posts longer. It's odd that you ask that, since I frequently feel like mine are too long!

 

 

Sickness/outbreak: That would be a unique story line. Which is great -- we like unique! Have to find an herbalist who can figure out what it is and how to cure it (and maybe the first one doesn't know, but refers you to his/her mentor who's more knowledgeable), but it requires a very rare ingredient that you have to go and get (which, naturally, is only found at the end of a long and dangerous dungeon -- because isn't that where everything worthwhile is in Skyrim?).

 

And maybe the twist could be that the herbalist's original diagnosis was wrong, and then sends you on yet another quest to get yet another super-rare ingredient to make the real cure. And at the end you get to cure your town, and the herbalist will give you a couple bottles of the original potion, which could be something like a cure disease with a long-duration resistance to disease. Or, heck, maybe drinking the potion grants you a permanent disease resistance!

 

Or, maybe once you cure the town, the herbalist reveals to you that this wasn't a natural outbreak, but the result of someone poisoning the town's water (the herbalist could hint at that early on with comments like, "This is very odd..."). Now you have to figure out who, and go deal with them.

 

 

Missed your comment in your previous post about the librarian sending you out to get books. It's a good idea, but what's-his-fangs in the College of Winterhold already does that for players who've joined the College, not to mention that the quest to join the bard's college is also a "fetch such-and-such book" quest, and I think I've seen at least a couple other "I want this book, bring me a copy" quests as well.

 

Rehashing existing plots isn't necessarily a bad thing, though, especially if the reward is something tangible in the player's own town. Maybe each of these rare books brings more researchers into the library, and in turn they can offer unique services to the player. Will need to put thought into it to make it worthwhile, make it more meaningful than earning the begrudging gratitude of a grumpy old orc...

[elricshan]

hmm the title i think would be lord or lady not steward. a lord/lady that rules over a town sounds bether than a steward and it make more sence that a lord/lady rules a town and answers only to the jarl and the high king.

[arcana75]

Some personal views, not really a bearing on the mod.

 

1) Enough fetch quests please? Vanilla has enough of it. Though to be fair a quest is a way to sort things out, but if my alchemy or restoration is good enough, hey *I* am the solution :)

 

2) @kromey the Blades behaviour isn't a bug the bug I read up on was the companion carry weight bug :)

 

Some really fun ideas being bounced around, hope to see some of them realised. The bard idea is good, but could I request that more, MUCH more activity happens in the open within the walls of the township? No bards in inns please. Let there be a dining hall in the open, and strolling minstrels. Abit like how the colonials of the old or the Amish live. Communal, in the open, fresh air, etc :)

[arcana75]

Anyway, yeah, I know that followers can be recruited into the Blades, which changes where they go home. If that's something built into the follower, though, I hesitate to do anything with it -- it would make my mod incompatible with a whole host of follower mods that are already out there. And, if you can't tell already, I'm awful paranoid about being incompatible with other mods...

 

I suspect it's as simple as moving a specific marker, though. Which is certainly doable without breaking anything, and even means that if you "recruit" a follower into your town, it will still work to later recruit them into the Blades, without anything breaking.

Thinking about this again, changing companion behaviour to return to your town, ends up changing companion behaviour anyway. I know about how companion "objects" have the IDs and stuff and wondered whether the best way to not meddle too much with companions is to somehow achieve this without affecting the main elements of a companion object.

 

Some ways I toyed with in my head:

-- add a dialogue option to get companion to "migrate" to the town. This requires new dialogue options for all companions.

-- change behaviour of "go home" option to return to the town. This changes vanilla behaviour, in the sense that companions aren't where they're supposed to be after parting ways.

-- cast a special spell on companion, or trade an item. Both triggers them to "travel" to town once you leave their cell. This happens all the time for NPCs. A script auto-triggers the "let's part ways" option, then loads a "roam package" to stay in the town.

 

In any case, I think caveat emptor. Mods are mods and are recognised to change behaviour. Whichever way, to fully realise "life" for companions in the town a lot of work will need to be done to add the new behaviours like strolling, chopping wood, swinging swords at targets, etc inside the external cell town.

 

This creates a really nice "recruitment drive" meta-quest for the player to run around the world looking for people to recruit into the town. A nice spin to this is that certain companions (there are a quite few not critical to vanilla esp the mercs) could actually on their "own accord" travel to your town seeking employ, or come find you (like a courier) begging to join your town after "hearing of its independent ways" and how (s)he "tires of the civil war and just wants to be independent".

[elricshan]

hmm why not give the companion a now dialoge? go to town that way it wil bring the companions there but not be incompible with other companions mods. i am not shure if this is what arcana ment but still

[kromey]

1) Enough fetch quests please? Vanilla has enough of it. Though to be fair a quest is a way to sort things out, but if my alchemy or restoration is good enough, hey *I* am the solution :)

Heh, I totally get what you mean. There's a reason there's so many, though -- they're really danged easy!

 

Perhaps you could short-circuit a quest to fetch an herbalist if you yourself have high skill, but even the best still has to go and get ingredients.

 

Some really fun ideas being bounced around, hope to see some of them realised. The bard idea is good, but could I request that more, MUCH more activity happens in the open within the walls of the township? No bards in inns please. Let there be a dining hall in the open, and strolling minstrels. Abit like how the colonials of the old or the Amish live. Communal, in the open, fresh air, etc :)

I do intend the outdoor spaces of the town to be much more "alive" than the vanilla towns and cities. That said, though, I was looking into bards, and it seems they have to be within specially-designated areas before they'll sing. I do love the idea of one singing in the open in the town square, so I'll try to make it happen, but they are definitely designed to sing only within inns...

 

Thinking about this again, changing companion behaviour to return to your town, ends up changing companion behaviour anyway. I know about how companion "objects" have the IDs and stuff and wondered whether the best way to not meddle too much with companions is to somehow achieve this without affecting the main elements of a companion object.

 

Some ways I toyed with in my head:

-- add a dialogue option to get companion to "migrate" to the town. This requires new dialogue options for all companions.

-- change behaviour of "go home" option to return to the town. This changes vanilla behaviour, in the sense that companions aren't where they're supposed to be after parting ways.

-- cast a special spell on companion, or trade an item. Both triggers them to "travel" to town once you leave their cell. This happens all the time for NPCs. A script auto-triggers the "let's part ways" option, then loads a "roam package" to stay in the town.

I'm going to look into how the game does the Blades recruitment. It may simply move a marker, which if that's the case it's trivial to add a recruitment-style option to the town (probably not via new dialog on the companion per se, but rather a "recruiter" NPC in the town). Don't really like the idea of casting a spell (breaks immersion for non-mage characters, for one), but giving them an item (e.g. a recruitment letter you in turn got from a "recruiter" NPC in your town) might work.

 

In any case, I think caveat emptor. Mods are mods and are recognised to change behaviour. Whichever way, to fully realise "life" for companions in the town a lot of work will need to be done to add the new behaviours like strolling, chopping wood, swinging swords at targets, etc inside the external cell town.

 

This creates a really nice "recruitment drive" meta-quest for the player to run around the world looking for people to recruit into the town. A nice spin to this is that certain companions (there are a quite few not critical to vanilla esp the mercs) could actually on their "own accord" travel to your town seeking employ, or come find you (like a courier) begging to join your town after "hearing of its independent ways" and how (s)he "tires of the civil war and just wants to be independent".

I think the "life" can be handled more-or-less automatically, as I believe the default behavior (at least for most of them) is to wander around their area interacting with stuff.

 

Love this meta-quest idea, especially with people going there on their own and/or approaching the player and asking to be recruited. I was already planning on introducing a couple of new companion NPCs with this mod, perhaps this is how I'll do that.

 

hmm why not give the companion a now dialoge? go to town that way it wil bring the companions there but not be incompible with other companions mods. i am not shure if this is what arcana ment but still

Certainly something to look into at least. Actually, my first thought was that this would necessitate incompatibility with other mods that alter companion dialog, but that's not the case -- create a new quest object, totally independent of all the others, and put the dialog in there. Could restrict it to only companions that are currently with you, or as a new option alongside "come with me". Or both.

 

Still dependent on what mechanic determines where a companion's "home" is, but we'll see what there is to work with. We do know it's changeable -- Lydia, for example, will make her home inside Dragonsreach (if you haven't bought Breezehome yet), inside Breezehome (after you've bought it), or at Sky Haven Temple (if you recruit her into the Blades) -- now I just have to figure out how that's done, and if I can safely do it. Yeah, mod incompatibility is a fact of life, but I really don't think a town mod should be incompatible with a companion mod...

[RandomlyAwesome]

idea:

-Maybe a Monster Zoo