SSE No Mod to Perform Black Sacrament Yourself?

[seventhdayavenged]

I have looked high and low, and I have been immensely disappointed that with all the talent we have on the nexus, not one modder has been able to produce a simple, immersive, working mod that allows you to hire an assassin to kill someone for you. It makes me wonder if it (A): is even possible to realistically script, or (B): has ever even been a highly sought after feature. I know that there is mods like "Become the High King" that adds this functionality, but come on. Why do I have to wait till I am the grand highlord of epicness? Why can a LITERAL PENNILESS ORPHAN (Aventus) perform the black sacrement while I cannot, especially since it is such an iconic thing in Elder Scrolls lore. I don't know, just a bit jaded here after searching for such a long time for this. /rant

[seventhdayavenged]

Here is how I would have it work. Read the book about the black sacrament, or start the dark brotherhood questline. Once you do, you are given a power, something along the lines of "consider for assassination." You can use this power on any non generic, non essential npc. Nazheem, for instance. Also unlocked by the above methods is the ability to craft an effigy. The effigy can be used while you are [hidden] to expend it (as well as a few other lore-friendly items) and perform the black sacrament. Some time later, a courier will approach you and give you a note, sporting the black hand, Saying to go to [location.] This could be handled a few ways. Either you could be told to leave some gold in a marked container, like a dead drop, or you could be told to meet with an actual Brotherhood representative. The latter option might be a little more difficult to script I imagine, as it would involve using an actual npc from the Brotherhood, and that could mess up quests. Anyways, after the payment have been made, some time later the npc will be killed off screen, and later still, a courier will approach you with another note, again sporting the black hand, with nothing but the sentence "It is done."

[seventhdayavenged]

Some things to consider:

- When using the power on an essential npc, you will recieve a notification along the lines of "This person is worth more to me alive."

- When using the power on a child npc, you will recieve a notification along the lines of "Even the Brotherhood has standards. This child lives."

- When using the power on a generic npc, you will recieve a notification along the lines of "This person is not worth the coin."

 

- When using the power on an any other npc, you will recieve a notification along the lines of "The Brotherhood could deal with this person... for a price."

- If you are already a member of the Dark Brotherhood, you would instead just speak to a non-generic member of the Brotherhood after using the "Consider" power.

- During the timeframe between the Falkreath sanctuary being sacked, and the Dawnstar santuary being established, using the "Consider" power will instead give you a message along the lines of "The Brotherhood needs time to recover before they can take any new contracts."

[ElPolloAzul]

I'm also kind of exceptionally surprised if this has not been done. This was one of the ideas I was considering for Skyrim weird weapons, and I think your high-level design is the correct plan. As to your (A), the scripting should not be a problem -- but there are always setbacks when things don't work quite as you imagined from the documentation. The selection power itself is easy to construct, aside perhaps from getting the generic nature of the NPC. The quest and book delivery part is even easier. Random dead drops from a small list of hidden boxes chosen to be close to the target or even the conversation with the generic DB rep to process payment wouldn't be hard either.

 

Two points are interesting from the programming perspective (there may be differences depending on what wasn't in Skyrim but was in FO4, but I think you should be able to do all of this without the Script Extender and be on XBOX too for SE). This is what I had imagined:

 

1. Orchestrating the murder. Probably this would be faked/cheesed a little depending on if you were around to witness things (if you've played the space sim X3, there are wildly different combat mechanics for ships that are OOS, or out-of-sector). You could have a specific generic murderer or a pool of murderers who fall with mutual exclusivity into a specific Alias with a package to go to and stalk the NPC. You poll around from something else, waiting for the NPC to be kind of close (same Location or cell) to the target; you can do this out-of-loaded-area if you are just looking for something very approximate, not involving most kinds of distance checks. If you as the Player are not there, you can cheat and send a Kill event with the necessary details (e.g. the murderer) to the victim. If you are present, it gets more interesting. You could have the NPC path to or AI package to the target and StartCombat with them. In my Kids Eat Free weapon for Fallout 4 which spawns child serial killers who stab people with rippers, I used paired animations to make the murders more explicit -- ripper to the gut -- but they are more finicky than just a StartCombat, as the NPCs have to be positioned just right for the animation system to accept this. The victim targeting was supposed to be random and work for arbitrary numbers of present targets and murderchildren, so I couldn't use a central Alias for the targeting -- it is appropriate to only have one Black Sacrament murder running at a time. It would be more trouble than worth for the assassin to have to sneakily kill the target, or do it by a specific means, such as magic. When the target is detected as dying or gives off the dying event to its alias or by some other means, you can trigger the rep or a nap or even maybe the game's normal Courier (less advisable for uninstallation maybe) to give you the note.
2. Doing the Black Sacrament. It would be unnecessary but also pretty damned interesting to have to actually do the black sacrament in an arbitrary location. The unconstrained geometry problem of the spell or a vendor giving the player special candles that have to detect in a distributed fashion that they are encircling the necessaries is annoying as heck, so you would want to take a hard pass on that. Give the player an item that would black out the screen and spawn a circle of candles when a master controller item (maybe with no significant 3D) is dropped. Then the invisible or visible master controller object could check periodically if ritual ingredients were close when the player is there. It could trigger FindNearestFromRef type queries to be sent from each candle in the circle towards each necessary body part (bones and flesh). The consensus/modal (most-common) body part of each type returned out of say 10 candles offering a ObjectReference could be checked to see if it was in the circle, which is completely trivial if you are using a check within an exact circle rather than an approximate circle because you have the closed form constraint used to generate the circle that the candles lie on -- then do a height check to make sure that the bones are not on the floor above the 2D circle, etc. If all necessary parts are there, an OnHit event attached to the ribcage or similar items (maybe even the union of body parts, each updating your master controller with valid item counts) could see if you were hitting with the proper weapon. A DB rep NPC could sell or give you the enchanted dagger, and maybe you would have to equip it with nightshade in inventory or something before it could become the real dagger required by the ritual. Just put a message on the screen with the Black Sacrament text instead of triggering vocalizations, or make a ghostly voice version of somebody generic and Lucienlike intoning the exhortation. This detail may all be overkill, but it is cool overkill -- letting the player experience the Sacrament is the key to this. It would be interesting to get some sound and voice and maybe evil lighting into the rite.

 

Don't know about your (B), which is how much people would actually care about this now. In 2012 or 2013, I imagine this would have been a pretty cool mod for people. It would have to be pretty cool to go through the writing and script testing that you would need to go through to make it happen -- some new voice lines with nonoriginal DB characters could make it better or you could stitch some very minimal responses together from an existing DBer. The total complexity of the project is something I would see as pretty darn manageable (prototyping a version without the writing and sound polish would probably just take a couple days or maybe a week if everything necessary was still there as I imagine it), but I have tried to do intricate things in these games and some of them were really time consuming (implementing a Tetris clone and a in-game scripting interface, a maze generator, etc.) to test, so I might not give a realistic normative feasibility estimate.