[LE] Beginner's questions: Modifying a vanilla quest in the Creation Kit

[WhiteWolf424242]

Hello everyone,

 

I have a few questions regarding the Creation Kit and quests. My knowledge currently goes so far that I can create a small "Billy Bob's Great Adventure", namely I followed a great youtube tutorial on the very basics of creating a new quest with placing NPCs, creating dialogues, going through stages, completing objectives, and the necessary small scripts and such.

However, I don't want to create a new quest from scratch, I want to mod a vanilla one, for starters, the DB10 "Death Incarnate" from the Dark Brotherhood questline.

And of course, in the real word a lot of things seem work differently than in the beginner's "Billy Bob" example, so my first question is: how can I find the points where the quest stages propagate, in the vanilla scripts?

To be more precise: I want to fork away from vanilla, and start my own stages from stage 60. So I want to find where the vanilla game propagates the quest to stage 60, so that I can modify it by including a couple of extra filters, and if those are true, then instead of going to vanilla 60, it would go to my 61, which is already my alternate story for this quest.

The problem is, I can't find where this happens. The objective for stage 50 is to "Embrace the Night Mother", but I can't find the script that handles the objective completed part here. Namely: I can't find SetStage(60) call anywhere. How can I find this?

 

(EDIT: I've also looked through Data/Scrips/Source/DB10 (*) .psc scripts, with no luck).

 

 

Here is an even longer explanation with full details of what I want with all of this:

 

 

Summary: I want to create a mod, in which Astrid isn't the one who betrays you, but instead it's Arnbjorn.

Reason: It always bugged me, that you do have dialogue options in the game, where you can be kind to Astrid and agree with her points of view and accept her leadership, or you could also be like "heeeey everyone, mr. Listener's home, bow to meee now! SITHIS!!!" - but in the end it absolutely doesn't matter which approach you take, Astrid always betrays you. I wish to change that.

How: By monitoring the dialogue choices throughout the DB quests, and if you side with Astrid, then by modifying the Death Incarnate quest so that it wasn't Astrid who caused the downfall, she's also just a victim. Choices for the traitor are limited, I think the next best bet is Arnbjorn, out of rage and jealousy. (He still dies in the attack in the same way as in vanilla).

So my stage 61 would enable a normal Astrid instead of the AstridEnd actor, with some dialogues of explaining what happened. She would still accept that her mismanaged leadership was also an indirect cause of this disaster, and she'd still back down and give the leadership to the player, to act as Listener as he/she saw fit. Astrid would be just a regular DB member NPC from then on, and that's how we fork back to the vanilla questline - you continue as normal, but Astrid would also be available as a follower in the Dawnstar Sanctuary. (Having to kill Cicero would be a hard requirement for the alternate story - these two shouldn't meet, as we don't have voiced dialogue for it).

 

 

 

Thank you for your kind help

 

 

 

EDITED (2020.08.08)

If by some miracle someone else finds this topic wondering about the same thing - it's in the Scene Data of the scene where the Night Mother tells you to speak with Astrid, the end fragment sets the stage to 60.

Edited August 8, 2020 by WhiteWolf424242