Help regarding different sentences for global rumors

[dfar8090]

Hi everyone. First post here.

Fairly recently I decided to see what could be done with the TES3 Construction Set. I've been making small edits to dialogue so far, mostly correcting things like spelling and quest directions. But the other day I decided to try changing dialogue based on character modifiers - class, rank, race and gender. One of the more jarring aspects of Morrowind dialogue was the transition between race specific dialect and common topics, which most NPCs reused. A Khajiit would go from speaking in third person to giving the same advice and in the exact same manner the Imperial next door would - in first person, etc.

I've searched and noticed there are already some mods that do this, and some have been quite well received by the community, but I'd still like to try my hand at this. Yet, even after reading some documentation, I can't seem to achieve the kind of effect I want.

As an example, I'm trying to edit Ra'Virr's speech so that while he talks about the same rumors and topics as other NPCs, he will speak in his own way - but also maintaining the ability for the game to register his different speech as eligible to create a Journal entry (so if I ask him about current rumors and he talks about Larrius Varro trying to take down corruption, it should update my journal the same way as if I had spoken to some other NPC about the same rumor).

A quick step by step of what I'm doing:

Character > Dialogue > Topic: latest rumors
New Entry in Info/Response
Insert custom text about Larrius Varro fighting corruption
Speaker Condition:
Ra'Virr (because I want this NPC to have a specific response), Disposition 30
Function/Variable: Not Local, No Lore, 0 (the same definitions as the original rumor)
Cell: None (because this leads me to believe he would need to be in a specific cell to offer this response, and I'm not entirely sure of what would happen if a player used Command Humanoid and took him elsewhere)
Result: ; balmora; Journal town_balmora 5 (the same definitions as the original rumor)

But it seems regardless of the filters I place, I cannot achieve this. The new text itself doesn't even appear when asking him about latest rumors. Would anyone be kind enough to tell me what I am doing wrong? Is it not specifying a cell or something else? For reference, I'm using the latest official OpenMW build, the original Construction Set (so the output is an *.ESP file), and only the official mods (Tribunal, Bloodmoon and Bethesda's plugins except Entertainers).

Thanks in advance!

[abot]

; balmora; Journal town_balmora 5
will not work if you write everything in the same line, ; means "anything from here to the end of the line is a comment", it needs to be:
; balmora;
Journal town_balmora 5

if you placed your new dialog line right before the original one, there are other random lines before that could trigger instead, try placing your line before the "People don't realize how deeply the Dark Elves resent the Occupation" one

try your mod with only the 3 master loaded, this way you should be sure it's not a (rare, but not impossible) dialogue id conflict with the other mods

Edited September 14, 2020 by abot

[dfar8090]

Hi abot, thanks for the reply!

You're right about the ; balmora; Journal town_balmora 5, of course. I actually have it in two separate lines, but I formatted the post here the wrong way.

However, I think I realized the problem... Kind of. I left only the three main ESM files: Morrowind, Tribunal and Bloodmoon. The problem persisted, so I deactived the expansions and played only the main game. The rumors now appear. Apparently the expansions override the rumors if the plugin did not use them as parent masters.

So I went and redid the changes, using MW, TR and BM as parent masters and it now works. One of the rumors doesn't appear though, but it's not really a necessary one for the merchant. I'm wondering if I'll bump into issues later if/when I decide to rework Tribunal or Bloodmoon rumors... Solstheim in particular becomes a recurring "latest rumor" for just about everyone, so we'll see.

Thank you once again :)