Kneading the Dough

Priority: 

Stage: 

  • Merged

Development Progress: 

100

Merged into: 

Claim Type: 

Description

Latest Rumor - I bought a loaf of bread at The Mother Alessia the other day -- stale as timber. I hear they are only kept afloat by the favorable contracts the Baker's Guild keeps steering their way.

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"The Mother Alessia" is having a hard time making ends meet. Meanwhile competitors are flourishing that, unlike the Mother Alessia, are not part of the Bakers' Guild.

The owners want these non-members to pay guild dues. They need a mercenary (the player) to get them to pay up. There should be a few creative ways of doing this, some taking advantage of Mercantile/Speechcraft. Potential targets are:

*Pinefist Foods
*Gul-Ei's Pantry
*Emaroc Harquart's Baked Goods
*A street vendor selling homemade bread

The player will collect the dues and get to keep a 10 percent portion of the money, possibly more with good Mercantile skill. The player can also lie to the various bakers about the amount they owe to inflate his or her personal profits.

A basic outline with sample dialogue can be found in the original thread, though the claimant should feel free to revise, tweak or deviate from it to their liking.

Also, there should be no references to bread being imported or exported. It's a local everyday commodity.

Note: "The Mother Alessia" is a bakery in Old Ebonheart, as are the potential targets.

Comments

OK, I've (finally) finished

MacBone's picture

OK, I've (finally) finished the first draft of this quest.  Comments, suggestions, and corrections are welcome!  I feel like I have too many journal entries for this one, so any suggestions on streamlining the quest would be greatly appreciated.
 

 

 

this is awesome! a few

Mortimer's picture

this is awesome!
a few changes without digging into grammar
1. you want greeting 5, not greeting 1
2. instead of journal 1-24 you'll want 10-240. You never know when you need to add another quest state.
3. have you considered putting this in game? you've basically done the heavy lifting and we sure could use another quester

Thanks for the feedback,

MacBone's picture

Thanks for the feedback, Mortimer!

So should it be Greeting 5, 6, and 7?

I'll change the journal entry numbers to Journals 10-240 instead.  

I haven't ever added any dialogue in-game.  I certainly can learn how to do it if needed, or I can move on to another quest's dialogue and journal entries.  

we very much need people to

Mortimer's picture

we very much need people to put stuff in game, plus if you know how to implement it you'll get an even better grasp of what needs to be written

as for greetings: http://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/content/guidelines-quests-and-dialogue scroll down, kevaar (I think) wrote a nice guide on what goes where. Generally the ones you use are 5 and 7 only. 1 is used for absolute priority like if they're a scamp or possessed by a demon or something. 

dialogue is surprisingly simple to learn, but i'm sure you'll have questions. me and the rest of the crew are always in discord to help if need be

[Drops bloody knife] There

6plus's picture

[Drops bloody knife]
There you go.

Two notes:

  • this uses the 2017-10-20 version of the OE section file (v.0109)
  • there's a very minor "bug" - in which Emaroc's dialogue slightly changes after the PC returns Emaroc's money (if the player chose the honest option). The dialogue still makes perfect sense though, just letting people know that I'm aware of it and let it sligde on purpose

Quick playtest, well done,

Rot's picture

Quick playtest, well done,

 

 

I quickly fixed the direction

6plus's picture

I quickly fixed the direction and the cut-off choice (cut-off as in 'the rest just not being displayed') in version 2.
Regarding the gloves I figured from the dialogue that, indeed, only Calsia can give you gloves (since it mostly being racism/harassment).

Picking for review

Rot's picture

Picking for review (edited file rev2) done
 

 

Does it need an option to pay yourself?
Going with no. Vanilla lets you do that but that's usually when you have something to gain (guild quests, rank). The only thing you get in this quest is gold so it wouldn't make sense, and those fines are too shady for a do-gooder to feel that need.

Does it need an option to abandon the quest?
By vanilla standards no. By TR standards maybe? dialogue makes it clear that the quest is going to be purely speechcraft/mercantile checks before you take it, but if a new character doesn't have the 55 mercantile to pass that check and gets stuck, 70 gold isn't any incentive for them to come back to the quest later - adding abandon option

Guild Dues
- cleaned vanilla line
- added choice 5 "maybe later" that doesn't refuse quest forever, made the "yes" choice explicitly affirmative instead of maybe
- combined duplicate dialogue with different results - if the only difference between two entries is in the results under added conditions, you can use If() in the results, which also frees up condition slots and lets you avoid yet more duplicates. Left the same conditions but note that letting Journal ... X happen again after it's already been done once is harmless (except quests that SetJournalIndex back and forth) since Journal doesn't repeat the same entry and doesn't change the journal value if it was higher.
- "someone in as humble circumstances as myself" > "someone in circumstances as humble as mine"
- added abandon option, choices 6 7 8, sets global variables to -1

Gul-Ei, etc.
- combined duplicates, same

gloves for baking
- combined duplicates
- changed some plural "septim" to "septims" for consistency with rest

latest rumors
- cleaned OE file lines
- rumor still makes sense during or after the quest, and simply disabling it upsets the balance of probabilities (the next one in line would come up more often). It's best to replace a rumor with another (resulting or innocuous) if it needs to be disabled. Just made it available regardless of quest state for now, something to check later with other OE rumors.

Greeting 5
- cleaned Mainland lines

TR_m3_OE_Kneading
- added 250 for give up
- added questgiver location

general:
- dash - to double --
- removed spaces in "Player -> " out of habit but it works with them
- added Addtopic "" as safety for quest topics
- changed topic "Guild Dues" to "Bakers Guild Dues". teaching that topic would have unlocked a MG quest with manwe (vanilla's fault for not giving her conditions)

 

Thanks 6+ and MacBone!