q3-4-Mis

[Haplo]

Claim type: Quest
Claim ID: TR_q3-4-Mis (#2578)
Faction: Misc
Parent claim: TR_3-1-Ind (#105)
Claimed by: rot
Status: Approved (Progress: 100%)
Location: 1:(4273, -3855):0
Files: TR_q3-4-Mis_rot_4.esp

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Kiseen, a smuggler posed as a trader in Bosmora, is being blackmailed by a group of fellow smugglers in Sassur-Dari Iron Mine. He asks you to get them off his back, somehow. The claimant is welcome to think of a more creative solution besides simply going to the mine and killing them.

Relevant latest rumors:

“I've heard rumors of Kiseen being involved with some 'shady dealings'. I wouldn't trust that Khajiit, anyways. He's often caused trouble around Bosmora.â€Â￾

“Did you know there used to be an iron mine by the river to west of Bosmora? Well, some new folks have been coming into town saying they're iron miners and that they've struck a new vein there. But that old cave hasn't been used for at least two dozen years. Something's fishy about it, if you ask me.â€Â￾

[Why]

Build the quest in a new .esp, with the latest M3A8 file loaded alongside it. The NPC'd exterior can be found in this thread:

http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/old_forum/viewtopic.php?t=21208

Be sure to visit the last pages of that thread for the latest version of M3A8!

Yay, I managed to figure out how to attribute designs to people!

[rot]

Are the smugglers to stay agressive?
If so how about magically sealing the door as an option. (Lock spell)

[arvisrend]

Remove their aggressivity if it helps your plot. You'll have to be a bit creative with their "Background" responses, however, as they obviously won't be like "I follow the trade of Random Smuggler in a Cave".

[Why]

Grant! What arvis said.

Sealing the door seems fun. I'm a bit concerned about the fact that the lock spell was unavailable in vanilla though - it's got a lot of potential for exploiting bad AI and stuff. But feel free to experiment.

[rot]

Could give the player a scroll to use but that doesn't make loads of sense. So pretty much straight from description with some forcegreet dialogue added to the smuggler at the entrance, options:
- intimidate if the player is high level
(level > 30)
- speechcraft bluff, available if the player got the "latest rumor" on the mine or asked another NPC about the place. Didn't put any journal info on that.
(speechcraft skill > 30)
- kill them

I get the feeling nothing should be done to the NPC, but maybe the player can rat him off and have the guards confiscate the smuggling goods under his stall?

Quest is functional if anyone's up to test it.
... and to check the dialogue, naming conventions & stuff.

[rot]

re:chat: added slaves.

Is the slavepen under the stairs ok? If not I can't do it in the esp, it'd require editing refs in the mine as there's not much free space.

[Yeti]

Does there need to be slaves here? Smugglers can smuggle plenty of other things besides slaves. Also, Kiseen's dialogue refers to him being a former slave, so why would he be involved with slavers?

[rot]

That's because of the iron mine "cover story" - when you look at the interior it'd turn out to be true; it's got iron nodes, some amount of iron, the NPCs have picks, one even is a Miner.
So we decided the smugglers weren't doing the mining themselves and kept slaves for that. I dunno whether ex/slaves would feel less strongly about slaves of other races, but made them only Argonians so it wouldn't feel too weird - one of the smugglers also is a khajiit.

[Yeti]

I don't remember ever planning on having the smugglers actually mining the cave. The mine is supposed to be dry and they're just using it as a conveniant hideout. But I'm fine with the change if you think it adds something to the story.

[rot]

I thought as much from the rumor & quest design, that's just how the interior is in the M3A8 esp - the slaves don't do much in the story, but they're more practical than redesigning the mine. And a "latest rumor" can be slightly subverted for a change~

Out of reasonable ideas on this, so I'm done for now. Notes:

- I gave 2x ebony as a quest reward

- I modified the resultbox of this "latest rumors" - in case that can cause any problems?
“Did you know there used to be an iron mine by the river to west of Bosmora? Well, some new folks have been coming into town saying they're iron miners and that they've struck a new vein there. But that old cave hasn't been used for at least two dozen years. Something's fishy about it, if you ask me.â€Â￾

- need to remove the "miner's pick" from these NPCs, (see reasons above)
TR_m3_O_Sadas
TR_m3_O_Docien
TR_m3_O_Serer <- perhaps also change his class to smuggler instead of miner and give him equipment

- there's no option for the player to report Kiseen instead of helping/ignoring him, so as not to interfere with other quests,
you might want to add conditions to his greetings containing "help Kiseen", to at least make his quest unavailable to Indoril faction members

[Yeti]

you might want to add conditions to his greetings containing "help Kiseen", to at least make his quest unavailable to Indoril faction members

There's nothing to stop a player who is part of House Indoril from doing Thieves Guild quests, so I don't see any reason why we'd need to stop an Indoril player from helping a smuggler.

[rot]

Right, forgot vanilla logic still applies,

And the smuggled merch showing under the stall is so obvious I guess the guards must already know and not care. Though I would've liked to do something to avoid that situation where the player gets arrested for stealing the Khajiit's skooma...

[arvisrend]

And the smuggled merch showing under the stall is so obvious I guess the guards must already know and not care. Though I would've liked to do something to avoid that situation where the player gets arrested for stealing the Khajiit's skooma...

Merge instructions: make the skooma free-to-take.

[rot]

That's a lot of free skooma - guess there aren't any merchants who accept it on the Mainland anyway? (only khajiit traders afaik)

There are also some ebony ore and dwemer weapons there, but I don't know how illegal these are supposed to be, and they probably require telekinesis to be picked up.

[rot]

File _4.esp makes one small modification - if the player "completes" the quest by talking to the smuggler and then immediately kills him, it's not considered as complete as he realistically didn't relay the info/orders to the other smugglers.
Up to you to decide whether that's too much-

[Why]

Given the 100% status here I'm moving this to q:reviewing, it's time we brought some structure back to this process! :D

[arvisrend]

TESAME: Clean

Fits exterior: Yes



Northmarker set: Yes
Loading errors: No



Review: Very well-done. I can't give 100% certainty about the quality of the dialogue, but I don't see any issues with it.

Rewrote some journal entries for style. Set Docien's AI Hello to 0. Improved rotation of bowls. "abandonned" corrected to "abandoned"; are you French? "to west of Bosmora" corrected to "to the west of Bosmora".

You gave Khajiit a choice of Choice "[Accept]" 1 "[Refuse]" 2 where other races got Choice "Why don't you report it to the guards?" 3 "I will help." 1 "I can't help you." 2. I assume it was a bug and replaced the former with a mild variation of the latter.

Forcegreetings should be Greeting 1! Wasn't it you who found that bug in the Mainland? Also, try inserting your dialogue not at the end or the start of the list, but somewhere in the middle; this avoids certain issues. Fixed in my version.

Removed a couple useless variables from smugglers.

Comments

Rating

[Stryker]

Greeting 1
- "Come for ash yam? Kiseen has nothing else to trade. Kiseen is in trouble, and noone in Bosmora will help Kiseen!"
- "It has been abandoned for many years, and noone's been interested in what little iron was left to mine."
Changed to no one['s].

help Kiseen
- "You have cleared the Iron Mine of bad people? Kiseen is grateful."
Small error, I believe. Iron Mine is not the actual name of the mine, so I uncapitalized it.

Journal
- "Kiseen thanked me for getting him rid of the blackmailers."
Removed 'him' for the sake of awkwardness.
- "Kiseen, a Khajiit trader in Bosmora, was being blackmailed by the smugglers in Sassur-Darit. He thanked me for having cleared the iron mine"
Removed the 't'.

Overall a good job!

[arvisrend]

Same problem as with the other one you reviewed, Stryker: the references to the M3A8 claim have been lost, so dialogue lost conditions. Anyway, your edits took me a whole 2 minutes to restore, so no problem.

This is a merge-ready version (merge to M3A8); once again, well-done, rot. Thanks for the review, Stryker!

Merge instructions:

- Possibly condition the "latest rumors" rumor so that it doesn't get repeated after the quest is done. Only important if there are other quests in Bosmora that use rumors in a nontrivial way.

- Check that the "latest rumors" rumor is in the right place (among the Bosmora rumors, and not dominating other random rumors that have lesser numbers). That's important due to its random condition.

- need to remove the "miner's pick" from these NPCs, (see reasons above)
TR_m3_O_Sadas
TR_m3_O_Docien
TR_m3_O_Serer <- perhaps also change his class to smuggler instead of miner and give him equipment.

- Check whether Kiseen doesn't have way too much smuggled merch under his counter. If so, remove some of it. Possibly un-own it, given that Kiseen isn't much on friendly terms with guards?

[Why]

Finished, to be merged later.

[Haplo]

I have the error "Cell "Bosmora" not found for dialogue type Topic Info "EMPTY" when loading this in the CS. Four times, approximately.

I checked the dialogue of this one and it is okay. However, I'd like for quest modders to try to avoid beginning sentences with "But" or "Or" or "And" so much. They can get the same effect without ignoring that grammar rule without too much effort.

Also, if a Global Moderator/Head of Department approves a file and proclaims it Finished, please upload your latest fixed file to the top of the claim where the rest of the WIP files are, so we can avoid having files uploaded in multiple places (within the claim structure versus outside the claim structure just floating around in various posts). Thanks!

And nice work, rot!

[arvisrend]

Looks like you've made the same mistake as Stryker and forgot to load the file alongside the M3A8 one (which should be called TR_Map_3_Detailing_A8.esp).

I checked the dialogue of this one and it is okay. However, I'd like for quest modders to try to avoid beginning sentences with "But" or "Or" or "And" so much. They can get the same effect without ignoring that grammar rule without too much effort.

[url=http://www.dailywritingtips.com/can-you-start-sentences-with-%E2%80%9Cand%E2%80%9D-and-%E2%80%9Cbut%E2%80%9D/]I don't think that's an actual grammar rule[/url]. Too many of these in a row sound somewhat cheesy, but the alternatives often sound somewhat formal instead.

Also, if a Global Moderator/Head of Department approves a file and proclaims it Finished, please upload your latest fixed file to the top of the claim where the rest of the WIP files are, so we can avoid having files uploaded in multiple places (within the claim structure versus outside the claim structure just floating around in various posts). Thanks!

In Quests, I don't think we proclaim claims Finished until they're merged, do we?

[Why]

..in that case, I'll move it back to reviewing! Yay!

[Haplo]

[url=http://www.dailywritingtips.com/can-you-start-sentences-with-%E2%80%9Cand%E2%80%9D-and-%E2%80%9Cbut%E2%80%9D/]I don't think that's an actual grammar rule[/url]. Too many of these in a row sound somewhat cheesy, but the alternatives often sound somewhat formal instead.

That's not actually a rule kind of like "irregardless" is a word because people use it all the time. AKA pandering to the lowest common denominator because its easier than maintaining worthwhile standards. Also, the alternatives don't have to be used to begin sentences; you can simply change a period to a comma, semicolon, ellipsis, etc. I don't think we need to eliminate it completely from TR, because this IS dialogue and not literature, as Why pointed out earlier, yet I've seen a large number of sentences starting with "Or"/"And"/"But" just from these three claims I've checked out"

In Quests, I don't think we proclaim claims Finished until they're merged, do we?

Back when I was the one merging quests into TR_Mainland, that's how I handled it. No real reason though; just so that I could tell which ones were Finished. But that is something different than from what I'm talking about. What I mean is, when a decision is made that a claim is Finished/Ready for Merge (same thing, in this instance), whoever makes that decision should upload the latest file to the top of the claim rather than adding it as an attachment to a post.

[rot]

I also believe that's an issue of style and pacing, only disguised as a grammar rule to make it easy to teach (another facet of low standards - though unlike "irregardless" this is actually used by people who aren't idiots); but I understand what you mean and agree that it's often unnecessary, so I'll try to avoid it-

[arvisrend]

Merged into m3a8 file and executed the merge instructions.