Advanced Quest Tutorial
This tutorial is designed to pick up and add onto where the Quest Tutorial left off. It will also provide some alternative ideas and values compared to those used in the first Quest Tutorial. It should also be noted that this tutorial will assume that the individual already has the skills needed to duplicate items, create worldspaces, and exteriors without causing unnecessary changes to existing objects already in Oblivion.
Decide on your Quest
A quest idea should be approached as a logical progression of occurences in a story line. A haphazard approach will at best be semi-entertaining and at worst be boring or confusing to the player. For purposes of this tutorial, I am going to use part of a quest I wrote involving a mysterious group of mages that disappeared when the Imperial Battlemage, Jagar Tharn, usurped the throne from the Emperor, Uriel Septim VII.
Creating the props for your Quest
Our first step is going to be the creation of the physical items involved in the quest which consist of:
- A key which will open a door
- An NPC to give us information leading us on the quest
I chose a random key and edited the ID. When you close the box for the key it will ask "Create a new form?" at which point I clicked "Yes" to create a new instance of a key that I can alter however I wish without altering some other object in the game. Next, I edited the new form of the key that I just made and checked the Quest Item box, gave it a new Name, and then closed the box again. We now have a key to use in the quest.
I did the same things for the NPC, with the exception that when I opened up the new form of the NPC, I also changed the facial characteristics of the NPC to create an NPC that didn't look like a clone of the original one. Additionally, since the NPC is not going to be a quest item, I did not check the Quest Item box on the NPC.
Creating your Quest
Next on our list is creating a new quest. Open up the Quest window and right-click in the EditorID section of the window, then click New. A box will pop up with the title New Form Editor ID. This is where you are going to create a new instance of a quest, which in my case was ShadowMages. When you hit Enter, it takes you right to your new quest and shows you the Quest Data tab.
The Quest Data tab has items that we need to make some changes to. The first change I made was putting The Shadow Mages in the Quest Name box. However, my next change is a departure from the original Quest Tutorial. Instead of setting the Priority to 100, I chose to stick to Bethesda's Dialogue Priorities that can be found on the Quest Data Tab page and set Priority to 50. The other changes I made were checking the Start Game Enabled box and setting conditions that will remain constant throughout the quest. This is where the real differences between this tutorial and the Quest Tutorial begin.