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.
Rather than creating a new NPC like was done in the Quest Tutorial, I chose to take an existing MGMageScholar NPC and duplicate her since I am going to be dropping her into The Arcane University in the Imperial City. I did the same things for the NPC that I did with the key, 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 (and be evaluated) throughout the quest. This is where the real differences between this tutorial and the Quest Tutorial begin.
Note:
- The first thing to be aware of is that Quest Conditions are 2nd party to the Player and first party to the Actors involved in the quest. What this means is that any time you are running conditions dealing with the Player or objects the Player possesses (which we will be doing with the key), the Run On Target box needs to be checked. Anything that runs on an Actor involved in the quest (such as Topics for the Actor) does not have the Run on Target box checked.
For the Quest Conditions on the Quest Data tab I chose the following two conditions:
| Target | Function Name | Function Info | Comp | Value | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| yes | GetItemCount | Key: 'ShadowfallManorKey' | == | 1.00 | AND |
| yes | GetIsID | NPC: 'Player' | == | 1.00 | AND |
When setting up these conditions, I clicked on the Function Parameter button that said INVALID for each of these conditions and then chose the appropriate item (ShadowfallManorKey or Player) and set the appropriate Value (in this case 1.00) for my conditions. These conditions must always be met in order for anything set up in the quest to actually happen.
Lastly, I wrote a startup script for the quest which consisted of:
Scriptname ShadowMagesSCRIPT
short Key
Begin GameMode
If Key == 0 && GetStage ShadowMages == 0 && Player.GetItemCount ShadowfallManorKey == 1
SetStage ShadowMages 10
Set Key to 1
EndIf
End
As you can see from the script above, the key that is going to be the kickoff point that activates this Quest. That leaves the only other thing that needs to be done on this page for this quest is to choose an icon for the quest by clicking on the Add Icon Image button (doing it this way requires the quest icons to be pulled out of the BSA file or the creation of a new icon).
Quest Stages
Again, I am going to go with Bethesda's standard for the Index on the Quest Stages tab which is to use units of 10 for each stage. Right-click in the Index box and then click New to add the stages. For now all we need are 10 and 20. Once you create the particular stage, you want to then right-click in the Quest Stage Items section in the top box and again click on New to create a new log entry. Then click on the Log Entry window and type in what you want to appear for the log entry for that stage in your quest windows in the game. For the 10 stage, add AddTopic SCKey in the Result Script box so that when we have the key and the quest starts, we can immediately go and talk to the NPC about the quest.
Topics
Now it is time to set up some topics for the NPC we created earlier. Since I duplicated an NPC rather than creating a new one, my NPC already has a GREETING and a Rumors incorporated into it. Due to this, on the Topics tab, we are only going to create 5 topics consisting of:
- SCJagarTharn
- SCKey
- SCNo
- SCShadowMages
- SCYes
We will start by right-clicking on the EditorID portion of the Topics tab and then clicking on Add Topic to open the Select Topic window. Then right-click in the Select Topic window and click New to create a new topic. Once the topic is made, click OK to add it to the EditorID box. At this point, we can change the Topic Text for each of these items to what we want to appear as a choice in the dialogue that is displayed to the player. Then in the Info window right-click and click on New to open the New Response window, type in the response text, choose an Emotion and its Emotion Value, and then click the OK button.
My items consist of:
| EditorID | Topic Text | Info/Response Details | Emotion | Result Scripts | Add Topics | Choices |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SCJagarTharn | Jagar Tharn | Jagar Tharn was the Imperial Battlemage that imprisoned Uriel Septim VII in an attempt to usurp the Imperial Throne of Tamriel for himself.
He lost the key when battling the Shadow Mages. |
Anger (90) | None | SCShadowMages | None |
| SCKey | I found this key... | Oh! You found the key that Jagar Tharn lost! | Surprise (50) | None | None | SCYes, SCNo |
| SCNo | I lied, I didnt find any key. | Suit yourself. Although it won't do you any good to have it and know not what it is. | Disgust (80) | None | None | None |
| SCShadowMages | The Shadow Mages | There is little that I can tell you of the Shadow Mages, other than that they all disappeared when Jagar Tharn usurped the Imperial Throne. | Neutral (60) | None | None | None |
| SCShadowMages | The Shadow Mages | The only thing I can say for sure is that the last openly known Shadow Mage, Fasriel, headed north towards Skyrim. | Sad (50) | SetStage ShadowMages 20 | None | None |
| SCYes | Yes, I found this key in a well. | It is widely believed that his desire to obtain that key was one of the reasons that Jagar Tharn killed his apprentice in the first place. | Anger (90) | None | SCJagarTharn | None |
Each of the above items also has a condition consisting of:
| Target | Function Name | Function Info | Comp | Value | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| no | GetIsID | NPC: 'SCMageScholar' | == | 1.00 | AND |
Some additional items that didn't really fit in the table but should be noted are the check boxes on the Topics tab. In the SCNo topic, I checked the Goodbye choice so that choosing that topic automatically ends the conversation with the NPC. The other thing to note is that there are two SCShadowMages topics because there are two seperate Info/Responses that appear under that topic. The top one has a check in the Info Refusal choice and has an additional condition of:
| Target | Function Name | Function Info | Comp | Value | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| no | GetDisposition | [ TARGET ] | < | 75.00 | AND |
The other SCShadowMages topic has an additional condition of:
| Target | Function Name | Function Info | Comp | Value | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| no | GetDisposition | [ TARGET ] | >= | 75.00 | AND |
This is so that the NPC will only give the Player the direction that the last known Shadow Mage went if she likes the Player. The Info Refusal being checked results in the SCShadowMages topic staying gold until the NPC likes the Player enough to tell the rest of the information about the last known Shadow Mage.
(*to be continued*)