How Oblivion engine deals with NPC leveled equipment

I spent a night making some experiment to find out how Oblivion engine deals with levelled item lists for NPCs equipment.

I asked some expert modders, and all answered the same “ It’s based on player level”.

Howewer, I always had many doubts about this, because I realized many balance mods which introduce maximum levels on NPCs, but don’t touch levelled item lists, actually are also limiting NPCs equipment. I never found a confirmation of the common sentence “Use G_S Loot Mod unless you’ll find lvl 1 bandits in daedric equipment”.

So I made some test. I point out in advance that I used Wrye Bash to import NPCs levels into save games.

Here’s what I performed

Player level=31

- First, I started a Vanilla Oblivion session and, using my lvl 31 character, I fought a group of marauders. They where all lvl 28/29, and carried a mixture of daedric/ebony/orcish stuff.

- Then I put a -21 offset to Marauders throught CS and made the same. Now they were all lvl 10 and carried a mixture of dwarven/steel/iron.

- This time I introduced a maximum level of 10, without changing offset. Same result: lvl 10 marauders with dwarven/steel/iron stuff.

Player level=10

- Then I started a Vanilla Oblivion session with a lvl 10 character. I found lvl 7/8 marauders wearing dwarven/steel/iron.

- I put a +20 offset through the CS. I found lvl 30 marauders in dwarven/steel/iron.

- I introduced a minimum lvl of 30, and I encountered lvl 30 marauders in dwarven/steel/iron.

From this experiments, it’s clearly evident that NPCs levelled items are based on minimum value between player level and NPC level, rather than player level only.

So if your player level is 15:

A level 5 NPCs will have level 5 equipment

A level 25 NPCs will have level 15 equipment

Comments

I have also verified your results, Blade. The NPC offset max is applied correctly when calculating the gear an NPC will have. A lowly bandit with a Lvl-6 max offset will never get any high-level gear no matter how powerful the player is. What does not work correctly are level minimums. If a lvl-5 player meets an enemy who has a lvl-15 min offset, then the enemy will have lvl-5 gear rather than the lvl-15 gear he should have. This is really too bad because it makes it a lot trickier to design boss-type characters who level correctly along with the player (you have to create special gear lists for them to match their min settings). --Dev akm 01:03, 6 February 2007 (EST)

I however have found that this might not be entirely correct. I started playing the game and instantly understood that most of the NPC's equipment was leveled. So I restarted my character and simply never slept. Actually I did once for the dark brotherhood. Anyway, most of the types of NPC's were those that you would encounter around level 1; however there were many places including in the plane of Oblivion that I found NPC's with weapons covering every range, including deadric. Of course this is absolutely the easiest way to beat the game especially as a dark elf with the ring from the vendor quest in the Imperial City. Since then I have played another character that I have leveled and noticed a couple of things due to the fact that some of the NPC's that I encountered at a level 1 still had a wide range of equipment (better and/or worse then before.) 1) I did play the level 1 character for a really long time. 2) Though I did not sleep to gain levels I still received skill increases higher then my leveled character. 3) Though the NPC's did have great gear they were easily killed.

So this brings me to 3 choices either there is a time dependence in some instances, a skill dependence or the simplest answer is that the NPC's have a geographical gear tiers or quest depth tiers that affect only the gear and not their level.

--Physicsking 18:27, 23 May 2007 (EST)

Perhaps there's been a little misunderstanding. The rule described in this topic explains how game engine calculates the level number to apply to a particular levelled list. Of course, a particular NPC can have a levelled equipment which allows daedric stuff to be available also at lower levels, it's only a matter of choice. Actually I don't know if preventing level advancement by avoid resting could have some side effect on the levelled lists. --Blade9722 16:13, 29 June 2007 (EDT)

References

• Leveled Item