[PC_q2_Tvy02_Journal] A Noble Debt [Ph.D. in Sorcery][Reviewed]

[Violet]

PC_q2_Tvy02_Journal - A Noble Debt

This is the quest claim for the "A Noble Debt" quest for Thresvy. Quest synopsis:


-Locrus Matimus was a noble in Anvil that flushed his wealth down the drain via gambling (this is from Thresvy's little secret topic). His wife now lives in the North Wall Bakery and Tenements building (Anv_55) and in poverty, while he's out in Thresvy fleeing from debt collection.
-There is a man currently visiting Lady Sigorn's manor, from Anvil. He's a debt collector for The Abecette, and he's looking for Locrus.
-The player can either:

-A. Convince his debtor to forgive the debt. It's been years after all. Doing so will cause Locrus to move back to Anvil. (HIGH DISPOSITION, POSSIBLY A SKILL/ATTRIBUTE CHECK TOO)
-B. Convince Locrus to high-tail it out of Thresvy, doing so will cause a confrontation with the debt collector in Locrus' house, it'll be two on one, though. You'll need to kill the collector to survive and "end" the quest. Letting Locrus get killed also ends the quest and causes the collector to stop being hostile.
-C. Convince Locrus to work at the Abecette to pay off his debts. (HIGH DISPOSITION, POSSIBLY A SKILL/ATTRIBUTE CHECK TOO)
-D. Pay Locrus' debts for him, allowing him to move back into Anvil with his wife. (1000+ Gold)
-E. Kill the debt collector, which will cause Locrus to flee. (HIGH RISK OF GETTING A BOUNTY)

All of these endings essentially allow the player to get a free shack to use as a player home. As such, there is no monetary or item-based reward for completing the quest. Consider a free bed, whatever Locrus had lying around in there, and - depending on the ending - whatever you can get off of either NPC's corpse as the reward.

NPCs you'll need to create:

-(any race or gender) the debt collector.
-Possibly his wife, as I can't find her on the NPC sheet. Should be a Female Pauper and can probably be of any human or elven race. Put her outside the North Wall Bakery and Tenements building (Anv_55) for now, and we'll move her in there when the interior is NPC'd after this quest is merged. If the interior is NPC'd before work on this quest begins, stick her in the interior.

[Ph.D. in Sorcery]

I would like to claim this, please!

[Ph.D. in Sorcery]

Very convoluted update that I could have sworn I posted earlier.

[Ph.D. in Sorcery]

I'm simplifying this a lot. The wife and the bounty hunter add a lot of complexity to what should be a simple quest, so I'll keep them as stretch goals.

[Ph.D. in Sorcery]

Quite close to done here...

[Ph.D. in Sorcery]

Update. I have to head out so I can't write a fuller description.

[Ph.D. in Sorcery]

Minor update to Journal structure before my laptop dies.

[Ph.D. in Sorcery]

Crystallized the journal structure.

[Ph.D. in Sorcery]

More dialogue

[Ph.D. in Sorcery]

Ditto

[Ph.D. in Sorcery]

A bit more

[Ph.D. in Sorcery]

More minor an update than I'd hoped. The topics situation is more tangled than I'd thought.

[Ph.D. in Sorcery]

R4R after two years.
Dialogue is a bit barebones; there are a couple NoLore'd NPCs I'd like to give "my trade" and "Background" responses to, but those can be filled in later. Decidedly nonessential.
I've moved the noble-commoner out of his shack and into Sigorn Lacorius's distillery because the lady is supposed to be his employer. Further, it's a nicer experience when the whole Thresvy portion of this quest is consolidated to the estate.
The debt collector

Spoiler

isn't actually a debt collector but rather a humble merchant who seeks the noble's expertise in the rare metal commodities market. He just looks a bit scary.

Also

Spoiler

I made the noble a master trainer in Speechcraft at the end of the quest. His 100 Speechcraft can certainly be knocked down to 70 or whatever; I don't mean to clog this release up with MTs, but it seemed appropriate for the character and the setting of Anvil.

Also there are a lot of Thresvy dialogue responses filtered using PC_NoLore and using Not Local T_Local_NoLore = 1, both of which seem wrong.
Also, completely random aside, but something I noticed in the CS: mercenaries is a dialogue topic that should have generic non-Morrowind-province dialogue entries written for it, since right now it talks about Great Houses no matter where in Tamriel you are.
Also, I use T_De_Et_Shirt_02 on a Western noble. This will look like a bug if you're looking at IDs alone, but the shirt itself is actually extremely Western-looking and already used on Western nobles in TR. Infragris noticed this back in 2018 (https://discord.com/channels/1328912726 ... 5063944193) and said it should be labeled Com instead of De, but this was never followed up on. I'll make a bug report. (If consensus goes against me, the shirt can essentially losslessly be changed to an extravagant_shirt_02, which it's already a reskin of, but I think this reskin has a certain pizzazz and vibe that the original doesn't match.)
Also, I took the liberty of renaming PC_i2-Anv_Quinterius to Raco Derrissa, as was discussed a few years ago but never implemented. (In the spirit of transparency, the consequence of the discussion a few years ago was that it was up to whoever made the first quest involving PC_i2-Anv_Quinterius; that happens to be me, I think, and I prefer Raco Derrissa to Quinterius, mainly as I think all Imperials added by the mod should have surnames, though I do recognize that the original intent was evidently to have Quinterius be a pseudonym and respect the intent, just disagree.) I didn't re-ID him, though.

You can pay the noble's debt right out of the box if you want to, but this is kind of a joke ending and I didn't really put effort into it. Realistically he just goes back to the Abecette, racks up another debt, and winds up face-down in a river with a knife in his back, but here he just disables after CellChanged and no one ever talks about him again, not even Raco at the Abecette. What you're (heavily) encouraged to do is find someone willing to employ the noble so he can work his debt off gradually. There are two such individuals that you're directed to and one individual who seems like a terrible choice but is actually the best (

Spoiler

the "debt collector", see above

). Decisions abound.

[Denis418]

This dialogue is in the loop

[Denis418]

Playtested the quest. Works pretty good. The dialogue and lore bits are excellent. The former occupant of Nilius Noma's shack should be removed

[KnobelKnight]

Reviewing.

[KnobelKnight]

Ready for merge.

Review notes:

Spoiler

- Re-ID'd quest from PC_q2_Tvy02_Journal to PC_q2_Tvy_NobleDebt
- Re-ID'd PC_q2-Tvy02_TreigoLetter to PC_q2_Tvy_NobleDebt_Letter
- Re-ID'd PC_i2-Anv_Quinterius to PC_i2-Anv_Raco
- Reduced the weight of the letter from Treigo to 0.2 from 1.0
- Moved generic dialogue in "Nito Nesba" topic below specific lines
- Removed unnecessary "PC_NoLore" filters from generic dialogue- this local is no longer used
- Journal update from hearing Zanthus out has been removed- you must now agree to help him in order to start the quest
- Removed the disp loss when asking Zanthus about "business with Nito" at low disp
- You can no longer ask Merania Chaldrava and generic NPCs in the Lacorius Distillery who Nito Nesba is once you've learned his identity
- Added an extra greeting to Zanthus for when you've agreed to help him
- Sigorn Lacorius now tells you staight up who Nito Nesba is at high disp rather than awkwardly punting you across the room
- Adjusted a lot of the disp requirements for dialogue- dropped most, raised a couple
- For several disp checks, added some unique dialogue for when you don't have the required disp to prevent it from falling to generic, sometimes unfitting dialogue
- Added lots of dummy lines of dialogue- on the vanilla engine, when a new topic is added, it doesn't show up in the topic list or link in dialogue unless you had already met the requirements for one of its lines
- Added two new journal entries for when you hear about Nito's potential job opportunies
- A lot of the dialogue Sigorn and Nito had about Zanthus' letter was locked to you having it on you, which resulted in unifitting dialogue if you were to drop it. Changed the item check to a journal and new progression global check
- Per Marhaus' comments, going back to Zanthus should be the hidden path, and finding alternate employment for Nito should be the main path. In practice, it felt like the other way around because Nito never brought up the idea of you finding him a job. To help make this more clear, you can now bring up the possibility as a dialogue choice.
- Gave Sigorn an additional "business with Nito" line when you have the letter but haven't spoken with Nito about it
- Freed up PC_ControlQ on Zanthus by having him lock "bounty hunter" dialogue behind global check instead
- Used PC_ControlQ as an alternate trigger for Zanthus' "business with Nito" dialogue instead of the highly nonstandard disp logic used
- Gave Raco an additional "Nito Nesba" line for when he agrees to let Nito work off the debt
- Removed a duplicate G5 line
- Moved all G5 lines that "do stuff" to G1
- Replaced the Locrus Matimus rumor with one about Zanthus
- Removed the letter from Zanthus- if you pickpocketed it off him before he gave it to you, he could still give you another one
- Removed the housekey from Nilius for the same reason. Added a getdeath check to add it to him if you kill him before he gives it to you
- The letter is now removed when it's shown to Nilius
- MenuMode checks in NPC scripts are generally unnecessary- removed
- Reworked the logic for disabling the post-quest Nito NPC. Before, he disabled the first time you loaded him, even if he should be enabled at that point
- The logic for disabling Nilius post-quest was non-functional- fixed
- "Nilius is dead" journal no longer pops if you kill him after completing the quest
- Replaced GetHealth > 0 checks in some dialogue results with GetDeadCount checks
- Gave Zanthus an extra "business with Nito" post-quest line to prevent incorrect dialogue
- Fixed a broken positioncell in the Millona ending due to a cell name changing
- Cleaned out G7 and "little secret"- both were unused
- Added two "background" lines to Nilius- one before learning his identity, one after- and a "my trade" for before you learn his identity
- Added a "background" line for Nito, and "my trade" lines for each of his potential jobs
- Zanthus didn't have idle anims after being positioncelled- fixed
- The "paying off Nito's debt" path didn't work at all- the dialogue choice pointed to a line that did not exist, and so it just resulted in a loop. I implemented this by having him give you the normal rewards and then winding up dead in the Garden Quarters sewers. No knife in the back- sadly couldn't be done due to being unable to control the death anim
- Added addtopics throughout the dialogue
- Replaced a bunch of double quotes in dialogue with single quotes
- Added a "Raco Derrissa" topic so it's a bit easier to find him in the Abecette
- Deleted Locrus Matimus and his house, since they were replaced by Nilius and his shack
- Added NPC markers for the locations where Nito and Zanthus can wind up
- Slightly adjusted the positioncell location of Nito to the Abecette to avoid conflicts with Millona KoA Q7
- Updated the ownership of items throughout the Abecette to point to Raco instead of the deprecated Quinterius NPC
- Replaced the "Seryn's Blessing" spell on Zanthus with the Rga equivalent

Dialogue changes: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

[Taniquetil]

Merged by Silvone into Cyr_Main