Punishment Mod?

[illwoo19]

Hey, I am a total newb at this. I am interested in making a mod that punishes the character for (as the wasteland boxedbitch says) stealing, killing livestock, being a bitch. Instead of having people turn hostile, one would be put in the pillory, publicly whipped, made to spend (x)hours in the box, etc.

 

Am I biting off more than I can chew here? How hard would this mod be? Also, I havent seen it but I have been told I am blind: does something similar already exist?

 

thanks

[zippy57]

Hostility in response to actions like stealing is hardcoded. You would have to detect that an NPC had changed from non-hostile to hostile (in other words they're not hostile by default due to faction settings), reverse the faction modifier so they don't immediately go hostile again, StopCombat, and launch your scene at a location in the near vicinity so the player isn't teleported to the other side of the map.

[cold burn]

Unfortunately it does not, sounds like a cool Idea though.easiest implementation would be a quest that removes a point of infamy or something similar and traps your character in the box, might be hard to balance since removal of infamy is a big deal.

[Azothiol]

Hm... if it´s hardcoded, i gues that means it´s difficult to change? But what if a mod simply (?) changed the reaction you get based on infamy. I ones had a misunderstanding with the Legion about the right of sexual self-determination, which gained me quite a bit of infamy with them. Shortly after that, I had Legion assassins attacking me. What if instead of them some Legion dressed goons came after me, who are not members of the Legion to the game, so they are neutral and started a quest, that would reduce infamy with the Legion? Would this be easier? Would not solve the problem with the fight if caught stealing, but if you ran, you could perhaps switch everything back to neutral, if you did the quest.

[sen4mi]

Hm... if it´s hardcoded, i gues that means it´s difficult to change? But what if a mod simply (?) changed the reaction you get based on infamy. I ones had a misunderstanding with the Legion about the right of sexual self-determination, which gained me quite a bit of infamy with them. Shortly after that, I had Legion assassins attacking me. What if instead of them some Legion dressed goons came after me, who are not members of the Legion to the game, so they are neutral and started a quest, that would reduce infamy with the Legion? Would this be easier? Would not solve the problem with the fight if caught stealing, but if you ran, you could perhaps switch everything back to neutral, if you did the quest.

 

I think you are imagining that reputation is a variable and that we can modify the events that alter that variable.

 

However, what we are really speaking of is relationships between factions.  Each faction has a fixed relationship between certain other factions (some are allies, some are enemies and of course there is the faction itself), and for the remaining faction pairings, each faction has a cumulative fame and reputation with each other faction.  And while you can manually modify these there will also be other events happening that will also be modifying these numbers.  For example, if a member of a faction attacks a member of another faction that automatically gives the faction with the attacking member infamy in the victim's faction.  Something similar happens when an item is picked up by a member of a different faction from the owning faction [except if the owning faction has a fixed relationship with the picking up faction, or if the owning faction has the "evil" flag set - then it will not matter that that item was picked up].

 

The player, of course, has a special faction - the PlayerFaction, and members of this faction can take actions that modify the relationship of this faction with other factions.

 

So... if I understand reputation properly... the problem is, you are not "being caught stealing". Instead, you, the only member of the player faction, picked up an item which belonged to a non-evil non-allied faction causing your faction to gain infamy with this other faction. If you are attacked, it's because you are a member of a faction which is infamous in the eyes of the other faction. The idea that you were "caught" seems to be a fantasy we construct in our mind to represent this hostility.

 

Another problem is that the reaction to infamy is itself hardcoded. You either need to prevent hostility from happening (by modifying faction infamy before it goes critical) or you need to stop combat after it starts (which is tricky because, for example, imagine a grenade was thrown, and then combat stops - that grenade will still go off after a short time, and the resulting damage can modify faction infamy... there can be all sorts of cause/effect chains still happening when you stop combat.)

 

So, anyways, for example, the game is not prepared to take you to court where a lawyer would expound on your crimes. Your crimes were not even tracked. Instead, you just have an infamy number that got too big, when compared with your fame.

 

Does this make sense?

 

Zippy and cold burn explained some of the important consequences of this system.