Raiders

[arkanae]

The Raiders in Fo4 seem to be a very under-used faction for quests. However, I believe they have similar or greater potential than the Fiends in FoNV when it comes to sex quests, and are associated with some great locations too. Some of the Tryout Fiends quests where some of the most original in New Vegas, and the same could happen in Fo4 if we are careful to maintain some structure and consistency.

 

 

Since we don't have Fo4 mod support yet, and it will probably take several months after this happens until we have a working set of frameworks, the best quest modders can do for now is to lay out story scripts. I started this thread to collect ideas about the raiders and potential quests, radiant quests, and PC / NPC / Raiders interaction.

 

 

Raider lore, culture and behavior is underpinned in Fo4 by a single basic mechanism: might makes right. Therefore, one simple method that could be used to structure Raider interactions and quests is to keep track of a two separate scores about the player (and potentially named characters): fear and might.

 

Both would start neutral (zero) and would evolve depending on player actions. Depending on the combination of scores, Raiders would react differently (and open new quest venues) to the PC and NPCs. This would help keep some consistency and lore awareness in quests, without constraining the individual quest ideas and script.

 

Fear would increase upon boisterous and intimidating actions and taking the violent way out of quests, and decrease upon meek, conciliating and submissive actions.

 

Might would increase with strength, armament, successful kills, and decrease with failures, defeats, running away from fights and being hurt.

 

High might and neutral fear would open up "leader" type quests, possibly culminating in the unification of all Raider factions.

High might and high fear would open up cruelty, slavery and "laying the land to waste" type of quests, as well as making Raiders be subservient and cowering.

Low might and high fear would lead to "crazy which" quests, and Raiders reacting with defiance and hostility.

Low might and low fear would open up Raider whoring, and ultimately PN and NPC slavery at their hand.

 

[Elgate]

As much as I love the idea, this seems quite counter intuitive to me. The good point about the fiend was the fact that you could find them almost only in vault 3, making them less likely to break the game. Raider can be found everywhere (I don't mean by that you find a lot, but you find a few often) making it hard to implement.

 

According to what you say, the more kills you get, the more might you get and the more you run away, you more might you lose. Removing an opponent from the available targets may make it a bit harder, especially if other mods appears, removing more and more opponent, like the ability to sell your body. It would mean you'd have to be much more careful in your mod selection, or you'd have to create a load of patches to makes mods run together.

 

For fear, there are not much way to "chose" intimidation or meek solution without charisma check. Without charisma, you'd be locked in the predefined choice the game give you, meaning you can't "control" your fear.

 

I think another solution might be to go for another faction, like the minutemen and corrupt them. Turn Preston in a mighty slaver, with a single simple questline, revealing his dark true self. once he become the Master slaver, he makes you his "general" (A.K.A. 1st bitch), and start taking the settlement by force. Conquer settlements, enslave with collar or other devices and protect your "slave dens" from others factions trying to steal your slaves.

Remove the normal arrival of settler and go catch lost settler in the commonwealth, or turn raider/gunner into your new slave (or send other slavers do it for you). The more you do it yourself, the higher your might, allowing you to control other slaver easily, and eventually overthrow Preston. The more you send other do your job, the less mighty you'll be perceived, and other slaver will start to laugh at you or use you and the more preston will humiliate you.

The stronger (high fear) you become, the less likely your settlement are to be attacked, the weaker (low fear) you are the more likely your settlement will be attacked.

 

I think the minutemen would be better, allow for easier access to settlement, doesn't remove any hostile human faction and less likely to break quest since you won't be asked to "go kill that [random enemy]" that just happen to be a friend of yours.

 

Conclusion, I like the idea of controlling a faction (or being controlled by) but I think the raider are a bad choice. The best choice to me are the minutemen, my second choice would be the "forged", and my 3rd faction would be the railroad (who want to reprogram freed synth into sex-slave? Note: I did not look into the railroad faction yet, the only thing I know about them was that they wanted to free the synth)

 

I hope i've explained myself well and I'd love to see more about your idea and see what can be made of it.

[arkanae]

You are right that the raiders are everywhere. However, they do not behave as a single group or faction like the others, and are related to fewer quests. It would be relatively easy to just isolate a few encampments, and only make this type of interactions work with those.

 

This would require creating a few custom factions for those camps, but seems safer to me than involving (and potentially breaking) factions heavily involved in quests.

 

Furthermore, all the other factions the player interacts with have their own precise objectives, and are rigidly organized. The unifying leader line would clearly be out of context with the Institute or the Brotherhood. The slave one would be out of context with the Minutemen or the Brotherhood. And the most extreme slavery or cruelty lines would be clashing with the lore for all of those.

 

I do agree that a slave line would work relatively well with the Institute, however. An interesting idea to pursue.

 

 

Regarding the balancing of might, the mightier you would get the fewer opponents you will find among the raiders, and vice-versa (this can be tied to tweaks about raiders numbers in camps). This results in might being harder to acquire as you increase, and easier to get as it decreases, making it self-balancing.

 

Fear would obviously require the existence of a Defeat or Tryout type of framework to really be adjustable. The existing mechanisms in Fo4 don't give you much of an opportunity to loose a battle without being killed anyways, so this would be necessary for any slavery quest to work in a lore-friendly way. However, it would also be self-balancing: the higher the fear, the higher the hostility from Raiders, the more chances of being overwhelmed or having to submit, and the harder it would be to increase fear. It works also the other way around.

[Elgate]

I quite didn't understand it like that the first time, but I see a bit better now. I still don't like the idea of using the raider, even if we were to create more factions. With skyrim modding, I often end with faction corrupted by other mods, or other weird things happening, needing a lot of tweak.It would mean to replace a old group of raider with a new faction, causing some trouble with the relations. Would be pretty bothersome to be excluded of all city because the guards shoot on sight the raider that is following you.

 

To keep the raider as the base faction, I think it could be better to instead create new raider spots, at previously empty location. Or maybe add those new raider faction(s) to your settlements, you'd get the best of both world: The setllement system, the raider theme and the usual raiders would be untouched, less likely to ruin quest. And it's also easier to implement (I think) since you actually don't change any existing faction, making it less susceptible to conflict with other mods.

 

Edit: For the new raider spot, there are a few places on the edges on the map that are pretty empty, or you could even have those faction come in action after a quest clean the place (vault 111 is empty after the beginning, so is vault 114, the bridge on top of graygarden, the swamp to the south or even deeper in the sea, ...)

[NismoMan]

Heck, if the Creation Kit is out, we might as well create a new faction that deals with slavery or other intricate quest-like interactions rather than play around with the existing ones and risk breaking things with quests and factions. let "defeat" like mods deal the with the existing factions and then get sold to the "newly" developed slavers faction

 

There would definitely be alternative-solutions mods where you can get things done by offering your body (which would eventually require charisma, I assume )

[Elgate]

exactly my point. a new faction that ressemble the raider but that is not. I just found out that the new Add-on added a new faction though, the rusted at fort haggard array. I'm afraid that adding new faction before all DLC are done may cause trouble with those said DLC once they come.

[Clegane]

Another fine idea.

[zayaid]

it would be great if raider can raid your settlement and enslave them

you can make a deal with them or attack to conquer those settlement again

 

but as slaver

[pihwht]

Before the player starts killing them, named raider leaders know and interact with each other. Near College Station, raiders had set up a system of tolls before the ghouls you meet attacking Danse wiped them out. The Combat was a neutral entertainment zone for raiders: Cait points out that more will drift in when Tommy claims to have been put out of business. We find notes raiders have written to and about other raiders. We find raiders mourning the death of raiders and hear cries of anguish when we kill raiders. Many of our encounters with them involve our invading their territories. Once we wipe them out, there are lots of signs of "primitive' settlement building.

 

It seems to me that there is a lot going on with raiders and gunners what we don't understand, but which could tie into some very nice mods.

 

What's with the references to prisoners at Quincy? Even the Super Mutants sometimes take prisoners they don't eat immediately.