Quest Dialogue Writers Wanted!

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Kevaar's picture
Kevaar
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Thought I might as well get this announced in a more visible place.

So! We now have some CS implementers that are good at creating the scripting for quests, but are not so keen on doing the writing and dialogue. With this in mind, I am now opening up quest claims to be claimed for intent of writing out their dialogue! See here for a current list of quest claims: http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/claims/quests

A few things to bear in mind
--You won't be able to literally "claim" the quest due to how the files and posting permissions work. Instead, post your writing into the comments section of the claim.
--Morrowind's engine doesn't handle conversation trees very happily, and they can be a pain to implement correctly. Please keep back and forth between NPC and player to a minimum.
--It's good practice to write blandly for anything the player says (including journal entries) so the player can roleplay how they like.
--Dialogue will be subject to reviewing as normal; not responding to critiques could mean your dialogue isn't utilized in the final implementation.

Terrifying Daedric Foe's picture
Terrifying Daed...
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Which quest claims are eligible for this? Any that are unclaimed?

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Kevaar
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Terrifying Daedric Foe

Which quest claims are eligible for this? Any that are unclaimed?

Correct. Also check some other writer isn't already working on it.

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HD3
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" It's good practice to write blandly for anything the player says (including journal entries) so the player can roleplay how they like. "

Maybe I just don't understand this but if all the responses are bland and there's minimal back and forth dialogue between the player and npcs, how are they supposed to roleplay?

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Rot
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HD3

" It's good practice to write blandly for anything the player says (including journal entries) so the player can roleplay how they like. "

Maybe I just don't understand this but if all the responses are bland and there's minimal back and forth dialogue between the player and npcs, how are they supposed to roleplay?

That might be an overly general way of putting things (how appropriate),
but for dialogue the idea is that the way responses are phrased should not clash with whatever the player might imagine their character would say. Take the case of a NPC making an offer, the answers "Wowee, sure thing my good fella! / No, never, not ever, cross my heart and hope to die" don't do a good job of representing all possible character personalities, whereas "Yes / No" or "[Accept] / [Refuse]" are one size fit all and let the player fill the blanks.

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Kevaar
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Rot explained it better than I could. It's not to limit plot or character development, so much as not to limit the player's head canon when it comes to their own character.

As far as limiting back and forth, Morrowind's engine wasn't built for tree dialogue, like it is in Skyrim or Neverwinter Nights. You have to script the logic yourself, which gets complicated fast. It's not a blanket ban or asking you to jump through hoops if there's no other way to get a scene across by any means, just a hassle we want to avoid when we can.

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Hello, I was recently born on the register page and I want to do something with my life.

I just wanted to ask these questions
1. Can I write a quest without coding, without making the NPC model, without making the dungeon or anything, just pure text of a quest?
2. What is the limit to quest writing?
3. What is the progress on the number of quest made for TR? Like how many are the petty fetch, kill that, and steal this quest? Is there a shortage on quest relating to (for example) khajits? If someone was to contribute on the quest for TR where and what topic?

A little background, I'm currently enjoying Morrowind right now, have applied mods to it, but not TR just yet. I love videogames and writing and I would love to write a story for a videogame, but without the talent to code or mod I think I just can't conrtibute. I feel like I want to dedicate myself, can I write quest for TR without the coding part? I don't plan on writing a grand quest line with new monsters, branching conversations, new dungeons, new lore, new guild or new islands. I just want to write a simple interesting story that some one can enjoy.

Sorry for my username, can't believe the site actually let me keep it. 

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As this thread indicates you can propose writing for quest claims or propose quest designs in the asset browser, though without guarantee that either will be used.

It is of course less likely that something will come out of designs if nobody is there to implement them, so I would suggest you keep your mind open as to observing how the construction set works. The "coding" involved more often than not is extremely basic and doesn't require any of the talent you seem to ascribe to it; creating NPCs almost never means making a new model but rather just selecting parts from those available in the original game or TR's files. If nothing else, knowing how quests work is the first step to creating appropriate dialogue/journal/events flow, etc.

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Dormichign64
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Hello, MisterSciens-hit.

You probably should know basically how the dialogue in Morrowind works first before writing any text simply so that it makes sense mechanically and in context. But as rot said, it's really not too complex. Just fire up the CS and browse through a couple examples of dialogue and you'll figure it out. I suppose you could also take a look at how others write dialogue on the forum itself as they may seem more organized than what you'd see in the CS.

I don't think there is a limit to quest writing. As long as you have hands to write with, I suppose. But depending on what you may mean, I'm not really one to say.

I think that fetch quests should be dealt with later, and more detailed quests should be the focus now. As for the topics, I'm really not quite sure. I would deal with balancing that sort of thing later as well, for the sake of creative streaks.

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Thank you all for the reply!

I think it would be worth it to give the CS a try, read a few tutorials and play some already made quest mods on the nexus to help me create my ideal quest. I just hope that the TR project will not gradually lose its light and die out in the years to come. Thank you again.

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Kevaar
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We've been going on for 15 years....should be good. :) If slow sometimes, haha.

A great way to get your feet wet in the CS is to make a showcase. If you get stuck, feel free to post with a copy of your .esp and your issue and we'll see what we can do to help you out.

Biggest thing to remember about Morrowind dialogue is that it is topics-based rather than tree dialogue like some other RPGs do, meaning the character gets text based on a certain topic (eg. "my fat pony") rather than a flowing back-and-forth conversation. But if you've played around in the game at all, you'll see what I mean--we try to keep vanilla conventions there as much as possible.

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Great, thats exactly what I could do ^.^
By the way, you know, Im german. But I have an american friend who said he could read the texts I wrote, so they should be okay in terms of grammar, spelling...

And another point: I think because of the nature of MWs dialogue system and the sheer size of TR and Project Tamriel it may become necessary to have 1. a tool for checking keyphrases (those blue highlighted phrases you can click on ya kno) if they are already in use, and 2. a system that makes it possible to add an infinite amount of quests to a mod. I already have an idea for that.

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One question: could one of the lead devs read my imperial cult - proposal and give feedback? I would begin designing NPCs and quest for that faction, because Im simply best informed in the IC. House dres is at the moment a closed book for me.

EDIT: heres the link
http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/forum/imperial-cult-brainstorming

Thats a proposal for the internal organization of the institution "imperial cult", not really for the quests themselves (the quests themselves are proposed in the imperial cult documentation I think? http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/forum/imperial-cult-documentation). But it tells what task the questgivers actually fulfill and why they are interested in what. I want to flesh the IC out completely, with every facet you know :-))

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Kevaar
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@NathanJ :
1. We've already got one in the CS! WIth all the relevant mods loaded, open up the dialogue window and search the list of topics. These are alphabetized, you can also quickly navigate to them by starting to type out your topic. The main problem, as I think Rats pointed out elsewhere, is when topics start containing the same phrases. For instance one topic might be "ring" and another might be "ring I found". The topic "ring" would be completely taken up by "ring I found", though there are ways around this, too.

The other issue is when using Greetings or latest rumors to put a lot of dialogue in. Not because the engine can't do it, but because you can quickly become very lost when you have 100+ entries crammed in there. Also they can start getting out of order and NPCs will start saying the wrong things, if you don't make use of placeholders or loading all relevant mods while working on dialogue.

2. I'm not sure what you mean here. The engine already allows for infinite quests, albeit it might start falling apart when you get to hardware limitations. The main limitation for TR is the number of implementers that can do the work to get the quests ingame.

(3.) I'll put discussing the Imperial Cult into the Sunday meeting agenda. Are you able to make one of those meetings? They are in Discord, starting around 11am USA Mountain Time (I don't know off the top of my head what that is in GMT)

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Yep, I falsely thought the limitation of keyphrases means a limitation of quests xD However, now I know better

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Kevaar
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There you go, then. :) Also, I ninja edited on you--see (3.) up above, RE: Imperial Cult.

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Yes, I will try to be there