Love in The Time of Dragons

Before you hit me with a stick, I've done a lot of steady progress in the College of Winterhold Quest Expansion. Out of the 7 new quests, 5 of them have their audio ready. It's quite exhausting to work on them though, as I'm super limited with the audio that's available and the direction I want to take...

This means, ultimately, that I get distracted by other smaller projects. So here we are!

As a way to improve on the "proposal" mechanics of Skyrim, I have 2 mini projects in the works. Some of you might be familiar with my mod "NPCs wear Amulets of Mara".  This mod will be getting a big update soon. The update will do a couple of small, but interesting things:

- Nords no longer will require to first learn about the Nord marriage tradition before they can ask others to marry them. Cause... they're Nords and should know them already.

- Other races can learn about the marriage tradition without having to go to Riften personally to talk to Maramal. If you ask the courier if he has anything for you, he will hand you over a pamphlet that Maramal has asked him to hand out to travellers.

- Fixing vanilla non-sense (Part 1): In vanilla, you can continue asking people to marry you after you've agreed to marry someone else. In the end, the last person you asked for marriage will be who shows up at the wedding. This is weird. This is no longer the case after my update. You will first have to cancel your engagement with your betrothed. (By talking to the person you're engaged with).

- Fixing vanilla non-sense (Part 2): If your betrothed dies after you tell Maramal to organize the wedding BUT before the wedding actually happens, you completely lose the option to get married in vanilla. WTF? I've fixed this so, if this happens, you can simply tell Maramal that your betrothed has died. He will say a couple of nice words and you can go out there again and propose to someone else.

And now let us discuss the video attached to this post. The actual exciting stuff!

It always bothered me that the Dragonborn can never be refused. The "Are you interested in me?" marriage proposal dialogue only appears when the answer of the NPC is "YES". That's not very realistic, is it? Well, say no more! NPCs will now be able to "reject" the player, coming up with 90 hilarious new dialogue options. You can ask pretty much anyone to marry you, provided you're wearing an amulet of mara and you're not married. HOWEVER... the mod does NOT change the vanilla mechanics or the available candidates. What does this mean? It means if Ysolda would've said yes in vanilla, then she will say yes with my mod. It's untouched. However, if she does not like you (you haven't completed her quest) or if you ask someone else with her voicetype that is NOT a marriage candidate (someone that is already married for example) the NPC will say "NO" with one of the new lines.

Also, depending on how much or how little the NPC likes you, they will have 2 ways to reject you. A kinder, gentle rejection, and a "Get away from me, you filthy skeever" type of rejection. I'm also adding SOME easter eggs with this system. You can, I don't know, ask quest NPCs to marry you with funny rejections. This does of course not affect gameplay and the option will only appear if you happen to be wearing an amulet of mara. It's kind of a small, funny mod that doesn't really affect the game much, but that can hopefully get some laughts out of you.

Since I'm imagining this is not everyone's cup of tea, I'm thinking of making the "Rejections" mod separate from the "NPCs wear Amulets of Mara" update, so one can decide to use one or the other separetely. That will also put some eyes on the original "NPCs wear Amulets of Mara" mod, as it will now be doing a lot more than just giving NPCs amulets. Funny thing to mention here is that I've managed to make both mods without editing any vanilla quests per se, just dialogues. I'm quite happy about this. Mod is quite easy to make now that the dialogues are almost done so I'm thinking I could release it next week probably. I've attached some of the dialogues in the video for you to hear, but please note that this is NOT all of the dialogues and also the quality of the audio here is not final (gotta give them another pass and find out which ones do not sound natural and fix them before release).

Anyway, let me know your thoughts! Will you be interested in being friendzoned in the game? So immersive! Now you get to feel like Aerin (Mjoll's "best friend") haha!