Alternate start mod

[Narf the Mouse]

This is pretty much me throwing ideas/inspiration out there, given the state of the project and having my own projects to do. Hopefully this rambling will be useful to someone.

I'm sure plenty of us have happily ignored the main quest, using any reason from "My character doesn't care about that" to judicious narrative editing "What main quest? My character's a/n $Something who got accidentally trapped in a cave on their way to do $Nothing_To_Do_With_The_Main_Quest."

But it would get easier with an alternate start mod, and a mod like that would also allow us to start with a character that has the equipment/other stuff that'd be relevant to our interests.

For example, it'd be easier to RP as a Knight of X Region if we started the game as a Knight of X Region, or at least in some city in said region, rather than a random hobo with whatever we could get out of Privateer's Hold, and no ties to anyone or anything.

A major inspiration here is "Alternative Start: Arrive By Ship" for Oblivion. Yeah, there could be unbalanced starts to a certain extent, but on the other hand, it didn't stop me from playing a penniless hunter, or a high-born warrior with 3,000 Septims, or variations in-between.

So, for specifics, I'm thinking you'd have the option to pick items from a list:

Item #1) A starting region and location; if you picked a dungeon, you'd start at a random spawn point in the dungeon.
Item #2) Social status for a single region. "Common Citizen" or whatever.
Item #3) Job status: member of any factions? Start at the bottom, or set your rank and reputation according to your skills? This would set your rank and reputation according to the highest rank you could get with your skills, and the minimum reputation needed for that rank. Maybe with a +1 to reputation, just in case you needed to travel a long distance to reach a faction or complete a quest.
Item #4) Starting equipment level, including gold. This would be influenced by job and social status. A rich discharged soldier is still not nearly as rich as a middle-class noble.
Item #5) "Other" options. Start as a Vampire or Werewolf, or with the preliminary disease (select the number of days left? select the clan?)

Maybe also the option to randomize the starting region and location, maybe from sub-lists such as "All Cities in Betony"?

[Jay_H]

I just started replaying Morrowind, and my second character was made using an alternate start mod. The role-playing aspect increased 5x with that, in that I can write his story entirely.

Vanilla Daggerfall has a quirk that does the same thing to a limited degree. In the file Z.cfg, two lines determine the starting location:

startMap
region
mapfile

By changing those two, the character starts in a different place and a different region. So that can place you in a crypt, an animal cave, a city, or anything else. This link shows how to find the map data using Donald Tipton's Atlas.

[LypyL]

I too love alternate start mods in later ES games...this mod should be fairly easy to make when all the systems are in place.

[Narf the Mouse]

Vanilla Daggerfall has a quirk that does the same thing to a limited degree. In the file Z.cfg, two lines determine the starting location:

startMap
region
mapfile

By changing those two, the character starts in a different place and a different region. So that can place you in a crypt, an animal cave, a city, or anything else. This link shows how to find the map data using Donald Tipton's Atlas.

Thanks.