Daggerfall Workshop Forums

I got a quest in Gothway Garden where an old man in a tavern is being threatened by assassin's for his property, he wants me to go to his residence between 9 and midnight which is when the assassins have threatened to arrive. So I found his place (which strangely had another guy living in it) and loitered until 1 assassin appeared and I killed him, I waited around till the sunrise but no more assassins. I went back to the tavern but I am unable to talk to the guy who gave me the quest, nothing comes up. How do I finish the quest?

When the quest-giver doesn't activate hand-in, its usually because the quest script doesn't believe you've obtained the right conditions to complete. This could be caused by a bug, quest timer exceeded, or the quest failed in some other way. It's not possible to tell for sure without a copy of the save to look at so we can inspect the quest state.

The quest itself should expire out by itself after several days and clear from your log.

I just had an issue with this same quest as well. I have a save right before I stay the night... But the bug doesn't repeat itself every time. I kept reloading that save and loitering through the night until assassins appeared. Then I was able to kill them, get the dialog from them, and complete the quest... Sometimes though, no one ever shows up.

The questfile rolls a 25% chance every 10 minutes. So if you're there by 21:00, you're going to get 17 rolls and they'll almost certainly appear. If you loiter outside and enter the house at say 22:50, then you'll only get 6 rolls and the chance of them not showing up is small, but definitely possible. So it could just be people walking in late and getting unlucky with reduced rolls.

I did notice some oddities when I tested:

-there's a delay between the "enemies are nearby" interruption and when enemies actually appear. In classic, I'm pretty sure enemies were instantly visible when you got that message.
-the questlog references the questgiver as a "her" instead of a "him".
-1 out of the 10 times I loitered into a spawn, only 1 (of the 2) assassins appeared. You need both to die to succeed, so the other must've spawned in the void or something and made the quest un-completable.

Proof of that save here:

What Banshee says about the delay is true, it is not so in Classic. Personally, I much preferred the delayed interpretation, because you'd go searching for them, and often they would spawn in places behind you, which was a nice surprise. Where the classic method is much easier, you just aim at the door and usually that's where they show. In DFU, this was not so easy.

However, in earlier DFU versions, I ran into a similar issue with this sort of defense from assassins quest in Gothway Gardens. You definitely need in previous versions to make your save outside the quest building. In those versions, reloading in an building save did not clear everything and you often got no respawn or the quest failed because it had failed in the previous load in that building -- something like that was the pattern (heck if I know why, but back then each map seemed to be initialized until you were off it).

There often are normal NPCs in buildings where then the Quest NPCs are also added as well as the enemies. Since they do not seem to be harmed or truly aware of what is going on, that's just part of the Daggerfall oddness.

If the only way the Assassins spawn is 25% per every 10 minutes, that guarantees that sometimes this quest is going to fail, unless it has some forced entry in the last 10 minutes as well. Plus, is this quest's conditions when you kill 2 assassins or all assassins or just one assassin? It was said that it was 2, but does the game truly know that, as it often spawns enemies in waves in the other similar quests, so I'm wondering.

In the interim, if you do any quest, make sure you always make a save also outside any target building, as in the past, for me at least, reloading a save while in the same building you just failed it without exiting the game first (sometimes even then) caused issues. Hopefully, 10.7 is beyond that problem, but it used to be the case a few months back that it was problematic.