I also want to be able to kill them, some that are too important should remain "essential" until the quest is completed, like the main quest.
But the rest should be able to be killed.
It's my choice whether or not I want to fail quests by killing NPC's. And I thought the Radiant Storytelling was gonna allow us to kill them.

Yet some quest NPCs are completely vulnerable and even put themselves in harm's way willingly.

I've lost count of how many villagers have charged to their deaths in a dragon attack. Villagers whom I've done various tasks for already.

For instance: The leader/mayor of the mining village Karthwasten. There are a handful of tasks he's tied to but he is completely vulnerable. Meanwhile enemy combatants like the Imperial Legates remain invincible even when you're asked to cause chaos for the Empire and raid their camps.

Immortal characters in a sandbox game is just like a huge contradiction, just doesn't feel right at all.

5 years later: "Why has my game not got any quests?"

Im sorry but its a necessary evil, im afraid.

If they worked out the radiant respawner, then there wouldn't be a need for it, they obviously haven't.

It would be better if they fell on the floor, like when people die. But then an hour or two later they get up, instead of 10 seconds. They made to many people immortal though, if someone kills someone else who gives a quest then its their fault.

wow why the hell would someone want to kill every person in the game...


you can't kill everything, because bethesda doesn't think about angry kids that just act like killkillkillkillmanlookiamsoevilehehehehhe

But to have the solution make no more sense than the problem is stupid. They get back up to their feet so quickly that they have to be taken down over and over, and are possibly screwing up what you are trying to do at the time. So instead of having quests we may not even end up doing that we can't finish, we have NPCs we can't kill messing up the gameplay we currently are doing.

The solution could have been much easier. If you are going to make them unkillable, why not leave them on a knee until you zone out or back in? Or, always leave them on a knee, having been beaten down to death's door? Unless they have to follow you somewhere, they can still fulfill their quest role from their deathbed.

And a little more coding could allow you to kill these guys at your own choosing. Guy on the knee? Walk up next to him with a blade and do a power attack, and he dies. You cannot do his quest now, whatever that might have been, but you have chosen to make that your play style. Anyone part of the main quest line would have at least 2 backups. It wouldn't be hard to make one of these backup guys spawn when needed too, preventing accidentally killing them early.

You can edit this or just remove them from the game with console commands. (there is a simple mod which removes all essential tags for everyone who is).

If you are on a console then I am sorry, that does svck. : (

Edit:

As said on the first page adding back-doors to quests (some) would be nice.

I think it's easy enough to fix on PC, svcks for you console guys though.

It's not about blindly killing everyone in the game.

Something similar happened to me near solitude. Came across a band of Imperial Soldiers and Stormcloaks fighting. One amongst the stormcloaks was invincible. Didn't know that, and being an imperial sympathizer I jumped in to help then. Then taht invincible character was on my ass forever.

I think this was Bethesda's reason for making so many NPCs immortal. I would not want one of the shopkeepers or inn keepers to die just because when they went for a walk in the world, they were killed by a randomly generated and roaming creature of gang of bandits.

This happened to me in Oblivion. The NPC who was in charge of selling me a house, fell off a bridge and died. I couldn't buy the house. That svcks.

I would rather have immortal NPCs than not. I think whoever goes around killing everyone in a town just because needs a little counseling. Why would you want to destroy your game world that way?

Definitely a bit game-breaking, especially if you are a thief and go on killing sprees regularly. I would prefer they would be killable, but maybe give you a message on what quest they were important for? Maybe put the type of quest, like Main Quest, Sidequest, Guild or Misc? Then you can decide maybe to reload an earlier save to spare them or just carry on. I remember in Morrowind, if you killed an NPC crucial to the Main Quest, you would get a message of some sort telling you.

And you would think with the Radiant AI thing, they would be replaced eventually if they are really that important... Anyways it definitely kills the inmersion, but I don't find this issue that bad, just a decision Bethesda made that we have to accept. I'm hoping moddders will eventually come up with something for this.

If you find yourself in this situation just run, sprint. After a while, the invincible character will abandon the pursuit.

Anyway, I don't understand why you want to kill everyone in a TES game. The fact that Bethesda created these "invincible" character is due to you and all the gamers that play like that, to avoid them scrambling their game. It's all your fault. :wink_smile:

Or even making "reincarnation" a real spell, not a short-term excuse for a "summon-dead".

Sure it should be expensive as hell, with reprocusions... But still possible. Poof, problem solved. (Can't tell you how-many time I have used ressurect on all the idiot towns-people who are not AI smart enough to run away from danger, heading inside a house for cover. Just so I could sell them items, or complete a quest they are part of. That was the only good advantage of the game forgetting to remove all the dead bodies in towns.)

If you need to justify it in the game... make it part of "The fate of the gods. They choose who can and can't be resurrected." (When tried to ressurect... fails scripted as this... "The gods refuse to return the soul to this body. His/her passage has been set in stone. This body should be mourned and respectfully rested."

Anything except conflicting immortality. Heck, make that a mini-quest... "The voice of the Gods calls to you. Take Hadvar to the ressurection alter."

The reason many are immortal, is because of the crazy need to have them mentioned in recorded dialouge. "Go see my mother Frita. She knows more about this." (So Frita has to be immortal, so she can be there.) As opposed to saying... "Yes, I think I remember someon saying something about that." (Quest updates with "See {Name-here} to get more information.")

What a foolish comment you just made. Some of us don't really want to kill everyone, just one or two characters in particular. There's no point in killing everyone in the game. Role playing is just impossible for some, when you want to kill or retaliate at one character in particular that acted like a total moron or bullied you.

See the video in post 44 ? This is the remains of a camp of Legionarees who ran after me when I passed through the camp. My character feeling rather skittish with 6 strong Imperials on her heels fled to Windhelm and got saved by the brave Stormcloak guards who save travelers such as herself from such ilk as murderous Legionarees who attack innocent travelers that just want to pass by. Needless to say I noticed that they killed 5 of them but didn't feel like finishing the last one, Legate Hrollod, who kept standing up after a while to get assaulted by the guards again who would leave him with a sliver of his life left kneeling on the ground until he stood up again and the process got repeated (and sped up in the video by me healing him).

:facepalm:

It has nothing to do with everyone just wanting to "killkillkill" as you so put it.



Bethesda was going to fix this with successors. Guy falls off a bridge ? Cool, now someone will take his job. He dies ? That is some extraordinarily bad luck you have there... but who knows, perhaps it would even be possible to have two possible successors.

I prefer the way morrowind did it. (a note appears if an essential character dies)

atleast pc players still have the chance to just make them killable with the console.... it also annoys me that i can't kill some ppl, but it's possible to just ignore them.


and to ellert... i saw it and i don't know why the leaders of the camps are always unkillable, but usually no1 goes to a imperial camp, makes them angry by attacking them(because normally they just tell you to leave first) and than runs 10miles to the nearest town, while taking care of them not losing you.

:P I swear in that case it was totally accidental that I got attacked by them, and then I just made the best I could with the situation and decided on the spot that I'd run to Windhelm with them since and give my character a personal reason to prefer the Stormcloaks over the Legion.

But that's beside the point, this was just an example and not a very good one at that, there are other parts of this game that really don't work so well with immortal NPC's.

What would be nice is if you had an option to turn it on or off. It's good for quests NPCs especially when you have to go through a cave or something with them.
It's downright annoying when I decide to try to wipe out a town or when said NPC tells the guards about my crime because they cannot be killed.

Like in the example below, why the hell not?

Yeah but in Morrowind fellow NPCs and Dragons wouldn't kill essential NPCs, they just stood still for the entire game. Immortal NPCs are necessary and personally I like how they are handled in Skyrim as opposed to being unconscious like in Oblivion. People would be pissed if they were just walking along minding their own buisness and up pops a note saying that an essential character died reload a previous save.....when you had nothing to do with it.

Yeah, you're right. It would be better if the essential characters would be knocked out for like 5 ingame minutes or till the fight is over.

I wouldn't have such a problem with Immortal NPC's if they didn't act like tw@s.

A lot of the immortal NPC's act all condescending by telling me to do what I'm told and stuff. It just really badly makes me want to kill them and I can't. svcks.