It is starting to bother me that I'm forced to kill wildlife like bears and wolves because of their high aggression levels. What if I want to be nice to them? Do I have to go around casting "Calm Creature" all the time in order to walk by in peace?

So, I was thinking, is there any way to alter creature aggression levels as a function of how many of that type of creature you kill? The effect would be something like this:

1) the more bears you kill, the more aggressive they are toward you, and/or the more they will run away. They have learned to fear you.
OR
2) The fewer bears you kill - as in, not killing any - the more friendly and passive the bears will be toward you. They will tolerate your presence more, too.

Time needs to be incorporated as well. Thus, if you don't kill any bears for x amount of time, aggression decreases by y amount per interval of time. So, if you are a wildlife friend, after a while, the creatures will not be all so aggressive toward you.

It could even be set to be regional, like bounties that decrease over time. So, if you kill some bears, then leave Solstheim for several months, their aggression will have waned slightly in your absence. And if you are nice to kagouti in the Bitter coast, there's no guarantee the kagouti in the Grazelands will be friendly to you( because you've never been around them).

It would sort of work like the NPC disposition system, I guess.

Does this make any sense? Am I the only one who is bothered by being forced to kill the creatures in self defense, and that it is an unrealistic portrayal of animal behavior to have them so ferociously hostile to humans?

PirateLord did something like this for Kwama Foragers and Cliffracers in his Creatures mod so it should be possible
Animals in general should be a lot less aggressive than they tend to be in RPGs anyway. Even predators tend to avoid humans unless hurt, diseased, defending their young etc

Best animal AI was in the Gothic series. If you confronted a beast, first thing it did was threatening you with gesture and voice. If you stepped back, beast wouldn't attack you at all. In Morrowind you get attacked at once and stupid creatures follow you from one end of the land to the other, if you don't kill em!!!


TheDaywalker :rock

There is a popular Ob mod that did this very well. But thats because animals and npcs are grouped into categories and alignments.

I had been wondering about how much work it would be to try to recreate that in Morrowind. You would need scripts on all creatures for it to work. I guess you could control it using a Calm Creature effect for Neutral and a Command Creature effect for Friendly. Use a global variable (or a global script with a variable) to keep count of the number of critters killed in each alignment (Evil, Neutral, and Good or maybe more like Evil, Neutral, Good, Carnivors, Omnivores, and Herbivores ).