It's possible that with a high level of speechcraft, some hostile NPC is friendly? I've already found two NPC who should be hostile but are friendly with me and I don't know why.

An UESP member told me that probably it's due to my speechcraft skill (in fact I've 100 in personality and 80 in Speechcraft).


Thanks in advance

Unless you persuade them up to 100, 99 is not enough, then the NPC should attack. Your Speechcraft skill would have no bearing on their disposition, only in how you can affect their Disposition. Reputation has more to do with initial disposition.

Also, if you are a member of their faction, they won't attack you.

I don't know, but I happened with Daracy in Ashir-Dan and Vadeni Rethan in Kunirai, both are NPC with lowest fight value of their dungeon. I begin to believe it's true that Personality and/or Speechcraft influence him in some way.

personality directly affects disposition, so that might be it. along with reputation like ccna said

my reputation is only 7. It's not too low?

I've had two or three instances (while playing a high Personality and Speechcraft Imperial) where I could casually stroll right up to a "hostile" NPC and trigger conversation before they'd initiate combat, not that they had anything relevant to say. We're not talking about the "highway robbers" like the Nord near Hla Oad or the Dunmer near Pelagiad, where you have to select a topic in conversation to trigger the attack. In other games, those same NPCs attacked my character on sight. I recall raising the disposition of the one through Admire attempts, and wasn't attacked afterwards. One example is a Nord in the St.Delyn underworks.

A secondary way to do this is to use calm humanoid spells and admire/bribe them after they are calmed.

I've encountered this before...

A lot of this has to do with the actor's "fight" setting in AI. Most hostile actors are set to 90 which means they will attack when the player is detected within 2000 game units. However it is undocumented for this fight level that no disposition towards the player is checked, but I think this is where the "bug" resides. I.e. it is documented (and tested with some mixed results) at lower fight settings that actors will attack when disposition is low, and fight is high. A value of 80 within 1000 units and a disposition <= 40 will start combat with the player. A fight value of 50 with a disposition of 0 will produce the same results (think Council Club).

So having said that it boils down to; actor fight setting and disposition value. Disposition of course influenced by the player's personality, reputation, and clothing modifiers.

Thanks. So, it's possible to increase disposition enough to able speaking with any hostile NPC (including those with fight value of 90)?

Yeah, this is really annoying. Its starting to happen now and my character only has a reputation of 12. His Personality and Speechcraft are terrible and are pretty much the same as they were at the beginning of the game, yet I'm now starting to get these delays around level 15ish. Anyway, a couple questions:

How often the disposition check is made in the presence of NPCs? I'm assuming this is made more than once in a short period of time since the NPCs at first don't attack but eventually do after a few seconds.

What are the details on how clothing effect the disposition check?

I've suspected that level difference also plays a part in disposition. Bottom line, does anyone know the exact formula for the disposition check?

I'm pretty sure that's the AI lagging. Reducing the number of ESPs you're using may make them turn hostile faster. My last install did it all the time, but my current one with the same machine doesn't.

Well this is within a game where the number of mods have stayed the same from the start, although I do typically play with a large number of mods. But its not just this play-through; usually I play long games (i.e. stick with one character through a lot of levels/quests) and this delay in attacking, where you can walk up and start a conversation before they attack, has always happened to me in the later stages of the game's progression, not so much or at all during, say, the first 1-20 levels or so. I usually have my mod build pretty much finalized before I start playing a new game, so the number of mods typically changes very little during a play-through. So maybe the direct cause of the lag is the size of a saved game. (Which of course will be made larger more quickly by a large mod build.)

So if I understand correctly we have two theories in this thread.

1.High personality/speechcraft/reputation.

2.Large save file size/mod build.

This can also be caused by the Morrowind Code Patch's 'Allow stealing from KOed NPCs' feature.

Speechcraft won't deter an attack at range, but if you do manage to get within conversation range through Personality and Reputation, a few successful Admires or Bribes may be able to avoid it entirely.

It's possible that the checks are made less frequently if the lag causes the CPU to put the check lower on the priority list, but that seems a bit weird. It seems even weirder if it stops it altogether. It happened long before the MCP was created, and still does.

If you could initiate dialogue then yes. An actor with a fight value of 100 will always attack though.

As I said it is undocumented whether or not disposition influences this, so I can't be 100% sure this is what is happening, but I'm almost sure there is a disposition check when fight is set lower than 100. And as mentioned already this may also be influenced by processing priority with the game engine and sharing data with active esp files. Gamebryo, (and possibly coupled with the older Netimmerse coding with Morrowind) is more cpu intensive than other engines.

With that MCP feature you can talk to a hostile NPC if you manage to sneak up on them without them noticing you due to your stealth skills.

Whereas, the bug that this thread is concerned with is where you can walk up in plain site waving your arms and the hostile NPC will be staring straight at you and not attack during which time you can initiate a conversation with them.

I confused the two a while back in the mods forum and it was made clear that they are separate issues.

This can also happen if you activate them to talk to them before they go into combat mode. Yes, your Speechcraft has an impact on that, but you still have to activate them before they go into combat mode, your Speechcraft just helps keeping them friendly. Just so you know, there are a few Ascended Sleepers that are friendly, one will even repair your weapons before you kill them.

They're not evil; they're just misunderstood.