I would like to add birthsigns to NPCs to give them Abilities and Powers.

After thinking it over for a bit, there are 3 ways I can see to implement this:

1) manually add them to every NPCs. Will probably cause a lot of conflicts with other mods that edit those same NPCs. Will take a lot of tedious work. Patches needed for mods that add new NPCs.

2) script that go through every NPC in vanilla Morrowind and randomly assign them birthsigns' abilities and powers. Probably slow down the game alot while the script does its thing? Patches needed for mods that add new NPCs. Although it's a one time script run so hopefully not too bad.

3) dynamically assign random birthsigns' abilities and powers to NPCs in the same cell as the player. Will skip NPCs that already have birthsigns' abilities and powers. Probably takes a lot of processing, especially outside in exterior cells? Will run everytime on cell change. Patches for mods that add NPCs might not be necessary. Make use of MWSE.

What would be the best implementation method, in terms of less conflicts with other mods, and also processing speed?

Is there better way(s) to do this? Is there anything that would need to be paid attention to? Am I missing something, or overlook something?

I would really like to make this happen.

Please, experienced modders/scripters of Morrowind, lend me your aid!

Just want to say, I believe lore-wise not every person is born under a sign. Soccucius seems to imply this when he says, "Now it says here you were born under a certain sign..." as in, it's not that common.

I see, didn't know that.

Well, if I can get it to work at all, I'll make a note that it's not lore-friendly.

Well perhaps you could implement it so that a certain percentage of NPCs get birthsigns? I don't know, just a thought. Make your mod the way you wanna make it, regardless.

Hmm, that is a good idea.

Was able to get several test case of implementation idea #2 to work. Chugging along on this.

The best way to do this would be via tes3cmd, that way it's just a simple plugin and no extra lag in-game. It'd also allow you to do stuff like giving birthsigns to only 10% of NPCs, or only NPCs over a certain level, etc.


I had a similar idea that's on the backburner for now to make racial abilities scale with the characters level, for both the player and NPCs (thus making the MCP feature not so stupid and racial "powers" not so lame).

I use TES3CMD for cleaning and leveled list merging, but didn't know it's that powerful. Currently looking into that. Thanks for the help.