Hey guys, I'm building a magic shop at the moment in Oblivion, and I've decided, as shops in vanilla Oblivion aren't exactly thief-friendly, I'd like to have the store's inventory lying around in chests. The thing is, what kind of wizard uses a normal lock to protect his stuff?

So, what I'd like to do, is have a chest that can be lockpicked as usual, but if the player has a high enough (let's say, Conjuration) skill, then he/she can recognize some Daedric runes carved into the chest, which brings up a message window like:



(The 'Impact' font being a placeholder for the 'Daedric' one bliviongate:)

And after closing the window, the player can either open the chest (getting hit with a fireball or a summoned Scamp or whatever), or dispel the chest, allowing it to be opened safely. And if the player's Conjuration isn't high enough to bring up the message window, then he/she can open or dispel it anyway, but doesn't get the warning.

So, how would I go about doing this?

The Daedric font available in the game is not easily readable. If you were able to to display a message using it, the player would most likely not know what it says, just "something illegible in Daedric". The object script for the chest can handle OnActivate and OnMagicEffectHit events to do the rest, but I recommend dropping the Daedric message idea.

What might work is using the font to make a custom texture on a label attached to the chest which can be separately activated to "translate" it. This would not activate the container itself directly, but you could script a menu of options into the activation of the label to do so if you wanted.

Hmm, that could work. Thanks!