Hundreds of hours playing sneaky types in this game, and it was already easy enough with intelligent play and withuot using invisibility... until I added ASIS. If you want to add an insta-kill move for undetected sneak attacks, personally I would make it as a percentage based on your level v the opponents, their size and armor having an effect.... If someone's wearing full plate, you're not going to be slitting their throat with a dagger ... you might get your dagger through under the armpit or some other weakspot, but that should not be a certainty.

Things I would love to see aded from an assassins point of view would be throwing knives which take the backstab bonus, and garrottes for guaranteed silent kills on light or non armored mobs( not that that's particularly accurate either).

likewise, the ability to knock people out should alse be dependant on the armor they are wearing. Are you really going to puch someone over the head when thay're wearing a full helm ? Perhaps have a billy club or something. If you want somethign immersive you have a variety of moves dependant on the opponent which you can pick up as stealth perks. so lets say at 30 stealth there's a perk to knock unarmed folk out. At 50 sneak a perk to use a billy club to knock someone out wearing light armor, at 70 sneak you get a perk to use skyrims equivalent of chloroform or something on plated folk.

The one biggest thing though that I could use as a sneaky type early in the game, especially when playing with increased spawns is some distraction method other than attempting to shoot an arrow beyond sometwhere which never seems to work very well for me. .. I know there's throw voice shout, but I was thinking there shoudl be someway of diverting enemy attention to allow a quick sneaky dash behind them.

Anyway .. thats my tuppence worth, hope its helpful.

It's been a while since I updated anything here, but I plan to release a beta tonight. It will not have all featured mentioned in OP yet since they're not all finished yet.

It will have:
- Throat-slitting when sneaking behind someone with dagger drawn
- Knocking unconscious when sneaking behind someone with fists raised
- Killing sleeping targets with 3 hard hits in rapid succession.

Feedback I'll be looking for is:

- Does the AI always respond as expected? Reported as crime if you're seen commiting one of these crimes, and not reported as crime if noone sees you?
- Does the gameplay run fluently enough? Should a menu pop up when you activate someone in the correct circumstances asking you if you want to pickpocket or execute one of these moves, or should they replace pickingpocketing as the default action if all conditions are met? (in the second case, you will be unable to pickpocket with a dagger or fists raised, but you will automatically execute the special moves when activating a target under these conditions and won't see any menus popping up)
- Should you be able to kill essential targets by slitting throats or killing them in their sleep, or should they remain essential?
- Is knocking people out useful in it's current state, or does moving bodies need to be more user-friendly? Is the duration for which people are unconscious too long/too short?

The idea of identity-hiding masks mentioned in the OP has not been scratched, and it actually is somewhat working already, but it is not finished yet and I haven't looked at it in a while so I will be disabling it for this first beta (which is planned to be released tonight).

The mask is the thing that interests me most out of all of this, personally.

I personally feel like if we're going for realism here, targets clad head to toe in heavy armor should be immune to simply being knocked out, which would add a component of evaluating the opponents you choose to KO.

Agreed with if they're wearing a helmet then it should be harder to knock them out.

Perhaps some sort of test.

i.e. % chance based on unarmed skill & sneak and then penalties for helmets.
2*unarmed skill + 2* sneak -head armor rating of NPC.

So 100% chance of knocking someone out not wearing a helmet with an unarmed skill of 50 and a sneak of 50.

But only 75% chance if that NPC is wearing a helmet with 25 armor rating. Or something like that?

First a quick compliment: I use Deadly Combat and Dual Wield Parrying and they are fantastic. Looking forward to this effort as my primary is a sneak character.

I was wondering what you can do with disguises. I frequently role play disguises - i.e. I will steal a guard uniform before pilfering a castle. It might not really make a difference but it makes me feel better. It would be great if game mechanics could be designed that really made them work. Undisguised you should not be allowed in a restricted area. Disguised increases your chances (speechcraft should be high enough to convince people that you really belong there). Probably way too difficult, but thought that I would throw it out there.

Another: using speachcraft to talk your way out of situations. "Really officer, it wasn't me." This would make speechcraft incredibly useful and hopefully would not be that difficult to implement, at least as far as guards are concerned.

I like the idea of context based actions rather than pop ups. Have fists, knockout. Have dagger, cut throat. None of the above, pickpocket. The game play would be much smoother.

Just uploaded the 0.1 BETA version to skyrimnexus, download link is in OP.

Some of the recent comments have already been adressed in the ''Future Plans'' section which can be found in the OP and in the mod's readme.


While I do not disagree that having full functional disguises would be cool, I do think I'll be focusing on quite a few other things before trying that. The most important reason is that for a disguise feature to work properly, in my opinion there would be need for a lot of new dialogue. I know that nowadays there are quite many voice actors on these forums willing to do free voice acting for skyrim mods, but still, it would obviously have to work on vanilla NPCs as well and the change in voice would be very annoying imo.

EDIT:

Could anyone tell me what the custom is on these forums if you want to change a topic's title? Should I press the report button or PM a moderator? In the rules I could find it said the report button was for offensive posts/rule-breaking posts, but if I have to send a PM I wouldn't know which moderator to pick

Personally I'd much prefer this option. I think an activation box will break immersion.

To be honest, you should have both hands available to be able to pickpocket affectively anyway.

Or alternatively, can you not incorporate it into a 'Press E', 'Hold E'? press E to pickpocket. Hold E to perform special move.

I suggested a lesser power that would activate and deactivate a stance in which you would activate sneak options or picpocket..

But the idea without the box seems fine..

You should also make ko possible with a blunt weapon

Yep, that's what I'd do. Report it. It's what you do for moving a topic, too.

For tomorrow I'll look into deciding action based on context instead of menu pop-ups, seems better to me too. Could look into blunt weapons too I guess, although they will probably come with the risk of actually killing your target

Apparantly I kind of screwed up the download yesterday and forgot to add 2 scripts, one of which is supposed to actually launch the mod, so it wasn't working yesterday. Reuploaded now, hopefully everything correctly included, so the beta should work now.

I was wondering, could anyone please confirm they have tried version 0.11 BETA and whether it works or not? I have noticed some issues with AI which I have fixed now, but before I upload again I need to know whether the previous upload was fine or if there were still some issues there as well.

Made some good progress on identity-concealing masks today, so hopefully I'll have a beta testable version of those masks for you guys somewhere tomorrow Along with a couple small improvements to the currently released features.

Just ran a test with the identity-concealing masks I'll be uploading later today. This is what happened:

- Equipped my mask whilst standing in Markarth. No crimes had been commited yet, so noone was paying attention to me and noone knew who I was.
- In broad daylight, with my mask on, I killed Hroki because she happened to be standing next to me, so I got a bounty of 1040 (1000 for murder + 40 for assault) on my mask's identity.
- Getting chased by the guards, I fled out of Markarth and stole a horse from the stables in order to be able to flee faster. Mask bounty = 1090.
- In the mountains near Markarth, I unequipped my mask. Except for the stolen horse and a dragon flying over, noone saw me. Since these creatures do not care about criminals and identities, I was perfectly safe. Real bounty = 0.
- I immediately returned to Markarth, without mask, and had no problems with any guards. I put my mask on, and in a few seconds they realise I must have been the criminal. Real bounty = 1090.
- I again fled into the mountains, and when safe I took my mask off again. Then I waited for 24 hours in the mountains. When not wearing any masks for 24 hours, your Mask bounty is reset, because the guards of skyrim do not plan to over-generalize and immediately arrest the first guy to enter town with a mask the next day. Mask bounty = 0.
- I enter Markarth again. This time, my real identity has a bounty but my Mask identity doesn't, so now I am safe for as long as I keep wearing my mask.

Sounds like amazing progress. So shouldn't the mask still hold the bounty? It's what got your real identity a bounty when you put it on.

That sounds perfect! I've generally played very law abiding characters, just for the convenience, but I can tell I'm going to have a lot of fun with this one! Can you make the identity concealing behaviours apply on all masks with a specific keyword, so other modded in masks will have the same functionality? Or does it only work on yours, as you need a different "bounty profile" for each mask?

The mask bounty was reset after waiting 24 hours, but his real bounty continued. So presumably when he took the mask off, after that, the mask would reacquire the bounty.

Aye, but 24 hours seems unrealistic. Everyone smoking magical marijuana that the Mages College crafted and suddenly get amnesia? It's still some good role-playing I'd love to venture into.

Currently I do not make a distinction between which mask accumulated a bounty, there are just in total 2 identities: a mask identity and a real identity. Bounties on masks do indeed remain for a while (they remain for as long as you keep any mask equipped, and when you unequip a mask you must keep the mask unequipped for 24 hours of in-game time, and then masked bounty disappears). The reason a bounty on a mask doesn't remain forever is it is assumed that these masks are just general, unrecognisable headwear which is not illegal to wear in skyrim. These masks are not famous masks like the Gray Cowl of Nocturnal would be. If you re-enter an area where you have commited a crime very soon after the crime and you're still wearing a mask, they will be suspicious about you, but not a full day later anymore.

Any bounty which is put on your real identity (either because you didn't wear a mask or were recognised putting it on or taking it off) obviously still remains untouched, although it of course be easier to for example access a member of the Thieves guild to reset it by going there with a mask on after that bounty has been reset.


Currently for testing I just have one special mask. However, there is only a single script on this mask, everything else is handled by general quest scripts and magic effects, which means that other masks can very easily be given this ability by just adding that one script to them. For the beta release, I'll just automatically add this single mask to the player's inventory, because let's face it, my main priority with this beta is to be able to properly test it (the crime system in skyrim is quite complex and big and impossible to test fully for just 1 person) and does not require an immersive way of obtaining a mask.

For a proper non-beta release, I would probably try to find some immersive way of obtaining such a mask, and add an optional second .esp which adds the property to all vanilla hoods for which it makes sense (masked dark brotherhood hoods, nightinghale cowl etc). Other modders could also easily make an optional patch .esp for their mod-added masks which just adds the one script to those masks.

That sounds super fun

Beautiful job Borgut, as always really.
One question: have you decided what to do regarding the pop up vs. contextual options debate? Please, tell me I'll be able to slit throats /cause knock downs without having to go through an in-your-face menu.

Something that would be good for the masks, but potentially way too much hassle, would be disabling all quest conversations with the mask on.
The point is, people shouldn't recognise you as the dragonborn, Archmage, or whatever if you've got a mask on.
It might be viable to disable the comments you get when you walk past people, at least those ones that relate to quests and factions.
Stripping out the options for everyone that gives quests might be entirely more difficult.
Thoughts?

For the next version there will be no pop up menus and when the conditions are right throat slitting or knocking unconscious will replace pickpocketing as the default option. I'll look at feedback, what people think works best, and probably in the future have both options available anyway because when I decide I need SKSE for some features, I'll also be able to make it much easier to change options.


I definitely like the idea, but I consider it to be in the same priority class as some of the other extra things I mentioned in future plans. I would only consider it however, if I can somehow implement it dynamically do disable dialogue for NPCs around the player, becaues I will not be changing every single quest in game (mostly because it would cause incompatibilities, but also because it's too much work )

Any chance you could upload a pic of the mask?

So i'm assuming the controls would work as such:

Sneaking + weapon drawn = Throat slit

Sneaking + Fists Raised = Knock out

Sneaking + no fists or weapons = pick pocket.

Sounds good to me if thats right.