Many of you might be familiar with the http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/11474/? mod which adds in delayers for all the official DLC. This is really handy from a roleplay standpoint and for cutting down on the barrage of messages you get when starting a new character.

You may also know that many of the individual delayers no longer work, and the large single delayer hasn't recognized many of its masters for a while.

Regardless of their current functionality, the delayers also take up a lot of space on mod lists. I feel this could be implemented in a much better manner nowadays.

It'd be nice, for example, for 100% of the delayers to be bashable, like the http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/25946/? mod. Or for a single esp to run a script to identify the DLC you're running, and then delay your DLC accordingly. Players could even expect a degree of customization, delaying Shivering Isles til after the MQ, or perhaps until they reach a specified level, or after a set number of days (for example: they may want it to begin on Sheogorath's Summoning Day on the 2nd of Sun's Dawn).

I'd like to hear people's thoughts on this. I'm not even sure how many people still use the official DLC beyond KotN and SI. And I would certainly like to encourage anyone who would take up such a project.

Not that I'm volunteering (I'm not), but this should be relatively easy to do with OBSE's new functions.


If I was to do it (which I won't), I would have an initial start up script that would check to see if each DLC is active using IsModLoaded. If the answer is yes, then it would use RunScriptLine techniques to do stuff in each case. In theory, it wouldn't need any masters at all.


Caveat, I have *not* looked under the hood of SM Plugin Refurbish, so I don't really know what or how it does what it does. But I would imagine that there are enough OBSE command options available that the quests should either be entirely modifiable via scripts, or at the very worst, include a couple of bashable patchers that would link the main Delayer.esp to whichever DLC it needs to be linked to.


One Mod To Rule Them All

This reminds me. Maskar's Oblivion Overhaul starts Shivering Isles with a note pinned to one of its notice boards. The nice thing about this is that it puts the player in complete control. You manually start the expansion by reading a notice. I would imagine this approach could be extended to all of the DLC: read a notice in Chorrol to start Fighters Stronghold, read a notice in Bruma to start Wizards Tower, ect, ect.

That sounds like something I would use...if anyone decides to take up the banner.