Races - Playable vs NonPlayable (and which to use)

[Koniption]

The below comments by Andalaybay......

Let me clarify custom races and whether they are playable or not.

When you create a custom race, you can choose whether it will be playable by the player or not. You can choose to create a custom race to make something unique, like you have done here. You can also choose to create a custom race so that you don't have to worry about the default dialogue. We have a character called the Watcher in tDBC. Well the Watcher was brilliantly voiced by Ibsen's Ghost. But that voice is unique, to say the least. So I created a custom race for him. He looks exactly like an Altmer and has the stats of an Altmer. But I don't have to worry about him switching to the Altmer voice when chatting about mud crabs. In fact, he won't chat about mud crabs at all. He only has the dialogue that we provide for him.

Now in our case, we don't want the WatcherRace, as I called it, to be playable by the player. That's what is meant by a playable race. Simply that it is an option for the player when they choose their race during character creation. It has no impact on interacting with the NPC's created with that race during the game. There is no scripting required to make those NPC's function.

There are a couple of significant impacts when using custom races. Number one is quest creation. If you look at the vanilla quests, you'll notice that one of the quest conditions is:
GetIsPlayableRace == 1.00

Well if you are using custom races and you will be interacting with NPC's from that race in a quest, you can not define that condition! They'll just look at you with a goofy expression on their faces. Basically the quest doesn't apply to them. You only need to omit that condition on the specific quests in which they are involved.

The second impact is that they will not have any default dialogue - at all. If you click on them you will get "I HAVE NO GREETING". So in order for them to work properly, I suggest you give them at least a basic greeting. You will have problems adding topics to them during quest building if they don't have a basic greeting, so it's easier to just give them a basic greeting from the start. If you want them to chat to other NPC's, or each other, you will have to supply a lot more than that.

However other than those issues, you don't need to do anything special for NPC's of custom races to work. If you want them to wear certain clothes, you just add those items to their inventories. You can add clothing and armour. You can instruct them to wear one or the other by using flags in their AI packages, or by explicitly ordering them to equip items via script.

One last caution: if you create a merchant with a custom race and you want to restrict the clothing they can wear, make sure you give the merchant a vendor chest or they will attempt to equip any armour you sell to them that is better quality than what they're wearing already. That's why Enilroth in Anvil wears the armour you sell to him - he was never given his own vendor chest. That will be fixed in the next version of the UOP, apparently.