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About this mod
This mod adds risk-reward gameplay to Morrowind's sneaking. While sneaking behind a creature or NPC, charge an attack to place your mark on an enemy. This mark will drain a portion of the target's health opening them up for a strike. But act fast, the mark doesn't last forever, and their health will return when it expires. OpenMW 0.49+ only.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
Assassin Mark
By: slaythedragonn
By: slaythedragonn
Place your mark on an enemy, exposing their weakness for your killing strike.
Description
This is a configurable sneak attack mod. While using a short blade, sneak behind an enemy and charge an attack. This will place a mark on the enemy, accompanied by vfx and sound cue, that will drain the health from the enemy. Strike and kill them before the target expires. After 10 seconds from being placed, the mark will expire, returning their health.
- Each NPC or creature can only be affected by the mark once. Make sure to strike fast and hard while they're health is drained before it comes back! This is not configurable!
- A vfx, as seen in the screenshots, is placed upon the target, and a sound effect is played while the mark persists.
- The health drain is based upon your sneak level and your weapon type. By default, this will cap at 100 sneak and will only affect short blades and hand-to-hand attacks. Using a short blade with 100 sneak will see a 50% health drain effect, allowing the player to really feel like they're an assassin striking from the shadows.
- There is also a small strength bonus while you're behind the target and sneaking, to help make that killing blow that much easier. This strength boost is configurable, but by default is a total of 5 points per player character level, and caps at 150. This boost only remains for as long as you're behind the target and sneaking in order to facilitate extra damage on the critical strike.
- This mod is configurable through OpenMW's script settings. Want the mark to work with every weapon type? Just turn on the setting. Want a higher drain effect for long blades than spears? You can change the drain multiplier for each weapon type. Don't like the strength buff, or think it's too weak? It can be turned off, the cap can be changed, and the per level gain can be changed.
- The default settings are the ones I suggest using for balance reasons, though I personally play with the strength buff turned on for all weapons (but the drain effect just for shortblades/h2h). Play around with it and find the settings that you like.
- I've included a supplementary addon that is one single change to the GMST "fCombatCriticalStrikeMult" from 4 to 2. This will make critical strikes for all weapons to be weaker, but allows for short blades to outshine other weapons even more with the mark. I personally play with this, and have included it for those interested.
Note: The enemy health bar seen in the screenshots is from SME-Useful Widgets-Actor Info- Health Bar-Hit Chance. This mod does not touch the UI.
Creator Commentary
Sneak attacking with short blades in Morrowind is underwhelming. In vanilla, there is no reason to use a short blade as opposed to any other weapon when sneaking at all. A critical attack simply multiplies all weapon damage by 4, so you're better off swinging a war hammer at the enemy rather than a dagger. This mod seeks to change that.
At first I set out to simply have dynamic critical damage in OpenMW. But as I dove into learning lua scripting, and became more familiar with OpenMW's api, I realized that my vision was simply an impossibility with where OpenMW is currently. But that limitation lead to a much larger project than I had anticipated, and more than a hundred hours of coding and testing later, this is the result.
The hope that is with the time limit, and the powerful health drain effect, the gameplay for sneak characters will be much more rewarding, and actually give you a reason to use short blades. I tried to make it as configurable as possible, so that anyone from power gamer to vanilla enthusiast could find a place for it somewhere in their load order.
I intend for this particular project to roll over into a much greater one in the future that will try to make each class unique and have their own playstyle. We'll see what comes though.
Known Issues and Limitations
Nothing game breaking. Sometimes the VFX is slow to load on the actor, and isn't always a perfect indicator that the mark has gone into effect. Be conscientious of this, and listen to the sound cues, which are much more consistent. I'm not quite sure as to why the VFX is slow to load sometimes, but if you're a VFX guru and can figure that out send me a message.
Currently, there is no way for OpenMW-lua to know if the player is hidden or not. That means that at some point in your playthrough, you're going to find a way to exploit the mark. You'll be able to sneak up on someone who knows you're there, and still get the benefit of the strength bonus and the mark. This isn't a bug, but a limitation of OpenMW that will (hopefully) one day be able to be changed in the future. It isn't ideal, but you could always open up the console and set anyone's health to zero, so I'm assuming you'll be able to play around this limitation.
Also, I don't love how hand-to-hand is implemented with this. I'll probably change it in the future.
Requirements/Compatibility
OpenMW 0.49+. This hasn't been tested on anything else. This has not been tested on any android platform, and probably will not work. Please see the OpenMW discord android channel for help with android and OpenMW.
Due to how the mark is currently implemented, Fair Care and this mod react poorly with one another. They work together (and I personally use them together), but the target will begin healing themselves, making it much more difficult to kill them in the alloted time that the mark is placed. I will be addressing this in the next update.
This mod is all custom lua scripting and custom assets that should be able to fit into any load order. Due to that, it should be compatible with almost any mod out there. If you find anything incompatible please reach out so I can list it here.
For installation, simply install this as you would any other mod for OpenMW. Since this is a script and a small omwaddon for assets, where you place it within your load order shouldn't particularly matter. I personally utilize Mod Organizer 2 but there are many routes to modding Morrowind. Some people even still do it all manually, which is crazy to me but it works.
Of note, I've included an optional supplementary addon that makes a change to the critical strike GMST, lowering it to x2 from x4 for the critical strike multiplier. This addon will probably conflict with anything else that changes that GMST too.
Credits/Permissions
I want to give a big thank you to everyone over on the OpenMW discord: S3ctor, gnounc, Côme, sjek, and everyone who helped answer my questions over the month it took from knowing zero about OpenMW and coding in general, to being able to throw together something like this. Seriously, if you're interested in learning to make your own mods for OpenMW that discord channel is a great resource.
For permissions, do whatever you want with this, just credit me. All the code is mine. The VFX for the mark is edited (poorly) by me, but is originally found in Magic Diversity -COMPLETE- by Arkann. Be sure to check that mod out if you're looking for better VFX for your spells.
For permissions, do whatever you want with this, just credit me. All the code is mine. The VFX for the mark is edited (poorly) by me, but is originally found in Magic Diversity -COMPLETE- by Arkann. Be sure to check that mod out if you're looking for better VFX for your spells.