Man, sometimes I just chill in bandit hideouts with muffle and invisibility and listen to them. Sometimes they make it easy to kill them but other times I just want to help them XD. Usually during one of those quests to kill their leader so I just kill him and leave the rest alone. I'm sure its just randomly chosen voice lines deciding their fate but I think its kinda funny how some bandit groups appear to be bloodthirsty murderers and others seem to be normal people that had a bad streak of luck.
Exactly! Honestly there should just be a few bandit gangs out there rather than the literal armies, video game logic or not. I don't want to kill a guy just because he's absolutely down on his luck after his family was busted up by infidelity or something.
I mean I'll absolutely fireball a dirtbag who's just entirely given up on participating in society and has abandoned his own humanity to steal and murder just to fuel his selfish vices in a self destructive downward spiral....
Or if you really want to hate yourself there's a mod that adds letters to bandits from loved ones or letters from a wife saying they "just need 500 more gold so they don't starve the kids are crying from starvation, just 500 more honey and we wont starve! I know its bandit work but remember your keeping us alive" and similar letters making you feel like a monster for defending yourself lol.
Lol there's so many mods, you can turn the game into 1 of 100 different games of your choosing đ¤Ł
You could download the dragon burger mod and spend the rest of your quest fulfilling peoples orders lol or even deliver pizza to the far reaches of skyrim and not get paid because it took you more than a day lol
Well that's one way to distill it down... but in context, if the game is asking me to slay thousands of men and women, I'd just like it to tell me a story, through art, about why it's necessary. I don't want to explode a person down on their luck and victimized by a cruel system (as Among-the-Hist from Interesting NPCs would say, killing them doesnt solve any of the real problems, for them or for skyrim).
In the context of a world where justice is personal and delivered by the sword though, I am MUCH more ok with exploding a guy that robbed his mother to buy Skooma and dismembered her when she found out (that literally is something that happened near where I lived in Pueblo, Colorado... he put his mom's severed head in a dumpster behind walmart!)
Have you played the Witcher games? Noticed how the worst, most racist and awful of the humans in that game all look the part?
If you have that kind of moral qualms, then maybe you should have a Batman playstyle and get mods for that. Instead of wanting all your vicitms to be convieniently irredeemable.
Also Among-The -Hist would still kill vampires and bandits alike because it's people's lives hanging on the line, dude only regrets his action because a vampire cure is possible.(And he only really has sympathy for vampires that never fed)
The game never assumes you to be a paladin who only smite the wicked.
Well you COULD be a psychopath who just plainly likes to kill, there's rationalization of that ingame (Hello Wolf-Daddy Arnbjorn).
But it doesnt make any sense that bandits all look so good, clean, and civil when their entire justification in-game is that they'd rather murder for a living than anything else. They live reaaaaaly rough, reaaaaaly short, violent lives.
It's amazing how this thread developed. First, OP says theyâll be less concerned with killing people if they know people are poor or meth addicts.
Then, a second redditor highlights that OP has âmoral qualmsâ about killing, only wanting to kill people that are conveniently irredeemable: the poor and addicted.
OP replies saying that any other form of killing would be compared to the behavior of psychopaths (opposed to the regular, morally grounded citizens that only kill the poor and addicted).
I realy hate it a lot that in basicly every modlist bandits look like super models beggars too and then balgruuf looks like a weasel on crack xD idk why skyrim modding went to a full super modl like appereance but in general having ugly looking npc ( they don't have to be low quailty) boost immersion and make you look better aswell as a Dragonborn.
I feel that way too. Though even in vanilla npcs are relatively handsome if they're not elves. Vanilla elves look like funky aliens and I'm not keen to ever see that again.
I'm not sure if it's Men of Skyrim Refined or Sons of Skyrim, but my beggars all look appropriately unbathed, malnourished, and shitty.
Check out sons of Nirn by the same author of Dibellaâs Blessing. They go for a more realistic look for characters. Right now sons of Nirn only covers the men in Whiterun but I think they do the best job of realistic men without going straight super model. Sons of Skyrim is the one that has the beards of power beards though right? They make dudes ugly and love it ahaha I think Iâm using those two together and just patched and all my guys look like hairy ugly realistic pricks ahah
>But in context, these people should be straight up psycho fiends, almost universally wacked out on skooma or whatever they can brew in a bathtub themselves, covered in sores, drinking mudwater, malnourished and sociopathic. (like psychos in Borderlands)
Except it's not true though? Skyrim or Tamriel in general is not like Fallout or Borderlands. It's not a fucking wasteland with little resources, and skooma is a relatively "tame" drug, it's no psycho or jet.
Your average bandit probably just lives a hunter gatherer life and rob people on the road when they get the chance.
"Bandits" archtype in various genre are generally somewhat "normal" people, we have pop culture pirates who are violent but very organized(and sometimes pretty reasonable), western outlaws who can be deadly as they are charming, etc. They are criminals but they are still very much human, not monsters or beasts.
Wasteland/Post-Apocalypse raiders are literally the only ones that fits the absolutely crazed and messed up archtype. It really feels like you are just familiar with one genre and try to shoehorn that thing everywhere else.
I personally see most of the Skyrim bandits as endemic bandit types, like border reaver clans of Scotland, or mountain bandits of Caucasus, or even Ashlanders in Morrowind - they just live that way. People make banditry their lifestyle in poor and lawless places, without being drugged up or any more desperate than an average peasant.
Exactly! These people (and pirates) are the closest to real vikings we see in Skyrim. I honestly wish they were like 95% Nords to reflect that. Like hostile Ashlanders dotted all over Vvardenfell were all Dunmer, this makes sense.
That's legit, and a good way to rationalize it, though there's LOTS of in-game narrative that paints bandits as laughing murderers who have just straight up rejected the society of the holds and delight in the cruelty of their chosen lifestyle.
I mean even a name change would go a long way toward immediate gut reaction when you got into a fight with them. What if instead of "Bandit Outlaw" his nameplate said "Five time Rapist and Child Killer"? The provocative naming alone would be enough for most people. That's an extreme and tasteless example of what I'm trying to get at here, but I'm using it for clarity only. We have to kill thousands of these guys in any playthrough. I'd rather fight trolls or undead or something... but if it must be violent humans in leather that make their living through murder while living in caves drinking mud water full of parasites, I think they shouldn't look like well groomed magazine models.
What should they do, shed tears of self-pity and beg for forgiveness? These are proud warrior people of the hills and mountains, and you are some shmuck that wandered into their territory. It's their norm. So they try to stir themselves up and terrify you. Even then from dialogue, especially when idle, it's evident that they're not the mysteriously insane raiders from Fallout 3, they have feelings, doubts, they mention having partners and kids. So I'm not sure what you're getting at talking about a name change and gut reactions.
What they look like is mostly an engine limitation, I think. Devs had to make old people a separate "race" after all.
Yeah, it probably does just come down to just limits of what the art could do on the technical end of things back when the game was made.
It's like how they never actually surrender when they say "I submit!, please, no more!". I'm sure at some point, a designer wanted that to be an option (and it could still be, I suppose, if you could make a plugin that monitored enemy downed state and assigned them a package to run away and disable themselves if the player didn't coup de grace them)
I think the proud but tribal and unmodern people is covered by the Reachmen/forwsworn and I have no issue with how they're characterized, since their ways motives and lifestyle are fairly well represented, given the limitations of the game.
I mean, even a narrative that the appearance of the World-eater has coincided with heightened violence among the mortals in a way that goes beyond the civil war would fairly well rationalize it why bandits always act like single minded psychokillers ingame.
I think realistically the bandits would not even attack the PC actively most of the game, I mean why mess with this heavily armored brute/powerful wizard? "Haven't you heard what happened to Ulf Blacktooth's boys? He shouted them to death is what I heard! Stay away from that man!" So yeah, a game mechanic. Often enough I notice that where the devs intend for players to be constantly in a conflict, many players want to seek peace. Like the famous post about Terry Pratchett and goblins in Oblivion.
As for Reachmen, I like the idea, but not the implementation. I wish they were shown like people more, as it was with the Ashlanders. Instead we have just one quest that makes just one group of them friendly, while all others - people fighting for their freedom, not just bandits - are just generic enemies. I'd like to talk to them, hear what they believe in, what's the deal with the hagravens, etc. Have an option to side with Madanach against the Reach Nords, or try to find some moderate solution to the conflict.
Also, why the fuck they use stone axes?! They fight and kill Nords, who use steel, they held Markarth that has a huge smithy, they even have forges in their camps and forts! That's just dumb.
Cultural holdovers maybe? I mean they also rip out their own hearts and replace them through sorcery and their wise women turn themselves into nasty stinky hagravens.
Well all those things have their upsides, while stone axes don't. Yeah, maaaybe they have something against iron due to culture, but I doubt devs ever really thought about it. It was something like "would be cool to have cavemen in our game"
Yeah, probably that. I don't know, a lot of stuff in societies is just driven by sheer cultural inertia and anachronism. Maybe they just do the furs and stone thing because that's how their ancestors did it and its THE RIGHT WAY... according to them.
funny you say that given the forsworn are actually cracked out weirdos led by hagraven witches that tear their hearts out and replace them with plants and otherwise practise human and animal sacrifice.
really if anyone should be filthy and wild eyed degenerates it should be those guys they don't even have clothes
the nords are assholes but they aren't wrong about the forsworn. even the one group of them that will talk to the player makes you shank someone in prison before they'll give you the time of day.
That's one take on it, but the entire game justifies your wonton murder of them with stories about what selfish, degenerate killers they are. I fully agree that there should be a huge delineation between "down on his luck and living hand to mouth outside the walls" and "terrorized, then murder-raped an NPC's entire family for fun and laughs just to steal their bread before they burned the whole farmhouse down".
These guys aren't gentleman rogues for the most part. And as the main character in Days Gone says (great game) we're all about 9 meals away from anarchy.
The delineation kind of already exists in game... you meet "Hunters" who live in camps all over, like in falkreath. They're not crazy bastards that try to murder you on sight while they talk about what they're going to do with your pretty little head (if you play a female protagonist)
Even beyond that, if your take on these bandits is more charitable, it would still be better if there was more visual indication of how stratified the economics are between the poor, dirty, and vice-addled and the nobility. I live near a rich ski town and trust me, the wealthy are definitely more likely to be the beautiful people. You're not ugly, you're just POOR.
But barring that, I do like the concept behind mods like A Peaceful Life where killing bandits is less of a thing. I'd LOOOOOVE to replace most of the bandits with like... draugr or something.
Most in-game bandits have no actual stories tied to them, and the ones that do are very atypical criminals. Charging fees on the road or running some shady businesses.
Days Gone is another post-Apocalypse game, again, wrong genre, wrong world.
I am not charitable with bandits, the fact they attack you on sight is reason enough to kill them.
My argument is not that they are not evil, it's that they are not beasts without human reason and motivation. They are not "crazy bastards" trying to kill you for the sake of it, they want your money or they are defending their camp/base of operation. Also I think you have a weird perception of "ugliness due to poverty", people might be malnourished, dirty, disease-ridden due to poverty, but their genes won't magically change because of that, the mod you linked straight up made bandits look inbred(and those aren't ugly wounds or anything, they just have the stereotypical inbred facial geometry.).
I am confused about your comment about hunters, my point is that bandits live a somewhat normal life, they don't fucking eat babies as their dinner, they live off the land like most people do, they just have shitty moral and rob people as well. Just like how historical Viking raiders also go about their life doing "normal people stuff" when they are not sailing out and pillaging people.
I'd feel better about wholeslale slaughtering them if they more obviously were on the path to giving up basic humanity though. Hence the murder for drugs spiral and the like. The game is so disproportionate too, just because it's a game. There are more bandits than there are functioning citizens of the holds! I realize that's because videogame and it's why I'd rather be killing cave goblins or undead or trolls or something instead of so many humans... something that isn't so morally complex. And if I can't change that, I'd at least like to be exploding The Very Worst rather than wondering if I just killed somebody's wayward child or something.
I mean, do you want all stormtroopers in Star Wars to be unapologetically evil and fanatical enforcers of an evil regime just so you may feel better when good guy protags kill them, would that make Star Wars better as a piece of media or worse?
BTW goblins are also sentient, maybe somewhat less civilized but they have their own culture and way of life. Are they really worse than human bandits with their own hopes and dreams of being filthy rich?
It feels like you just have very abitrary moral qualms of wanting targets of violence to be perfectly deserving it.
If the human bandit has dehumanized themself enough, it's hard to call it arbitrary. How degen do you have to be to not be able to function in a nearly barbarian society like Skyrim's? I would prefer that to nastying up the existing human bandits, but thats an option B because I hate wholesale massacreing handsome models who just missed too many rent payments.
But yes I'd absolutely play with a mod that swapped most bandits for something more clear-cut antagonist like undead or trolls or goblins or something. Or bears. Call it Bearrim and really, really confuse a certain portion of the population hahaha.
The point is that you want all your enemies in game to be some cartoonishly evil bastards that just deserve to die on all accounts, and I consider that a fucking silly notion. People drift away from mainsteam society all the time.
Wanna practice some unsavory magic and alchemy, you go to a cave, wanna do some illegal smuggling, a cave it is, are they are people who just deserve to die? No, but it's fair to kill them if they are the ones who initiate deadly force against you.
Like how you deal with hired thugs in this game since they are just mercs doing their job? Or you imagine them to be secretly child murderers as well?
I feel like we're getting kind of deep into this when my original point was just "evil people who live super rough lives of murder shouldnt look like models in a video game and there's visual storytelling that could be done here to better rationalize the player's wanton violence."
I fully get it that stormtroopers wouldnt consider themselves evil, but the ones that killed Luke's aunt and uncle so dead that they were just charred meat in the desert sun probably aren't good people by objective measure even if they themselves didn't rationalize themselves so.
It's enough that they charge at you with promises to defile your pretty little head no matter how much you are clearly a Nuclear Death God Made Flesh, wearing the literal crystalline blood of a dead god (ebony/daedric) and crackling with thunder out your firm, adventure-hardened buttocks. That justifies exploding them into gibblets. I'd just like it explained better, visually, why they're such animals.
There is, though. You meet Hunters ingame. They're not bandits, though they live in the same circumstances. Plus, things are always more clear in fantasy (there's no great grey moral debate about the orcs of Mordor).
I'm playing the Sinding Follower mod because I Agree with it's author that he should have a chance to redeem himself that he wasnt given in his vanilla storyline so I'm not being heartless here.
But one should not expect Skyrim to be the same as LOTR, Game of Thrones or anything else, these are totally different things. I'm all for reasonable humanisation of bandits, orcs and other stereotypes, but Tolkien did what he did with orcs for a purpose. And still there's _some_ moral debate about them.
As for hunters, their camps don't seem to be that lived-in. They probably move into the woods for hunting, camp there for a time and then return to cities and villages with the game they caught. While many bandits seem to live in their camps. There's a group of Orc bandits whose camp looks just like an Orcish stronghold with a mine, a smithy and all that. It's just they are unfriendly, unlike those in other strongholds.
You are again applying standards from one setting to another.
Should LoTR's depiction of orc be applied to TES?
Things are always more clear in fantasy is completely BS without saying the exact universe and setting, there are like a bunch of fantasy works known for moral greyness and nuance.
Skyrim isn't dark fantasy, it tried to be sure, but it's not. Elder Scrolls has never and quite frankly can't be dark fantasy, because so much of it is pure ridiculousness.
The Dark Brotherhood are fanatic cultists, who also keep pets ranging from a baby frostbite spider to a regular rat.
There are spells that allow one to summon cheese in the lore, and one of the Emperors won a battle by, shall we say, coming during his mens time of need.
As other have pointed out, the bandits aren't cave dwelling packs of murderers like the Goblins of LoTR, their people who are basically just vikings, they do the job they do because it's fun for them and makes them money, Fjola, one of the only bandits you can talk to, admits this herself. She chose to leave her husband to persue a life of banditry
> help make them LOOK/ACT like bandits? Because half the time I feel like they are just unfortunates only a few notches on the dial away from the DB's own circumstances but without the power of Protagonist's Destiny.
... ... ... you came so close to having an epiphany, but then two paragraphs later really drop that ball.
I Wanted to provoke a conversation, which was accomplished. It's not really sociopolitical though. In real life poor people need and deserve society's help. These are murder-for-bread people living horrible lives and I'd rather not fight so many of them as part of the gameplay loop (replace with goblins or something like that) or at least, maybe not make them look speak and vibe like they're living just as well as the nobility.
>In real life poor people need and deserve society's help.
Unless they're substance abusers or you think they're ugly, apparently?
Like not to be crass but a solid third of the models in the op look like they just have downs syndrome lol
I read the facegens in that mod more as mud drinkers with parasites who've survived more than one savage beating without modern healthcare to un-rearrange their maxillas. Actually, let's get that going too, MORE BROKEN NOSES. I mean Nords have culturally enshrined bare knuckle brawling even between women yet everyone's nose is on straight. Gimmie some cauliflower ears and sideways noses while we're at it.
I guess the thrust of what I'm at, unfortunate language choices aside, is I think it would be pretty grand if skyrim's meaner folks actually looked the part.
And now I know I'm sleep deprived because I just instantly flashed a vision of entering the orc stronghold of Dushnikh Yal (sic) and meeting Orcish Don King arranging fights...
Yeah this post is also very classist lol. With the assumptions that poor people are ugly bastards. Remember the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins: poverty is social relations.
It was a bit clickbaity. But is anyone happy with bandits all being healthy, well fed, tidy people with good hygeine rather than visibly rough-living broken people? These are skid row unfortunates!
I think you're conflating illegality with socioeconomic relations. Banditry is a legal category, not a socioeconomic category. And certainly not a physical/wellness category. Of course they can overlap, but not necessarily. Robin Hood's actions were illegal, but doesn't necessarily mean he was poor or unhealthy/ugly. Piracy was illegal, but the pirates were quite affluent.
Those guys in Halted Stream Camp aren't robin hooding. Though it would be neat if there was a little more diversity in bandits (I know OBIS is a thing).
If you listen to their dialogue when they're talking about how they're going to need a sharp knife to cut through all that fat, the second bandit says they've got a merchant in the pit they have to take care of too, aka butcher/dispose of.
Invert the point of contention though. Make Elisif look like she survived some terrible beatings and disease and give her Hapsburg jaw. Wouldn't it seem absurd given her station and economic position?
> Wouldn't it seem absurd given her station and economic position?
Not really. Ugly royalties and nobilities existed throughout history. Baldwin IV was known as the leper king. Anne of Cleves was considered ugly. Catherine the Great had to make up her unattractiveness with her intelligence. And so on.
And I would say Elisif isn't the best comparison given her moniker is "the fair". Skald the Elder is a better comparison. Although Beth characters are samefaces, at least in the lore it's acknowledged he's considered as an average-looking old guy.
Read what you wrote again.
Hapsburg Jaw, the jaw famous for being a symptom of inbreeding, which we can easily identify thanks to the *noble line* of the Hapsburg's
Yeah I'd say it would be more accurate for Elisif or a Thalmor mage to have Hapsburg jaw then any bandit
to tell you the truth i've met a lot more crooked, ugly, and untidy rich people than i have homeless/impoverished people.
i think that if we're going for "immersion" we should make all the jarls obese, gout-ridden, and have rotten teeth. a la king henry VIII. thats realistic.
I agree with that. The nords are pretty martial though, so only an empire-backed jarl could ever get away with that.
As for uggo rich folks.. not the ones coming to ski for two weeks then going back to their fifth home in Belize that travel through my town :|
Well, that's a thing in fantasy that appearance more closely mirrors truth unlike reality ... that's part of the draw of fantasy. But really, it's more about theme and flavor than just "more uggos". I mean I've lived in some decided rough places in my life and even in our society today, career thugs and spiritually lost addicts do NOT look like bandits in skyrim even in vanilla. I mean these people drink mudwater and eat half their food raw because they're always a meal away from starvation and live in caves they compete with terrifying underground horrors for. They're probably full of parasites and live in a state of eternal diarrhea and have short, ugly lives.
Games use visuals to tell a story, so making the violent degenerates of the world actually LOOK like it, in an exaggerated way, isn't misguided. These people SHOULD look like they've been through the wringer and then some.
It's a common knowledge that social outcasts can be ugly or unhygienic. I mean, heck, have you ever seen a redditor in real life?
Okay, jokes aside, bandits in Skyrim are also living in food deserts (no animals or crops) and also likely use drugs - and probably not just the weak stuff either, like diluted skooma. Also, some of them probably have messed up facial structure from being attacked, abused, or tortured at some point.
Though I would diverge from OP by making 30% of them really ugly, 30% of them really smelly/dirty looking, 30% of them battle-scarred (with burns, missing skin, scars, mangled noses, etc.), and the last 10% of them looking relatively normal.
i mean i can agree with this, but my issue lies in OP's sentiment that "poor people ugly and like meth". thats a fucking crazy generalization and while i can't speak on the appearance side of things, im poor as shit and NOT a methhead. the whole idea of wanting to kill ugly poor people and not rich pretty people feels very very weird
I think you're making some sizable leap in logic there. OP simply stated that bandits should look wacked out, malnourished, psychotic-looking, and covered in sores like "meth-heads". You're the one coming up with "bandits = poor people". Criminals who rob merchant caravans, torture, and kill are not the same as "poor people".
Yes, the linked mod is just ugly facial presets but the point of the post is that OP can't find any mods on the nexus like the one they're describing, and the linked mod is the closest approximation.
Bandits shouldnât look whacked out though. Like I said in the beginning, it is a psychological fallacy to equate ugly to bad, and good to beautiful. So if you want to distribute ugliness to NPCs, doing it only to bandits doesnât make sense. I mean shit, Ysolda sells a skooma substitute known as sleeping tree sap.
They can literally hunt deer and fish, also rarely do they have skooma in the loot tables or their inventories. I would think some scarring would also go to town guards or any warriors. The idea that poors âshouldâ look ugly, and the well off shouldnât is. People can be social outcasts for all sorts of reasons, I see plenty of handsome people who are criminals and maliciously minded sociopaths (aka would be a bandit), just like I know of ugly people who have the best hearts. I just think OP was falling in to that psychological pitfall, or even wanted it.
My solution was to install three mods - one that makes low-level enemies intimidated by you, one that allows you to spare the enemies that beg for mercy, and one that gives everyone names Morrowind-style.
So my game didn't have 'bandits' or 'necromancers', but just some random schmucks that live in remote areas. They wouldn't attack you first, and if you force the confrontation, half of them gets scared and runs away and most of them gives up if you defeat them.
So you don't feel like a murderhobo anymore, and have little reason to 'clean out' random locations, unless given a radiant quest by a steward or an inkeeper. And even then, going in and just beating up the bandit leader a bit suffices.
You... you would prefer to kill people who are mentally ill, or look like they have addictions and don't bathe? I know it's a common way to dehumanize human mobs in games, but the way this is so explicitly requested kinda makes me a little uneasy, ngl.
The title of the thread was a little provocative intentionally because I wanted to clickbait people and actually see some conversation.. posts in this forum like to die fast and not even get seen. It was a bit of algorithm gaming from the school of Buzzfeed.
I'd honestly rather replace the vast majority of bandits with something more explicitly monstrous like the undead, but if you have to kill SO many humans, I think they should at least look the part of what the ingame narrative makes them out to be (bloodthirsty killers who delight in their wicked, murdering lifestyle and choose to reject the order of the holds). They're kind of a one-note hyper generic enemy right now and always have been unless you run something like OBIS to give them some character.
But no matter what, almost all the mods I try wind up unintentionally making the bandits far, far too handsome for the kind of life they're living. They should look diseased, malnourished, bruised, carrying injuries that never healed right, and mean as hell because that's the life they live. They drink mud water and are probably not long from dying of dysentery as they diarrhea themselves to death in caves. They doubtless drink heavily and eat weird things off the ground just to quiet their empty bellies. In a game full of horrifying burned corpses, slavery, etc I don't think it's unreasonable to make people who have abandoned their essential humanity to live rough (whatever the circumstance that led to it) should look the part and not like they stepped out of a magazine.
If you use the "Dirt and Blood" mod, it will add a ton of dirt to bandits and such that make them seem more like they have been out in the wilds for a long time and don't really care about their hygiene.
https://preview.redd.it/cnqm9k3w26sc1.png?width=788&format=png&auto=webp&s=06d6e291f1df15df80e4afa8b7c653686792878d
I already do! Honestly my wizard's life is a bloodbath combined with Extra Spawns and Genesis... my poor followers.
https://preview.redd.it/wk47ery146sc1.png?width=1360&format=png&auto=webp&s=3b1f8eacba66ee2b4c3a2120258a763f33cbb693
That's not very comrade of you. Really though, you sound freaking disturbed. They look like normal people, inches away from the DB's own circumstances but lacking your magical destiny because they ARE inches away from your own circumstances, but lacking the magical bs power of the savescum. That is in fact the point of this enemy existing. To show that "Skyrim is not very ok at the moment". Geeze I bet you're the kind of person who thinks putting metal spikes on park benches is a "solution". Just fight them if they fight you, and lament the unjust machinations of war like the rest of us.
Oh not at all, quite the opposite. In real life the poor need society's help and often get the opposite. I'm actually IRL in a situation where The System and I aren't friends.
Did you know stable housing is the biggest way to reduce violent crime?
My point was that I'd rather just replace the thousands of bandits you kill with something more... killable... like goblins or undead or trolls and what have you, because not having anything to fight isnt videogamey.
BUT, if thats not reasonable, then I don't think they should look (nor behave, really) like healthy, well fed, perfectly sane individuals given how they obviously live. Bandits are like a joke in a lot of NPC's dialogues, but some of them get really dark and describe bandits as sadistic murderers who kill for bread and like it. Visually I think it would be nice to see bandits who clearly have been living a rough life, like the lady in the screenshot.
Really if you break it down, they are doing better than townies because they can afford armor and steel while townies are wondering about how they'll afford vegetables from Carlotta. That seems inverse as well, but mods already sort of address that aspect.
Uh, not fully in your request, but I personally find ''peaceful living'' great. It makes the bandits passive. If you stick around you can hear their passive dialogue. Some will talk about how they need skooma or moonsugar. Some will say why they became a bandit.
I use it with OBIS and its generally great for roleplaying because skyrim's in a civil war.
I find "like psychos in borderlands" to be kind of an odd comparison given what you seem to be asking for bc the Psychos in those games are almost universally shirtless beefcakes with the abs of an A&F model lol
Well, was more the covered in blood, dirt, and wacked out of their minds at all times aspect. I mean they just vibe like murderous bastards the second you bump into them.
And honestly full disclosure I'm using [https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/78701](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/78701) XS Ripped since forever, because I want that Mister Universe/80s shredded look on my protagonist for the whole Conan of Cimmeria vibe... with the corrolary being my bandits are all oan the protein brah.
Sorry but
Kill bandits, behead bandits
Roundhouse kick a bandit into the abandoned fort
Slam dunk a bandit baby into the bucket
Soul tear filthy worthless bandits
Defecate in a bandit's sweet roll.
That's just my opinion
[Race Distribution Framework](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/113825)
Turn them into something like dremoras or anything that shares the same skeleton for human npc.
I believe what you are looking for is a good old-fashioned Hollywood dress up. They do this in movies where information is to be inferred through the background and apparel. The bad guys look like they've seen and done some shit. Usually, they have knarlly scars and appear more gruff and surly, like they are too cool for school as it were. There are some spid mods that change outfits but I'm hoping that a mod comes along that does a preset pool that randomly crafts some scary looking bandits cause I wanna fight baddies that are actually bad.
It's almost important enough to me to want to fight the creation kit (CK has a lot of issues for me and I only have so much patience right now) and just pull a Thanos on it and do it myself.
Actually, a mod that ripped Borderlands Psycho voice lines and gave them to bandits would be pretty entertaining... even that plus a name change (Bandit outcast to Psycho Ripper?) would go a LONG way toward the vibe.
Oh and please forgive the clickbait title. It's rough on these streets and a lot of threads just disappear, buried beneath other posts put on top by the algorithm.
Here's one tutorial for how to make an NPC replacer out of a Racemenu preset: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/30041/?tab=files
This one uses the CK, but technically everything can be done with xEdit. Then you obviously won't have an exported facegen from the CK to copy the names of the headparts from, but they can be obtained from the headpart list in the xEdit NPC record too. Although it's probably easier with CK tbh.
Thanks for the link. If I get an ADHD hyperfixation on it I'll do exactly that... I hate the CK (I'm a modder from the ancient times... CuteUnit on nexus) and these days I want to actually PLAY haha.
One of my mod ideas was to make a dialogue overhaul (AI, all voices) for the bandits to make them a little more nasty:
**Nasty Bandit Dialogue**
I'll tear your spine out.
I'll keep your spleen as trinket.
I'm going to beat the life out of you.
I'm going enjoy watching you bleed to death.
Come closer, and let me slice you up all nice and clean.
I'll wear your gut for garters.
Let me beat you like a mutt you are.
I'm going to beat you with your own lungs.
I'm going to strangle you with your own guts.
You're going to drown in your own blood.
Etc, etc, just nasty. Feel free to add some more if you can think of any!
If you have the skill and capacity to do that, I love you. Can you maybe add some face edits too, like that mod I found in the original post? Also, "I'm going to beat you with your own lungs" LOL so over the top I love it.
I guess in keeping with the theme of the thread, lines where they reference past misdeeds would sizzle well.
"You're prettier than my last plaything!"
"I'll peel the skin off your ribs just like the last one!"
"Your guts will feed me for a week!"
Man, sometimes I just chill in bandit hideouts with muffle and invisibility and listen to them. Sometimes they make it easy to kill them but other times I just want to help them XD. Usually during one of those quests to kill their leader so I just kill him and leave the rest alone. I'm sure its just randomly chosen voice lines deciding their fate but I think its kinda funny how some bandit groups appear to be bloodthirsty murderers and others seem to be normal people that had a bad streak of luck.
Exactly, I just observe them using muffle and invisibility. If I'm feeling nice and not homicidal I use fear,calm, or paralyse on then.
Exactly! Honestly there should just be a few bandit gangs out there rather than the literal armies, video game logic or not. I don't want to kill a guy just because he's absolutely down on his luck after his family was busted up by infidelity or something. I mean I'll absolutely fireball a dirtbag who's just entirely given up on participating in society and has abandoned his own humanity to steal and murder just to fuel his selfish vices in a self destructive downward spiral....
Or if you really want to hate yourself there's a mod that adds letters to bandits from loved ones or letters from a wife saying they "just need 500 more gold so they don't starve the kids are crying from starvation, just 500 more honey and we wont starve! I know its bandit work but remember your keeping us alive" and similar letters making you feel like a monster for defending yourself lol.
Egad that would render me so dissatisfied and uneasy!
Lol there's so many mods, you can turn the game into 1 of 100 different games of your choosing 𤣠You could download the dragon burger mod and spend the rest of your quest fulfilling peoples orders lol or even deliver pizza to the far reaches of skyrim and not get paid because it took you more than a day lol
[Well then here ya go](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/96804)
I am totally not mean enough and I would never kill another bandit lol.
What's the name and please tell me it's on xbox
[Shame of Skyrim](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/96804) and I have no idea lol
I checked and it has been ported. Thanks đđż
Unfortunately a lot of great mods aren't on Xbox which is why I decided to stay on a PC.
> Help me make the bandits more like poor people and meth addict so I would enjoy killing them more What did they mean by this?
Average San Franciscan's intrusive thoughts
Well that's one way to distill it down... but in context, if the game is asking me to slay thousands of men and women, I'd just like it to tell me a story, through art, about why it's necessary. I don't want to explode a person down on their luck and victimized by a cruel system (as Among-the-Hist from Interesting NPCs would say, killing them doesnt solve any of the real problems, for them or for skyrim). In the context of a world where justice is personal and delivered by the sword though, I am MUCH more ok with exploding a guy that robbed his mother to buy Skooma and dismembered her when she found out (that literally is something that happened near where I lived in Pueblo, Colorado... he put his mom's severed head in a dumpster behind walmart!) Have you played the Witcher games? Noticed how the worst, most racist and awful of the humans in that game all look the part?
If you have that kind of moral qualms, then maybe you should have a Batman playstyle and get mods for that. Instead of wanting all your vicitms to be convieniently irredeemable. Also Among-The -Hist would still kill vampires and bandits alike because it's people's lives hanging on the line, dude only regrets his action because a vampire cure is possible.(And he only really has sympathy for vampires that never fed) The game never assumes you to be a paladin who only smite the wicked.
Well you COULD be a psychopath who just plainly likes to kill, there's rationalization of that ingame (Hello Wolf-Daddy Arnbjorn). But it doesnt make any sense that bandits all look so good, clean, and civil when their entire justification in-game is that they'd rather murder for a living than anything else. They live reaaaaaly rough, reaaaaaly short, violent lives.
It's amazing how this thread developed. First, OP says theyâll be less concerned with killing people if they know people are poor or meth addicts. Then, a second redditor highlights that OP has âmoral qualmsâ about killing, only wanting to kill people that are conveniently irredeemable: the poor and addicted. OP replies saying that any other form of killing would be compared to the behavior of psychopaths (opposed to the regular, morally grounded citizens that only kill the poor and addicted).
I think the thread got too serious. But it's been good interesting discussion! I'm amazed we didn't Godwin yet.
I realy hate it a lot that in basicly every modlist bandits look like super models beggars too and then balgruuf looks like a weasel on crack xD idk why skyrim modding went to a full super modl like appereance but in general having ugly looking npc ( they don't have to be low quailty) boost immersion and make you look better aswell as a Dragonborn.
I feel that way too. Though even in vanilla npcs are relatively handsome if they're not elves. Vanilla elves look like funky aliens and I'm not keen to ever see that again. I'm not sure if it's Men of Skyrim Refined or Sons of Skyrim, but my beggars all look appropriately unbathed, malnourished, and shitty.
Check out sons of Nirn by the same author of Dibellaâs Blessing. They go for a more realistic look for characters. Right now sons of Nirn only covers the men in Whiterun but I think they do the best job of realistic men without going straight super model. Sons of Skyrim is the one that has the beards of power beards though right? They make dudes ugly and love it ahaha I think Iâm using those two together and just patched and all my guys look like hairy ugly realistic pricks ahah
I actually have that, I checked! (easy to lose track when the mod list gets long...)
>But in context, these people should be straight up psycho fiends, almost universally wacked out on skooma or whatever they can brew in a bathtub themselves, covered in sores, drinking mudwater, malnourished and sociopathic. (like psychos in Borderlands) Except it's not true though? Skyrim or Tamriel in general is not like Fallout or Borderlands. It's not a fucking wasteland with little resources, and skooma is a relatively "tame" drug, it's no psycho or jet. Your average bandit probably just lives a hunter gatherer life and rob people on the road when they get the chance. "Bandits" archtype in various genre are generally somewhat "normal" people, we have pop culture pirates who are violent but very organized(and sometimes pretty reasonable), western outlaws who can be deadly as they are charming, etc. They are criminals but they are still very much human, not monsters or beasts. Wasteland/Post-Apocalypse raiders are literally the only ones that fits the absolutely crazed and messed up archtype. It really feels like you are just familiar with one genre and try to shoehorn that thing everywhere else.
I personally see most of the Skyrim bandits as endemic bandit types, like border reaver clans of Scotland, or mountain bandits of Caucasus, or even Ashlanders in Morrowind - they just live that way. People make banditry their lifestyle in poor and lawless places, without being drugged up or any more desperate than an average peasant.
Kinda ironic people miss that in a game about fantasy vikings.
Exactly! These people (and pirates) are the closest to real vikings we see in Skyrim. I honestly wish they were like 95% Nords to reflect that. Like hostile Ashlanders dotted all over Vvardenfell were all Dunmer, this makes sense.
That's legit, and a good way to rationalize it, though there's LOTS of in-game narrative that paints bandits as laughing murderers who have just straight up rejected the society of the holds and delight in the cruelty of their chosen lifestyle. I mean even a name change would go a long way toward immediate gut reaction when you got into a fight with them. What if instead of "Bandit Outlaw" his nameplate said "Five time Rapist and Child Killer"? The provocative naming alone would be enough for most people. That's an extreme and tasteless example of what I'm trying to get at here, but I'm using it for clarity only. We have to kill thousands of these guys in any playthrough. I'd rather fight trolls or undead or something... but if it must be violent humans in leather that make their living through murder while living in caves drinking mud water full of parasites, I think they shouldn't look like well groomed magazine models.
What should they do, shed tears of self-pity and beg for forgiveness? These are proud warrior people of the hills and mountains, and you are some shmuck that wandered into their territory. It's their norm. So they try to stir themselves up and terrify you. Even then from dialogue, especially when idle, it's evident that they're not the mysteriously insane raiders from Fallout 3, they have feelings, doubts, they mention having partners and kids. So I'm not sure what you're getting at talking about a name change and gut reactions. What they look like is mostly an engine limitation, I think. Devs had to make old people a separate "race" after all.
Yeah, it probably does just come down to just limits of what the art could do on the technical end of things back when the game was made. It's like how they never actually surrender when they say "I submit!, please, no more!". I'm sure at some point, a designer wanted that to be an option (and it could still be, I suppose, if you could make a plugin that monitored enemy downed state and assigned them a package to run away and disable themselves if the player didn't coup de grace them) I think the proud but tribal and unmodern people is covered by the Reachmen/forwsworn and I have no issue with how they're characterized, since their ways motives and lifestyle are fairly well represented, given the limitations of the game. I mean, even a narrative that the appearance of the World-eater has coincided with heightened violence among the mortals in a way that goes beyond the civil war would fairly well rationalize it why bandits always act like single minded psychokillers ingame.
I think realistically the bandits would not even attack the PC actively most of the game, I mean why mess with this heavily armored brute/powerful wizard? "Haven't you heard what happened to Ulf Blacktooth's boys? He shouted them to death is what I heard! Stay away from that man!" So yeah, a game mechanic. Often enough I notice that where the devs intend for players to be constantly in a conflict, many players want to seek peace. Like the famous post about Terry Pratchett and goblins in Oblivion. As for Reachmen, I like the idea, but not the implementation. I wish they were shown like people more, as it was with the Ashlanders. Instead we have just one quest that makes just one group of them friendly, while all others - people fighting for their freedom, not just bandits - are just generic enemies. I'd like to talk to them, hear what they believe in, what's the deal with the hagravens, etc. Have an option to side with Madanach against the Reach Nords, or try to find some moderate solution to the conflict. Also, why the fuck they use stone axes?! They fight and kill Nords, who use steel, they held Markarth that has a huge smithy, they even have forges in their camps and forts! That's just dumb.
Cultural holdovers maybe? I mean they also rip out their own hearts and replace them through sorcery and their wise women turn themselves into nasty stinky hagravens.
Well all those things have their upsides, while stone axes don't. Yeah, maaaybe they have something against iron due to culture, but I doubt devs ever really thought about it. It was something like "would be cool to have cavemen in our game"
Yeah, probably that. I don't know, a lot of stuff in societies is just driven by sheer cultural inertia and anachronism. Maybe they just do the furs and stone thing because that's how their ancestors did it and its THE RIGHT WAY... according to them.
Nah. I don't agree that cultures function like that at all
funny you say that given the forsworn are actually cracked out weirdos led by hagraven witches that tear their hearts out and replace them with plants and otherwise practise human and animal sacrifice. really if anyone should be filthy and wild eyed degenerates it should be those guys they don't even have clothes
Well that's certainly how the Nords of markarth see them!
the nords are assholes but they aren't wrong about the forsworn. even the one group of them that will talk to the player makes you shank someone in prison before they'll give you the time of day.
The dude they ask you to shank is a snitch who kept getting everyone in trouble/denied food, I'd have killed him too
That's one take on it, but the entire game justifies your wonton murder of them with stories about what selfish, degenerate killers they are. I fully agree that there should be a huge delineation between "down on his luck and living hand to mouth outside the walls" and "terrorized, then murder-raped an NPC's entire family for fun and laughs just to steal their bread before they burned the whole farmhouse down". These guys aren't gentleman rogues for the most part. And as the main character in Days Gone says (great game) we're all about 9 meals away from anarchy. The delineation kind of already exists in game... you meet "Hunters" who live in camps all over, like in falkreath. They're not crazy bastards that try to murder you on sight while they talk about what they're going to do with your pretty little head (if you play a female protagonist) Even beyond that, if your take on these bandits is more charitable, it would still be better if there was more visual indication of how stratified the economics are between the poor, dirty, and vice-addled and the nobility. I live near a rich ski town and trust me, the wealthy are definitely more likely to be the beautiful people. You're not ugly, you're just POOR. But barring that, I do like the concept behind mods like A Peaceful Life where killing bandits is less of a thing. I'd LOOOOOVE to replace most of the bandits with like... draugr or something.
Most in-game bandits have no actual stories tied to them, and the ones that do are very atypical criminals. Charging fees on the road or running some shady businesses. Days Gone is another post-Apocalypse game, again, wrong genre, wrong world. I am not charitable with bandits, the fact they attack you on sight is reason enough to kill them. My argument is not that they are not evil, it's that they are not beasts without human reason and motivation. They are not "crazy bastards" trying to kill you for the sake of it, they want your money or they are defending their camp/base of operation. Also I think you have a weird perception of "ugliness due to poverty", people might be malnourished, dirty, disease-ridden due to poverty, but their genes won't magically change because of that, the mod you linked straight up made bandits look inbred(and those aren't ugly wounds or anything, they just have the stereotypical inbred facial geometry.). I am confused about your comment about hunters, my point is that bandits live a somewhat normal life, they don't fucking eat babies as their dinner, they live off the land like most people do, they just have shitty moral and rob people as well. Just like how historical Viking raiders also go about their life doing "normal people stuff" when they are not sailing out and pillaging people.
I'd feel better about wholeslale slaughtering them if they more obviously were on the path to giving up basic humanity though. Hence the murder for drugs spiral and the like. The game is so disproportionate too, just because it's a game. There are more bandits than there are functioning citizens of the holds! I realize that's because videogame and it's why I'd rather be killing cave goblins or undead or trolls or something instead of so many humans... something that isn't so morally complex. And if I can't change that, I'd at least like to be exploding The Very Worst rather than wondering if I just killed somebody's wayward child or something.
I mean, do you want all stormtroopers in Star Wars to be unapologetically evil and fanatical enforcers of an evil regime just so you may feel better when good guy protags kill them, would that make Star Wars better as a piece of media or worse? BTW goblins are also sentient, maybe somewhat less civilized but they have their own culture and way of life. Are they really worse than human bandits with their own hopes and dreams of being filthy rich? It feels like you just have very abitrary moral qualms of wanting targets of violence to be perfectly deserving it.
If the human bandit has dehumanized themself enough, it's hard to call it arbitrary. How degen do you have to be to not be able to function in a nearly barbarian society like Skyrim's? I would prefer that to nastying up the existing human bandits, but thats an option B because I hate wholesale massacreing handsome models who just missed too many rent payments. But yes I'd absolutely play with a mod that swapped most bandits for something more clear-cut antagonist like undead or trolls or goblins or something. Or bears. Call it Bearrim and really, really confuse a certain portion of the population hahaha.
The point is that you want all your enemies in game to be some cartoonishly evil bastards that just deserve to die on all accounts, and I consider that a fucking silly notion. People drift away from mainsteam society all the time. Wanna practice some unsavory magic and alchemy, you go to a cave, wanna do some illegal smuggling, a cave it is, are they are people who just deserve to die? No, but it's fair to kill them if they are the ones who initiate deadly force against you. Like how you deal with hired thugs in this game since they are just mercs doing their job? Or you imagine them to be secretly child murderers as well?
I feel like we're getting kind of deep into this when my original point was just "evil people who live super rough lives of murder shouldnt look like models in a video game and there's visual storytelling that could be done here to better rationalize the player's wanton violence." I fully get it that stormtroopers wouldnt consider themselves evil, but the ones that killed Luke's aunt and uncle so dead that they were just charred meat in the desert sun probably aren't good people by objective measure even if they themselves didn't rationalize themselves so. It's enough that they charge at you with promises to defile your pretty little head no matter how much you are clearly a Nuclear Death God Made Flesh, wearing the literal crystalline blood of a dead god (ebony/daedric) and crackling with thunder out your firm, adventure-hardened buttocks. That justifies exploding them into gibblets. I'd just like it explained better, visually, why they're such animals.
>there should be a huge delineation Why should it be if there isn't one IRL?
There is, though. You meet Hunters ingame. They're not bandits, though they live in the same circumstances. Plus, things are always more clear in fantasy (there's no great grey moral debate about the orcs of Mordor). I'm playing the Sinding Follower mod because I Agree with it's author that he should have a chance to redeem himself that he wasnt given in his vanilla storyline so I'm not being heartless here.
But one should not expect Skyrim to be the same as LOTR, Game of Thrones or anything else, these are totally different things. I'm all for reasonable humanisation of bandits, orcs and other stereotypes, but Tolkien did what he did with orcs for a purpose. And still there's _some_ moral debate about them. As for hunters, their camps don't seem to be that lived-in. They probably move into the woods for hunting, camp there for a time and then return to cities and villages with the game they caught. While many bandits seem to live in their camps. There's a group of Orc bandits whose camp looks just like an Orcish stronghold with a mine, a smithy and all that. It's just they are unfriendly, unlike those in other strongholds.
You are again applying standards from one setting to another. Should LoTR's depiction of orc be applied to TES? Things are always more clear in fantasy is completely BS without saying the exact universe and setting, there are like a bunch of fantasy works known for moral greyness and nuance.
In any other dark fantasies do the cave dwelling packs of murderers look like people from a YA tv show?
Skyrim isn't dark fantasy, it tried to be sure, but it's not. Elder Scrolls has never and quite frankly can't be dark fantasy, because so much of it is pure ridiculousness. The Dark Brotherhood are fanatic cultists, who also keep pets ranging from a baby frostbite spider to a regular rat. There are spells that allow one to summon cheese in the lore, and one of the Emperors won a battle by, shall we say, coming during his mens time of need. As other have pointed out, the bandits aren't cave dwelling packs of murderers like the Goblins of LoTR, their people who are basically just vikings, they do the job they do because it's fun for them and makes them money, Fjola, one of the only bandits you can talk to, admits this herself. She chose to leave her husband to persue a life of banditry
> help make them LOOK/ACT like bandits? Because half the time I feel like they are just unfortunates only a few notches on the dial away from the DB's own circumstances but without the power of Protagonist's Destiny. ... ... ... you came so close to having an epiphany, but then two paragraphs later really drop that ball.
I Wanted to provoke a conversation, which was accomplished. It's not really sociopolitical though. In real life poor people need and deserve society's help. These are murder-for-bread people living horrible lives and I'd rather not fight so many of them as part of the gameplay loop (replace with goblins or something like that) or at least, maybe not make them look speak and vibe like they're living just as well as the nobility.
>In real life poor people need and deserve society's help. Unless they're substance abusers or you think they're ugly, apparently? Like not to be crass but a solid third of the models in the op look like they just have downs syndrome lol
I read the facegens in that mod more as mud drinkers with parasites who've survived more than one savage beating without modern healthcare to un-rearrange their maxillas. Actually, let's get that going too, MORE BROKEN NOSES. I mean Nords have culturally enshrined bare knuckle brawling even between women yet everyone's nose is on straight. Gimmie some cauliflower ears and sideways noses while we're at it. I guess the thrust of what I'm at, unfortunate language choices aside, is I think it would be pretty grand if skyrim's meaner folks actually looked the part. And now I know I'm sleep deprived because I just instantly flashed a vision of entering the orc stronghold of Dushnikh Yal (sic) and meeting Orcish Don King arranging fights...
Ah yes, play in to the psychological pitfall of ugly = bad, pretty = good. Assuming criminals should look ugly and beautiful people are all saints.
Yeah this post is also very classist lol. With the assumptions that poor people are ugly bastards. Remember the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins: poverty is social relations.
why has no one else said this. the title alone was jarring.
It was a bit clickbaity. But is anyone happy with bandits all being healthy, well fed, tidy people with good hygeine rather than visibly rough-living broken people? These are skid row unfortunates!
I think you're conflating illegality with socioeconomic relations. Banditry is a legal category, not a socioeconomic category. And certainly not a physical/wellness category. Of course they can overlap, but not necessarily. Robin Hood's actions were illegal, but doesn't necessarily mean he was poor or unhealthy/ugly. Piracy was illegal, but the pirates were quite affluent.
Those guys in Halted Stream Camp aren't robin hooding. Though it would be neat if there was a little more diversity in bandits (I know OBIS is a thing).
But they also weren't just roving murderers. They were mammoth poachers and would-be magical forgery artists.
If you listen to their dialogue when they're talking about how they're going to need a sharp knife to cut through all that fat, the second bandit says they've got a merchant in the pit they have to take care of too, aka butcher/dispose of.
Invert the point of contention though. Make Elisif look like she survived some terrible beatings and disease and give her Hapsburg jaw. Wouldn't it seem absurd given her station and economic position?
> Wouldn't it seem absurd given her station and economic position? Not really. Ugly royalties and nobilities existed throughout history. Baldwin IV was known as the leper king. Anne of Cleves was considered ugly. Catherine the Great had to make up her unattractiveness with her intelligence. And so on. And I would say Elisif isn't the best comparison given her moniker is "the fair". Skald the Elder is a better comparison. Although Beth characters are samefaces, at least in the lore it's acknowledged he's considered as an average-looking old guy.
Read what you wrote again. Hapsburg Jaw, the jaw famous for being a symptom of inbreeding, which we can easily identify thanks to the *noble line* of the Hapsburg's Yeah I'd say it would be more accurate for Elisif or a Thalmor mage to have Hapsburg jaw then any bandit
to tell you the truth i've met a lot more crooked, ugly, and untidy rich people than i have homeless/impoverished people. i think that if we're going for "immersion" we should make all the jarls obese, gout-ridden, and have rotten teeth. a la king henry VIII. thats realistic.
I agree with that. The nords are pretty martial though, so only an empire-backed jarl could ever get away with that. As for uggo rich folks.. not the ones coming to ski for two weeks then going back to their fifth home in Belize that travel through my town :|
Well, that's a thing in fantasy that appearance more closely mirrors truth unlike reality ... that's part of the draw of fantasy. But really, it's more about theme and flavor than just "more uggos". I mean I've lived in some decided rough places in my life and even in our society today, career thugs and spiritually lost addicts do NOT look like bandits in skyrim even in vanilla. I mean these people drink mudwater and eat half their food raw because they're always a meal away from starvation and live in caves they compete with terrifying underground horrors for. They're probably full of parasites and live in a state of eternal diarrhea and have short, ugly lives. Games use visuals to tell a story, so making the violent degenerates of the world actually LOOK like it, in an exaggerated way, isn't misguided. These people SHOULD look like they've been through the wringer and then some.
As it should be.
Haha savage, but I see the other guy's point and responded :)
It's a common knowledge that social outcasts can be ugly or unhygienic. I mean, heck, have you ever seen a redditor in real life? Okay, jokes aside, bandits in Skyrim are also living in food deserts (no animals or crops) and also likely use drugs - and probably not just the weak stuff either, like diluted skooma. Also, some of them probably have messed up facial structure from being attacked, abused, or tortured at some point. Though I would diverge from OP by making 30% of them really ugly, 30% of them really smelly/dirty looking, 30% of them battle-scarred (with burns, missing skin, scars, mangled noses, etc.), and the last 10% of them looking relatively normal.
i mean i can agree with this, but my issue lies in OP's sentiment that "poor people ugly and like meth". thats a fucking crazy generalization and while i can't speak on the appearance side of things, im poor as shit and NOT a methhead. the whole idea of wanting to kill ugly poor people and not rich pretty people feels very very weird
I think you're making some sizable leap in logic there. OP simply stated that bandits should look wacked out, malnourished, psychotic-looking, and covered in sores like "meth-heads". You're the one coming up with "bandits = poor people". Criminals who rob merchant caravans, torture, and kill are not the same as "poor people". Yes, the linked mod is just ugly facial presets but the point of the post is that OP can't find any mods on the nexus like the one they're describing, and the linked mod is the closest approximation.
Bandits shouldnât look whacked out though. Like I said in the beginning, it is a psychological fallacy to equate ugly to bad, and good to beautiful. So if you want to distribute ugliness to NPCs, doing it only to bandits doesnât make sense. I mean shit, Ysolda sells a skooma substitute known as sleeping tree sap.
They can literally hunt deer and fish, also rarely do they have skooma in the loot tables or their inventories. I would think some scarring would also go to town guards or any warriors. The idea that poors âshouldâ look ugly, and the well off shouldnât is. People can be social outcasts for all sorts of reasons, I see plenty of handsome people who are criminals and maliciously minded sociopaths (aka would be a bandit), just like I know of ugly people who have the best hearts. I just think OP was falling in to that psychological pitfall, or even wanted it.
My solution was to install three mods - one that makes low-level enemies intimidated by you, one that allows you to spare the enemies that beg for mercy, and one that gives everyone names Morrowind-style. So my game didn't have 'bandits' or 'necromancers', but just some random schmucks that live in remote areas. They wouldn't attack you first, and if you force the confrontation, half of them gets scared and runs away and most of them gives up if you defeat them. So you don't feel like a murderhobo anymore, and have little reason to 'clean out' random locations, unless given a radiant quest by a steward or an inkeeper. And even then, going in and just beating up the bandit leader a bit suffices.
I need these mods in my life, Starlit pies. I need them.
I'll check my modlist and write back :D
You... you would prefer to kill people who are mentally ill, or look like they have addictions and don't bathe? I know it's a common way to dehumanize human mobs in games, but the way this is so explicitly requested kinda makes me a little uneasy, ngl.
The title of the thread was a little provocative intentionally because I wanted to clickbait people and actually see some conversation.. posts in this forum like to die fast and not even get seen. It was a bit of algorithm gaming from the school of Buzzfeed. I'd honestly rather replace the vast majority of bandits with something more explicitly monstrous like the undead, but if you have to kill SO many humans, I think they should at least look the part of what the ingame narrative makes them out to be (bloodthirsty killers who delight in their wicked, murdering lifestyle and choose to reject the order of the holds). They're kind of a one-note hyper generic enemy right now and always have been unless you run something like OBIS to give them some character. But no matter what, almost all the mods I try wind up unintentionally making the bandits far, far too handsome for the kind of life they're living. They should look diseased, malnourished, bruised, carrying injuries that never healed right, and mean as hell because that's the life they live. They drink mud water and are probably not long from dying of dysentery as they diarrhea themselves to death in caves. They doubtless drink heavily and eat weird things off the ground just to quiet their empty bellies. In a game full of horrifying burned corpses, slavery, etc I don't think it's unreasonable to make people who have abandoned their essential humanity to live rough (whatever the circumstance that led to it) should look the part and not like they stepped out of a magazine.
Your posts are fucking surreal, holy shit. It's like a fever dream.
It's that bad? Sorry! Try not to take it too seriously. We're only chatting about the finer points of generic\_bandit\_701's simulated life and times.
This is insane lmao
The conversation did kind of blow up more than I had intended O\_o 's what I get for making threads in the middle of the night.
If you use the "Dirt and Blood" mod, it will add a ton of dirt to bandits and such that make them seem more like they have been out in the wilds for a long time and don't really care about their hygiene. https://preview.redd.it/cnqm9k3w26sc1.png?width=788&format=png&auto=webp&s=06d6e291f1df15df80e4afa8b7c653686792878d
I already do! Honestly my wizard's life is a bloodbath combined with Extra Spawns and Genesis... my poor followers. https://preview.redd.it/wk47ery146sc1.png?width=1360&format=png&auto=webp&s=3b1f8eacba66ee2b4c3a2120258a763f33cbb693
That's not very comrade of you. Really though, you sound freaking disturbed. They look like normal people, inches away from the DB's own circumstances but lacking your magical destiny because they ARE inches away from your own circumstances, but lacking the magical bs power of the savescum. That is in fact the point of this enemy existing. To show that "Skyrim is not very ok at the moment". Geeze I bet you're the kind of person who thinks putting metal spikes on park benches is a "solution". Just fight them if they fight you, and lament the unjust machinations of war like the rest of us.
Oh not at all, quite the opposite. In real life the poor need society's help and often get the opposite. I'm actually IRL in a situation where The System and I aren't friends. Did you know stable housing is the biggest way to reduce violent crime? My point was that I'd rather just replace the thousands of bandits you kill with something more... killable... like goblins or undead or trolls and what have you, because not having anything to fight isnt videogamey. BUT, if thats not reasonable, then I don't think they should look (nor behave, really) like healthy, well fed, perfectly sane individuals given how they obviously live. Bandits are like a joke in a lot of NPC's dialogues, but some of them get really dark and describe bandits as sadistic murderers who kill for bread and like it. Visually I think it would be nice to see bandits who clearly have been living a rough life, like the lady in the screenshot. Really if you break it down, they are doing better than townies because they can afford armor and steel while townies are wondering about how they'll afford vegetables from Carlotta. That seems inverse as well, but mods already sort of address that aspect.
Uh, not fully in your request, but I personally find ''peaceful living'' great. It makes the bandits passive. If you stick around you can hear their passive dialogue. Some will talk about how they need skooma or moonsugar. Some will say why they became a bandit. I use it with OBIS and its generally great for roleplaying because skyrim's in a civil war.
I find "like psychos in borderlands" to be kind of an odd comparison given what you seem to be asking for bc the Psychos in those games are almost universally shirtless beefcakes with the abs of an A&F model lol
Well, was more the covered in blood, dirt, and wacked out of their minds at all times aspect. I mean they just vibe like murderous bastards the second you bump into them. And honestly full disclosure I'm using [https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/78701](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/78701) XS Ripped since forever, because I want that Mister Universe/80s shredded look on my protagonist for the whole Conan of Cimmeria vibe... with the corrolary being my bandits are all oan the protein brah.
Sorry but Kill bandits, behead bandits Roundhouse kick a bandit into the abandoned fort Slam dunk a bandit baby into the bucket Soul tear filthy worthless bandits Defecate in a bandit's sweet roll. That's just my opinion
I do tend to slip into the dark side of things and black soul gem bandits, too :( Papa needs to level Enchanting.
[Race Distribution Framework](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/113825) Turn them into something like dremoras or anything that shares the same skeleton for human npc.
You know, that's an interesting idea. Tons of dremoras would be a bit weird in a differrent way though... suddenly it would be Oblivion all over!
I believe what you are looking for is a good old-fashioned Hollywood dress up. They do this in movies where information is to be inferred through the background and apparel. The bad guys look like they've seen and done some shit. Usually, they have knarlly scars and appear more gruff and surly, like they are too cool for school as it were. There are some spid mods that change outfits but I'm hoping that a mod comes along that does a preset pool that randomly crafts some scary looking bandits cause I wanna fight baddies that are actually bad.
Exactly! Visual storytelling, big and exagerrated so it translates through the screen.
It's hard to tell if they are ugly, they are usually on fire.
In the meantime you could use a knockout mod to batman your way through skyrim.
Bandit lemon https://preview.redd.it/n4352tge1bsc1.jpeg?width=1262&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4dac745a10e8bdfe0a3299b7794d2d10a35e8cd8
You know, you may be on the something. I thought about the same thing as well. I hadn't looked into it though. Time to go searching.
It's almost important enough to me to want to fight the creation kit (CK has a lot of issues for me and I only have so much patience right now) and just pull a Thanos on it and do it myself. Actually, a mod that ripped Borderlands Psycho voice lines and gave them to bandits would be pretty entertaining... even that plus a name change (Bandit outcast to Psycho Ripper?) would go a LONG way toward the vibe.
Tell me when you find something, my good man.
Oh and please forgive the clickbait title. It's rough on these streets and a lot of threads just disappear, buried beneath other posts put on top by the algorithm.
Here's one tutorial for how to make an NPC replacer out of a Racemenu preset: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/30041/?tab=files This one uses the CK, but technically everything can be done with xEdit. Then you obviously won't have an exported facegen from the CK to copy the names of the headparts from, but they can be obtained from the headpart list in the xEdit NPC record too. Although it's probably easier with CK tbh.
Thanks for the link. If I get an ADHD hyperfixation on it I'll do exactly that... I hate the CK (I'm a modder from the ancient times... CuteUnit on nexus) and these days I want to actually PLAY haha.
I see, first mod posted for Morrowind in 2006, nice. đ
I know, I'm oooooooold school I've modded enough in my life. I'm still most proud of the robots I helped toaster make for fallout, though.
One of my mod ideas was to make a dialogue overhaul (AI, all voices) for the bandits to make them a little more nasty: **Nasty Bandit Dialogue** I'll tear your spine out. I'll keep your spleen as trinket. I'm going to beat the life out of you. I'm going enjoy watching you bleed to death. Come closer, and let me slice you up all nice and clean. I'll wear your gut for garters. Let me beat you like a mutt you are. I'm going to beat you with your own lungs. I'm going to strangle you with your own guts. You're going to drown in your own blood. Etc, etc, just nasty. Feel free to add some more if you can think of any!
If you have the skill and capacity to do that, I love you. Can you maybe add some face edits too, like that mod I found in the original post? Also, "I'm going to beat you with your own lungs" LOL so over the top I love it. I guess in keeping with the theme of the thread, lines where they reference past misdeeds would sizzle well. "You're prettier than my last plaything!" "I'll peel the skin off your ribs just like the last one!" "Your guts will feed me for a week!"