User talk:The Raconteur

Status Update -- 29 March, 2017 I fell off the radar for a bit because I was busy in meatspace, but I intend to spend at least a little bit of time this weekend grinding away at my monumental chore of updating Morrowind inventories.

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MWOP Inventories

Hey Raconteur! Awesome work on all of those MWOP inventories! It's great to see more people working on the project. I just want to mention a few minor details for you to keep in mind should you continue working on them.

First, if an NPC wears a common shirt, common pants, and common shoes, we typically list this as something like, "he wears a commmon shirt, pants, and shoes" rather than putting the word common in front of each item. You could also use something like, "he wears a common shirt with matching pants and shoes". I typically like to put shirts and cuirasses first before things like shoes, belts, and boots, but it doesn't really matter too much.

Secondly, we typically put a character's equipped items/what they are wearing before the items they are carrying. So any clothing or armor will go in one sentence and then typically the second sentence of the inventory paragraph will include any items they are carrying, including any sort of weapons.

The third thing I want to mention is to watch out for the number of a certain item in a character's inventory. Gold can be particularly tricky. A lot of times, characters will have what is called random_gold in the Construction Set in their inventory. With random_gold, there is only a 60% chance for each piece of gold to appear in their inventory. So if a character has 7 random gold, they may actually have 7 gold but it is actually much more likely that they will have less than 7 gold. Typically, I handle cases like these by saying something along the lines of "he carries up to 7 gold".

Oh, one more thing. When you add your name to the project template for filling out the inventory, you don't need to include any additional code. The project banner will automatically link your name. So you can simply type The Raconteur and you'll be all set. The one exception is if you are filling out say dialogue and the character doesn't have any dialogue. Then you would need to do something like [[User:The Raconteur|The Raconteur]](none). We typically reserve any of the fancy formatting stuff for signatures, so you don't really need to put that in the project template.

Again, thank you for your contributions toward the MWOP and I hope you continue to work on the project. It's always a great time! Feel free to ask me or head to the project talk page if you have any other questions. Forfeit (talk) 18:50, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

Okay, I'll take all that on board. Thank you for the input!

I was, for the most part, putting equipped before what was carried, but depending on any existing sentences, I was shuffling things around if I felt like it flowed a bit better. But, order of things and sentence flow is pretty subjective and up to the opinion of who wrote it or wants to rewrite it, so I see no harm done.

I do want to bring up something about some changes you did. You de-linked inventory that was carried for sale on a couple of the merchants I had done edits to. That was stuff that was on their person. If you killed them, that's what you'd find on their body. I didn't see anything on the MWOP guidelines saying to specifically omit specific items from the list, but I did see some lines about inventory and container being accurately described, so I am of the opinion that if it's a guaranteed item to find in their inventory and not just floating around the store itself - like this edit and this edit - then we'd be doing a disservice to the reader and not accurately recording inventory to exclude these items from what you'd find on their person.

Lastly, about the signing off on the template, that was me being lazy and entering three tildes and letting that enter in my signature without the timestamp instead of writing out The Raconteur over and over and over. I have no problem writing it out manually if that's preferable, but that's why the extra formatting was being included.

Again, thanks for the feedback, and I'll keep it in mind when I get back to it in a little while. the raconteur 19:06, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

The merchant inventories are something I have personally avoided since you are correct that they are carrying some of their wares. However, it is somewhat of repetition to list these wares in both the inventory and also the wares section so I have been not including them in inventories. However, I think there may be merit in listing them since, as you pointed out, sometimes not all the wares of an NPC are in their possession; only a few select items are there occasionally. You also correctly mentioned the issue that the reader may think that the wares do not appear in their inventory at all. I proposed this question on the MWOP talk page here along with a few ideas with how to handle it to see what others think are the best approach to handling this as it isn't something we've discussed much in the past, if at all. Forfeit (talk) 19:16, 11 March 2017 (UTC)