I am the best parent in Skyrim.

[theweaselking]

Hello adopted child who I have just picked up off the street with a promise of candy, and welcome to your new home! I am your new mother and I love you. Come in, come in! This is the main hallway, which is full of dead animals that stare at you. That heavily armed person over there staring at you while he sharpens a giant axe, who only speaks in grunts, is the Steward. He will be responsible for your education!

The east wing of the house is an unlocked trophy room full of dangerous artifacts, like that one right there. That's the Wabbajack, it's a magic wand that turns things into other things, at random. Mommy got it from the god of insanity, who is Mommy's friend. If you touch it he might speak to you!

In the north wing is Mommy's lab, full of things that are delicious and things that will explode or kill you, or both! That's where I keep all the potables. And the poisons! None of them are labelled! It's also where we prepare dinner because I didn't build a kitchen. The only spoon in the house is actually a fork.

Over here in the east wing are the living quarters! You get your very own chest to store things! I've pre-stocked it with the personal diaries of a notorious serial killer and a copy of all the different contracts on my life that have been taken out in the last few months. There's a LOT of reading material there! The chest is also full of severed ears. Mommy takes those from elves.

Oh, and this is your new younger brother Aventus. Say hello! Aventus is my other foster child. It's a funny story how we met - he performed an ancient and profane ritual to summon an assassin, me, to kill his previous foster family! So I did, then I brought him here. You two are going to get along JUST FINE. You share a bedroom! You're going to sleep within arm's reach of each other! Now, I have a gift for each of you: You get 1000 gold to use for ANYTHING you want. Aventus gets this magical knife, made from the heart of a demon, that steals souls.

Don't go in the basement.

Comments

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

Frankly, I found the game's assumption that "of course you want to adopt a child, here we will throw them at you in almost every town/city" both annoying and presumptive. Not to mention the distinct lack of romance in the "marriage" silliness. I am child-free by choice, so while I have no problems with gaming companies putting the option in for a character to have/adopt children (I'm all for seeing more relationships/families/romance/love in games), having them literally say things like, "Can you be my mommy???" when I walk past them on the street is intrusive.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

There should be an option to have them adopted by all the guards who used to be adventurers until they took an arrow in the knee. Clearly the gameworld presumes that adventuring correlates with wanting to raise children; however, there are certain... uhm... certain practical considerations...

(Don't go in the basement is cracking me right the hell up.)

...ahem. Yes. Anyway: option to route orphaned children to former adventurers.

(This doesn't work so well if people who tell you they used to be an adventurer are promptly stricken by lightning. My theories are a work in progress.)

[glenn-3.livejournal.com]

For all practical purposes, I adopted children on behalf of my housecarl and steward. I never spend any time in the house they live in. And my ex-wife wants nothing to do with any of us.

(I watched my wife get fried by a dragon while a courier was delivering a letter from a friend and a lot of unskippable dialogue. I used the console to resurrect her. She moved back in with her brother, and now tells me the sight of me makes her blood boil. Investigation on the wiki reveals that this bit of dialogue was supposed to be a result of doing the divorce quest.)

[torrain.livejournal.com]

...oh man, it's been a while since I laughed out loud from LJ. XD

[glenn-3.livejournal.com]

I was upset at first, but then realized I would have divorced me too. If you marry a dragon slayer, there is a not unreasonable expectation that said dragon slayer will slay dragons that are attacking you in plain sight less than a hundred yards away, rather than stopping to have a chat with the mailman.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Yeah. There is a certain "you let my blood boil" background to the "you make my blood boil" reaction. (Can you edit her reaction to you with the console commands?)

[glenn-3.livejournal.com]

Maybe? I haven't tried, and I'm not sure how I'd go about it. She isn't always angry at me--sometimes she still tells me I'm a strapping fellow and shouldn't be a stranger, or thanks me for bringing back the golden claw. So it isn't that our relationship rating is low. Somewhere in there, it's keeping track of the fact we were married and now aren't, so it can spit out the right dialogue. I suspect it has something to do with the fact she lost her wedding ring upon resurrection. Someday, I might use the console to force her to remarry me, to see if she stays mad, but...well, it feels a bit creepy to do that, honestly.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Totally fair. :) (There's apparently some console commands to reset your own relationship status, and open up the dialogue after that - I don't know if that'd feel less creepy?)

Wait, is this the golden claw from somewhere around Bleak Hills Barrow? (If so, I think I've seen it! I have not gotten very far at all in the game, but I think I've seen it!)

[glenn-3.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's the one! It was stolen by bandits, and the Valerius siblings want it back....

(After Camilla left me, I stole the claw myself so I could complete my claw collection. She sent assassins to kill me. Maybe the divorce was for the best.)

[glenn-3.livejournal.com]

So, I decided to use the console to put myself back on the market, without forcing anybody to actually like me. I still boil my ex's blood, so I decided to look elsewhere. I remembered a girl who'd given me a ring for killing people she wanted dead, and thought to myself, "Ah, yes, there's the future mother of my children."

I should have know it wouldn't go well just from the wedding. Four people showed up for the wedding: my bride's boss, Gregor the Housecarl (aka my children's primary care giver), the dark elf from the Companions, and that jackass from Windhelm who walks around harassing the dark elves all night long. I've beaten that jackass to his knees on multiple occasions, and his dialogue indicates he does not like me; the body of a dead follower would have been a more welcome guest. He heckled my dark elf guest, and the priestess, almost the whole time he was in Riften, stopping only for the ceremony itself.

Stepping out of town after the wedding (jackass still closely following my friend while complaining loudly about dark elves), we were met by a Stormcloak courier, a cave bear, and a frostbite spider. If only there had been a bar outside the gates, we all could have had a good laugh. The Stormcloak started to fight the Imperial guards at the gate, then wised up and start retreating. Meanwhile, my wife's boss yelled, "I'm gettin' outta here!" and ran between the Stormcloak and the Imperials--getting herself killed in the process. Because I don't learn, I decided to fix this with the console resurrect rather than reloading a previous save and clearing the road out of town before the wedding began. But I figured, what harm can it do? I've resurrected townspeople before, after all, even making trips to the body dump to bring back people whose corpses had been cleared off already.

I found my wife at work, and we had the conversation about where we would live. She said she'd pack up and meet me there, then went back to work at the alchemy station. No amount of conversation would get her to actually leave her routine. After a week, she still was in Markarth, and Gregor hadn't come home since the wedding, so I used the console to bring them both to our house. My wife immediately turned away and headed back to Markarth. She still talked like we were married and living together. I wondered if she didn't like my kids, or if she (like the bard I hired for that home) hates the stray dog I moved into the house. I decided to use the console to divorce her, then remarry her, to see if that would fix things.

After divorcing her, I talked to her (mostly because I was curious if I made her blood boil). She told me the store was hers, now that her boss was gone, and she wished her boss was still here because she wasn't ready. Her boss, by the way, was standing at the counter ten feet away during this conversation. But I guess she was dead long enough to pass ownership to her apprentice. So if I did remarry and manage to get my wife to come live with me, it's entirely possible the store would close.

Time to choose another victim and try for ex-wife number three!

(On the way to arrange the wedding, by the way, I was attacked by a dragon, and stopped in the middle of fighting it by another damn courier with another damn letter from a friend! Apparently couriers are in too much of a hurry to be delayed by little things like people dying around them; and apparently in spite of being a werewolf who deals extensively with daedra, I'm too polite to say, "Jeez, dude, I'm in the middle of something." The letter itself was kind of hilarious, too, because of its origin: it seems I caused a bit of a stir in Apocrypha with the use of my Thu'um. Apocrypha. Land of snot, and tentacles, and Lovecraftian horrors that want you dead. I am hugely amused imagining one of the junior-Cthulhus sitting down with a flourish, Jimmy Fallon thank-you note style, to write me an encouraging letter after my visit.)

[glenn-3.livejournal.com]

Might as well cap off the story of my marital misadventures, for whatever amusement it might offer.

For my third (and final, I think) wife, I selected a follower (a dark elf warrior-type, specifically), because that seems to be the only way to beat the wife-won't-move-in bug introduced by the Dragonborn add-on. She has many sterling qualities as a follower: high aggression, low morals, decent skills. (In spite of her low morals, she snapped at me for checking out the chest in front of the altar before our wedding; I guess she didn't want my sticky beak ruining her special day.)

The first problem I noticed was that a number of things I'd left around my home to decorate it disappeared, only to reappear for sale in my wife's store. I don't seem to get the speechcraft discounts in the spousal store that I get with other merchants, either; to buy back all my stuff I had to pay full price. Not a huge deal, I decided--I still have all my other homes to clutter up with Centurion Dynamos and what have you.

No, the deal-breaker was when she fought my housecarl over an apple dumpling. At least, I'm pretty sure it was over an apple dumpling. You know how aggressive NPCs will fight over equipment you drop in front of them, sometimes to the death? Well, the only thing near my wife and my housecarl was the food on the table. Anyway, they had an exchange that basically amounted to "Leave that alone!"/"Try and make me!", then approached each other with weapons drawn. She sheathed her sword and tried to walk away, but he attacked her anyway, driving her to her knees. She never fought back. My kids witnessed the whole thing; they screamed a bit, and if I had been the attacker, I would have had a bounty on my head for the assault.

I know it's an asshole move to shove her out the door when she didn't do anything wrong. But it's easier to get a divorce than get rid of a housecarl, and besides, he's the closest thing my kids have to a dad 90% of the time.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

that seems to be the only way to beat the wife-won't-move-in bug introduced by the Dragonborn add-on.

Unofficial Dragonborn Patch works wonders. Just make sure that the game loads the mods in the right order - Main Game, then Main Game patch, then Vampires, then Vampires Patch, then Houses, then Houses Patch, then That Dickhead Who Steals Your Kills, then the Dickhead patch.

Even if you don't use any other mods, the unofficial patches fix so much.

[glenn-3.livejournal.com]

I feel like an idiot having to ask--and the answer will probably be, "duh, go right here where it says Change Load Order in flashing neon with giant arrows pointed at it"--but how do I change the load order?

(All I can say in defense of my ignorance is that Skyrim is both the only game I've played with mods and the only game I've played on Steam. On the other hand, I've put in 450 hours, so...yeah, still embarrassingly uninformed.)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Generally, you go into your mod manager and change the load order. If you're not using a third-party mod manager, uh, well, you kinda might want to start because it's super-handy and lets you do things like change the load order.

If you're just using the vanilla steam launcher, there's no easy way I know of to change the order - it's based on filename and modified time and stuff like that. ALMOST ALL mods will still work, but there's occasionally weird things that happen, and the bugfix patches aren't nearly as reliable at catching and fixing all the bugs because they're not always making the right change *before* something else changes it again.

I have basically decided I never want to play Skyrim without the bugfixes and UI improvements, which means I need to start Skyrim Script Extender instead of Skyrim-from-Steam *anyway*, so I might as well let Nexus Mod Manager handle the load order.

(Before Steamworks, "the Nexus" (http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/?) was the main place to get mods for games like Skyrim. Even now, there's a bunch of really good ones that aren't available through Steamworks[1]. Also a bunch of really bad ones, and a bunch of really porn ones, but you don't have to use those.)


[1]:like the ones that fix your "e" key to actually be your default "do the thing" key in every interface, instead of it being E sometimes then A or R or whatever. And SkyUI, which makes the UI into something that works with mouse and keyboard on a high-res screen and not something that expects you to be waggling sticks at it from across the room.

[vertigoranger.livejournal.com]

I don't have this problem at all. I've played 108 hours of Skyrim and never had a child say a word to me. I think your problem is not going "ugh, get away from me!" when you see a child 30 metres away. I practice this in real life too, and it's going great!

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Depends on the DLC you have.

"Hearthfires" adds the ability to adopt children, several orphan children to each Hold who will sometimes approach you. In addition to the children in the Orphanage. And if you missed the quests that take you through there even without the DLC, you're missing out.

(Even without the DLC and outside the Orphanage, there's several children who'll interact with you. But it's not like they want anything *major* from you, unlike all the annoying fucking adults.)

[marrog.livejournal.com]

I have Hearthfire and have never been approached. I guess my skinhead must put them off. That and I guess I spend more time roaming the countryside looking for stuff to kill than mooching around cities.

[jerril]

I've wanted to be able to deliver kids to the orphanage. That way I can get the girl off the freezing streets of Windhelm without having to leave her neglected in my home with housecarls I barely know.

"The playboy Jarl says this heavily armed lady is totally respectable and gave her to me after he had me go assasinate his business partners. She'll be babysitting you now."

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

This god of insanity?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I believe you're talking about Sanguine. I'm talking about Sheogorath, who is taking a vacation from being the god of madness inside the subconscious mind of The Mad Emperor.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Ah, oops, looking around more it was this quest for Peryite, god of pestilence. But that quest WAS pretty insane, so that's my excuse.

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

Yes, indeed you are the parentiest greatest parent evar.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Skyrim is one of those games that's genuinely weird: You can spend a TON of time and effort getting your home and trophy room and prizes and all that so that it looks absolutely perfect on inspection..... for a single player game. Where nobody will see it but you.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

HAH!

I still haven't seen that movie and that's okay.

EDIT: Err, not "okay that I haven't seen it", because I hear it's really good. "Okay that I don't need to see it to get the joke"

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

I liked it, didn't think it was great, but could see how people would think it was great.