Apparently players can abort a conversation in different ways?

I’m currently playing N1 - Against the Cult of the Reptile God, and by accident I found out that you can reap a quest reward repeatedly if you escape the conversation that gives it to you by running away instead of properly closing it. However, when I checked to see if that was also possible when pressing Escape to abort the conversation, the NPC registered that I had already gotten my reward.

So it looks like the game makes a difference between ‘accidentally’ aborting a conversation because of the distance between PC and NPC and intentionally aborting a conversation by pressing Escape. I thought of the tooltip about NPCs possibly not taking kindly to PCs aborting a conversation, and I wondered whether that’s also true if you just run away. Can you theoretically avoid bad consequences that are triggered by going through with a conversation or intentionally aborting it, if you just run away instead?

Just asking out of curiosity, from a playtester’s perspective, and because it may be relevant for module authors, too.

I think that this kind of exploit can be fixed with a proper script on the “aborted” slot of the conversation scripts. (Current file tab)

Also this kind of stuff typically happens when the scripts that run the events meant for the “consequence” of the dialogue are not slotted at the final dialogue branch.

Another possible route is to cutscene paralyze the player as soon as the conversation starts, at least that should prevent them from running away.

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As the module creator, that’s kinda annoying :slight_smile:

I had taken great care to avoid multiple quest rewards, but maybe not enough - I often tested this by re-clicking the NPC to restart the conversation halfway through; whether that is the same effect as walking away and returning I’m not sure.

But thanks Olivier - if you let me know the dialog, I’ll check it out (and potentially others!)

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@Clangeddin Thanks for the insightful reply!
@Phantasma I sent you a PM. :slight_smile:

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I think there’s a bug of that sort when the PC only has one option at the end of a conversation. A forced break is treated as Conversation End rather than Abort or Action Taken. Something like that, at any rate.

Just in case it helps anyone in future, the specific conditions in which this has occurred is…

  1. NPC gives reward in their final dialog line
  2. NPC’s plot status is updated in the PC’s final dialog line

This works fine if the dialog is escaped from, but not if it’s walked away from, i.e. hitting escape will still execute that final PC line, walking away won’t.

Who knows why I didn’t put it all in the same actions taken script, but it was early development of the module over a decade ago, so I’ll cut my former self a little slack, but still administer a mild beating :slight_smile:

Thanks for finding this though, Olivier, and to @Clangeddin and @Proleric for sharing your thoughts :slight_smile: