Morrowind talk:Non-Relevant NPCs

Archives
Discussions
What is Relevant?
Full Pages or Redirects?
Longterm Plans for Page

Zainab Camp Non-Relevant NPCs

Please remove these, as killing any Zainab will make you unable to complete the Main Quest. See "Zainab Nerevarine" for why. --Narfblat 21:12, 2 March 2007 (EST)

Ranes Ienith - O Brother Where Art Thou?

He's listed on the Dren Plantation page. Not that he actually starts there - he starts 'nowhere' - but that information can be added to his NPC page when it gets created. Anyway, I've removed him from this page. --Gaebrial 09:43, 29 January 2008 (EST)

Aha, so he is ;) Thanks, Gaebrial! --Nephele^Talk 10:29, 29 January 2008 (EST)

I think this category is arbitrary, inaccurate and causes a serious lack of information

(1300 unique NPCs vanished)

This category is very doubtful for many of reasons:

1. Who and how decide what's a non relevant npc? That categorization is biased and subjective. Most Elder Scroll games have a huge enfasis in world building, diversity and in the last three chapters in the main series, uniqueness. For many people (me included) the world exploration, observation, the simple enjoy ot world-building richness is a very relevant part of their TES experiences, in some cases even the first reason of enjoy over quests, points, combat or even stories. That "non relevant" definition towards 1.300 unique NPCs is totally biased only considering this fact (people have different experiences about what is relevant, specially in this game).

2. All Npcs included in this page are UNIQUE. This sentence "...these NPCs are just generic town occupants or generic enemies in caves but they happen to have a name (unlike other Elder Scrolls games, such as Oblivion, where generic enemies are not given names)." it's totally wrong. All the NPCs not only have a name, but an individualized appereance (face+hair+clothes combination) and personal set of skills, attributes, class, level, possessions and in some of them, individualized spells and factions & ranks too. They have "true" dialogue too, shared but filtered as usual and in some cases (in non hostile, faction members) very abundant, some even have a non-dialogue world-link, in their inventory for example (a key, a note, etc). And all of them have a pre-fixed (no generated) world presence too.

So they aren't comparable with Oblivion generic enemies example (or Skyrim ones), because their features are not "generated" but unique (including name, but as only one of many features), and because they have an pre-fixed existence in game world, aren't spawned in accordance with leveled lists as most Oblivion, Skyrim, Dagerfall or Arena generic enemies (and of course, some hundreds aren't even enemies)

Beldrose Dralor, for example, a member of Redoran House, with more than 80 different true topics to speak and more than 100 answers (nort counting greetings or detection and combat dialogue that generic enemies in TES susually have), a key for redoran vaults, the same skills, class, name, location or inventory in every gameplay, can't be considered at all a "generic" npc. In fact is far more unique than many others npcs with specific pages here on uesp wiki and "people" or "named npcs" categories, what I'm going to explain in detail in the next point.

3. In Oblivion, Skyrim or Online pages and categories, all named NPCs are considered equally simply "people" or "named NPCs" and don't exist this "Non-relevant NPCs" category. In Skyrim or Oblivion NPCs pages, ALL npcs, generic archetypes included, are considered in general NPCs category. In Online, named NPCs without dialogue, inventory, class or skills (named "decorative" npcs, even less unique than "generic-named" Daggerfall ones), even corpses!! are included in npcs category. In Morrowind however NPCs category only include about a 45% of named npcs, there aren't pages for the suposed (wrongly) "non relevant" NPCs, who are simply categorized as "non relevant"...

All these Morrowind's non quest related and not providing services named NPCs (more than 1.300) are "unique" and "people" not simply in comparison with the generic npcs in Daggerfall, TES IV, V or Online, but being more unique too, much more, than hundreds of Oblivion or Skyrim named NPCs and thousands of Online ones.

For example, our Morrowind:Beldrose Dralor (don't have article yet, because is "non relevant"...) has more unique features than Oblivion:Ashni, Oblivion:Kiara, Skyrim:Gwendolyn, Skyrim:Kornalus, Online:Adol Flan, Online:Abanilu the Importunate and obviously examples as Oblivion:Blackwood Company Member or Skyrim:Firir, all with their own article and all in the NPCs general category...

4. As I suggested before, the "non relevant" category is the main reason of the total absence in uesp of articles and info for more than half of all named and unique Morrowind's NPCs, in clear contrast with the presence here of several articles about Oblivion's corpses, Online's pseudo-npcs (without dialogue not even 2 shared sentences) or Skyrim (or Oblivion) npcs with unique dialogue and basic daily schedule who nonetheless are LESS unique than most suposedly "non-relevant" NPCs.

I would like to create articles for every unique NPC (as in the rest of TES games), but I think we need to remove this arbitrary and inaccurate category first.

--Tamrié (talk) 12:49, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

First, let it be known that I am generally in favour of this, but not the removal of the category as will be explained. Originally I was of the opinion that every named person in Morrowind should have an article, until it was pointed out to me that every NPC besides guards in Morrowind is named. There are no generic Bandits or Vampires, so there really are irrelevant NPCs that later games found alternate generic names for, as well as genericising and randomising their appearances. The decision to do this was made around the time the wiki opened up and moved to its current address, which required a lot of work that was better placed on pages that actually needed it than creating and editing pages for generic named bandits in Morrowind. This decision was only ever applied to MW and every game since has benefited from bots and easier to read coding for the games, allowing a lot of the base work to be done and allowing editors to focus on the content. You can see the topic on the community portal where it seems that there was at least some muted acknowledgement that we could reduce the number of irrelevant to those that in other games would not be named (ie, bandits and other enemy NPCs only). The portal would also be the best place to have another go at changing consensus properly, but you might have to find other reasons than those already discussed there if you want to change it immediately. You will also find it hard to persuade people that every single named NPC should get a page, but that's up to you. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 18:45, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

Hi The Silencer, thanks for answer. I'm going to follow your advice and discuss the topic on community portal, but let me answer you here only to your second idea about your personal experience and Morrowind uniqueness in NPCs, because you was centered again (as in the Oblivion-generic-NPCs sentence in this article) in the "named" NPcs condition, comparing with the "not named" later games generic NPCs, and citing the ramdom apeareances too. But the uniqueness of named Morrowind npcs is really, far more deep.

I tried (with my language limitations) to explain in my previous second point, that the features that makes these Morrowind NPCs really unique aren't limited to name and fixed location but many more reasons: The "true people dialogue" used, (Oblivion, Skyrim or TES generic bandits or vampires never will talk you about lore, some city or region, nothing about themselves or the world... you can't ask them even after calm them or using console changes in disposition, etc), the personalized appearence, the personalized set of skills, disposition or classes, their mostly unique inventories, that always contains some (and in most cases, all) unique "personalized" items, or the fact that many of these suposed "non relevant" Morrowind NPCs, including hostiles, have posessions in the world, owned beds or houses, furniture, books, etc. Most Morrowind "non relevant" npcs have more unique presence in the game world, and more unique features than many Oblivion, Skyrim or TESO secondary npcs that own some unique sentences or even are included in some quest...

I'm going to start to edit some articles, and only after some tens, I will discuss again about this category in the portal. Thanks for your friendly answer.

--Tamrié (talk) 21:15, 26 May 2017 (UTC)