So I'm having an issue in Tarant where certain NPCs are inexplicably hostile towards me. The first, I don't remember his name, is a gnome in a bar flanked by two half-ogre guards. Second is everyone in Madam Lil's. These are the only ones I've found so far, but it concerns me that significant quest NPCs are completely broken.

They don't attack me on sight and in fact have very positive reactions to me until I talk to them. I'm then able to select on dialogue option and everyone goes berserk.

My character is a pretty, squeaky clean goody two shoes, so I'm pretty sure I haven't done anything to piss these people off.

I have both the newest official and unofficial patches installed as well as a ddraw fix to make the game playable.

If anyone can help, that would be great. I'm really enjoying the atmosphere and characters, but this issue is kind of ruining the experience for me because I don't know when, where, or why it's going to rear its head.

I haven't encountered this issue myself, though I have seen other reports of it.

Could you provide more info on your character? Do you happen to use anything that artificially changes your reaction during the dialogue? This is the first thing I can think of that might be capable of causing this, because the NPCs you listed all share one scripting quirk: they don't have the reaction-specific greeting lines, and instead, every time you talk to them, their reaction is set to 50, regardless of what it was before. So if it then somehow drops further down, they might go hostile.

Not that I know of, no. I do have a high reaction modifier because I dumped a lot of points into beauty for rp purposes (I saw that I could be a dumb super model and never looked back. Although I did put a couple of points back into intelligence).

Could that be what's doing it? If so, is it a bug or are these characters supposed to hate attractive people?

I tried the dread armor and it didn't work, but a couple of things you said got me thinking. 1. That it seems to have something to do with high reaction, and 2. these characters have a special script that automatically changes their reaction score.

So, I downloaded a character editor and played with it and this is what I found.

The higher my character's reaction modifier, the lower Madame Lil's (and everyone in her place) reaction dropped the first time I talked to her. The second time I talked to her, her reaction went to fifty like it was supposed to. So, the way I solved this was to reduce my beauty to 10 and then give myself enough character points to raise it back up to where it was before I edited anything.

I talked to each character that this was happening with, got their reaction to the right amount (50 or 65 or whatever it was set at), then put a point of beauty back in. This only raised their reaction to me a little, because each point of beauty only raised their reaction to me beyond their new "normal," and didn't use my base reaction modifier at all. Then I talked to them again to reset them to their scripted base level. I just did this again and again until my beauty was back up to where it was before and now nobody tries to kill me.

You know, I used to think I tolerated bugs pretty well thanks to my favorite game of all time being Morrowind. Arcanum has taught me that I didn't even know what a bug was.

Anyway, thanks a ton for your help. I never would have put two and two together without you.

Well, I'm glad you've sorted it out. :) Yes, Arcanum is buggy, most of the time it's just lazy scripting, since the game was kind of rushed and never got a proper pre-release polishing. The unofficial patch fixes a whole ton of stuff, and there's still more...

Watch out for other NPCs affected by this issue, though; I know there's at least one later on that can actually cause you to get stuck with no way of progressing through the plot (there's an alternate option, but it has to be obtained way before that point).

Thanks for the heads up. Hopefully now that I know the cause and solution I can deal with it if and when it arises.

You know, I should have gone into this expecting it to be buggy. One of my other favorite games is Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines, another buggy Troika game. I guess I just figured the buggy nature of VtMB was a one time thing rather than a hallmark of the company.

The funniest part about this particular bug is that this "set reaction to value" tag that is attached to the greeting lines was likely supposed to prevent those NPCs from being too hostile towards you in case you have a low reaction modifier (because there's no option to charm them into liking you more with your charisma, like you can do with a lot of other NPCs - not that it matters in any way as I don't think they have any reaction-dependent lines at all). What apparently happens instead is that the huge reaction drop caused by it being reset from an initially high value to whatever the dialogue script says gets treated as an offensive action towards them. Talk about defeating the purpose...

The third and final game made by Troika was Temple of Elemental Evil. In case you are wondering, it's real buggy too.

I'm pretty sure you can't break Arcanum so it's impossible to finish, unless perhaps you misplace the Vendigroth Device?

There's IIRC a totally brute force method that bypasses just about, literally, *everything* unless I've forgotten something ...

Hello, Shawn.

Welcome to Arcanum! I'm glad you got your problem sorted out and I hope you enjoy the game. I just wanted to give you kudos for investigating your problem on your own and then reporting back about what you found. Hopefully it will help someone else in the future.

I realize this is a bit necro, but -- for anyone who doesn't want to mess with the outmoded trainer, CheatEngine has a table (from 2022) that'll let you lower your beauty to circumvent this problem.