I should have made a poll to go along with this thread, because it seems to be about 50/50 when talking about people thinking it's realistic for everyone to attack a dragon. I thought people in general were smarter than that. So, you may actually be right, stupid is as stupid does. And maybe the whole reason why you are arguing the A.I. is perfectly fine during dragon fights, is because you yourself would run towards a dragon with a dagger and wearing a snuggie if given the chance. In which case I hope someday a dragon lands near your house. Yes, that was a death threat through a mythical scenario. lol...

hahahahaha .. true that

This right here. /thread That is freakin' hilarious. I think it bears noting that it is humerous exactly BECAUSE of how unrealistic such behaviour is.


So let me get this straight, you are attacking not the very real and easily manipulatable confidence level fleeing mechanic at work when you cast fear on something or when something reaches near death, but rather the reason why most "untrained professionals" as you say with only their fists or a broom would run for their lives? Seriously? You're being sarcastic surely.

You ask too much of the game or it's AI as an argument I could see. It's clearly false, but at least it would represent a real attack on doing so in the game. But you have to be some kind of well trained professional with access to modern telecommunications to have enough sense to run for your life? It takes being drilled daily to understand that your best chance of survival lies in that stone sewer, inside a building, or at least as far AWAY from the thirty foot, giant creature eating people as you can get?

Yes people in catastrophic events react stupidly. People run back inside burning buildings for a family photo album and burn to death. Some people in the World Trade Center ran UP stairs. You hear the story of a shop keeper rushing a robber with a gun and being shot dead now and then. That it can happen is not at issue. The fact that it is the rare exception not the rule is the point. Because most people adhere to the primary instinct, which is flight. This has been true since way back before the day of radios. Some few people probably did turn with their hoe an brandish it at the charging Mongol horde destroying their village, but most of them ran like hell. The opposite, that everyone overrule basic instinct and rush unarmed to their death against a dragon is the unrealistic thing.

Proof that a mechanism like the confidence level from Oblivion system exists in Skyrim is given every time I dual cast fear at an important NPC challenging a dragon to a bare knuckle fist fight and they run off like they should have, like they all did in this games famous initial trailer. So yeah, come on Bethesda, put in a simple script to simulate a mass area effect fear spell, temporarily assigning immunity to the guards or other adventurers well armed while cast, when a dragon attacks. Assign at a small percentage a chance of any others also being immune to simulate the rare suicidally brave exception. Viola! Bit more realism for little effort.

I am not qutting. Maybe you should. You seem to stand on losing ground if you now have to try to confront me. I am on your side, I just think that you are wrong, mate.

Come again? I do not think you actually understand the discussion. This is about players wanting to change the AI to get all important NPCs into safety when a dragon attacks, and their argument is that the current behaviour is unrealistic.

Rather than to come up with good arguments why these NPCs should get saved do you argue blindly, believing that if only they had acted realisticly (meaning smarter) would they have survived.

The sarcasm is on your side, clearly.

I think the AI needs tweaking when it comes to being inappropriately brave in general. If everyone is that brave, there would be no need for adventurers. I dont like how they charge dragons, werewolves, or vampires..

The NPC's should not try to fistfight Dragons, period. The only NPC's that should join the fight are the guards and some of the armed, able bodied villagers with a stake in the village. The town drunk should run, the grandma should run, kids should scatter. Dogs should fight, dogs are just down like that. The blacksmith witha vested interest in trying to defend his/her village and family should fight, but flee if gravely wounded. The guards should have a low chance to flee but every once in a while a gaurd should fully abandon his post and run away.

None of this is difficult scripting, it's all child's play in the archaic NWN editor, I'm sure that BGS awesome editor for TES is capable of producing these effects quite easily.

I agree 100% with this. Bethesda MUST include this in the patch.

Oh, what a drama! Now you are making up stupid rules... It still is Skyrim and not Hello Kitty. If some old Nord granny feels like fighting then let her. Surely, it does not need a "milk drinker" to tell her that she is acting inappropriately, right??

I agree to the point where you would say that a future AI shall have more detail. Nothing wrong with such a demand, but making up rules who shall fight and who shall run, and just so it can be labelled and organized in neat categories, is bad. Let a guard drop his sword and run away, let Belethor roll out a ballista, because he has got one stashed away, and let some old granny fight a dragon with her bare fists and then die. It is only good and fun. Labelling people and their behaviour just so it fits into boxes is an act of desperation and is at best silly.

Should the AI of Skyrim really bother you that much and you cannot bare the loss of a quest giver then do not play it. Play Battlefield or whatever if you truly need an AI with a strong focus on combat. There you can play with NPCs, who act with military precision and in a team to a player's needs. Skyrim is different and there NPCs server more than combat roles. Here NPCs can die even when they are quest givers. Drama is a part of the game.

Make them pass a horror check or they run away;
Oh wait - Skyrim doesn't support most RPG functions...

Yea I know I hate when that happen too.

I want a dragon to pick me up and throw me ragdolling to the ground like when draugrs forks-go-chah me.

And get up. And feel hardcoe for surviving that.

No, I think I understand this about a hundred times better than you. That or you are deliberately trolling because nobody can be that dense. Yes someone doesn't like the fact that certain quest givers die to this piss poor AI fail. That is the one small facet of this "discussion" you want to pretend is the important one. The rest of us have moved past that side effect of the real issue here. Namely that every single person runs up to fistfight a dragon AND NONE OF THEM RUN! You know, like real sane people actually would and do when faced with real life certain death such as a gunman opening fire in a crowd.

You cannot not understand how completely unrealistic this is. You just can't. That is why I think at this point you're simply trolling people. Nobody is saying SOME few of those people who probably ought to run for it wouldn't choose to fight and wind up dying. But for the love of god, even a hardy brave Nordic grandmother would run grab a knife or a bow instead of trying to punch it out. Instead of attacking the feasibility of trying to fix this blatantly obvious flaw by saying it's beyond the game's AI (the discussion everyone expected to have thrown at them), you actually scoff at the idea that most real people would take cover or run for their lives?!?! What are you smoking? Care to share? Even the Spartans, a warrior culture whose women were famous for saying come back with your shield or on it (the dead were carried on their shield) gathered their women and children inside when they were under attack.

Let me show you how much more I understand by clarifying what you would actually have to be arguing to defend the notion that "nope, nothing wrong with the AI that I can see, perfectly realistic". By not bothering to at least run in their houses and grab a weapon (most houses in this land have at least one), a person is not thinking at all. I even said that some few people might not think clearly is understandable, but to say every single person panics you would have to believe that nobody ever has the ability to think clearly, everyone is immune to fear (because as we all know, panic inspires suicidal bravery all the time, never fear), nobody has any sense of self preservation (a thing I'll remind you that we are born with and do NOT need special "training" to gain), and this includes the children. Perhaps most telling is the fact that running is exactly what most of the people in the trailer for this very game did do when the dragon attacked, and only the dragonborn turned around and walked towards it (though he was armed to the teeth).

Only you seem to think this is about wanting to protect quest givers and that what the discussion needs is good reasons to do so. I think everybody gets it that if the simple effort it would take to make the general public's reaction realistic were put in a patch that some quest givers running for their lives like most would might still die in the flight. Not every kid who ran for their life escaped at Columbine, but even kids had enough sense to at least try. So why don't you join the rest of us here in the real world and tell us again why it is not possible to fix this aspect of the AI. Nobody is going to take you seriously for trying to defend it because "everyone is an insane, suicidal moron without a shred of survival instinct unless they are regularly trained".

Amen.

the only possible way to workaround this issue at the moment, is attempt to kite the dragon away.

i have 2 occurance as such, 1 as the southern mining town south of Windhelm, and the other is at the Orc camp south east.
both times dragon attack, killed few NPC. I keep on reload and fight the dragon, when the dragon died, i chk, still end up with NPC killed.
then i tried another approach (starting at the mining town)
the dragon attack soon after i leave the inn, so i load the game prior to that save, once outside, i keep run to a place furthest away from these population, the dragon does seem to follow you in a way.
the catch is sometime when you fighting the dragon, it may fly off and go attack the town.
so keep save the gam during the fight, as long as the dragon is not bothering the town/npcs.

i managed to use such "crude" kiting to avoid the npc getting killed.

I tried that a few times but the dragon rarely follows me anywhere. In fact it barely ever pays any attention to me, and I'm Dragonborn. Instead, it wants to eat all the idiots that are pulling it's tail and socking it in the legs with their fists, stabbing it's toes and so on... lol

But yeah I had a situation where I saved the game just outside of Riverwood (I didn't fast travel), and after the game saved a dragon appeared a minute later and headed for the town. I followed it and after it died I noticed Gerdur had died. Well I reloaded the save to see if I could avoid her dying and I did but then the game locked up my PS3 so I had to try again. The 3rd time I thought I did it but found Gerdur's body again. So I had to do it a 4th time and finally got away with it without the game freezing and making me hard boot out of my system. Then I saved the game over an old save and made a new character, only to find out the new character save slot saved over my save after that dragon fight (The famous manual save overwrite bug that isn't being addressed in the next patch). So I had to load the save before the dragon attacked again and this time Alvor died. So I reloaded again and finally did it without anyone dying and saved it on 3 new slots to make sure the game doesn't eat the save if I start a new game. I have unfortunately lost a few builds with that save slot overwrite bug and it wasn't until the dragon instance that I finally knew it couldn't be me so I checked online and sure enough I found out it was another bug and how to avoid it in the future.

This whole process took 2 hours, and doesn't really help my case in this thread. Just thought I'd share that experience. The reason why it doesn't help my case is I think Gerdur and Alvor SHOULD fight any dragon, just wish the dragon would come after me and not them all the time. I will always reload a save before a dragon attacks so a person I don't want to die doesn't die. But if a guard, a follower, a companion, or an elderly person, or a boring NPC I don't care about such as the town drunk or a bard dies from a dragon I won't care at all. I think some people SHOULD die from dragons even some minor quest givers. But I will avoid it if possible or if it's someone I like. I still think the A.I. could be better though so when NPC's who "should" be fighting the dragon's life gets low they try to get farther away and maybe heal themselves. They could still die, just not quite so easily.

Before the game came out (like 6 months before) I was on the Bethblog and I recommended that dragon's attack towns, just not very often but nope, they attack way too often in my opinion. I also recommended that when a dragon attacked, NPCs run away except for guards, followers, warriors, and specific passer-bys which I recommended they create JUST FOR DRAGON ATTACKS. I'm talking about like traveling NPCs on horses and with carriages and religious monks and such, that when a dragon attacks, these "dragon food people" with no associated quests and little dialog, would spawn just outside of the town and would be the one's the dragons mostly go for. That way a lot of quest givers don't die, but you would still see cool things like dragons swooping down on horses and monks, and torching wooden carriages and see bodies flying around. It's obvious they didn't listen to my recommendations. lol... I will just say once again I don't think the way dragon attacks are now are horrible or game-breaking, but the A.I. of the NPCs and the dragons themselves, could have been a lot better and a lot more realistic, and it wouldn't have been that hard to implement.

I watched 2 guards, and 2 vigilant of stendarrs take down a dragon. I didn't help. I was hoping the vigil would die, because I wanted her necklace.

I thought you were just always exaggerating when you say that they all do not run... NPCs in Skyrim do run from fights when they cannot win.

Btw, you think that the NPCs act stupid and at the same time do you try to kite the dragons and do not think that their behaviour is stupid?? Right, I can see how you have gone past your drama...

I was in riverwood during a dragon attack, and okay, before I start, I was at an early stage in the game and I was around level 8 / 9. Dragons weren't the most 'Difficult' enemies at that stage.

Although, I was jotting arround, selling some stuff and buying some steel bars or whatever, and a Dragon flew down near the river. I charged at the dragon as a hero, only to notice I was beaten to it by the Blacksmith, Alvor (I think his name is). He was swinging his weapon with Valiant Rage!
To be honest, I don't think I could have done anywhere near as good as him. So as it goes, I left him to it. He smashed off a good half of the dragons health before I decided to help him in his insane endeavor.

What a Guy...

It shoudl be changed so all NPC's run away and hide in their homes except for the immortal children. No we should send them out to fight the dragons because, lets face it, one, they are annoying and it would be funny to see their sarcastic asses being handed to them by a dragon; and two, they are immortal so they cant be killed so we dont run the risk of losing an NPC that is important to us.

No. I have a better idea. The dragons should just swoop down on the children, pick them off of the ground and then drop them from a great height.

Or better still, NPCs should seize the irritating children and offer them as a sacrifice to the dragon to make it go away. That would be AI with no flaws.

I'm just glad they put children in the game. Kind of stupid they can't die, but I understand. Kids make the world a little more believable. The mod "Children of Morrowind" For MW was one of my favorites. Not because I talked to them or did any of their related quests, but I just like that they are there in the background, playing, in that unforgiving world. I did hate how battle music would play when they were play fighting though. As for dragons and children, I think they should've had one event play out where the dragon swoops down and takes one of the children, and you start a quest to find the dragon's nest and rescue the kid. There isn't enough cinematic events in this game for my taste, but that's always been the case with these games. More of a sandbox with fetching/killing quests than a good story driven game. At least this time it's a little better. I do miss how dark/mature the world of Morrowind was with it's slavery and politics though.

Anyways... I can't believe this thread got so much attention. It goes to show that at least the dragon aspect of this game is something to talk about. They attack too much though I think. I wish they were harder to find most of the time and it was more of a dragon hunting experience where they would hide behind rocks, in forests, deep in caves and you had more variety in them and the ways to fight them. They are also too easy to kill where as the NPCs they are always killing are dying to easily, for my tastes of course, since I like to keep as many people alive as I can. As in another thread about the population, I already think they should have put more people in the game anyways. More voice actors, and better voice actors that could sound like many different people. Too often you hear the same person talking the same way and I hate that. Still, better than the 13 or so voice actors that did ALL the voices in Oblivion. Wow I sure know how to wonder in my thoughts and get off topic lol...

Edit: I mean how cool would it be if you could jump onto a dragon's back from higher elevation when it swoops down. And that's starts a cinematic God of War or Shadow of The Colossus type of action where the camera slowly goes around as you climb to the right spot while hanging on when it tries to shake you off or flies upside down, and you could give a good blow to it's back/spinal chord and it would fall to the ground and throw you off and you rolled and stood up like, "Yeah, I just did that." Sometimes it would still be alive but coughing up blood and trying to bite you, or try to claw you or whip it's tail at you. I think they could have made the whole dragon thing more exciting, because after awhile it kind of gets repetitive.

Let's just hope one of the DLCs is mountable dragons. Like you could find an underground cave with magic spring water that these different kinds of dragon drink that makes them more docile where they live and breed, and can be trained to fight with you or ride. LOL imagine the lag though flying a dragon... I guess they could make them smaller, younger or flightless or even bring back Guars! I want to ride some Guars in Skyrim!

I noticed this, and found out, if the dragon flying/circling too high, it won't notice you. I have to go to higher place, only it will attack me.

I guess you need to "aggro" it 1st, and do this outside of npc area, hence the initial "kiting".
I usually will pop/conjure flame element, as it like range shot the dragon, can help the aggroing.