I'm going to be working on a companion with quite a large romance quest and I have a few questions whose answers would save me a ton of time.

What is the name of the standard companion quest that triggers the follower to actually follow you? I can't seem to find it. I still want to use this, I don't want to reinvent the wheel.

My old companion Viconia in Oblivion is met by the player going to the jail in Bruma and rescuing her. In Skyrim the player will simply meet her in Riverwood.

I've copied Lydia over and have been working on the basics such as stage numbers, other basic, etc. Her stock companion/follower logic is working just fine and she is testing out as I would expect.

My issue is I'm trying to figure out how I can piggyback on the standard companion logic to do my own introduction to the companion so it suits Viconia better and then triggers the actual romance quest (which is simply a setStage at the end of the opening dialog).

Any help on this is appreciated. It would certainly save me a ton of time. Just entering all the stages and their conditions took me over an hour yesterday and the amount of dialog I have to enter in is staggering.

The default follower quests are DialogueFavorGeneric (the initial "follow me" option) and DialogueFollower (dialogue options and other functionality while the NPC is following). Both are in the "Generic" quest branch of the Object Window's tree view.

There is however something of a catch-22 that you will run into: you need to edit these quests in order to have a follower with a custom voice use the default follower system; but, editing these quests will render your mod incompatible with other mods that edit the same quests, which includes other followers with custom voices or the very popular mods that add new follower functions (UFO, Followers Can Relax, Follower Trap Safety, EFF, AFT, etc.).

The alternatives are:

1) Pick an allowed follower voicetype close to that of your voice actress. The Gabby follower mod does this, for example. The voice used for answering follower commands will be a little different than Vicky's usual voice; but then, you have two sets of voices already, don't you, from what I remember of the Oblivion mod?

2) Scripting the injection of your custom voicetype into the allowed follower voicetypes, and then having your voice actor duplicate the default follower lines. As I understand it, you're using already-recorded voice files that can't be changed, though, so this may not work for you unless you happen to have some lines like "lead on" and "as you wish" and so forth.

3) You can roll your own follower scripts, but that has its own set of negatives; namely, that because your scripts will be incompatible with mods that add to the default follower functionality, you may need to do additional work incorporating that functionality into your own scripts if you want your mod to be widely used. (You can snag the follower scripts that I wrote for my mod via the Nexus link in my signature, but they're somewhat specific to the needs of my follower, so you'd still need to do a fair amount of editing work.)

I think option 2 is what I'm going to do but we'll see what happens. I'm not a stickler for everything matching up perfectly voice wise. Now that I what the follower quest is I'll play around a few different ways and see what works.

Thanks!! Much appreciated.

After fussing around with it I may just go with option 3. Pray for me. LOL

After a lot of poking around and experimenting I've decided to go with option 1 but I'm looking at Gabby and wondering why I can simply trigger the romance quest along with the default follower quest. I should be able to run them simultaneously. The thing I can't seem to figure out is the code to start the quest as part of the dialog where she decides to follow you. I found the dialog but i can't seem to figure out the code to add to the End script fragment. Any help there is appreciated, the rest is manual labor.