Mesmetron Manifesto
How to Win Friends and Influence People; Wastleland Style

I've been sitting on this mod for like two weeks now. It's time to get off my butt and put it out there and see if it's worth taking to the next level.

A beta/WIP version of this mod will likely be made available this evening or tomorrow morning. I will try to create some YouTube video demonstrating some of the more 'fun' aspects of the mod at the same time. When the mod is made available this topic will be edited with links to the mod and associated videos, as well as edited to include install/uninstall instructions. This post is intended to be a mirror of the main nexus and read-me docs that will be associated with the mod.


Overview

This mod reintroduces the mesmetron from Fallout 3. It does so in a method that focuses on balance and sensibility, while at the same time not forgetting that this is a Fallout game and we're here to have some fun. Players can find and then maintain one or more mesmetrons. These powerful weapons can then be used to daze opponents and dramatically increase their suggestibility. Characters with the right attributes, perks, talents, karma, skills or even reputation can then leverage the victims lowered defenses to swap items directly from their inventories, negotiate huge discounts or altogether waive costs for repair, medical and barter service. Use their altered consciousness to alter their mood, inhibiting or exacerbating their helpfulness, aggression and respect for others. Make guards leave their posts and others ignore your attacks on their former friends. Victimize influential figures and you can even get them to change the perception their faction has of you or even bypass huge quest requirements; no more pesky errand boy quests for the Brotherhood, simply tell that Elder to open the damn doors!

Control collars can be attached to these victims, who can thereafter be 'sold' to the Legion, the Khans or the NCR depending upon factions. Or send them to the Lucky 38 as a slave, or make them follow you around, perhaps even fight for you! Even use them as suicide bombers with your trusty detonator!

Abstract

This mod is intended to be a fun Swiss army knife of possibilities, one that allows players to muck about with the game world to an unprecedented degree. I must stress that significant effort has been expended to make sure the mesmetron is a balanced tool that players can use without fear of 'destroying' any sense of game balance. Virtually every single skill is in some ways involved with the acquisition, use and care of a mesmetron. There are appropriate karma and reputation hits for differing uses of the mesmetron.

Key Features

• Reimplements the mesmetron from Fallout 3.
  
• Adds recipes to craft a mesmetron and mesmetron Power Cells (requires the discovery of a mesmetron).
  
• Mesmetron has the same odds of mezzing, frenzying and head-popping as it did in FO3.
  
• Extensive dialog tree available when talking to mesmerized (mezzed) targets.
  
• While the target's suggestibility is increased, characters with the right abilities can take advantage of them.
  
• This can result in free access to their personal inventory, deep discounts on services and the ability to enslave them with a control collar.
  
• Mesmerized characters can have their behavior altered, altering their aggression, helpfulness and more.
  
• Certain characters can be used to influence faction standing.
  
• Quest related characters can be directly manipulated to bypass quests or other difficulties.
  
• Control Collars can be acquired or built (after finding the right recipe), these collars can be used to enslave mesmerized targets.
  
• Enslaved characters can be set to follow the PC, or directed to the Lucky 38, the Legion, the Khans or the NCR prison.
  
• Enslaved characters can also be controlled remotely using the detonator, and then detonated remotely.

Details

• There are five mesmetrons that have been placed throughout the game world. No mesmetrons appear on any NPC or on a levelled list at this time.
  
• Three of these mesmetrons are broken. Two of them are functional but in low health. Not every mesmetron appears with ammunition.
  
• Upon finding a working or broken mesmetron, the recipes to craft a functional mesmetron and mesmetron power cells are unlocked, both requiring moderate levels of Science to pull off.
  
• Control collars are found in a few scattered locations, and once acquired unlock the recipe to craft more of them. This recipe requires a moderate amount of Explosives skill.
  
• When firing the mesmetron at a normal target, the odds of mezzing are 50%, frenzy 30% and cranial explosion 20%. You've been warned.
  
• Mesmerizing a target of any kind always gives a karma hit equivalent to theft. Further manipulations can add additional karma or reputation hits.
  
• When intiating dialog with a mesmerized target, you will be presented with a list of dialog options based on the type of target (is it a doctor? a vendor? do you have a control collar in your inventory?). Simply choose the type of manipulation you wish to perform (accessing their inventory, barter with a huge discount, attach a collar, etc.).
  
• After selecting a manipulation, you must now use your character's abilities to pull off the manipulation. There are a variety of abilities that can be used, and many have different effects. They are:
  
  • Luck: With a luck of 8 or higher, you can always pull off at least one manipulation on a target. Once you've used your Luck attribute to perform one manipulation on a target, you cannot use luck again for the duration of the time that the target is mesmerized. There is no karma or reputation hit from this approach.
    
  • Karma: At extremely high or low levels of Karma, you can attempt to use your association with ultimate good or evil to sway a target. Each use of the karma approach costs 250 'virtual' karma. No karma is really lost, it just reduces your ability to use karma in this way. For example, a character with 750 karma, could use the karma approach 3 times before running out of 'virtual' karma to use for manipulating a given target. This 'virtual karma' is restored once the mesmerization effect expires. Negative karma is considered as well, just use the absolute value of the karma score. There is a karma hit when using this approach, but it's severity ranges from theft to murder based on the type of manipulation and whether or not the PC was evil or good.
    
  • Relationship perks (Black Widow, Lady Killer, Confirmed Bachelor, Cherchez La Femme): If your have this perk and the target is susceptible to one of these perks, you may use the perk to repeatedly access any of their services. Because these perks represent an investment in persuasion, there are no karma or reputation hits for using these approaches.
    
  • Terrifying Presence: If you have this perk, you can use it repeatedly on any target susceptible. There are definite karma and reputation hits associated with using this approach.
    
  • Reputation: When dealing with a member of a faction that you have an 'Idolized" ranking with, you can cite your affiliation with the group as a reason to accept your manipulation. Depending on the manipulation (slavery, etc), there may be karma and or reputation hits. This is repeatable as long as you remain "Idolized" throughout the dialog.
    
  • Speech: With an adequate speech ability, you can simply persuade a target to accept your directions through charm alone. This is a repeatable approach, and there are typically karma and reputation hits depending upon the manipulation.
  
  
• If you have a control collar you can affix it to the target, making them your slave.
  
• Enslaved targets have much of the same dialog as mesmerized targets. However, they can no longer provide services other than access to their personal inventory.
  
• Enslaved targets can be given one of the following orders: wait, follow, go to Lucky 38, the NCR Prison, the Khans, or to the Legion. They can also be 'released' meaning returned to their old lifestyle, while still retaining the collar.
  
• Depending upon the victim, the results of these orders can have different effects. The Legion will put women to work as hard labor, and often crucify the men, or make them available for combat in the arena. Big targets might net a cash reward. The NCR might give a cash reward and thereafter imprison the target, or kill them outright if it's a wanted fugitive. People sent to the Lucky 38 are mainly there for amusemant.
  
• Enslaved targets can be detonated using the detonator normally used for C-4. To do this, aim the detonator at the victim and press the fire button. There will be an audible click. While still aiming the detonator at the victim, press the fire button again. This time there will be an audible arming sound. You now have about five seconds, during which a third press of the fire button will detonate the collar on the selected victim. You do not have to be looking at the victim (or even have line-of-sight) to detonate the target. After five seconds, a disarming sound will be heard and the arming process will reset.
  
• ALL nearby collars can be detonated simultaneously. Accomplish this by pointing into empty space (not at a slave) and pressing the fire button twice. A similar arming sound will be heard. Pressing fire now will simultaneously detonate all nearby slave collars.
  
• The detonator can be use to precisely direct the movement of slaves, for precision suicide bombing. Do this by aiming the detonator at the target and pressing fire. The usual sound will be heard. Now aim at your desired destination for the slave and press fire again. This will disarm the detonator, but issue an order for the slave to immediately move to that location and begin idling about.

Currently Implemented

These are the features that already work as described in this document. Fortunately, aside from the far-reaching pie-in-the-sky options, most of it is already there or reasonably close.

• Mesmetron weapon is fully functional and placed in game. Recipes are fully functional
  
• Control Collars and Detonator work as described but are not yet placed in game.

Coming Soon

These are the features that have been outline above but have not yet been implemented in a quality manner. They have the additional qualifier of being extremely easy to implement and most likely to be in an upcoming release.

• Altering victim mood via dialog.
  
• Altering PC reputation via dialog.
  
• Placement of control collars and recipes, etc.
  
• Completion/verification of scripting to handle slaves directed to any of the 'go to...' destinations.

Further Out

These things may or may not have been mentioned above but represent some of the more ambitious goals of this project, ones that will take significant planning and thought to pull off appropriately.

• The ability to bypass quests and minutiae when using the mesmetron on influential figures.
  
• Adding a quest line involving a NPC who mesmerizes the PC and acts as a sort of regional puppetmaster.

Known Issues/Bugs/Limitations

These are the problems I've been dealing with in delivering this mod. Any help from the community is greatly appreciated! Willing to trade knowledge of the ObjectUnderReticle method!

• The mezzed effect prematurely expires and people go hostile when the mesmetron is holstered while a target is mesmerized. This doesn't happen if I don't holster the weapon, but rather use my hotkeys to switch to a different item. I suspect it's related to the mezz effect being applied through an Object Enchant applied to the mesmetron itself rather than to an ammo or projectile, but I'd rather get some community input before going through the effort of changing it all.
  
• Slaves don't seem to follow the PC, particularly after I traverse a zone boundary. Ambassador Crocker for example will follow me throughout the embassy but after I leave, he doesn't come with me, but rather returns to his desk.

You know, rather than a Mesmetron, I'd love to see a CODE camera. It would have a similar function to the Mezzer, but it would be more interesting in general, especially if the story of Van Buren was tied into it. That and different punch cards with different 'orders' could be used with it, to get NPCs to do different things.

I'll pull up some links.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/CODE
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Victor_Presper

Idea man, me. That's what I do.

Edit #1: It would be especially entertaining if you actually used Victor Presper in it, just as a dead Scientist, and the schematics were for 'Victor Presper's Camera' or something similar. Perhaps with a quest tied into that.

It's interesting you bring this up, because my pie in the sky hope for this mod is to ultimately write a quest involving brainwashing. Here is the coffee-table-napkin version:

First I make the assumption that I can retcon the Mesmetron as a Commonwealth invention, and then suppose there is a reclusive Commonwealth expatriate living somewhere in the Mojave. He has a network of devices and brainwashed victims he uses to get by without ever being detected, because he uses mesmetron technology. As a result, he therefore covets any mesmetrons that exist and furthermore is paranoid that any irresponsible use will ultimately lead to his downfall. The net effect of this is that after some amount of time of extensive use of the mesmetron, the PC would be tracked down by an eyebot and blasted with a mesmetron. After some knockout-fade to black fx, the player reawakens to find a new quest to go and meet this puppetmaster type. The idea is that the player continues to have free will, but ignoring the quest slowly results in the PC being railroaded into the quest (representing the control). If the PC kills the eyebot or somehow eludes such capture, this puppetmaster resumes again, this time using living members of the PC's most favored faction. The point is that the PC ultimately one way or another confronts this character, who then sends him on errands and other things, and in many ways denies the players free will. Ultimately the player is presented with an opportunity to acquire a psychic nullifier (if you remember it from FO1-- its in New Vegas already, on that stupid fortune teller at the 188). This nullifier frees the PC who can then resolve his differences with the puppetmaster a variety of ways, because with the helmet he is rendered immune to the mesmetrons. The ideal reward for this was a unique Mesmetron that had better qualities and perhaps some of the more advanced features I had in mind only worked for it.

I don't know where the possible synthesis of my idea is with what you're talking about, but it's good to know that I'm not the only ambitious person in this regard. I could easily add a CODE camera to this mod as a side project, it would be trivial for all practical purposes.

Nice ... another slavery mod in development. My FNNCQ for NV is still in the works.

About your problems:
1. The original mesmetron code from FO3 is pretty messy. I don't recommend to use it. For my FNNCQ weapons I completely abandoned it and made my own effects.
2. You have to constantly monitor your slave unwilling NPC. Script packages get deleted as soon as you make a cell change.

Btw. be very careful it is pretty easy to mess up the NPC and destroy spawn points with enslaving as Bethesda showed in FO3.

My Powered Power Armor mod has a Mesmetronic Pulse Generator - basically an area of effect weapon that will center an explosion on the character/player that uses it, mezzing any NPCs within the blast radius (though the probability of it having an effect is proportional to your energy weapons skill.) It's something I transferred over from my FO3 version, so when I realized that none of the mesmetron scripts were present in FNV I hastily wrote something to keep the weapon from being totally useless. It's a bit of a hack job - the frenzy effect and eruptive cranial edema work as intended, but all the actual mez effect does is force the NPC into a non-combative state for 30 seconds. What I'm wondering is if you used the existing mez base effects for your weapon - if so, loading your mod after mine should overwrite my effect scripts and make the mesmetronic pulse generator fully functional. The only really major change I made that I'd like to preserve is that I've dropped Bethesda's previous limitation of only having 1 mezzed target at a time. Do you know if that would cause any problems with your code for enslaving NPCs?

Not that I know of. But to be honest, a good deal of my work is derived from the base scripts in FO3. I've also noticed that the were written with the 1 mez at a time limit almost as just a debugging aid intended for later removal. Sounds to me I should see about making a similar change and remove the cap... seems like that would be the fastest way to do it.

My mod basically works like this Mesmetron has an object enchantment that after firing does the math and determines if the target will be mezzed, frenzied or exploded and adds the relevant actor effect. The actor effect consists of disabling all aggression, mood, energy and playing the 'dazed' idle anim on a loop. My dialog tree associated with mesmerization consists entirely of choices (to avoid mixing in topics to keep the scope of the mod realistic), and the GREETING is conditionalized with a simple IsSpellTarget "MS13Mezzed" == 1 check. Between adding that effect via your script and my efforts to remove the 1 mezzed cap, the mods would seem perfectly compatible, right?

EDIT: Or rather, perhaps we should both use the same name for the actor effect we are adding to induce the 'mezzed' state. That way users with just your mod get the experience you've described, and users of this mod get this mods effect, but when they combine they get both fluidly? I'll put some cycles into removing the mezzed cap tonight before I push a release out.

@Imp of the Perverse
If you are asking me (I am not sure if you meant me) there are no compatibility troubles at all because I don't touch and use the original scripts at all. I made my own slaver weapons to avoid such problems. Except the optional mesmetron plugin for the FO3 version of FNNCQ. But I warn in the description that incompatibilities can happen with it.

FNNCQ2 for FO3 and FNNCQ NV are completely independent.

Oops, didn't notice you wrote me back once already sesom. Just some feedback regarding your input.

I've currently resorted to using the script equivalent of an enum that keeps track of a slaves current 'order', checks to see if the relevant package is in use, and calls addscriptpackage to put in back in place if necessary. This is in the gamemode block of the Collar effect, and sadly it still seems to break. :/ Any specific suggestions?

And yeah, I original did a straight port of the code, but I've hacked up a ton of it already. I'm looking at moving all of the code out of the weapon object effect and into an ammunition effect.

Forgot to add that I'm looking to add Activation choices to attach collars to unconscious or sleeping people as well.

????

I use a token to keep them at the scripted package. And btw. don't forget to check the 'continue if the player is near' in every package. Traveling and cell change with the player is always critical as we get demonstrated with the original 'followers' . There is no other way as to use drastic methods like 'moveto' to keep the slave by the the player. The art is to find out when it has to happen and that it doesn't look unnatural.

One additional thingie: In contrast to FO3, NV enables and disables NPCs a lot. Your scripts has to be ready for this situations.

About the activation: Use a Perk.

What I did was make a weapon object effect, PPAEffMZP, that gets applied to any actors hit by the pulse explosion. It runs a check against the player's energy weapon skill to determine whether the target should be effected by the mezzer. If they are, it applies the MS13MesmetronEnch, a leftover weapon effect from Fallout 3 that applies the MS13MesmetronEffect script type base effect. That object effect was originally attached directly to the mesmetron. The base effect is missing its script in FNV, so I wrote a simple one to apply, at random, either the MS13MezzedSpell, MS13FrenzySpell, or MS13HeadExplodeSpell. Each of those spells apply the MS13Mezzed, MS13Frenzy, and MS13HeadExplode script type base effects, which were again missing their scripts. I wrote simple replacement scripts for each to do roughly the same thing that they originally did in FO3, minus the slave collar bit.

So what I'm saying is that if you followed the same chain of effects and just restored their scripts like I did, loading your mod after mine would automatically replace my scripts with yours, giving my pulse generator the same functionality as your Mesmetrons (which would be cool). Or if you created new base effects, object effects, and actor effects instead of using the leftovers I could probably accomplish the same thing via a pretty simple compatibility patch.

Any update to this ?