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"Sao Feng's Bodyguards and "Free the Slaves" sidequests

Grey Roger

Sea Dog
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When you go to Port Royale to report completion of the "Sao Feng's Bodyguards" sidequest to Father Bernard, he accuses you of blackmailing Father Jerald, and also says that as you have the women still with you, you must be the kidnapper. You conclude that Ammand the Corsair told Father Bernard about the blackmail scheme. But as to the charge of still having the women with you, nonsense! Starting from Puerto Rico, where you went to collect them, it's quicker to first sail to Turks Island and hand them over to Sao Feng before going to Port Royale, rather than vice versa, which means by the time you get to Father Bernard, you probably don't have the women with you.

Suggestion: have Father Bernard check if the women really are with you. If so, he calls the guards, as at present. If not, he only accuses you of blackmail and uses that as an excuse to not pay you.


In Oranjestad, you see two men fighting, and if you choose to intervene, it turns out the one doing the attacking was a slave and the one being attacked, who you've just saved, is a slaver. You decide to go along with him in the hope of freeing some more slaves. If, at the start of the game, you went down the "Brock/Brinkley" path rather than the "Christopher Mings" path, then when you arrive at Eleuthera plantation, Gentleman Jocard tells you to go away and you do. The quest shuts down. According to the questbook, you can't fight a pirate lord. This is likely to happen if you're used to the normal "Artois Voysey/Nigel Blythe" start, in which, if you're trying to be the nice guy, you intervene on the side of the one being bullied; and if you chose "Brock Brinkley", either because you know how the story goes and want to save the Brin sisters, or because you're new to the story and didn't spot Lt. Bligh - if you don't talk to him on Speightstown port then Ming doesn't appear in the tavern.

Suggestion: allow the quest to proceed if you are yourself a pirate lord because you've completed "Sao Feng's Bodyguards" and Teague has given you his piece of eight. Also perhaps allow it to proceed if you've joined the Brotherhood at Nevis and achieved a high enough rank. (How high?)
 
Suggestion: have Father Bernard check if the women really are with you. If so, he calls the guards, as at present. If not, he only accuses you of blackmail and uses that as an excuse to not pay you.
Alternate (not necessarily better) suggestion: Force the player to still have the women present at that time.

Suggestion: allow the quest to proceed if you are yourself a pirate lord because you've completed "Sao Feng's Bodyguards" and Teague has given you his piece of eight. Also perhaps allow it to proceed if you've joined the Brotherhood at Nevis and achieved a high enough rank. (How high?)
I'd say "joining the Brotherhood" is good enough. I've made a fair few sidequests for Jack Sparrow conditional on that already.
It makes perfect sense to do the same now. :onya

Does this have anything to do with the fact that normally SAVING Artois is "the right thing" to do, while in this case "the right thing" is to let the slave KILL his owner?
 
Alternate (not necessarily better) suggestion: Force the player to still have the women present at that time.
Much of the rest of the storyline is about letting the player have the choice of paths, so I'd rather leave it up to the player whether to take the women to Sao Feng before or after visiting Father Bernard, and then having Father Bernard react appropriately. (One trick I might play is, if you go to Sao Feng first, Sao Feng sends a message ahead. Father Bernard then knows what you and the women got up to on Puerto Rico. :D)

I'd say "joining the Brotherhood" is good enough. I've made a fair few sidequests for Jack Sparrow conditional on that already.
It makes perfect sense to do the same now. :onya
Which other sidequests are conditional on you being in the Brotherhood? I know several are conditional on the storm scene happening before they're allowed to start.

Does this have anything to do with the fact that normally SAVING Artois is "the right thing" to do, while in this case "the right thing" is to let the slave KILL his owner?
It's the combination of the attacker and victim being the other way round, and the quest shutting down based on an apparently unrelated decision right at the start of the game.
 
Much of the rest of the storyline is about letting the player have the choice of paths, so I'd rather leave it up to the player whether to take the women to Sao Feng before or after visiting Father Bernard, and then having Father Bernard react appropriately.
Fair point. As I said: It wasn't necessarily a better solution. And indeed it wasn't. ;)

One trick I might play is, if you go to Sao Feng first, Sao Feng sends a message ahead. Father Bernard then knows what you and the women got up to on Puerto Rico. :D
:onya

Which other sidequests are conditional on you being in the Brotherhood? I know several are conditional on the storm scene happening before they're allowed to start.
Looks like @Talisman was kind enough to mark them here:
Legend of Jack Sparrow - Hoist the Colours | PiratesAhoy!
Good thing too! I didn't remember... :wp

It's the combination of the attacker and victim being the other way round, and the quest shutting down based on an apparently unrelated decision right at the start of the game.
Got it. :)
 
Sao Feng's Bodyguards: it turns out there is already code for what I want to happen. It doesn't work. In "Father Bernard_dialog.c", case "destroyed_sekt", the condition is:
Code:
if (CheckAttribute(Pchar, "ANIMISTS") == "women_returned")
I don't think 'CheckAttribute' returns a string to be compared, so that condition can never pass, which is why you're accused of having the women with you even if they're not. (Attribute "PChar.ANIMISTS" is set to "women_returned" by "Sao Feng_dialog.c" when you return the women.) So I changed it to:
Code:
if (CheckAttribute(Pchar, "ANIMISTS") && PChar.ANIMISTS == "women_returned")
And indeed, now Father Bernard only accuses me of blackmailing Father Jerald. Which I didn't, but apparently he's willing to take Ammand's word for it without corroboration. I still get to fight the guards.

Free the Slaves: there's a slight snag. The reason the quest wants you to have followed the "Christopher Mings" path is that certain specific Brotherhood members are then installed in Grand Turk. When you've killed Gentleman Jocard, you're supposed to report to them, the idea being they'll appoint a replacement pirate lord. If you followed the "Brock/Brinkley" path then those guys aren't installed. As a quick'n'dirty fix, I've simply added a different questbook ending to the effect that the Brethren Court will need to appoint a replacement pirate lord, and left it at that. What I'm thinking of doing, since Gentleman Jocard is supposed to be black, is to arrange a different dialog with the slave who talks to you after you've killed all the guards. Assume he's the slaves' leader. You've got a piece of eight looking for a new owner. So you offer him the job, on condition he assumes the name as well as the pirate title of Gentleman Jocard. (If you allowed the slave Gombo to kill the slaver at the start of the quest, he asks to be renamed Gentleman Jocard at some point during the quest, so the idea of a slave assuming the name is already in the game.)
 
I don't think 'CheckAttribute' returns a string to be compared
Indeed it doesn't. I wrote "GetAttribute" for that purpose, which does pretty much exactly what you just did: Do a check first and, if it exists, return the value.
So replacing 'Check' with 'Get' should solve the problem too.

Free the Slaves: there's a slight snag. The reason the quest wants you to have followed the "Christopher Mings" path is that certain specific Brotherhood members are then installed in Grand Turk. When you've killed Gentleman Jocard, you're supposed to report to them, the idea being they'll appoint a replacement pirate lord. If you followed the "Brock/Brinkley" path then those guys aren't installed. As a quick'n'dirty fix, I've simply added a different questbook ending to the effect that the Brethren Court will need to appoint a replacement pirate lord, and left it at that. What I'm thinking of doing, since Gentleman Jocard is supposed to be black, is to arrange a different dialog with the slave who talks to you after you've killed all the guards. Assume he's the slaves' leader. You've got a piece of eight looking for a new owner. So you offer him the job, on condition he assumes the name as well as the pirate title of Gentleman Jocard. (If you allowed the slave Gombo to kill the slaver at the start of the quest, he asks to be renamed Gentleman Jocard at some point during the quest, so the idea of a slave assuming the name is already in the game.)
Why not? :onya
 
"Father Bernard_dialog.c" now uses 'GetAttribute' - as you say, it does the same thing, and it looks tidier.

As for "Free the Slaves", here's how the dialog with the slave goes after you've killed all the guards:
slave_dialog1.jpg slave_dialog2.jpg slave_dialog3.jpg slave_dialog4.jpg slave_dialog5.jpg

The conversation with Gentleman Jocard always adds the line about not wanting to fight a pirate lord into the questbook, then closes the questbook. If you fight him as a result of following the "Christopher Mings" path earlier, it then adds another line to the questbook when you kill the guards and free the slaves. So, if you followed the "Brock/Brinkley" path and then killed Jocard, this is added into the questbook instead:
slaver_questbook.jpg
 
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