You turn a bend of the road and suddenly find yourself confronted by a band of 5 bandits. As they draw their weapons and start rushing at you, you suddenly realize that you're carrying nothing but a walking stick, and didn't bother to put your armor on this morning!
Well, no matter.... Open inventory, load armor, select just the weapon you're going to use to mince these annoyance. This one? No, maybe that one. Or maybe that one there? Then it's off for a leisurely stroll through your magic menu. Done? Fine. Exit menu and back to world with no penalty at all for being caught with your cuirass down.
Well, No More! This mod does something simple – it make you fall and fumble if you spend more than a few seconds in inventory, stats, spells or map menus under combat conditions. And by "fumble" I mean paralysis – spending more than 3 seconds in menu will cause paralysis. Paralysis will scale with the amount of time you spend in menu (up to twenty seconds).
To give you an idea of how close you're cutting it, you'll see an message when you exit the menu e.g.:
Combat Fumbling: 1.23/1.50 .
The first number is the fumbling seconds (menu seconds *scale factor), the second the fumbling threshold. If first number exceeds second number, you'll fumble, i.e., be paralyzed. Paralysis duration will be roughly equal to the fumbling seconds.
No special startup. Just install the mod and activate it. If you don't like it, de-activate it. There are no permanent effects to worry about.
Because this is still a bit experimental, when you first start, you'll receive a configuration sheet when you first start using the mod. Here's its text...
Combat fumbling penalizes you for spending time in menus in combat situations by freezing the NPC for a period. You'll be unable to cast spells or swing weapons, but you'll be able to access menus (at the cost of additional penalty). The time that you're frozen and whether you're frozen at all depends on configurable settings, which menus you visit and your Agility and Intelligence scores.
Penalty time grows as you spend time in menus. So long as it stays below the penaltyMin setting (default: 2 seconds), you won't be penalized. If you go over the minmum, then you'll be frozen for time equal to penalty seconds - penaltyMin. E.g., if you get a penalty of 3 seconds, and have a penaltyMin of 2 seconds, you'll be frozen for 1 second.
The maximum time that you'll be frozen is controlled by penaltyMax (default: 22 seconds). So, by default maximum penalty will be 20 seconds.
The penalty (by default) does not grow as fast as you recover from it. By default, penalty in the menus grows at 0.8 seconds per 1.0 game seconds. This is controlled by inventoryScale for the inventory menu and infoScale for the stats, magic and map menus. Both of these default to 0.8.
However, if your agility is over 50, the inventory penalty is also scaled by it. Specifically, the scaling is inventoryScale*50/agility. So at agility of 100 and default inventoryScale, the effective scale is 0.8*50/100 = 0.4. Ie., 1 second of inventory times equals 0.4 seconds of penalty time.
The other three menus are affected in the same way by intelligence.
As you spend time in menus, you'll get warnings about fumbling time. These are likely to lag after the second message or so due to Oblivion's minimum message display time, however, they should give you a feel for how quickly you're using time in the menus.
If you want to play a bit more hardcore, you can specify a minimum penalty just for using a menu at all. The minimum penalties are specified by inventoryMin and infoMin (other three menus). E.g., if you want to penalize player 10 seconds just for visiting the inventory, set inventoryMin to 10. Note: by default, these are both equal to zero – i.e., no minimum penalty.
So to modify Combat Fumbling, use the console to set the relevant quest variables:
• penaltyMin: Penalties lower than this won't cause fumbling.
• penaltyMax: Penalty will never be higher than this.
• inventoryScale: Ratio of inventory penalty seconds to game seconds.
• infoScale: Ratio of other menu penalty seconds to game seconds.
• inventoryMin: Minimum penalty for visiting inventory.
• infoMin: Minimum penalty for visitting other menus.
The relevant quest is "wrFumblingQ". So for example to set infoScale to one to one (aside from intelligence factor): set wrFumblingQ.infoScale to 1.0
You can also view current setting: show wrFumblingQ.infoScale
• Uses setRestrained plus shader effect instead of Paralysis or Fatigue hit.
• Scaling for inventory and info (other three) menus is now separate.
• Additional scaling for Agility (Inventory) and Intelligence (info menus).
• Support "hard core" minimum penalty just for visiting menus.
• Tweak parameters for faster penalty growth.
• Switch from paralyze to drain fatigue effect.
• You are free to redistribute this work in unmodified form.
• You are free to modify and re-distribute this work, so long as you: 1) give the author(s) credit proportional to their contribution to the final work, 2) distribute the final work under the same terms, and 3) make artistic resources included with the final work available under the same terms as below.
• Artistic resources (meshes, textures, sounds, etc.) included with this work may be included in unmodified form with modified versions of this work, so long as their authors are given credit proportional to their contribution to the final work. Note that artistic resources may not be modified, or extracted from this work, unless permission is given elsewhere.
While the license above allows modification and redistribution, I'd prefer to keep it under my control for now. So, please try to contact me before modifying or redistributing it.
• Wrye, Monkey God of Modding!
• Contact: PM to Elder Scrolls Forum
• Home Page: Wrye Musings