Elder Scrolls Why Morrowind is a bad RPG

[mediocrepoet]

I have a better time wandering around the later more dumbed down versions of TES simply because the combat is good enough* not to bug me

While Morrowind's melee combat feels wooden as fuck, I still prefer it over melee combat in Oblivion and Skyrim, because in those later games the melee combat is such a fucking slog. Never had issues with the dice rolls system, and when you do hit your enemy in Morrowind, it felt satisfying to hear that hit sound and see the blood splatter.

Yeah, I can see that. For me it's just that at low levels the amount of whiffing and stamina management is brutal. It'd probably bug me less if it was more abstracted (like isometric low level D&D) or if you didn't have to manage stamina. Later on once you can start hitting more reliably and/or have more stamina, I expect it'd bug me less.

There's a lot that you can do to alleviate it, even at low levels. Restore Fatigue potions are plentiful and cheap (free for Fighter's Guild members) and the most efficient race+class combos will have you starting with a weapon skill of 45-50. Dark Elves, Nords and Imperials all get a +10 with a melee weapon, and Redguards get +15. Khajiit also get +15 with H2H but that sort of doesn't count.

Yeah, really just to be clear since a lot of the advice I've gotten below this is redundant. I probably have a few hundred hours logged in Morrowind over the years. I'm just mentioning the things that bug me the most about it and generally stop me from getting back into it to try and actually complete the MQ, for instance.

I've played all the main line Beth games since Arena and I've never completed any of the MQs, rarely complete faction quest lines, etc.

 

[wwsd]

I think I need to play non-melee types and maybe it'll bug me less for Morrowind in particular.

I tried using a crossbow in Morrowind with my latest character, and it was suprisingly decent. Would recommend.

Been using one as a secondary weapon lately, and I used normal bows in a previous playthrough some years ago. Yeah not bad at all. Just being able to eliminate the cliff racers within a wide radius without having to wait for them to come to you is a huge bonus. It's only annoying when they fly away just when you shoot. But it's an example of a skill that many people would not consider from a power gaming perspective.

I played Tamriel Rebuilt and another mod that adds the Twin Lamps as a joinable faction recently, and it's not even funny how much better they both were than the vanilla content. Whoever it was at Bethesda that wrote Morrowind's quests genuinely deserves a kick in the nuts, because they're so inane and boring, and modders have proven that it really wouldn't have taken much effort at all to come up with far better stuff.

Sometimes you just randomly see the shit-ness of vanilla quest design and writing shine through. At some point I found myself carrying 20x of two different types of booze for two different mines, for two different Fighters Guild quest givers. MW can become a drag at moments like that. There are decent to good quests too, of course. It's just the static nature, the constant "Go to X, kill Y, get Z" thing that is often very limited and lacks player choice. The game is a very text-based medium but the storytelling isn't always great.

Then compare to TR where some quests start small, and then take you down a huge rabbit hole. Like a quest in one small town where you have to find a priest's missing friend. You can actually miss half of the rabbit hole if you make the superficially obvious choice. The end is pretty nightmare fuel as well. Conversely, the Great House quests (for the two that have them) in TR are OK at best, but we'll take what we can get. I wonder if TR will expand the three Houses of Vvardenfell on the mainland.

 

[NecroLord]

I think I need to play non-melee types and maybe it'll bug me less for Morrowind in particular.

I tried using a crossbow in Morrowind with my latest character, and it was suprisingly decent. Would recommend.

Been using one as a secondary weapon lately, and I used normal bows in a previous playthrough some years ago. Yeah not bad at all. Just being able to eliminate the cliff racers within a wide radius without having to wait for them to come to you is a huge bonus. It's only annoying when they fly away just when you shoot. But it's an example of a skill that many people would not consider from a power gaming perspective.

I played Tamriel Rebuilt and another mod that adds the Twin Lamps as a joinable faction recently, and it's not even funny how much better they both were than the vanilla content. Whoever it was at Bethesda that wrote Morrowind's quests genuinely deserves a kick in the nuts, because they're so inane and boring, and modders have proven that it really wouldn't have taken much effort at all to come up with far better stuff.

Sometimes you just randomly see the shit-ness of vanilla quest design and writing shine through. At some point I found myself carrying 20x of two different types of booze for two different mines, for two different Fighters Guild quest givers. MW can become a drag at moments like that. There are decent to good quests too, of course. It's just the static nature, the constant "Go to X, kill Y, get Z" thing that is often very limited and lacks player choice. The game is a very text-based medium but the storytelling isn't always great.

Then compare to TR where some quests start small, and then take you down a huge rabbit hole. Like a quest in one small town where you have to find a priest's missing friend. You can actually miss half of the rabbit hole if you make the superficially obvious choice. The end is pretty nightmare fuel as well. Conversely, the Great House quests (for the two that have them) in TR are OK at best, but we'll take what we can get. I wonder if TR will expand the three Houses of Vvardenfell on the mainland.

Never tried crossbows.
Does the damage scale with Strength like it does for Bows?

 

[None]

I think it goes without saying, but still should be mentioned, that not all TR quests are great. Some are a little too much. Like one where you interact with a wizard who turned himself into a crystal, which is fully voice acted. Or the departure of the OE thieves guild on his..."boat". Feels very moddy, out of place, and not in the spirit of the usual Vanilla+ style of content. Writing can be varied. Never as dull as vanilla, but I recall running into an Argonian who spoke like Jar Jar Binks. No idea how that got approved.

As for vanilla, I've come to the conclusion that something like 80% of all quests would need to be scrapped. The holistic nature of redoing everything to have multiple choices and reactivity would be a huge task, and would most likely be incredibly incompatible with other mods. Maybe one day.

 

[Lemming42]

Some of the vanilla quests are unsalvageable, but a lot might be saved via fairly minor changes. There's a mod that redoes the Balmora Fighters' Guild quests which has some good ideas - for example it turns "Gra-Bol's Bounty", one of the most worthless quests in vanilla, into something decent by just adding in a couple of new ways to beat it, including a speechcraft route.

There's also a mod that redoes the Seyda Neen quests, which adds a lot of different things (like you can now get the Nord guy to leave Fargoth alone, and there's a lot of new stuff in the murdered tax collector quest).

There's also some quests that are technically fine but the issue with them is that they lead you to boring copypasted dungeons, so some quests would be improved by overhauling their dungeons.

 

[None]

Some of the vanilla quests are unsalvageable, but a lot might be saved via fairly minor changes. There's a mod that redoes the Balmora Fighters' Guild quests which has some good ideas - for example it turns "Gra-Bol's Bounty", one of the most worthless quests in vanilla, into something decent by just adding in a couple of new ways to beat it, including a speechcraft route.

There's also a mod that redoes the Seyda Neen quests, which adds a lot of different things (like you can now get the Nord guy to leave Fargoth alone, and there's a lot of new stuff in the murdered tax collector quest).

There's also some quests that are technically fine but the issue with them is that they lead you to boring copypasted dungeons, so some quests would be improved by overhauling their dungeons.

I think I'm already familiar with the mods you're talking about. While good, I don't think they go far enough. Still not enough interconnection between other areas due to the compartmentalized nature of their development. And from a certain viewpoint, I think it is far easier to build a new house than analyze and renovate an existing one.

 

[wwsd]

I think I need to play non-melee types and maybe it'll bug me less for Morrowind in particular.

I tried using a crossbow in Morrowind with my latest character, and it was suprisingly decent. Would recommend.

Been using one as a secondary weapon lately, and I used normal bows in a previous playthrough some years ago. Yeah not bad at all. Just being able to eliminate the cliff racers within a wide radius without having to wait for them to come to you is a huge bonus. It's only annoying when they fly away just when you shoot. But it's an example of a skill that many people would not consider from a power gaming perspective.

I played Tamriel Rebuilt and another mod that adds the Twin Lamps as a joinable faction recently, and it's not even funny how much better they both were than the vanilla content. Whoever it was at Bethesda that wrote Morrowind's quests genuinely deserves a kick in the nuts, because they're so inane and boring, and modders have proven that it really wouldn't have taken much effort at all to come up with far better stuff.

Sometimes you just randomly see the shit-ness of vanilla quest design and writing shine through. At some point I found myself carrying 20x of two different types of booze for two different mines, for two different Fighters Guild quest givers. MW can become a drag at moments like that. There are decent to good quests too, of course. It's just the static nature, the constant "Go to X, kill Y, get Z" thing that is often very limited and lacks player choice. The game is a very text-based medium but the storytelling isn't always great.

Then compare to TR where some quests start small, and then take you down a huge rabbit hole. Like a quest in one small town where you have to find a priest's missing friend. You can actually miss half of the rabbit hole if you make the superficially obvious choice. The end is pretty nightmare fuel as well. Conversely, the Great House quests (for the two that have them) in TR are OK at best, but we'll take what we can get. I wonder if TR will expand the three Houses of Vvardenfell on the mainland.

Never tried crossbows.
Does the damage scale with Strength like it does for Bows?

Apparently yes. Didn't even pay attention to that. But in TR, I found an Adamantium Crossbow. Didn't even realise that that was a TR/Tamriel Data addition and the base game only has 2 crossbows. With 38-38 base damage, I had enough stopping power to not actually consider how the damage was done lol.

 

[NecroLord]

I think I need to play non-melee types and maybe it'll bug me less for Morrowind in particular.

I tried using a crossbow in Morrowind with my latest character, and it was suprisingly decent. Would recommend.

Been using one as a secondary weapon lately, and I used normal bows in a previous playthrough some years ago. Yeah not bad at all. Just being able to eliminate the cliff racers within a wide radius without having to wait for them to come to you is a huge bonus. It's only annoying when they fly away just when you shoot. But it's an example of a skill that many people would not consider from a power gaming perspective.

I played Tamriel Rebuilt and another mod that adds the Twin Lamps as a joinable faction recently, and it's not even funny how much better they both were than the vanilla content. Whoever it was at Bethesda that wrote Morrowind's quests genuinely deserves a kick in the nuts, because they're so inane and boring, and modders have proven that it really wouldn't have taken much effort at all to come up with far better stuff.

Sometimes you just randomly see the shit-ness of vanilla quest design and writing shine through. At some point I found myself carrying 20x of two different types of booze for two different mines, for two different Fighters Guild quest givers. MW can become a drag at moments like that. There are decent to good quests too, of course. It's just the static nature, the constant "Go to X, kill Y, get Z" thing that is often very limited and lacks player choice. The game is a very text-based medium but the storytelling isn't always great.

Then compare to TR where some quests start small, and then take you down a huge rabbit hole. Like a quest in one small town where you have to find a priest's missing friend. You can actually miss half of the rabbit hole if you make the superficially obvious choice. The end is pretty nightmare fuel as well. Conversely, the Great House quests (for the two that have them) in TR are OK at best, but we'll take what we can get. I wonder if TR will expand the three Houses of Vvardenfell on the mainland.

Never tried crossbows.
Does the damage scale with Strength like it does for Bows?

Apparently yes. Didn't even pay attention to that. But in TR, I found an Adamantium Crossbow. Didn't even realise that that was a TR/Tamriel Data addition and the base game only has 2 crossbows. With 38-38 base damage, I had enough stopping power to not actually consider how the damage was done lol.

Morrowind did the "Stealth Archer" right.
Daggerfall too, I guess, archery is pretty good, but you need decent skill to make it work.

 

[Lemming42]

As long as we're talking more interesting ways to play MW, I really like the mod "Bonk". It lets you do stealth knockouts on people and makes h2h way more viable and less retarded than it was in vanilla. It even lets you complete the game's endless "murder this guy" quests by "tying up" the enemies (which just flags them as dead and removes them from the world, as far as I can tell). It's superb, wouldn't play without it.

Destroys game balance but that's not really a big deal in MW. It's just a shame there aren't really any mods that make stealth good enough to work with it - there's one which is recommended on the Bonk page called "Stealth Enhanced" or something which is very impressive as a modding achievement and an extraordinary improvement on vanilla, but still nowhere near good enough to make stealth not stupid. There really needs to be enemy patrols and things like that (and, ideally, enemies should have the ability to follow you through load zones).

There's a couple other mods, one that lets you feed food to wild animals to pacify them and one which lets you cast cure disease on blighted animals to turn them friendly. All cool ideas that get around the shit combat problem by giving you interesting ways to bypass it, beyond the base game's methods of spamming Calm and Invisibility to get around everything.

 

[Funposter]

there's one which is recommended on the Bonk page called "Stealth Enhanced" or something which is very impressive as a modding achievement and an extraordinary improvement on vanilla, but still nowhere near good enough to make stealth not stupid. There really needs to be enemy patrols and things like that

The problem with stealth in these games is that implementing it across all dungeons to the standard of an actual stealth game would just be beyond practical. Even setting up some rudimentary patrol paths for every dungeon with human enemies, like getting them to walk around the perimeter of a room, would be extremely time consuming.

(and, ideally, enemies should have the ability to follow you through load zones).

There's an MWSE mod that does this - DragonDoor.

 

[Lemming42]

The problem with stealth in these games is that implementing it across all dungeons to the standard of an actual stealth game would just be beyond practical. Even setting up some rudimentary patrol paths for every dungeon with human enemies, like getting them to walk around the perimeter of a room, would be extremely time consuming.

Vanilla Oblivion and Skyrim were okay at it, iirc - not to Thief standards of course but Skyrim in particular was good at having enemies hang around doing their radiant AI behaviour in their locations, walking around and playing with objects and furniture and such.

Maybe there's other, systems-based ways to improve stealth - I did try the "Distraction" mod for MW which lets you fire ranged weapons at walls to make enemies walk towards the location of the impact and stare dumbly at it while you sneak by them, which adds another dimension to stealth. Maybe more ideas like that could help round out the experience.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

There was an old mod called Living Cities of Vvardenfell which added schedules to NPCs, but I guess this involved heavy scripting for every NPC. Not only is it a ton of work, it's going to be incompatible with a lot of mods. Unless some wizard comes up with a way of externalizing NPC behavior with lua, I don't see such thing becoming a reality. Making NPCs reactive to the standard of a decent stealth game is even further from Morrowind's native capabilities.

That said, Stealth Enhanced is an indispensable mod and it makes playing a sneaky character enjoyable. You just have to accept that you can't level up stealth by using it, you have to grind it by occasionally leaving your character in sneak mode somewhere behind a stationary NPC. And don't even think of "minoring" in stealth. You either go all in or forget about it. It's basically impossible to perform a successful sneak with low skill, which means you can't practice it enough to level, so you're stuck with a useless skill.

The Pickpocket mod is likewise indispensable if you're going to use the skill, although I don't like its way of doing things. I'd prefer to steal items during conversation and to be given a chance instead of being assured of success. Can't look a gift horse in the mouth, though.

 

[None]

There was an old mod called Living Cities of Vvardenfell which added schedules to NPCs, but I guess this involved heavy scripting for every NPC. Not only is it a ton of work, it's going to be incompatible with a lot of mods. Unless some wizard comes up with a way of externalizing NPC behavior with lua, I don't see such thing becoming a reality. Making NPCs reactive to the standard of a decent stealth game is even further from Morrowind's native capabilities.

I gave schedules a week or so of attention earlier this year. Most of the components can be done with relative ease, except anything that needs pathfinding. Which in my opinion is the most important part, as it is the difference between NPCs just showing up randomly at different locations and them physically moving from A to B. Vanilla uses pathgrids that are often hit or miss, and sometimes are randomly generated. So getting an NPC to walk from one building's door to another in a natural manner would probably require a custom pathfinding implementation or trickery. OpenMW has a better way, but its implementation of lua is limited and restricted to a slow release cycle.

And if we're talking about stealth related mods, I'll unashamedly shill mine. I'm also working on something related to combat & equipment right now. Only thing I have implemented is the ability to control a weapon's individual wind up and swing speed. Still deciding on what the controlling factors will be. Should end up giving attacks more weight, and allow for something like a light or heavy attack if I choose to go that route. I'm also thinking about breaking damage out into different types and assigning different resistances to armor based on their material or quality. Weapons will do different damage based on how you swing it. So thrusting a halberd does piercing, while swinging it does slashing. Not entirely sure of the specifics, which is why I bring it up. If anyone has anything they'd like to pitch then I'm all ears. The idea is generally vanilla+, so nothing like dodge rolls or sprinting.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

I'm one of the people who find Morrowind's combat OK. Sure, it could be made better, but you're never going to please everyone. However, anything related to NPC behavior would be filling a huge gap. Just having NPCs show up at appropriate places as part of a day-night cycle would be great. As long as it's easily configurable, so other people could patch up the imbalances this would cause. After all, not all NPCs have living quarters and it'd probably make some shops easier to loot if the owners disappeared during the night. You'd have to add extra guards or locked doors.

I didn't know about your mod. I thought I had looked up everything related to "sneak", "stealth", etc. on Nexus. I'll try it soon.

 

[Lemming42]

Morrowind Rebirth (or one of the mods it incorporates) seems to add locked doors for shops at night. It's still not much of a barrier to robbing a store since when you're in you can just grab everything, but that's a problem shared by all TES games, I suppose. Still a slight improvement on vanilla, and you can still rob a store during the day if you want to by just making the owner look away from you and then walking out with their entire stock.

I'm one of the people who find Morrowind's combat OK. Sure, it could be made better, but you're never going to please everyone.

I think the problem with it is that it's simultaneously not very good and also such a huge focus of the game. They might have gotten away with a weak combat system if the game had included all kinds of other world sim aspects*, accomodated a wider variety of non-combat builds, and had far better quests, because then combat would have been simply one option available to the player at any given time. But MW is ultimately very combat-focused and most quests (that aren't pointless fetch quests) devolve into some kind of fight, so you're constantly getting the combat shoved in your face, which makes its weaknesses harder to accept.

*eg a comprehensive crime system, better stealth/burglary mechanics, and a less tedious, more stealth-focused Thieves' Guild questline to allow players to viably play as a thief

Oblivion had pretty much the exact same issue because Bethesda always double down on errors rather than learning from them; Oblivion's crappy floaty health bloat combat wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the fact that simply attempting to walk down the road usually meant you'd be attacked five times, and then receive a quest that amounted to "go to a cave and fight six more people inside".

 

[Old Hans]

one thing I noticed while playing around in the creation kit is that this game has almost no props to populate areas. I was sprucing up Ebonheart and there was nothing to work with, so I had to resort to the old "stacked crates everywhere" seriously trying to make an outside area look nice is super hard without resort to the crates prop.

and I have a hunch the map makers for places like Balmora came to the same conclusion

 

[Funposter]

one thing I noticed while playing around in the creation kit is that this game has almost no props to populate areas. I was sprucing up Ebonheart and there was nothing to work with, so I had to resort to the old "stacked crates everywhere" seriously trying to make an outside area look nice is super hard without resort to the crates prop.

and I have a hunch the map makers for places like Balmora came to the same conclusion

Hence why so many mods that overhaul towns now rely on TR_Data and OAAB Data.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

Morrowind Rebirth (or one of the mods it incorporates) seems to add locked doors for shops at night. It's still not much of a barrier to robbing a store since when you're in you can just grab everything, but that's a problem shared by all TES games, I suppose. Still a slight improvement on vanilla, and you can still rob a store during the day if you want to by just making the owner look away from you and then walking out with their entire stock.

I'm one of the people who find Morrowind's combat OK. Sure, it could be made better, but you're never going to please everyone.

I think the problem with it is that it's simultaneously not very good and also such a huge focus of the game. They might have gotten away with a weak combat system if the game had included all kinds of other world sim aspects*, accommodated a wider variety of non-combat builds, and had far better quests, because then combat would have been simply one option available to the player at any given time. But MW is ultimately very combat-focused and most quests (that aren't pointless fetch quests) devolve into some kind of fight, so you're constantly getting the combat shoved in your face, which makes its weaknesses harder to accept.

*eg a comprehensive crime system, better stealth/burglary mechanics, and a less tedious, more stealth-focused Thieves' Guild questline to allow players to viably play as a thief

Oblivion had pretty much the exact same issue because Bethesda always double down on errors rather than learning from them; Oblivion's crappy floaty health bloat combat wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the fact that simply attempting to walk down the road usually meant you'd be attacked five times, and then receive a quest that amounted to "go to a cave and fight six more people inside".

If that was the only change that Rebirth made, maybe it'd be worth using. I've thought of making my own "Anti-Cheese" patch, it wouldn't be that difficult. Maybe in the future if I'm still interested in the game (I started playing very recently).

Making the owner look away I consider a bit of an exploit (only because they get locked in position). The problem is that some locked chests and stuff are impossible to get at without doing so (or just have extremely high Chameleon, which is lame). If something is locked, a thief should be able to steal it. Otherwise it'd be like having a monster a fighter can't beat no matter how strong they get. I have to make up my own excuses for making owners look the other way whenever it's somewhat plausible, otherwise I get roleplaying guilt!

Thieves Guild quests are very disappointing, yes. I haven't tried any mods that change it. I also tried a somewhat fragile talky agent character and found out it was unworkable to just rely on stealth and diplomacy. I'm not a savescummer, I like to play without dying and lose interest in a character if it gets pushed around.

 

[Lemming42]

Thieves Guild quests are very disappointing, yes. I haven't tried any mods that change it. I also tried a somewhat fragile talky agent character and found out it was unworkable to just rely on stealth and diplomacy. I'm not a savescummer, I like to play without dying and lose interest in a character if it gets pushed around.

Bonk is your best bet, though you'd have to be a talky agent who also punches people in the back of the head (though I think it lets you use spells too, which might be more appropriate from a roleplaying perspective).

There's a permanent calm mod on the Nexus too - obviously gamebreaking but good for roleplaying.

I wonder if it's possible to make a mod that lets you solve "kill this guy" quests as a Speechcraft-focused character by adding in a new dialogue option that somehow raises the NPC's death flag when clicked, that you need max disposition to select. So you could deal with enemies by casting Calm, talking to them and bringing them up to 100 disposition, and then clicking SPECIAL NEW OPTION that causes the quest stage to advance as if you'd killed them.

 

[jackofshadows]

Guys stop going offtop will you? Are there like too few morra threads there?

 

[Lemming42]

We're on topic I think, we're discussing how to make it less of a bad RPG.

 

[NecroLord]

Thieves Guild quests are very disappointing, yes. I haven't tried any mods that change it. I also tried a somewhat fragile talky agent character and found out it was unworkable to just rely on stealth and diplomacy. I'm not a savescummer, I like to play without dying and lose interest in a character if it gets pushed around.

Bonk is your best bet, though you'd have to be a talky agent who also punches people in the back of the head (though I think it lets you use spells too, which might be more appropriate from a roleplaying perspective).

There's a permanent calm mod on the Nexus too - obviously gamebreaking but good for roleplaying.

I wonder if it's possible to make a mod that lets you solve "kill this guy" quests as a Speechcraft-focused character by adding in a new dialogue option that somehow raises the NPC's death flag when clicked, that you need max disposition to select. So you could deal with enemies by casting Calm, talking to them and bringing them up to 100 disposition, and then clicking SPECIAL NEW OPTION that causes the quest stage to advance as if you'd killed them.

Having high Speechcraft is awesome.
Nothing like trash talking and insulting someone to the point they attack you.
This counts as self-defense and won't trigger the guards to attack you.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

Thieves Guild quests are very disappointing, yes. I haven't tried any mods that change it. I also tried a somewhat fragile talky agent character and found out it was unworkable to just rely on stealth and diplomacy. I'm not a savescummer, I like to play without dying and lose interest in a character if it gets pushed around.

Bonk is your best bet, though you'd have to be a talky agent who also punches people in the back of the head (though I think it lets you use spells too, which might be more appropriate from a roleplaying perspective).

There's a permanent calm mod on the Nexus too - obviously gamebreaking but good for roleplaying.

I wonder if it's possible to make a mod that lets you solve "kill this guy" quests as a Speechcraft-focused character by adding in a new dialogue option that somehow raises the NPC's death flag when clicked, that you need max disposition to select. So you could deal with enemies by casting Calm, talking to them and bringing them up to 100 disposition, and then clicking SPECIAL NEW OPTION that causes the quest stage to advance as if you'd killed them.

My agent(I followed the class restrictions, only adding Security) had no problems killing people, she was just too fragile for melee whackamole combat, which is unavoidable sometimes. The layout of dungeons doesn't leave you a lot of space for sneaking. I should mention I removed all the level scaling from my game, so some characters have a particularly difficult start.

I'll try Bonk next time I play a Garret-style pure Thief. As for quests, I know the Silver Tongue mod lets you initiate dialog even with hostiles if you have extremely high Speechcraft. You wouldn't even need to cast Calm, then. I'm not sure you could change the death flag without messing with the quests themselves.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Having high Speechcraft is awesome.
Nothing like trash talking and insulting someone to the point they attack you.

Peak Codexer build.

 

[Funposter]

There's a permanent calm mod on the Nexus too - obviously gamebreaking but good for roleplaying.

From a pure gameplay mechanics perspective, this mod isn't required iirc. You should be able to calm enemies (even normally peaceful ones that you've aggroed) and then Intimidate them until their Fight value falls under 70. The Silver Tongue MWSE plugin would be useful, since it allows you to view these otherwise hidden variables when speaking to NPCs, with an MCM menu that allows you to configure when many of the features are unlocked.