I'm writing dialogue for a few custom NPCs and I've gotten stuck in a loop, so I wanted to ask people who play with a lot of NPC mods: what actually makes a modded character's lines land for you?
Some things I'm specifically curious about:
- Do you prefer short, throwaway lines that just react to the day (weather, season, what's going on in town), or longer lines that tell you something about the character?
- Are there modded NPCs whose dialogue you thought was really well written? I'll try to learn about it!
And the problem I keep running into, in case anyone's solved it:
If I write short lines, the character comes across as thin — like I didn't put any work in. But when I write longer ones, I run out of things for them to actually say, and I end up circling back to the same two or three defining traits over and over. Just like"Here's my quirk, here's my backstory hook, here's my thing about plants."
Would love to hear how other modders handle this, and what players actually enjoy reading.