A couple of mods for BCE: SR Exterior Cities Patch, and Buy Skill Perks with Bardic Inspiration

[Gaerzi]

Here's a couple of files that I made for personal use, that may be of interest to other people.

The first is just a patch for using BCE with the excellent SR Exterior Cities series. There's not much to say about it.
https://anonymfile.com/JE174/srex-kgbce.7z

The other is slightly more involved: it's a use for Bardic Inspiration points after you've already completed the perk tree. What is this use? Well, exchange ten of your extraneous Bardic Inspirations for one generic skill Perk point! In front of the perk tree mural you will now find a little shrine of Dibella with a floating perk orb. It's not a regular shrine, though, what it does is that if you activate the orb, you get to spend Bardic Inspiration in exchange for one perk. That option is called "Perk Up" because that amused me.

• Why a shrine of Dibella?
  Dibella's been flanderized as a goddess of sex, thanks to Haelga, but really she's the goddess of beauty, the arts, and inspiration. The Dibella quest in Oblivion was about a paintbrush that could create paintings you could physically visit. I wanted the perk buyer to be visually distinct from the perk tree mural to show that it's not the same thing, so a separate object made sense, and since I'm not a 3D artist, that felt like the existing item that made the most sense.
• Why ten points for one perk? It's expensive!
  It's not that expensive; you can get a lot of Bardic Inspiration just by exploring, finding skill books, Shouting a lot... Maybe it could be cheaper without unbalancing the game too much, after all the most expensive perks on the mural only cost 7 points, but at the same time you weren't actually meant to get new perks outside of leveling, so...
• How does this work exactly?
  I tried to replicate the look and feel of the perk mural to the extent it makes sense, so you get a messagebox telling you about the cost. The skill orb will be purple if you can't afford it (you have less than 10 Bardic Inspirations), blue if you can (you have ten or more), and will flash big and orange, complete with the skill noise, when you do buy a perk point before returning to blue or purple.

This is actually something that I kind of hoped to see in a future update because those Bardic Inspiration just become inventory clutter after a while and there are so many perks even just in vanilla that you'd need to reach level 251 to complete all skill trees. With mods, it can be even much more, especially since some mods let you add entire new skills (I like Constellations, personally). In fact, there have been plenty of mods made to get more perk points (like Skyshards, Dragon Souls to Perk Points, Perk Points for Bounty Quests, etc.), but personally I like none of them as they do feel kinda cheap, so I felt Bardic Inspiration was the perfect alternative.
https://forum.kinggathcreations.com/resources/bardic-inspiration-to-skill-perks.9/

 

[kinggath]

Hey Gaerzi!

Thanks for posting these, the second one does sound very interesting! Definitely still our intent to add uses for Bardic Inspiration in an upcoming patch, but hey the more uses the merrier!

Would you mind hosting these files on some other platform, such as a google drive? anonymfile is a bit sketchy.

If you have an established Nexus account that you've uploaded mods to in the past and want to DM me on there, we can use that as mod author verification and I can let you host these files directly through our forum share system.

-kinggath