UESPWiki:Archive/CP Pages for Houses

There's been a bit of discussion on my talkpage recently about the best way to document the catacombs beneath Jakben Manor, something that we currently don't do. It looks like there's a slight preference for creating a page for Jakben Manor and including the catacombs as a section of that page. The purpose of this discussion is to find out:

Do people think this is the best way to proceed in this case?
Do we want to create pages for other houses? If so, what criteria will we use to decide which ones get written?

I absolutely do not want to create pages for every single dwelling in Cyrodiil, but I think pages for the larger houses would be worth having since there's usually a good quantity of loot to steal. I'd suggest saying that only houses with four or more zones should be eligible for pages. That only includes Jakben Imbel, Ulen Athram, and Umbacano. If we drop the requirement to 3, there are at least 30 pages we'd have to write. The other houses will be documented on their NPC pages in due course anyway.

What does everybody think? rpeh  19:33, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

:I support this. Some houses could be benefited by having their own pages. I'm not sure what I would suggest for a requirement, but I think that 4 zones would be good. Although maybe others if they are significant in some way, such for a quest and the like. -- DKong27    19:50, 27 November 2010 (UTC) 

::Which 30 people would get their own house page if it's 3 or more? Also will there be any special circumstance options (Quest related, quest specific, and/or notable in any other way)?

::: Almost everybody in the Imperial City for a start: the Elven Gardens (19) and Talos Plaza (17) houses all have three zones. Vilena Donton's house in Chorrol also has three, as do Ahdarji's, Alval Uvani's, J'Bari's and Mahei's houses in Leyawiin. So that's 43 - I underestimated!
::: I'm not sure about quest-related houses. Maybe. Let's see what others think. rpeh  09:44, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

:::: Oops - I forgot about the Temple district - another 18 houses there for a total of 61. rpeh  15:32, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

::::: I have mixed feelings about this, as I’m not really sure how we should handle it. I tried to set up an example in my Sandbox (now deleted), using the existing text from the NPC page and tried to accomplish a look similar to the Guild pages or stores in the Market District. Rpeh and I had a little chat about it and the biggest fear is that we will end up with 61 identical pages, because houses basically contains the same. The example in the Sandbox shows that. Another way of doing it would be to make lists like, say, the Cave-pages – with “The following items will always be found”-style, and a list of equipment chests, jewelry boxes and the like. I have no idea how such a page would look – but in theory, a decent excuse for doing something like that could be our “lacking” page on the Independent Thievery quest, which could be improved greatly using this method. It would provide quick and easy access to valuable loot for Thieves, but question is; is it worth it? As I said, I have mixed feelings. Let’s hear some more opinions. --Krusty 15:54, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

::::::I've never been a fan of specific pages for houses; mostly because they end up getting cluttered with not-really-needed stuff and may end up looking the same, as Krusty has pointed out. Personally, I think we should stick to the really big houses (e.g. Umbacano Manor) or 'special' ones, like Jakben's house. That means we have fewer, better and more original pages. Unlike a dungeon, I don't feel we need to listed every single item or respawning container in a house: instead of listing all the various ingredients found we can just say "food". I've managed to write pretty concise, yet detailed, house contents for the OBNPCRP for houses of three floors of no more than a paragraph. I don't feel like we need pages for houses with less than four "zones". To wrap this up, I think 61 new pages is madness and would prefer to see a maximum of 10. --SerCenKing   20:11, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

 Rather than limiting it by number of cells, I'd rather make a restriction that only quest-related and/or unique houses get articles of their own.  I think the quest-related restriction would cover pretty much any house we'd want to do a separate article for.

On a slightly-related note, when I began the NPC house contents the idea was to include all we could until we decided otherwise, with the thought that it would be easier to remove what we don't want than to add stuff we later decide we want; then, nothing else was ever decided.  I pretty much agree with Serc's suggestion of simply saying the house contains various food items, rather than listing each individual food item.  As far as containers go, though, I'd prefer to still list the contents of containers, but an argument could be made to do it in a more concise way (e.g. "The house contains seventeen respawning clutter barrels; two on the first floor, three on the second floor, and twelve in the basement." Rather than "On the first floor, a respawning clutter barrel sits in the northeast corner, with another on the north wall.  On the second floor..." etc.).  Also, by the way, that's one of the main reasons I left the larger houses for last, because I wasn't too keen on doing detailed contents for such large houses.  Either way, I don't like the idea of extremely-detailed but useless house contents cluttering up NPC articles--GK  21:42, 28 November 2010 (UTC)