Mind Your Dress Code - What you wear matters

Introduction

Mind Your Dress Code is a modified version of the mod Dress Code by dann1c, which gives the player a speech buff (or debuff) depending on what they are — or aren’t — wearing. I loved the idea of clothes not just being items to sell or throw away — it’s really immersive.

However, the original mod felt a bit broken, as noted in the comments. No, it didn’t stop working — in fact, it works as intended (well… almost, see Changes and New Content). The thing is, it gives you +80 Speech at level 1. Yep, as intended. So I decided to tweak the values, then fix the effect descriptions, then change the — well, you get the idea. You can see exactly what I changed and why below. It's standalone, you don't need the original file, but go there to download and endorse it! Don't forget to check Installation! Hope it makes your game even more immersive. Enjoy!

Changes and New Content

The original mod was giving the player a huge Speech bonus (and a flood of entries in Active Effects). My main goal was to fix that. I made two versions with different buff/debuff values — one with a slight adjustment from the original, just to make it fair, and another aiming for immersion (I think… open to suggestions).

I also fixed effects that only showed “Appearance matter” instead of the proper description and buff value. For me, at least, this never worked. But in the Creation Kit, I saw it was supposed to display the value <mag> in the description. Now it does — with custom descriptions (check the mod :D) for each status — and without cluttering your Active Effects with one entry per jewelry piece. To make this work — with my basic Creation Kit knowledge and no scripts — I simplified the logic.

The old setup gave a bonus per jewelry piece equipped plus another bonus for each “expensive” jewelry piece. This caused endless duplicate entries. Now there’s only one entry that updates as you equip or remove items. The “expensive” check is gone for now; bonuses are based only on jewelry equipped. The final numbers are close to what I originally wanted (slightly adjusted). It’s less dynamic than the original, but it works — and I plan to bring back the “expensive” check in the future using scripts, still with a single entry in Active Effects.

About intimidation, originally, it was supposed to scale with the number of equipped armor pieces (I think), but it didn’t. You just got a flat 10% bonus if any armor was equipped. Now it works properly: 10% per armor piece, up to 40% for full armor.Value adjustment (Original/New):

Slight adjustment:

[]Nude debuff: -50 → -30

[]Footwear debuff: -