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It's not just guards. I can successfully taunt someone, then let them hit me a few times, but when I retaliate I am charged with a crime / expelled from the faction. Anyone else have this same issue/bug?

Which game are you playing with this issue?

My apologies. I just copied and pasted my post from a different, game specific forum. This is Morrowind. patch 1.6.5, the updated graphics / creatures mod. It just started happening on about day 35 of this game.

Unfortunately I don't have knowledge of Morrowind, but I've moved this topic to the Morrowind subforum, so hopefully the Morrowind wizards here can help you out.

I'm no Morrowind expert, and haven't played in a while, but I thought that taunting was considered to be a crime, at least I think I remember some NPCs (guards?) in the game saying something to that effect. I never got in trouble for it, but then again I only ever did it when it was absolutely necessary, and I don't think I was in view of a guard at the time-- plus, I always try to work on getting my reputation up. Maybe you've done it too many times and it's affected your reputation?

I have seen this issue occur, although very rarely (I can only recall one, maybe two instances of it in nearly six years of playing the game), and I have no clue as to what may have caused it. My solution when it happened was to stare at the screen for a while yelling "WTF?!", followed by exiting the game, restarting, reloading a recent save, and trying again. This took care of the issue for me and I put it down to a weird, transient glitch. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like that's going to work in your case.

A few things come to mind. Do you have an older save game that pre-dates this behaviour? Have you tried loading it to see whether it starts happening again?

Are you running a mod(s) which might have (intentionally or unintentionally) borked something? Does the problem persist if you start a brand-new game?

Do you have a bounty? This shouldn't really affect your ability to retaliate against an attacking NPC, but you could try opening the console and entering:
and see what happens.

When the taunted NPC attacks you, do they actually hit you, or just swing at you? I think I've read of cases where retaliating will get you a bounty if they don't actually hit you first (but don't quote me on that).

It's also possible that your copy of the game has become corrupted somehow, in which case you'd most likely have to uninstall and reinstall it.

Probably not too much help here, I know, but it's all I can think of which might help narrow down the cause of the issue.


Er... patch 1.6.5 of what, exactly? The last official Bethesda patch for Morrowind (alone) is 1.2.0722, for Tribunal 1.4.1313, and for Bloodmoon 1.6.1820. Similarly, which graphics / creatures mod? There's about a million of 'em out there.


There is dialogue in the game indicating that "verbal assault" is considered a crime similar to pickpocketing, theft, or physical assault, but if it was ever intended to be so, it was never implemented. There's no penalty for taunting / intimidating an NPC; you can call someone a *bleep* *bleeping* *bleep* *bleep* all you like and the guards won't turn a hair.

1. I have tried reloading an auto-save from an hour or so earlier in the game, to no avail.

2. I have loaded a different character and I was able to successfully taunt and kill an NPC in the mages guild with no repercussions.

3. I have not started a brand new game but (2) seems to indicate it's a problem with this one.

Edit:

4. I was able to fix the issue, though not sure why this worked: I went to a Telvanni area, taunted a guard, killed its summoned minion and got a 40g bounty, killed the guard, with no consequences, then paid off my fine through the thieves guild, and was able taunt guards as usual. Weird. Thanks for the help though, Wolfie