"Neutral" mood in dialogue

[ZuTheSkunk]

Just a thing that I'm wondering about: is it common for everyone that if a dialogue line has a "neutral" mood set, then the NPC start to use an emotion depending on his disposition towards the player (smiling if high, disgusted if low), instead of actual "neutral" mood ()? Because it is annoying when Beth set this also in situations when NPC theoretically should be using really neutral mood, and instead he's e.g. smiling idiotically. And I just wonder does I'm encountering some strange error, while for others it works just fine, or it's a common problem of Oblivion and everyone occurs it?

[DarkRider]

When lines are written you can assign an emotional quality such as Happy 30 where 30 represents the degree of the happiness. This setting however, can be influenced by a characters disposition. It may be that the character has a high disposition by default or you boosted their disposition, so they may look uncannily gleeful. The NPCs just do not really understand what they are saying, they can't think "Huh this is a grim topic" and frown accordingly. It's a shortcoming of the game that their expression is sometimes unbalanced as a result of disposition.

[ZuTheSkunk]

When lines are written you can assign an emotional quality such as Happy 30 where 30 represents the degree of the happiness. This setting however, can be influenced by a characters disposition.

From what I've learned, it is true only for Neutral mood, while for other emotions (e.g. Happy, Disgusted or Angry), disposition never overwrites the emotion itself. So the Neutral seems to be the only one affected by disposition - and 50 or 100 values doesn't change anything at that matter, dunno how about 0.

My question is, it is true also for others? Because so far, if I wanted to overwrite the disposition thing and make NPC having totally neutral face, I've been forced to:

A) Set the emotion as Surprised 0.

B) Make him having Disposition 50, no more, no less.

[DarkRider]

In my experience, a high disposition will effect the actor's expression no matter what the dialogue emotion is, for example there's a character in RST who loves the player so much he grins through every convo regardless of emotion value. But it could be coincidence, so I can't say with 100% certainty if that's true in all cases or not.

That said, according to the Wiki:

The disposition formula for NPCs includes things like the player's fame or bounty, on top of the usual modifications (such as race, personality, etc.)

Seems with so many factors affecting the disposition of the actor, you won't be able to account for every situation. Meaning you may be able to force the actor to stay neutral faced to your test character by adjusting emotion and disposition, but the actor won't react the same to every type of player. This may be fussing about something needlessly. Players are used to being smiled at if they are well liked.

I would say give the character a neutral 50 emotion to his dialogue and set his disposition to 20. In most cases he should look properly straight faced.