A dark end for the would-be champion of light, as she is herself brought low and befouled by Malkoran the defiler.

Other heroines, other bad ends:

• Forsworn Fuckmeat

I've set up Deviously Enchanted Chests to have a 7.5% chance of a trapped container, with a 15% chance at finding keys in containers and corpses once I had at least one restraint. The thought being that it'd give me a window of time where I had to put up with the devious device, but I'd eventually get a key and unlock myself if I just pushed on. (The higher key chance was necessary, given that I couldn't rely on a Devious Follower this time round as a(n expensive) key dispensary.)

I started out in Solitude, again. It's such a fantastic and thematically-appropriate hub to start in I suspect it was at some point in development supposed to be a vanilla starting town. Been making my way slowly to Whiterun to start the main quest. I hadn't been doing a lot of dungeon-diving, so I just haven't looted that many chests. A third-way through Bleak Falls Barrow, I finally triggered a trapped container (draugr mummy), which equipped a blindfold on me. Usually, I'd just take the financial hit and immediately ask my Devious follower to remove it for me, but this time it wasn't an option. I was stuck in it, at least until I can find a key or pick the lock.

Devious Devices has a few modes for its blindfolds. "Leeches Mode" applies a blur(?) effect not unlike taking off your glasses as a myopic person, while "Dark Fog" shrouds everything beyond a certain distance in pitch black. Neither is fully satisfactory on its own - everything is basically still visible on Leeches Mode even at max strength, just a bit blurry; with Dark Fog you get clear unimpeded vision in the immediate vicinity not plunged into total darkness. But by selecting one after the other you can kind of trick the system into applying both, leading to this claustrophobic view:

This, I think, is supposed to simulate my character being able to vaguely sense her immediate surroundings, but nothing beyond that. It's a really good compromise between giving the feeling of being trapped in a blindfold, while still being playable. 

It turned what was a fairly routine dungeon run into a terrifying, intensely claustrophobic affair, where I'm groping around and flinching at every draugr groan and scuttle. (The tension was undercut a bit by the fact that this was maybe the sixth time I'd run through Bleak Falls Barrow in the past month, and could navigate a lot of it by sheer muscle memory. But it was still a breathtakingly unique experience.)

The uncertainty, too, was part of the thrill. Without a Devious Follower to ask for keys, I was entirely dependent on RNG. What if I don't manage to find a key by the end of the dungeon? It would be very dangerous for me to waltz around town with a blindfold on because of the way I'd set up the Proximity Rape parameters in SL Adventures.

I actually didn't end up finding a key in the whole of Bleak Falls Barrow. Running very low on lockpicks, I tried one last time to pick the blindfold's lock before I camped at the end of the dungeon for the night... and by some miracle of chance it worked! To my immense relief but also, I confess, slight disappointment.

Have cranked up the trap settings to 15% trap/20% key, because this is definitely an experience I want to have more often.

The lawless Reach, in the end, proved to be more than a match for the so-called Dragonborn...

Other heroines, other bad ends:

• Fallen Champion of Light

• Trade and Barter:  fBarterMax 8.00, fBarterMin 2.00
• Scarcity: 2x loot rarity .esp
• SexLab Survival: 50g toll, non level-based
• Devious Followers Continued: 500/50 base/level-based debt, 50% interest, 1000/1000 deal agreement/removal
• Perseids Inns and Taverns: 50% of default rental

I was on the right track before - using Trade and Barter to tune down the prices vendors were willing to give was the key. Offloading loot in town does kind of feel a bit unsastifying now as I get basically peanuts for most items sold, but it's probably the least unsatisfying compromise. To balance Skyrim's loot economy to my liking, it seems like one of three things must be true: recurring resource sinks must be tuned very high, the amount of loot must be severely reduced, or vendors must pay a lot less for loot.

But the payoff in the kind of game environment it creates is so worth it. For the first time in... maybe ever, I don't feel like I have to vigorously DM my own Skyrim playthrough just to not completely break the immersion. With a few small exceptions (no carriages), I'm finding myself actually trying my best and using all available (in-universe) tools to solve problems the game throws at me. It's also had positive effects on the Devious Followers side of things. When I took my first deal on the road to Markarth after realizing I didn't have enough daylight to reduce my 2K debt before the day's interest kicked in, it genuinely felt like a defeat.

Speaking of DF. I've been running with Belrand (spellsword merc at the Winking Skeever) as my Devious Follower this playthrough. He fits the role surprisingly well. My original intent was to hire him to clear Ahtar's mission, then replace him with Ahtar as a long-term follower, but I ended up deciding to stick with Belrand. He is kinda charming in an old-man kind of way and he has that balding, lanky hairstyle that fits the "creepy uncle" trope to a tee. That plus him being an old mercenary hanging out in a bar suggest a certain kind of dynamic that is quite different from the one my other characters had with Sven. In my mind my hedge mage character initially latched on to him as a sort of father figure, though (of course) the wily old merc had other designs on his hapless ingénue.

I also envision him as a bit of a drunk, which is a good excuse to handwave all the random times the follower AI will shit itself. Belrand stuck somewhere not helping out in this bandit fight? Oh, he's just shitfaced again. And with follower needs turned on in iNeed he just goes through all the booze I offload to him super quick, and he complains when he's out of drinks, which would normally be a little annoying but is a fortuitous bit of mechanical storytelling in this case.

(As an unrelated aside, I've been moving away from the original pure healslut character concept and going into Destruction magic, and goddamn. Having some offensive capability bypasses so much frustration related to the follower AI being dumb as bricks sometimes. Follower inexplicably ignoring an enemy archer taking potshots at him? That's okay, I can deal with them myself.)

So, of course, the in-hindsight entirely predictable outcome of removing/gutting all other major resource faucets in my game except for alchemy is, alchemy is even more relatively profitable than before. And it really is shockingly profitable once you discover the high-value potions. (For instance, blue butterfly wing plus blue mountain flower, both cheap and relatively common ingredients, make a two-effect potion that sells for 80-100g.)

The house rule I set to not loot bodies feels bad. It feels like leaving money on the table. Plus there's a certain lizard-brain satisfaction to running through a dungeon and coming out laden with the possessions of your vanquished enemy. That satisfaction feels like a core appeal of Skyrim, and taking it away lessens the thrill of dungeon diving.

I think the obvious solution of a mod that blanket nerfs the rates merchants are willing to give you, while inelegant, might be the way to go. I always kind of dislike that in RPGs merchants will give you like 20g for an item ostensibly worth 100g, but I see the necessity here. Trade and Barter looks good. I also really liked the idea of Trade Routes but apparently it has some unpredictable interaction with Ordinator perk trees.

I've set the Devious Follower debt to a base of 500 daily, with a level-based increase of 100 per level (previous I went with 1000 base and 50 level-based). I'm not sure yet as the effects haven't kicked in, but I think this should have the desired effect of cranking up the financial pressure as I start to level up.

Live Another Life is great. I started arriving on a boat to Solitude, which actually works really well. I come through the gates, and get to witness Roggvir's execution, a dramatic introduction to Skyrim and the Imperial/Stormcloak subplot. Though a bit later I did find a couple of radiant encounters on the road that would have made a lot more sense in Whiterun - the Honningbrew revelers and the two Alik'r harassing a random Redguard woman. I always assumed they were tied to a location, but apparently they are chained to the player character, wherever she might be.

-----

At this point, with a few restarts under my belt, I want to try to codify what I feel is the "ideal" playthrough, for me. What kind of experience do I want out of a playthrough of Skyrim + Devious Followers?

In a nutshell, I want to be put in the mindset of a struggling adventurer living hand-to-mouth.

• dungeon-clearing should be lucrative but not excessively so - ideally I should come out of a daily dungeon loop (kill-loot-return-craft-sell) with roughly enough to pay the follower, the toll collector plus a room at the inn. Sometimes I should come out ahead, other times I should make a loss. If anything goes wrong, like if the follower gets downed a few times or I don't plan my trips well enough, that should put me in the red unless I've had a long streak of moderate success beforehand and built up a nice nest egg.
• the various money sinks: inns, tolls, food etc., and alternate money faucets like waitressing, begging and performing should remain relatively relevant.
• financial ruin ideally shouldn't be reliant on big RNG "nukes" that I have no control over such as everything being stolen while I sleep. If/when I go into debt, it should be by incremental cuts and failures. I should be able to see it coming and either fail despite my best efforts or pull through to fail another day.
• I should feel comfortable enough to really actually do my best within the confines of the game mechanics, without relying on limiting myself with house-rules so as to not break the game.
• in a similar vein, I want to not have to constantly fiddle with the MCM mid-game to adjust settings, either in my favor or otherwise.
• the Devious Follower's demands should escalate steadily at roughly the rate or slightly above the rate of my increasing ability to make money (due to higher Speech, better potions, more valuable loot). At some point I should be pressured by economic necessity to start taking deals.

Is such an experience even possible to configure for? And more importantly, will I get there before my interest runs out? I don't think I have an unlimited amount of restarts in me. At some point (soon, I suspect) the novelty of replaying the first dozen hours over and over again is going to run thin.

I've been thinking about the economy loop for Skyrim. The very core of the problem here is that it is really easy to make lots of money in vanilla Skyrim - you very quickly get into a post-scarcity situation where you have so much gold and nice things that you have no more compelling reasons to engage in the game's "kill-loot-sell" core gameplay loop except for its own sake. And every aspect of Skyrim seems designed to funnel you into and facilitate this kill-loot-sell cycle, so when it breaks, the game can start to feel quite hollow. So getting that economy balance right is, to put it mildly, Quite Important.

There's actually two distinct sub-problems here:

• the resource faucets are too generous. You can clear a couple of dungeons and come away thousands of gold richer, potentially, not to mention all the other lucrative things the game lets you do like alchemy, ore transmutation and smithing.
• there are not enough recurring resource sinks. You don't actually need to eat, sleep or heal. You can get through the game never buying a single piece of gear. You don't need to pay followers more than once. You can buy property, but why? You don't need a place to sleep, and safe barrels to stash your stuff are everywhere. (I don't really like training as it feels basically like paying to bypass level progression.)

So far I've been playing with mods that tackle this latter sub-problem. Making it so that you have to eat and sleep in proper beds. Making sure your followers need to get paid. Introducing city tolls and taxes. I've come to the growing realization though that it's only a partial solution, because if you really want to put your nose to the grindstone, the game gives you multiple ways to make a shocking amount of gold in a really short time, so these sink mods all have to be tuned absurdly high to even have a hope of keeping up: licenses in SexLab Survival cost thousands. My Devious Follower demands over a thousand gold a day.

I could tune these resource sinks even higher, but even at this level it's already kind of distorting the game's incentives. Sure I could run all the way up Dragonsreach to claim the 100 gold bounty from Proventus Avenicci, but the time it takes to do that already cost me more than 100 gold in recurring costs. They also completely overshadow more modest sinks like inn, food and gear repair costs, as well as making features like begging from SLS or performing from Ordinator less viable than they might otherwise be.

So it's clearer to me now that the other half of the solution is tackling that first problem - the resource faucets. My first instinct is to just download a mod that guts the loot tables like Scarcity and be done with it, but thinking about it some more, a big chunk of my looted income actually comes from selling armors and weapons looted from bandits, which I don't think Scarcity touches. It might make more sense to also have a house-rule that I can't strip the armor and weapons off bandits (it always felt kind of unrealistic, anyway). I'm not 100% sure this is the way to go - what might end up happening is that dungeon-diving becomes so unrewarding it no longer makes sense for my timid civilian character to want to do so, which is not something I want.

Another house rule I'll probably go with is to not use the transmute spell, when I find it. It is really strange that this this is not a bigger thing in the lore, anyway - for instance no one seems to think about transmuting all that mined silver to gold in Markarth (yeah, I know they're called the Silver-Bloods but still).

Alchemy, the last big faucet, I will probably leave as is. I really like having a reason to tinker with the ingredients and discover various combos.

Unrelated but I'm excited to try out Live Another Life, which I just downloaded, for my next start. Will probably go with the shipwreck or just the ship arrival start. The escape from Helgen is pretty dramatic but there's only so many times I can run through the exact same narrative beats in a short span of time without my eyes glazing over ("yes yes, mead with juniper berries in it; oh look here goes that horse thief; the dragon is gonna burst through this wall in 3..2..."). I'm interested to see if the flow of the early game still makes sense when starting not in Helgen-Riverwood-Whiterun.

Generally, the idea is to play support for a follower who does all the actual fighting while I deal with all the “boring” stuff like looting, gear upgrades, selling stuff, getting leads for bounties, setting up camp. In combat I'm a healstick cowering behind my follower buffing his health while he goes on the attack with a melee weapon. I've played almost 150 hours over four playthroughs, and there have consistently been two frustrating issues that keep cropping up:

Firstly, the sex-upon-defeat system. In theory, I'd like a setup where I can be raped while my tank is preoccupied with other enemies; maybe he comes back in time to split open the skull of my would-be rapist, maybe he doesn't get back until the deed's been done. The idea being to add an element of vulnerability and peril to fights, but not fatal peril, because I want to play through my mistakes instead of getting a scot-free redo.

In practice what I've seen happen is that I get attacked, which (I think) puts the attackers into a non-hostile faction, then the follower AI goes "cool, no more hostiles, coast is clear" and proceeds to stand around while I get assaulted. D'oh. Or, I manage to struggle and throw my attacker off, in which case everyone just kinda sheepishly shrugs and ignores one another for a bit, which is also immersion-breaking.

I haven't tried a SexLab game that is solo (I got into SexLab modding explicitly to play healslut with a Devious Follower), but I strongly suspect these defeat sex mechanics just don't work that well with a follower, and especially not with a Devious Follower. I'm sure there's a combination of mods and settings somewhere in the labyrinth that works, but if there is I haven't found it. As a result I've been slowing paring back on my use of this system - at this point I use Death Alternative and nothing else. I miss the threat of rape on failure, but it is more functional.

The second big issue is more one with base Skyrim itself rather than any mod: followers are terrible. The game is very clearly designed around having a combat-competent player character, and to be fair, when you're cleaving through masses of bandits yourself your incompetent follower isn't really a glaring issue.  They help a little, but you deal the majority of the DPS. I don't think I noticed this when I first played through Skyrim. But of course as a passive healslut, you need your follower to be the killing machine that is usually the player. There are a couple of related problems as I've noticed that makes this hard:

• follower AI is just bad. Give them a bow and they will prefer to plink away at the enemy with the bow, even if (a) the enemy is getting close and winding up a melee power attack and (b) there are multiple archers. They also don't seem to have any situational awareness - I've often seen them completely ignore charging enemies at the start of combat, only responding when the enemy gets a hit in. Finally, the AI also has trouble with obstacles like tables, chairs and occasionally stairs. Interior tiles like the "bandit fort" one seem to cause the most problems.
• followers don't scale well. I'm not even talking about how they tend to level slower, though this also appears to be true. Even if you use a mod to make them level together with you, the game's enemy scaling assumes you're going to fight smarter and better when you're leveled up, so it throws tougher and more dangerous enemies against you. So take the snow troll on the way up to High Hrothgar at around lvl 12 for instance. As a player what I would do against this tough enemy is to get quick hits in then retreat out of melee range, especially when the troll telegraphs its attacks; maybe kite it a little as I drink potions or fire off a spell. It's I think what the game expects you to do. The follower of course does none of that, even with a follower framework that ostensibly improves the AI. He goes right up in the troll's face and proceeds to just facetank it and exchange blows, with the predictable outcome that he gets pounded down into the ground in record time.

The result is that the follower becomes more and more useless and prone to going down in a couple of hits as the game goes on, which puts a big dent in the fantasy, which, to me at least, requires a powerful dom full of unstoppable brute strength and killing power. Otherwise what is left is the squalid reality of a small man gaslighting and emotionally abusing a partner. Which is probably more realistic as far as how real-world versions of DF relationships go, but... that's not a fun fantasy.

I have been exploring partial solutions, a follower framework mainly. Been tinkering with the settings in Nether's Follower Framework, and I think I've found a setting that works okay. Regular legendary difficulty (x3 damage output for everyone but the player) and an additional x5 follower-specific damage output. It's unclear to me if that means the follower is putting out five times normal damage, or fifteen, but hey, it works, at least.