Most of the people are risk averse. Which is good for survival but boring. So they rely on art to deliver strong emotions normally incident to active risk taking. A game – an interactive art – looks like the ideal safe environment to unleash one’s inner fury, but it is not what actually happens. Players launch the game and… keep displaying risk-averse behavior – this time about some imaginary loss.

Consumable hoarding is a long standing problem in game design. Players come into possession of a consumable power-up but feel reluctant to pop it. Instead they keep it for the rainy day, until it eventually becomes irrelevant due to progression curve and gets dumped for some chump change. And all the developer’s effort invested in creating this consumable is lost.

So, with this in mind, how do we approach a mod about junkie hooker?

Currently drug addiction mods go as follows. There is this highly problematic consumable that gives not at all game changing (more like largely irrelevant) bonuses. Why, we wander, nobody wants to take it? Well, no problem, let’s force feed it. And now you get drugs from rapists (why would they bother?), from forest animals (weird and possibly a bug) and weirdest of all – from guards. You know, the ones who supposedly keep this whole drug industry under the radar. But wait, there is also addiction. Which adds some not at all game changing penalties and apparently turns you into a klepto.

The thing is, the narrative of a junkie hooker is not about drugs at all. And not about whoring either. It is about slippery slope and being desperate. As in “I will sell my body and my soul for a fix”.

Real world drugs work like a sort of inhibition breaker. They literally rewire addict’s brain into risk tolerance. So when junkies rob a pharmacy they are fully aware* of what they are doing. They simply do not care.

With this in mind we want a junkie gameplay to deliver these four feelings:

- “Rush” when drugs are in effect

- Depression when they aren’t

- Desperation when withdrawal kicks in

- Overarching feeling of slipping down the slope

Slippery slope is relatively simple one. You repeatedly put the players into a situation where they are tempted to take some immediate “easy way” that they know will lead them into some trouble in the future. And let them watch their future trouble debt pile up.

Rush boils down to bonus gerrymandering in such ways as to encourage deliberate risk seeking. E.g. not some flat +sword_dmg, but progressively bigger bonus for each additional enemy in the proximity. And insane HP regen (useless if PC is not actually taking damage). And bonus points if you go commando. I mentioned in my other post that Skyrim already has a mechanics that works like this – sneak levelling. This approach doesn’t really apply well to magic/archery playstyle, but it can be argued that the junkie game in fact should be detrimental to arrow plinking from a distant bush, for this is textbook risk averse style. Brutal face to face carnage and gore only!

Depression is a tricky one. You cannot actually drive your players into depression, they will simply quit the game. If I were developing a game for real I would secretly sabotage the player in various small ways: friendly NPC suddenly becomes passive-aggressive, alchemy refuses to cook and “just nothing is right”. Which is how drug addicts describe it. We could also introduce some form of hangover under this rubric but at this moment I don’t see how it would help.

Now, the holy grail of desperation. At this point I’m still not quite sure how to get there. Obviously it needs to involve scarcity – it’s really hard to relate to the craving for something readily available. But then we run into the player’s general reluctance to, you know, actually consume rare consumables. So how do we get PC addicted in the first place? Again, I would consider a dirty trick when the drug becomes scarce as addiction kicks in. But this clearly needs more work.

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* In the process. They might not remember anything later, but that is another story.

Step 1: get yourself enslaved - the usual way. Probably you will get all forms of predictable abuse - it doesn't really matter, because the real game begins after you escape. Possible masters for this idea are limited to bandit leaders, city nobles and other folks who can believably arrange a hunting party. With you in the leading role. The next depends on where you escape from. Countryside masters will literally hunt you. With dogs. City hunt is more gumshoe-themed: placing bounties, asking around in taverns etc. Arguably there should be separate hunting mode for mages, but at the moment I have no idea what that could look like.

The hunt is limited, but not by time. There is a budget of certain "heat units" that work not unlike the way sneak is leveled: units are spent when they are breathing down your neck. In other words, if they are hunting for you in the woods and you are hanging around in a tavern the counter is not ticking down. The side effect of having high heat on you is that fast travel (both by map and by carriage) becomes unreliable. Every now and then you will end up right where you don't want to be.

Now, how do you avoid capture? Often you will be able to simply outsneak or outrun the hunters, especially if you clock serious time with SLUTS. "Rule one: cardio" But then consider this: slave boots distort your footprints, rubber catsuits (or certain animal secretions) mask your smell, blindfold hides your identity in cities... you get the idea.

*pleasure contingent on your liking this kind of treatment

Long time ago there was a thread about supposed “weak girl” play style. It had lots of good modding suggestions, but the problem as usual is that everyone seems to have a different idea as to what “weak girl” even means. Some people apparently want a sort of misery simulator or one way trip into depravity.

I personally understand “weak girl” concept as a valid way to play the game (Skyrim that is) by non-traditional means. A character that is too weak to take the dragons, civil war and stuff head on, but fully capable of dispatching them via hired swords (who may or may not be devious followers), backstabbing, theft, etc.

I particularly like the idea of disabling the standard way of levelling and replacing it with money as a substitute to generic XP typical for other RPGs, which allows you to hire mercenaries to fight for you or to boost your own skills before engaging into otherwise suicidal combat. But this in turn means that we need a sustainable way to earn money that preferably does not boil down to low impact grind of 40 gp at a time.

Let’s see if we can make meaningful controllable risk / proportional reward gameplay out of something as mundane as peddling the most basic of goods.

Step 1. Collect flowers. Vanilla game has dozen or so plants that qualify as flowers. Throw in DCL/FMEA/bandits as you see fit, but generally Helgen to Riverwood run should not be a death march.

Step 2. Approach an NPC. We classify them as Paupers (non-customers), Commoners, Bourgeoisie and Nobility. For this job you need to look decent: clean, no weapons or armor in sight, no slut clothes, no humiliating DDs, definitely no parasites, cum or signs of substance abuse on your face. High-class customers have additional requirements (more expensive clothes etc).

3. Step 3. Bouquet making minigame. The NPC has 3 flowers and some small number X (not necessarily greater than 3) on their mind. You offer some of the flowers in your inventory, one of each kind. If you overshoot X – you’re busted and in trouble. Otherwise you sell your flowers at base price + markup defined by your customer’s class. There is also exponential premium for each flower that you guessed right, and also if you offer exactly X flowers. Depth of you trouble if you bust also depends on customer’s class. Regardless of the result, the NPC goes into cooldown for 20 hours.

It is always safe to sell one flower, but most of the time it only yields chum change. If you’re willing to take risks however you can make hundreds on a single customer.

Casino-like minigame will only get you so far, so let’s expand on that. We can add some Speech-based minigame that allows you to get some insight as to what X or bingo flowers are. But that one itself is risky because nobody likes inquisitive flower girls. We can also throw in some lore considerations. E.g. if you’re selling near a temple flowers related to that deity are more likely to bingo. That is the stuff you’re supposed to learn within the game.

Now, how do we tie this basic game mechanics into the larger game? Think: as a stereotypical weak girl, what do you miss the most? Poisons, of course - THE feminine weapon of choice since the ancient times. Lace drinks in a tavern, kill NPC via pickpocket and so on. Obviously we need real shit, not the underwhelming vanilla nonsense. And it needs to be obtained in a way than circumvents the vanilla alchemy so as to keep FMEA away - but still require the player to pick flowers.

So, meet our devious mistress: Angeline Morrard. Why Solitude? Well, it does not have the insane script load of heavily modded Whiterun, but has abundant flowers in and right next to it (important for the early game) and big enough market, including the Blue Palace crowd. In order to sell flowers you need to be formally employed.

Mechanically she is a sort of devious non-follower, if you will. The goal is to both satiate her greed (meet daily quotas and whatnot) and to earn her trust. Expect completely unjustified (you were not scamming on the nice lady, were you?) feats of paranoia, punishment if the customers complain, possible indenture if you underperform. But if you get on her good side she will teach you the ropes, including poison making.