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Lupine00

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This was a thread where the topic of creating a playthrough for a weak character was discussed at some length. There are many good ideas, mod suggestions, configuration recipes, and other information on making a Skyrim build with existing mods, and plenty of material to inspire new mods too.

Despite searching for this by the keywords in its title, LL can't seem to find it, so I've reposted the huge amount of stuff I put on there here so that I and others know where to look for it.

 

 

And of course, there were many long posts by me...

So many posts, and so long. I can't believe how much I wrote.

 

As the thread has vanished into obscurity, I'm going to collect them here, for reference:

 

Menial Jobs Mod Concept

Spoiler

Seems that though this thread is dead, it's the place to collect and perhaps continue some ramblings I started on the PoP forum:

 

I originally posted the following here: https://www.loverslab.com/topic/46551-prison-overhaul-patched/?do=findComment&comment=2493412

 

 

 

Just to clarify, this is just a talking point. I'm not making this mod, and I'm not asking anyone else to, nor am I asking for any existing mod to change.

 

I think this idea needs refinement, and if people can add to it, improve it, or think of easier ways to get the same results, I hope they'll post.

 

 

Been using Radiant Prostitution and ME a bit recently. Made me think that menial jobs need more reason for you to do them.

 

PoP is a great motivator!

 

I'm thinking now about how that could be done... a menial jobs mod for weak PCs.

 

Menial jobs that will make you wish you were working in a nice warm inn as a wench...

 

How could it work, and integrate with RP etc?

What makes those jobs worthwhile?

 

 

 

First, the PC needs some stakes, something to lose.

 

Already exists: PC starts with 1 in all skills except speech at 15. Skills only raise through buying training. Training uncapped. New trainers added around world.

Already exists: a mod that forces PC to sleep properly.

Already exists: a mod that punishes PC for being outside at night.

Already exists: a mod that makes the PC buy and pay for food.

Already exists: naked PCs get large fines (or arrested).

Already exists: PoP - set PoP to be punitive, including PoP eats lots of your money and prison can remove skills and levels.

Already exists: really expensive carriage rides.

 

Add to this: food and room costs must be raised. Room rental more expensive, as per Devious Followers. e.g. at least 50, more likely 100.

Add to this: you can't just wait around in inns, guilds or temples at night.

Add to this: you need to launder clothes, or buy new ones periodically, or they become beggar rags.

Add to this: SD+ enslavement results in PoP style skill/level rot.

 

Guilds should simply expel non-members at night, temples demand donations, or you have to leave, inns demand you rent a room or leave.Lock off "easy mode" Companions guild until a weapon skill over 30.

Lock off Thieves Guild until stealth+pickpocket+locks skills over 25

 

Itinerant, homeless PCs go straight to PoP unless they are beggars.

When released from PoP, your clothes are replaced with beggar rags.

 

 

 

 

Beggar - if you have beggar clothes guards will let you sleep rough - a chance of a new disease when you sleep rough - add parasites for more fun. Income from begging should be barely enough to buy survival level food. Needs dialog items for begging (these exist in various mods already, but mostly useless). Beggars should have blocking dialog, so all they can do is beg (based on outfit).

 

Woodchopper - cannot sleep rough, must pay for rooms. Income is poor. Main issue with this task is it is very boring.

 

Hunter - all you can kill is rabbits and foxes with low archery - probably die from wolves - sleeping in wilderness leads to parasites, also rapes and being kidnapped and enslaved

 

Flowergirl - really, selling flowers, it's a thing apparently (see My Fair Lady) - cannot sleep rough, requires dialogs for selling, boring, probably worse income than woodchopper.

 

Alchemist - must pay for access to alchemy tables or this is too easy. Cannot sleep rough. Start with 1 alchemy and cannot increase through experience, so maybe potion making should fail often. See also failure mode analysis. Could also be an "employee" type job where you work in alchemy shop. See smiths below.

 

Smith - ingredients and forge access shouldn't be/aren't free, so this should only be viable as an employee - make a little dialog game like the wench game where you have to make the right combinations of items or get in trouble. Cannot sleep rough.

 

Produce vendor - this might be most interesting. You have to buy from farmers low and sell high in town. Speculate on what produce will get the best return on any given day, worry about spoilage. Cannot sleep rough. Valued crops in iNeed stops simple looting of crops.

 

With most "employee" jobs, or as a vendor, if you sleep rough you should suffer a penalty to your earnings as your work is not as good, and you look bad.

 

Begging needs to be more punitive. It should be the "floor" that you hit when you fail everything else. PC should really want to avoid ending up there.

Beggar should not be able to get any job but woodcutter or indentured prostitute.

 

Indentured prostitute gets zero cash from the work, inn takes it all. Can sleep in the inn, and get food for free. Indenture lasts minimum N (default 3?) days, and minimum X (default 20?) customers. Numbers vary with circumstance. After that you are "free". If you run off during indenture, you go straight to PoP.

 

 

 

 

With no skills to speak of, waiting tables is now a comfortable, low risk job, and prostitution is "big money".

Adding some random "big tippers" to both jobs would add an extra attraction, so the risk isn't all in one direction (currently it's easy to get punished with fines).

Adding occasional chances to raise Speech or Pickpocket would add another attraction.

Could add a bonus to pickpocket against NPCs recently serviced, whether simply food/drink, or sex.

Instant PoP punishment for pickpocketing makes this nice and risky. Starts to feel like a game.

Add extra risks to prostitution as per ME, so there might be kidnap attempts. Kidnap avoidance/escape should be a mini-game of some kind.

Kidnap either results as you in an inn in a different town as indentured prostitute (with high freedom targets), or in SD+.

A low skill character in SD+ has to hope they can please their master, otherwise they'll just get sold on, so that's not a nice outcome. Plus skill/level rot like PoP. Nasty!

 

 

But what happens when you dig your way out of the cash pit, and buy into a guild, or otherwise gain a skill that allows a little adventuring? Or even buy a home of your own?

Are you now done with all this stuff?

 

Add: house confiscation on imprisonment

Add: lose thane rights on imprisonment (also add a way to get them back?)

Exists: PoP should eat any excess money easily (this is just configuration)

Add: PoP confiscates gear permanently (see above) leave PoP in only beggar rags.

Exists+Add: PoP adds extreme debuffs that only fade with time, preventing combat, alchemy or enchanting until recovered (see Wounds mod, etc)

 

Add some ways to get arrested, see SL Adventures.

 

Now, you might end up back in the inn, quite easily. Not even considering disasters caused by DCL etc.

 

 

Well, it's an idea. I'd like to do it, but probably will never have time.

A lot of this is already present in one mod or another, but a few things need tweaking or adding to really make it work.

If a few existing mods, such as SL Adventures and PoP added a few little tweaks, we'd be quite close to having this.

e.g.

SL Adventures could have a "always send to PoP" setting for crimes, so you don't have to set absurd bounties - though maybe absurd bounties are mostly OK.

SL Adventures could class wearing armor as a crime (for females only, of course).

SL Adventures could have a "beggars exempt" flag for characters in beggar outfits.

SL Adventures could add "sleeping" and "lollygagging" as specific crimes (lollygagging => waiting, in this case).

SL Adventures could specifically handle woodcutter axe as allowed, if any weapon in inventory is a crime.

 

PoP could have a few extra options for leaving imprisonment:

Confiscate home in same hold.

Confiscate homes in all holds.

Remove thane rank in same hold

Remove thane rank in all holds

Confiscate all non-quest items (this might already exist, but if it does, I can't find it)

 

SD+ could add skill and level decay during slavery, could also use for Bimbo in Hormones.

 

All of the above are things that would be handy to have in those mods in any case. So not crazy requests.

 

There are already mods that lock off guild quests until skill requirements met, though they are ... highly conflicting ... with other mods.

Various needs mods can increase food prices.

Inn price can trivially be set as a global.

 

This just leaves improved begging mechanics, flowergirl dialogs, alchemist and smith jobs, and produce vendor dialogs and farmer interactions.

Plus, indentured prostitution mechanics, and any extras, like pickpocketing and speech raises, pickpocketing customers bonus, and so on.

 

Basically, nearly all of it is dialogs, a couple of random events, and so on. A cheap first pass could get most of this without anything clever being required.

 

Follow up to above

Spoiler

 

 

Follow up was this:

 

  On 1/12/2019 at 6:18 PM, worik said:
On 1/12/2019 at 6:18 PM, worik said:

We already have that -> Realistic Room Rental

I think I alluded to this being covered by DF and iNeed already, amongst others. There are several other room rental mods, RRR is one of the more elaborate of course.

Thinking about it, I think SkyTweak also does room prices.

 

For room prices, all you need to do is set a global. You don't even need a mod!

 

There are probably other features or requirements I mentioned that are done by existing mods too, but possibly not in a way that is compatible.

The beggars thing, for example. Lots of mods allow begging, some even restrict it by outfit. Hmm, doesn't SD+ do this?

 

Some mods tend to bring a lot of baggage, so it gets complicated. I think SD+, Parasites and Hormones have a lot of useful stuff for this, but some of it is not quite ideal.

Hence raising the talking point.

 

What mods can we use?

What needs to change? If anything?

 

 

I'd like to up the stakes a bit more for menial jobs. If the only thing you have is the stick of being sent to PoP it's a bit monotonous.

There's also minor fines, which RP already does.

 

But I think there needs to be more in this area - something more interesting and gameplay generating.

Also, would be nice if there were things the player can accumulate beyond simple cash and such to lose.

Partly, that's why I'm hung up on skill-rot and level-rot in PoP and SD+, as they add more risk, but if you are in a poor situation, those might have no room to drop anyway.

 

Also, how would PoP work if there is no XP to deteriorate? Does it function right?

 

Maybe needs some kind of reputation you build up that unlocks more people who will talk to you.

Could build up in areas, so a lot of begging makes them start to react to you as a beggar, a lot of whoring, they give you whore dialogues, even if you aren't "in uniform". All dialogue stuff with faction ranks I imagine. Too much menial work and it gets really hard to get people to accept you as an adventurer. But being branded a thief, pickpocket, slave, or cheat is worse... That kind of thing...

 

Starts to feed back to my concept of "legal slave" and such, but still ... needs more things you can earn, that are valuable, so you can also lose them.

 

Continued...

Spoiler

Then...

 

  On 1/12/2019 at 10:14 PM, Kissinger said:
On 1/12/2019 at 10:14 PM, Kissinger said:

this seems like more sexlab survival's wheelhouse than pop's.  the simulationist elements esp begging are most in tune with what monoman is trying to do in survival and also his tweaked mods.  some of your suggestions are p novel but i still think they would are best served as updates to that mod.  the real issue is that there are a separate lot of mods that implement your suggestions individually but are janky together - either they are redundant or simply don't cohere due to mechanics or tone.

I'm not suggesting any of that should be in PoP, except in so far as I suggested that PoP could provide some additional "on release" options, which would be just as useful (or punitive to the player) without any of the menial jobs stuff.

 

As for simulation? I'm not sure why you would call it that, when the aim is to make menial jobs more of a game, not to build "washerwoman simulator" with realistic pre-medieval pregnancy survival rate. Monoman's SL Survival mod is a mixed bag of simulationist thinking and pure gameplay design, so it's not especially consistent internally in terms of how it plays, though the general intent is mostly coherent. Cum layers and frostfall? That's neither simulation, nor gameplay, I'm not sure what it is ... whimsy? But there is a lot in SL Survival that fits in with the general aims I'm describing here ... and a lot that doesn't.

 

If I didn't make it clear enough, there's already a mini-game in Radiant Prostitution, and it is more of a game than "tavern wench job simulator" - the design thinking is clearly not simulationist.

 

What I was suggesting is that we could do more to make that a worthwhile game by adding some balance. If the intent were simulation, there would be no need to balance it.

 

Most simulationist designs are stat focused, and numerically unstable, with self-reinforcing systems that tend to converge on one extreme outcome or another, despite intent to the contrary (SexLab Arousal for example). I wouldn't put SL Survival in that category ... or Radiant Prostitution. Simulationist mods do not attempt to deliver a fair game with meaningful choices, they attempt to simulate inevitable outcomes that you influence only indirectly.

 

So to make the game design intent more explicit...

 

I like the idea of making a difficult game, one where you don't start off as a magic Dragonborn to whom everything comes easily, and who everyone looks to as a savior, but as a nobody, with nothing, who has to claw their way out of the gutter, to climb a slippery slope that may lead to a hard and nasty fall if they aren't extremely careful. Not a street-scum simulator, but a way of extending the dynamic range of gaming experience in Skyrim, with lower lows and higher highs.

 

 

Taking Radiant Prostitution (RP), PoP and SL Adventures as core tools in this, what do we need to add? What do we need to change in existing mods? What mods would we have to replace entire?

 

Right now, there is little incentive to play the RP serving wench memory game, despite it being a "not bad game" that actually brings some gameplay to Skyrim that isn't intrinsic to vanilla.

 

 

ME tried to add game aspects to prostitution, to make it something you could play, rather than vanilla Skyrim (which is kill monsters, take loot, get rewards, level up). Slavery mods, like SD+ struggle because there isn't enough non-adventurer content in Skyrim. DF succeeds because it doesn't get in the way of vanilla Skyrim (much). Slaverun succeeds because it adds a massive amount of new quest content - though much of that content is even more grind-filled than the vanilla content.

 

Radiant Prostitution tries to bring across some of the ME ideas, and expand upon them. It doesn't bring across all the ME ideas, like the detailed postures and positions, which were "something novel to do" but not really gameplay - though they could have been a basis for gameplay, and it's clear that was the end goal, it wasn't realised.

 

 

Instead of just making the serving wench game have better rewards, we could make it an integral part of a wider game, that ties together events generated by RP, by PoP, by SL Adventures, by SD+, by Hormones, as well as needs mods, and many other kinds of mods.

 

The goal is not to simulate menial jobs, but to make a web of gameplay that leverages "sticks" like PoP, SLAdvs and SD+, and "carrots" like money => experience, so instead of earning money being a means to ... nothing really ... it becomes the core progression mechanism of the game.

 

That is why the beggar role is rock bottom (you have no money), but also a floor you can work up from - because beggars don't get arrested, or taken as slaves (they are just too repellent or something, who cares why exactly? It's to build gameplay, not simulate the vulnerability of real-world homelessness).

 

I admit the SD+ idea seems to undermine this, but I see SD+ like a PoP equivalent - it's a punishment and a prison, just one that's potentially mobile, and easier to escape from than PoP. There certainly don't seem to be any gameplay benefits to being an SD+ slave.

 

 

After you've failed, and been punished, the beggar role is a safe place you can start to build from. It's not a begging simulator, it's a restart point. You don't escape begging by begging, you escape it by moving on to something else that makes more money, but adds more risk.

 

The other jobs are choices, that in most cases need fleshing out as genuine gameplay, but the intent was for them to be games of one kind or another.

e.g. woodcutter needs to find the person who will pay most for wood, but that's not really enough, it needs more, hence the talking point post.

e.g. produce vendor needs to buy the right produce, when it's cheap, that will sell before it rots, again, needs more, just the germ of an idea.

e.g. serving wench gains pickpocket options, not as a wench simulator, but to add an option to turn a fairly safe game with low rewards into a high-risks, high-rewards game based on player choice.

e.g. flower girl takes risks with DCL harvesting flowers and ingredients, chooses to sell to alchemists or other customers, seeks best returns. How could we make it a game?

e.g. smithy worker has a memory game like serving wench, what else can we do to make it a game?

e.g. alchemy worker has a memory game like serving wench, what else can we do to make it a game?

 

The more menial jobs, like woodcutter, flower girl, or wench may overlap with begging, or prostitution, or both, how can we build gameplay out of that?

What meaningful choices can we offer the player? Can we make a web of choices rather than a binary tree?

 

RP adds progression and question to prostitution, what else can we add? Hence the kidnap mechanic from ME... It's not whore simulator, it's a game event, intended to be challenging and fun. How can we best achieve that with the minimum of effort?

 

 

It's true that a lot of it is possible with existing mods, yet not quite possible, because they clash, either in concrete ways, or simply in style. But if we don't talk about what mechanisms and styles we would prefer, it's much harder to work towards a coherent outcome.

 

I found a bunch of stuff on Nexus - with just a few minutes of searching - for menial jobs, but it's all low-risk, easy mode stuff: Jobs of Skyrim, Heljarchen Farm, Winstad Mine, Katixas Ciderhouse Restaurant (and let's not forget classics like Skooming Skyrim). There must be many more. I guess some of these things could be patched to make them a bit more hardcore. Also, most of the locations are more management games rather than grunt-work, but it's interesting to try this stuff out for a change. Things like the ciderhouse add a lot of menial jobs, and there are plenty of ideas to steal there.

 

 

I brought it up here [PoP forum], because the harshly punitive regime of PoP, and the way it (and SD Cages) are intended to increase game difficulty. They set a style guide, and fit the concept of a harder game with harsher penalties for failure. How can we extend that to make PoP genuinely part of the Skyrim game, rather than just a movie where the PC gets whipped and raped a lot? How do we really understand that style? What do we think are its defining points? It's all up for debate.

 

Originally from the SL Adventures forum (reposted in weak girl)

Spoiler

Then, in the SL Adventures forum:

 

I posted this long rambling idea for enhancing "menial jobs" on the PoP forum.

 

Anyway, most of it is about how to use existing mods to enhance the value of menial jobs.

 

This raised a few ideas for changes in existing mods that could promote this.

SL Adventures was central to much of it.

 


I hope people will talk about how this idea can be improved.

 

Maybe we can get a lot more of it with existing mode and no changes than I first guessed.

Or maybe not?

 

 

  • SL Adventures could have a "always send to PoP" setting for crimes, so you don't have to set absurd bounties - though maybe absurd bounties are mostly OK. Just seems silly that everything is equivalent to murder.
  • SL Adventures could allow wearing armor as a crime (for females only, of course).
  • SL Adventures could have a "beggars exempt" flag for characters in beggar outfits.
  • SL Adventures could add "sleeping" and "lollygagging" as specific crimes (lollygagging => waiting, in this case, sleeping is self evident).
  • SL Adventures could optionally specifically handle woodcutter axe as allowed, if you set any weapon in inventory is a crime. Possibly some other really weak weapons that have other utility could be exempted too, or different bounties per weapon class - a dagger might actually attract a higher bounty than a battle axe, because the dagger is concealable.

 

There are a few places a PC can sleep "rough" in some towns - Riverwood for example, and it would actually be a neat little mod to add a few more.

 

Such locations would carry attendant risk.

I would imagine that the percentage chance of arrest should be handled specially, probably based on how many hours you sleep or wait, rather than the guard observation cloak. e.g. a single check based on configured chance per-hour. So if you have 10% per hour, a ten hour sleep means you are always detected. Though I guess you could cap the chance at 90% so there's always a little luck in it.

 

 

I'm not actually asking for these features in SL Adventures, they were just some things that I mooted in that post.

 

Though I have asked for armor as a crime previously, and yeah, I guess I am still asking for that, but it's sort of unrelated to this.

I just like armor as a crime, alright!

It seems so obvious (to me) that SLA should have it.

 

Continued...

Spoiler

And...

 

  On 1/13/2019 at 5:56 AM, Teutonic said:
On 1/13/2019 at 5:56 AM, Teutonic said:

I might add the option to tolerate it outside of the city. A condition for customizable clothes / parts of equipment might also be added.

I'd love to be able to make characters in chastity belts totally excluded from rape attempts. In some games, but not others.

 

Yes, belts block rape in some cases, but I think oral and anal (and boobsex?) attacks can still occur? Or should ... perhaps?

 

DCL lets you toggle this: its "belts block rape" toggle causes belts to override "full chastity required to prevent rape".

 

 

Also, a question...

In SL Adventures, do hobble dresses provide rape protection?

 

DD has some internal idea of what protects against what, when it applies its animation filter, and so there are various items that prevent vaginal/anal access that aren't belts, hobble-dresses being one, some harnesses another. IIRC, it also considers locked plugs. There's also the slightly fiddly issue with gags that may or may not block oral access depending on their state.

 

I notice that Kimy pretty much always puts a redundant belt on for quests that also include a hobble-dress, which adds some confusion about what she believes they do, even though it would seem the code in DD does treat them as blocking all vaginal and anal access. You could make a model that hobbles but allows access, but I don't believe there is one like that currently.

 

I asked about this on the DD forum, but as usual there ... sound of tumbleweeds blowing past.

I was writing a method to correctly calculate access to each 'hole', and wanted to get the right results so I wouldn't hit the filter in the first place.

That said, I ignored the boobsex issue completely, as I don't support it at all, or feet for that matter. I'm not aware of any boobsex rape animations anyway.

 

Continued...

Spoiler

Then this:

 

I've set up a new game to explore the extremes of play as a "weak" character.

Spoiler
  • Starts with zero skills, except speech and pickpocket.
  • Skills only raise through training. (Plus various other SkyTweak changes). Added some extra trainers.
  • Cannot raise levels* at all! No health/magica/stamina increase possible, and no perks. (Might change this eventually).
  • Not the dragonborn.
  • Towns exit locked down with SL survival (tolls and follower required).
  • No fast travel.
  • 400/500 septim carriage prices.
  • Realistic Room Rental.
  • Apropos2.
  • Frostfall.
  • RND (had to use this instead of iNeed because of SL Survival hard binding, bah!)
  • Radiant Prostitution.
  • SGO III
  • Devious Followers.
  • SD+ / Hormones / Parasites / Cages.
  • DCL
  • EC+
  • Devious Captures
  • DA + Defeat
  • Jobs of Skyrim.
  • FMEA
  • Wounds
  • Various crime changes/fixes.
  • Various begging related mods.
  • LAL + CCAS - start as prostitute
  • PoP, with imprisonment up to 7 days, and skill decay.
  • SL Adventures

 

I did plan to put Skooma Whore in at first, but on reflection decided to leave it out for now. The main reason to put them in is because of the SL Survival options with them, but they're both a bit ... intrusive ... and tend to take over any game they're allowed into.

I think I might swap SGOIII for Fertility Mode if I rebuild this, as it seems a better thematic fit, but I might change my mind on that.

Rather than mod the house prices to be huge, I simply decided I wouldn't even try to buy one, and would never be able to do the quests to earn the right anyway.

 

I have mods that can block access to guild quests until high skill levels, but there doesn't seem a point. SL Survival nerfs those beds - big time - and I can choose not to pursue guild quests. Saves installing a couple of mods.

 

With RP, making money is not hard, but it's time consuming and apropos inflicts a toll on the character. You have to take breaks some days, and those are days you have to pay rent and buy food, but make nothing. The inn-keeper seems the primary beneficiary of all this; she's getting half my take, and my rent and food expenses. It's like DF's enslave yourself, but with less fighting or devious devices. If you want, you can press on despite apropos being maxed out on W&T. The main problem is walking slowly, but if you need the cash, you can keep at it. Apropos wasn't designed for the extreme end of this scenario. Adding in my dev-SLD can make it so you are severely crippled though. It's given me an idea for a blackouts event too.

 

* I wanted this, but couldn't make it work. I set the cost per level and base cost to the max, so levelling is approx 10x most costly, and set the XP from skill use to 0, so skills don't level from use, but buying skills still results in getting XP. I can simply choose not to 'accept' the level-ups in the UI though. Even if I did, getting above level 10 seems unlikely... will see.

 

 

 

SL Adventures contributes a lot to make this build work...

 

  • Poverty is on, turned up to the max, and everything is a crime. Simply owning a weapon is a crime.
  • Bounties are set up to be painful, but not an instant trip to PoP.
  • Cum penalties are all on, but arousal penalties are not. If I wanted arousal penalties, I'd use SLD for them anyway :)  (In practice a prostitute character rarely has any arousal level to speak of anyway, unless she ends up stuck in a plugged belt).
  • I tuned rapes so they would only occur if restrained, collared, exhausted, injured, or drunk.
  • On top of that I set a bunch of OR conditions, for basically everything else, except Thane, which I set to NOT. So even a restrained or collared character would also need to be naked, visibly horny, or out at night, to get raped. This wasn't exactly what I wanted, but it's as close as I could get.
  • Because of the prostitution, simply being naked would be too common a trigger, and would tend to result in unwanted rapes from customers. RP already handles customer rapes internally, so I didn't want that conflict.

 

Spoiler

After a while working in the tavern, my character had a lot of cum on her. Just stepping outside like that would mean a hefty bounty.

No need for a locked door, or possessive inn-keeper, the cum laws alone make venturing out something you have to plan for, and of course, going out at night would be both dangerous, and illegal.

 

Right now she's stuck in Windhelm, and even if she could leave the city without freezing to death, she can't afford a carriage, or an escort so that she isn't eaten by wolves. Assuming she manages to earn enough for the fare to Riften or Whiterun, she will still need an escort for the guards to let her out, and will still need to pay the toll.

 

 

There were a couple of areas where I felt that SL Adventures wasn't delivering quite what I wanted...

 

Crimes:

 

Spoiler

Being able to set specific outfits, and entire classes of worn item that attract a bounty would be a huge plus.

This would allow me to set "tavern clothes" as attracting a bounty, to replicate the ME feature that gives fines for whoring out on the street.

 

I also (still) want to outlaw women (except thanes) from wearing armor of any kind - though I think there ought to be some kind of "tax" you can pay to disable this, so you just pay 500 a week, instead of getting a 200 fine every time you're seen.

 

 

I'd also like to be able to set specific outfits or types of outfit as rape conditions, so tavern clothes could either protect, or make you vulnerable to rape, or armor could prevent rape, etc.

 

Another thing that would be a neat, small change, is to split the weapon crime in two, so instead of just a toggle, carrying, and equipping weapons are totally different crimes. You could then set a big bounty for equipping a weapon, and a smaller bounty for carrying one. Or the reverse.

 

Rapes:

Spoiler

For this sort of game, I'd like more location types in the rape conditions, so, for example, so I could disable rapes only in inns.

Maybe SLAdv could allow the location types that already have 'indecency' configuration? Temples, shops, jarl's hall, and inns - in exactly the same way it currently has city-exterior as a condition? A 'wilderness' or 'hold environs' (for outside the city) type locations would also be neat, evolutionary extension of existing functionality.

 

The actual condition system is more than sufficient, it's just the conditions themselves that I'd like more of.

 

 

I still have the feel that the way SLAdv checks for crime triggers is a bit ... unimmersive ...

 

Spoiler

e.g.

 

You have owning weapons as a crime (400), and visible cum as a crime (350), and out at night as a crime (200).

Major crime threshold set at 1200.

 

PC is seen by a guard, at night, covered in cum, and carrying a dagger.

 

PC gets 950 bounty. Not a major crime. Guard does not pursue.

Next time the guard sees the PC, they get another 950 bounty, and now they owe 1900, which is a major crime.

The PC will likely be arrested and sent to PoP.

This might be just half an hour later.

 

It seems ... weird ... the PC really only committed one set of crimes, it was just seen twice. Possibly by the same guard, possibly without the PC or the guard ever having changed location.

 

The cheap solution is to set the check times to a much larger number, say 12, or 24 hours.

The down side is that could mask off conceptually different crimes, like carrying a dagger one time, then a sword the next, or one layer of cum one time, and ten the next.

 

And then there's the question of, how did the guard know the PC was carrying a (presumably concealed) dagger on the first observation, when they didn't stop and search?

 

 

Well, you could say it's fixating on immersive trivia, but as this is a core feature of the mod, I think it would be nice to consider allowing more options, though I'm happy to admit, the main effects function pretty-much OK, but a more nuanced system could create some gameplay alternatives.

 

It would probably matter, if more crimes were ever added, such as making carrying other classes of item a crime.

 

I'd like to see a crime for having other classes of items besides weapons, such as lockpicks, or alchemical ingredients, or necromantic ingredients, or scrolls and spell books, or other kinds of items that nords might get nervous about. But I may be in a minority on that, and I guess it's pretty far down my wish list anyway. Many of these things are sold in nord towns, but ... so are weapons ... perhaps it's fine for men to have them? :) But women can't be trusted? Most alchemists seem to be women, but that merely invites a series of quests where people accuse them of witchcraft and vampirism.

 

 

If, for example, SLAdv split crimes into two kinds: visible from a distance, and only detected on search. If a guard sees you violate a "visible" crime, he force greets immediately, and demands you pay the fine. He also performs a search - but - if you don't get searched you can commit "concealed" crimes with impunity.

 

This solves two problems:

 

Firstly, for an ongoing crime, like "covered in cum", PC gets stopped and searched, despite a low bounty for the crime, and the PC knows to hurry away and clean up. If they run into a different guard, then they might be fined again - it makes sense. In this case a short cooldown, like half an hour, is the "safe" time for you to get home, and stops a group of guards all arresting you for the same crime, each in turn, in a stupid and unfair way.

 

Secondly, it makes immersive sense of crimes that shouldn't be instantly detectable from a distance.

 

It has the additional bonus that you don't get the weird thing where you build up a huge bounty from a very minor crime you don't even realise the guards are noticing. This behaviour where the guards just add on to your bounty without doing anything until it hits the point they go aggro on you is ... a bit odd ... even if there are messages about added bounty to warn you.

 

Particularly, useful when you don't actually know what rules pertain in a given hold, because they were set "randomly", and especially so with nudity laws.

 

If you wanted you could let the player configure a visible distance for each crime, with different values for day time, and night time.

Maybe it's getting a bit anal. I guess some people would like it, and it would be sort of interesting to make it easier to hide crimes at night, without turning them off entirely.

 

But, you can always just turn them off entirely at night, so it might be overkill.

 

 

One final possibility. What if guards had a chance to "harass" repeat offenders? Much more chance to get pulled up on small bounties, and more immersion.

 

A stop and search mechanic would make this even better.

 

There is actually a fancy crime overhaul "Crime, Punishment and Redemption" that has stuff like this, but it seems so complex that I can't imagine it not conflicting like hell with everything, and I can't imagine it works with PoP at all, in any way, because it has its own weirdly anachronistic "Skyrim Central Prison". Looks like lots of interesting ideas in it, nonetheless.

 

 

One thing is clear, when you make a game that is almost totally constrained to urban environments, the details of crime rules and rape scenarios become much more important to your game - along with your choice of solicitation mod, they pretty much define your experience.

 

You start to care about little things that wouldn't be a major part of a conventional playthrough. You aren't spending time walking through the wilderness, or looting dungeons, you're in an inn, or on the street, trying to turn a trick, or maybe pickpocket a sucker. With no home, getting raped and robbed, and maybe thrown in jail, is a disaster that will take days to recover from. It's a very different game; not Skyrim really. Makes a change though. Going back to regular play after this will feel like becoming a tiny god!

 

On the Experimental Games I Set Up

Spoiler

Due to some experiments with CBBE, I now have two "helpless girl" games in play, one UUNP and one CBBE.

 

The CBBE game also has some additional mods of note: Arachnophobia, and SXP Redone, that the first (UUNP) game doesn't have.

It's my first time with SXP Redone, and I have no idea if it's going to break everything.

 

It should be understood that there are a lot of other mods I haven't mentioned, such as No Starting Spells, or Parthunax Dilemma. A lot of stuff is just inherited from my regular games, like SL Stories, SL Stories Devious, SD+, SD Cages, Hormones, Parasites, DCL, DF, Simple Slavery, Immersive Creatures, Interesting NPCs, Inconsequential NPCs, EggFactory, RDO, Increased Bounty and Guild Rewards, SexLab Shrines, Dripping When Aroused, EFF, and a load of texture and model upgrades, along with a bunch of other stuff to make everything look nice, and to deliver immersive looking interiors, dark nights and even darker dungeons, and make Caffeine ENB pop. I also have a metric ton of follower mods, though I had to remove a few for the CBBE game, as they were set up to use the player skin - or probably were - easier just to drop them than dig into it.

 

I didn't bother with a mod to fix starting skills, as I found it easier to just player.setav them exactly to my taste after game start.

 

I'm not using "Disparity", as it's gone a bit funny on me in the past, and the effects are hard to perceive in play most of the time.

 

I have my dev version of SLD, but it's not configured to do much in either of these games. Rapes hurt stamina and magicka recovery, and high arousal benefits total stamina. Large boobs benefit total magicka. It's not particularly punitive, though the rape consequences are ... non-trivial ... but they wear off completely after a week.

 

 

In the first game, I reset all skills to zero, except speech and pickpocket. In the CBBE game, I didn't do this, and counter-intuitively, it's actually better.

 

I used the DA captured for ransom start in the CBBE game, and surprisingly was able to beat the stupid key mashing game, and even more surprisingly escaped the bandits without being arrowed to death. However, this left her naked, up near Windhelm, with Frostfall enabled. Luck was in my favour again, and some Stormclock soldiers got in a fight with Reiklings, and I was able to scavenge light armor and a sword.

 

However, ust because my character was able to fight, doesn't mean she could win. She was still only level 1, with lvl 15 skills. An attack by an IC wolf pack that mixed wolves and frost wolves, plus cubs saw me defeated by the final Frost Wolf. DA played a rescue scenario, and she was ported to the inn in Winterhold - though I was next to the Windhelm wall at the time - oh well!

 

With "Wounds" my character was left in a badly injured state, with cuts everywhere, and a broken leg. She could barely move. The innkeeper left her with no choice but to whore for food, drink and the money for a bed - and to do all the chores around the inn - while her Rockjoint infection worsened and the open wounds showed no sign of healing. The little shop in Winterhold doesn't sell any "Wounds" supplies, either by design,  or load-order :) 

 

So, despite being skilled, or perhaps because of it, the pressure was harder from the get go, with more drama, and more interesting choices. There's still a lot of radiant prostitution, but the goal of recovering and escaping the inn is far more alluring than the goal of simply raising enough skills to have a different profession, that drives the first game.

 

 

What's clear though, is that there are many mods to support this kind of play, and apart from a few minor tweaks I could wish for in SL Adventures and PoP, it really comes down to how much fun you can make a game that relies on Radiant Prostitution so much (you could use ME for the same thing). ME offers a little more variety and buttons to push, but doesn't have the quests of RP.

 

 

There are a couple of areas where I want more, beyond those already mentioned.

 

1) a blackout feature for SLD, so really high levels of apropos W&T can cause financial problems - hours blacked out are lost money making hours.

2) better begging, so you can beg for a place to stay, and possibly even get thrown out because of it, and have to take more extreme actions to be allowed back in.

3) a pay up, work, or leave rule for inns, so you can't just linger there indefinitely without paying for a room, or food and drinks, or working for the innkeeper.

4) more recognition of your actions and history from NPCs - this would benefit any kind of Skyrim game TBH.

 

I'm currently enforcing (3) by pure roleplay, but a game mechanic would be better.

 

While many mods add begging, and SL Survival mixes it up with sex for favours, there is no way to beg for a place to sleep.

This latter is a nagging omission from every begging feature around.

 

Given how hard it isn't to add dialogue and gate it off flags for past events, that clear with timers, it's odd Skyrim did so little of this in the first place, and stranger still there are so few mods that add much of it. SLSF being a notable exception, but it was/is overburdened with tedious rumor passing mechanics and underprovided with actual dialogues.

 

Spoiler

It keeps coming back to the issue that if you take away regular Skyrim gameplay, you need something else.

 

I'm using RP for that. You could use ME. Those are pretty much the choices. Maybe you could mix TDF in there, but it seems like easy mode compared to the others, and lacks depth.

 

Some features can spice up the very limited gameplay of RP, like the blackouts I'm thinking of - to stop you just screwing endlessly, even when you should drop - or better begging, for when things go completely off the rails.

 

 

But mainly what is needed is an RP plus. Not the extra quests for RP that have been added, though those are nothing to sniff at, but various pervasive changes to the mod to make it more fluid, offer more choices at more times, and to bring more obvious risk+reward mechanics to it.

 

Spoiler
On 1/17/2019 at 8:43 PM, Darkpig said:

What we need is a :

 

money drain

Powerful as fuck enemies

Slavery & prostitution

Food Water and Sleep I do that shit already.

Did all that. Got bored. Moving on from it.

 

In one game, the enemies were so fricken crazy I kept getting stuck in dungeons with no way back, and only insta-death forward. Because they were killing me so completely in one hit, I wasn't even getting post defeats, I was just dead. Even if I'd turned on the DA feature where you never die, I'd still  have been left with a broken dangling quest. That was obviously not fun. If you're going to go into dungeons, you at least need a chance, or you stop going, and they're just dead content.

 

That was when I had the "Immersive Unlevelled Zones" or whatever it's called, where draugr dungeons are locked at lvl 50+ etc. and pretty much everything has a pre-determined level, rather than sliding against the player. Even starting bandits were about 10 levels above a starting player, IIRC. If anyone cares, I'll find the link for this mod?

 

DF is the ultimate cash ramora. If you can't leave down without a DF, you have to fund that greedy follower.

Difficult enemies: IC crank up to max, game difficulty at master, or turn it down for an actual chance.

Slavery and prostitution: SD+, DF, RP/ME or DCL solicitation if you are really minimalist.

 

Tons of people play this mix (give or take DF - there are other cash sinks). It's not that niche an approach. It doesn't make the PC "weak" either, it makes the enemies strong, and there's a subtle difference.

 

The various wenches mods are also a way to turn most dungeons into a horror show for the player.

I stopped using wenches, because the difficulty spikes are too arbitrary. Some of the "chain" effects can explode, turning a tomb into a bigger population centre than Whiterun.

 

Spoiler
On 1/17/2019 at 8:43 PM, Darkpig said:

Edit: Actually now that I think of it, the whole thing with being helpless is that it is an on rails experience. It is a story of powerful people dragging you a helpless person with them on their mad journey for fame, fortune or someone to tickle their pickle.

Is it? I mean, is that how you want it to be?

 

People do seem to want that from slavery mods. I like it in small doses, but it's not the basis for a  whole game.

 

 

The weak character game isn't necessarily that. For me, recently, it's been about a high-stakes struggle to drag yourself out of a pit with slippery sides, reaching for success, wealth and heroism, but probably sliding back down and ending up rotting in a skooma den underneath Solitude.

 

It's hard, but it's got to be winnable, or else there's no challenge.

On the way, there is defeat, humiliation, and being at the mercy of the whims of others. There's also success and victory.

 

Having escaped that pit makes the freedom that follows sweeter. The deeper, darker lows make the highs seems like real high points, not something that was handed to you.

There's a sense of achievement; of overcoming odds.

 

 

But I get that's not what everyone is looking for. I'm just not sure what they do want.

 

A slavery mod might work well with an "on rails" narrative, that tells a good story, but you'd only be able to play it a couple of times before it was worn out. I had something in mind like that with my follower mod, and I'm still interested in that. I'm not sure if it really mixes with "weak girl" characters or not. A tough dragonborn can also be enslaved, it's just different.

 

Spoiler
n 1/17/2019 at 7:13 PM, worik said:

I guess it is just a comic like exaggeration. But some underlying mechanics are good impulses.

I think the main flaw is that everyone is annoyed by the overpowered skyrim-ish game progress. (Get insanely rich and become a god-like superhero in 9 days). So they do something about it and tune some screws.

But if you sum it up and combine it, it becomes ridiculous in the opposite direction.

 

I think, SL Survival's major flaw is that it's kind of rigid and a tries to solve everything alone. It still lacks flexibility.

Yes. It has some very all or nothing mechanics.

 

It wrecks "sleep anywhere" to the point where it's silly, with no MCM toggle. If this feature could be configured sensibly, would be great.

It wrecks using guild beds, with no way to disable it in the MCM. See above.

The forced RND integration makes you use a very old and somewhat lacklustre needs mod.

 

The forced follower mechanic is particularly weak, in that it's just that, there's no way to overcome it immersively. It's just a switch you throw that says "must have X followers" to leave the town. Nothing stops you paying them off the moment you leave and sacking them all though. It fails. You are (to some extent) better off roleplaying it how you think it should be.

 

It's a pity that he made it and then didn't want to develop it further. It's of some value. The begging parts are quite good, and the anti-stash is not bad either, but still needs some work to handle Realistic Room Rental chests etc better. Sex warming you has saved me from hypothermia-death-by-rape on several occasions. It's a very mixed bag. If it were just developed more, it could be great.

 

There are a lot of little details in SL Survival, but the lack of configuration options and polish hold it back from being more generally useful to more people.

 

Spoiler
On 1/17/2019 at 7:13 PM, worik said:

My stance is that this "Play the downtrodden anti-hero" would need  some kind of framework, where mods can fit in, as the players likes it for their own taste.

E.g.

  • DDa, DDi and DDx form the framework for mods like Laura's shop, CDS, DD helpers on top of that.
  • Campfire is the groundwork for FF and other mods on top of that

Not an easy undergoing to create something like this in 2019. Because there are many mods that already have these little tuning screws in place ... one little twist in one corner and the whole thing can easily get crazy again.

 

And we must never forget, that if we drag mod authors of existing mod into this direction, the core idea of their mods get fuzzier, more complex, less intuitive.

More so, from my reading, I get it that only few players enjoy this survival thing, so others get annoyed by "useless" features that they will switch off immediately.

 

Note to myself: this requires more thinking ?

 

Funnily enough, that last line is a paraphrase of the first line of my first post, where I put the question about what we need to develop.

 

I would say, mod authors can't be dragged anywhere, anymore than you can herd cats, from a distance, over the internet. Authors are going to make the mods they want, when they want, if they want.

 

But, I can make things, and while I have a plan of things to do for SLD, I'm also looking at what I might be able to shoehorn into it, or where I might go afterwards.

 

Mainly though, I'm trying to figure out how much I can do without a single new mod or mod-change of any kind.

 

 

It's becoming more apparent (in my mind) that the prostitution mod is the hub all the spokes have to hang off. Those other mods are just there to make sure you need the prostitution mod.

 

In a game like the one I've got now, getting enslaved to a DF master is about the best thing that can happen to you, assuming the master can win fights with your help, that is.

If you want to invest in skills, its probably best to think about pick pocket, or restoration. At that point, you're adventuring at the master's expense, not your own. An SD+ master might be even better.

 

Alteration spells to buff others seem like a desirable feature too.

 

 

There is still only a very small amount of "content" for prostitution or enslavement, so in the end, you need to get back to the core of vanilla Skyrim, or add a ton of stuff. I would suggest the best path forward is where you can do both, but that's a bit of an ideal situation.

 

Some mods I was using:

Spoiler

Some mods I'm not using right now:

 

  • Bathing in Skyrim - so many patching and compatability issues - may add it if I have time.
  • Loot and Degradation - too script heavy for too little benefit. A simpler mod that did a bit of gear breakage occasionally would be just as useful (to me) and have 1% of the load.
  • Community Uncapper - already using SkyTweak, so mostly pointless. I see no need to limit skill levels when raising them is so damned hard. With SkyTweak can simply make that high level training too expensive to bear (but it's not per-skill).
  • Katixas Skill Lock Cap - this would be what I used if I wanted to cap, as it does just that. Hopefully does not conflict...
  • Trade Routes - might be interesting - but my PC can't even travel yet so ...
  • I am Your Shield - also interesting - didn't know about this before I started looking at all this stuff.

 

I think L&D is probably the fanciest, most complicated mod on this list, and its benefit in a weak character game is pretty small. With so many other limits on your combat ability, and so many other better cash sinks, broken weapons seems pointless. Even if you have a mod to stop weapon looting, this is just fiddling around with the last percentile.

 

Compared to the massive effect a mod like Wounds has, or the huge impact of cash draining compulsory DF, or removing normal XP gain mechanisms and starting with low skills ... it's just not that big a deal. I don't see bang for buck. Can anyone convince me I'm wrong?

 

 

OTOH, Jobs in Skyrim is punching above its weight. It gives you more things to do that aren't fighting. It's "content" for prostitutes that want a day off, and it works, albeit I had to fix some bugs in its ESP right off the bat. It might not be the best content, but it's something. The incomes are so low compared to prostitution that it genuinely makes that profession look like the "Make big money fast" scheme the innkeepers call it in ME. Of course, it's the innkeepers that get the best of it; you're working to pay them, and they're taking a cut too.

 

On Mortal Weapons and Armors

Spoiler
  On 1/18/2019 at 9:34 AM, Corsayr said:

That has a lot of cool features but is currently in a very raw state. Lotta bugs much tweaking needed. 

I saw this, and I thought ... I'll try it if he keeps on fixing it ... but I'm a hard sell. I'm not really looking for an armor/weapon degradation system in the first place.

Also, it has all the laggy pain of DD, because objects in containers aren't containers, and like DD, doesn't cache instances. This is a Skyrim code pattern that probably should go away.

 

I prefer the kind of game where once you get far enough in, it's all about named unique weapons, and that sort of thing shouldn't break unless it's a story point.

Clearly, my "weak" characters won't be getting any of those, but from what's happened so far, they lose most weapons to theft already anyway.

 

I was surprised people were jumping at L&D earlier in this thread. I'm interested in why they think it's important to playing a weak character.

All I'm seeing is a minor cash sink, or possible a small random chance a combat will be lost, in an unfair way that only effects the player - am I missing something?

 

I already have enough cash constraints, and unfair random ways to lose fights.

So many weapons get stolen, due to combat defeat, or weapon drop mechanics, or post-rape theft, I think I'd be lucky to keep one long enough to break anyway. This is less of an issue with armor, but only slightly; I've lost that too.

Adding weapon or armor breakage seems like something you do more because you like the feel of it rather than it making a big change to the game.

 

What the Equipment Durability mod has going for it, is SKSE plugin only, no ESP, and no script load. I could imagine adding that, simply due to the low cost and high convenience.

 

On messing up your alchemy

Spoiler
n 1/18/2019 at 12:06 PM, Corsayr said:

After alchemy, enchanting is the 2nd most game breaking mechanic in Vanilla Skyrim (IMO). Giving a max armor set custom enchantments can really give you a significant advantage especially since NPCs rarely have multiple enchanted items. 

 

If you want to take away your alchemy advantage there are various choices, but I didn't see much discussion of them in this thread.

How are people dealing with this?

 

I have often considered, but never actually bothered, to install a mod that prevents insta-potion-guzzling.

 

The reason for this is, I don't generally need it. Due to robbery, dangers of plant harvesting, and other disruptions, I'm more likely to get useful healing potions as quest rewards or loot than by making them, and will often be very low, or completely out of healing potions. Other potions, like resists, you don't chain-chugg anyway, so it doesn't help with those.

 

The one potion I used to abuse to extreme, was cum potions from PSQ, but generally not in combat, that wasn't what they were about anyway. As PSQ would just give you them as a by-product of sex, and they were a valuable store of satiation, I would burn satiation to buy stats, perks, skills, spells, etc, then refill from the potions. This usually involved chugging about twenty of them, but it was not an in-combat action so...

 

PSQ is the opposite of "weak character" though, it's more like insta-win ... and being able to fly ... it's fine if you just want to smash through a main quest completion or explore some vanilla quests you might have missed before.

 

 

Enchantments though... The change I always thought made sense for enchanting is that you should be able to get some benefit from disenchanting items with enchantments you've already seen, so it serves as a sink for items, without yielding cash.

 

I can imagine a mechanic where you have to use a "material" you get from disenchanting previously seen magic to maintain enchantments on items you use. That material could possibly just be filled soul gems, or something new, or could come in flavours, so you need to disenchant more aggressively, or can't always keep your enchantments running.

 

A brief review

Spoiler

 

Reviewing some things:

 

When it comes to making the PC weak, we have plenty of options:

  • Stronger enemies
  • Limiting skill increases
  • Limiting starting skills
  • Capping skills
  • High risk combat mechanics, such as deadly combat, or simply turning up damage scaling
  • Combat consequences (like wounds)
  • Limiting armor or weapon availability
  • Limiting combat enchantments
  • Limiting combat potion use

Maybe I missed something, but the summary is: no shortage of choices here.

There are enough ways to make the PC weak in combat that you can pick from dozens of flavours and approaches.

 

 

Making the PC weak is just the starting point. What sort of game is it supposed to deliver?

 

 

More often than not, the aim is some kind of slavery, or prostitution game.

I think it's fair to say that most people who read LL forums aren't doing this so they can play a candlestick maker or a blacksmith, even if they might consider it as a briefly amusing distraction, it's not the focus or intent of making the PC weak.

 

In the same vein, the goal isn't simply a harder game, though that is a side effect I suspect most people interested in this sort of thing would consider beneficial.

 

 

So, once you've made it so that the player has a high risk of enslavement, and is very likely forced into prostitution, simply to keep the character "functional", what sort of gameplay are we expecting from that slavery, or prostitution?

 

 

Given what's currently available, it seems like the best part of the "weak character" approach is the difficulty increase "side effect", and the slavery and prostitution is ... a bit underwhelming as a game, with almost no content, and content that is often dull.

 

 

Slaverun is probably the biggest "content pack" for this, and there's lots of good stuff but ... also lots of grind: dull travel back and forth quests, or sex scenes that drag on for hours with no meaningful player interaction.

 

RP has some prostitution quests. Not a large number, but there's something. Most don't really have that much player involvement though. You get to a place, and then things happen, and you might get the odd dialog option. Mostly, it's about grinding sex scenes. Over and over.

 

SD+ and ME have content that is more like a sandbox, and ME offers a fair bit of button pushing, but it's hard to find much of a game in either.

 

SD+ fetch tasks pivot on pure luck as to whether the required items are available nearby, and the SD+ main quest is mostly just a bit of searching and dialog; though there is some combat at the "end" of the currently available quest. It's not finished, and has been like that for ... a long time ... though perhaps this year we'll see it tied off.

 

ME is more of a pure sandbox, with no story content. A lot of what exists as "escape" challenges seems broken. If you end up as a brothel slave, you probably aren't getting out. Ever. Not by design, but because the mechanics don't work as they claim to. If we imagine that content worked properly, it would still be little more than an extremely repetitive grind of sex scenes to earn your freedom.

 

CD is another chunk of content. With a struggle you can play through it, but it has a number of bugs, most of which result in task failures, or jam up its main quest completely. Setstage and property hacks can resolve much of this, but it erodes most of the fun that would otherwise be present. We've been waiting years for a serious revamp of this, to fix the bugs, and there's nothing in sight. It's hard to speculate where it's headed, but it seems like new problems/tasks (the changes in DD for example) are arising faster than it's progressing.

 

When CD works well, it can be great, and there's lots of immersion, but there's a lot of grind too. Whether it's mining, making butt-plugs, or chopping wood, it's grind.

 

 

There are other mods with conventional quests, some now old and broken, others still maintained. Devious Cidhna, DCL, etc. all have up-to-date working quests that are fun to play from time to time, and may (or may not) fit well with the weak character game.

 

 

The pattern that repeats here is repeated attempts to extend a small amount of content with cheap "content extender": grind. Whether it's chopping logs in a maid uniform, or watching a thousand sex scenes, it all becomes grind after a while. The Slaverun and CD grind is perhaps the most classical in a game-design sense; they both go out of their way to make the player do repetitive, time consuming tasks to gain access to tiny packets of rewarding unique content.

 

 

With RP and SD+ it's often the case that the design doesn't distinguish between grind and the "good stuff", as if the author feels there is no difference. In those mods, the grind is also the spice. It works longer or better for some people than for others.

 

 

DF, in contrast, leverages vanilla Skyrim gameplay, and adds a few little packets of spice to it. This works very well, but you are playing regular Skyrim most of the time. It's a tricky fit for the really weak PC, who can't fight at all, particularly if they lack tools to help the follower. Also, you're beholden to Skyrim follower AI, which is by no means capable, and which often suffers at the hands of bad nav-meshing, both by Bethesda, and modders. On the up-side, you're not too beholden. It's not like mods that drag the player. In DF the player drags the follower, and if they won't path, you can always port them to you. Sad as that is, that's followers in Skyrim.

 

DF doesn't add a lot of content of its own (though there might be more than most people think), but it lets you play Skyrim while keeping the "weak player" feel. It's probably the best content at the moment, but you need a setup that lets you help the follower.

 

 

PoP is another contrast. There is no real attempt to deliver gameplay, it's more a kind of "misery simulator". It really does work as a disincentive to go to prison, because being stuck in PoP is genuinely horrible. It's fun, once. And then it's not, instead it's tedious, and you just want it to end as fast as possible. This sure serves as part of a game, but it's not the content we're looking for, it's what we get when we fail. It makes us appreciate the alternatives. It's a stick, not a carrot.

 

 

Another approach of note, is SLSO, which adds some interactivity to otherwise repetitive sex scenes. Sadly, SLSO's interaction is basically just a way to pick an orgasm outcome - an alternative to a random number generator. It's not trying to deliver a "game" as such, though you do have some limited decision making capability.

 

 

How could something like SLSO be made into a real game? Not key-rotation, like DA or Arachnophobia, or key-mashing, like Defeat, that's for sure.

How can we introduce tactics, or even a deeper strategy to a mechanic like that?

 

 

What sort of content could we add to mods like RP to make them feel like there are choices? Presumably, any such content has to be fairly re-usable, because as with the authors of all these mods, we don't have a team of level-builders, and a team of scripters, and a team of content designers, to make all this stuff, we have no animators, or model artists - if we want assets, we have to make them ourselves, and it takes a helluva long time. We have to get some incredible return on effort. A lot of the play just has to be emergent or sandbox based to make the development time investment worth it.

 

 

There's no other way to make enough content as a modder.

It's not through laziness that Slaverun, or CD, or RP work the way they do. In their own way, they're simply trying to give the player more.

 

 

Given those constraints, what content would deliver the most return on development effort?

 

Why I don't trust combat mods - Wildcat included

Spoiler
On 1/18/2019 at 3:16 PM, Corsayr said:

never tried wounds, have you ever looked at Wildcat?

I've looked at Wildcat several times, but I had (still have) a low level of trust that Papyrus script could respond quickly enough to deliver that sort of thing in a satisfactory fashion.

 

With Wounds, the results can kick in a few seconds, or even minutes later, and it's OK, because the main impact is how they force downtime on you. It doesn't matter if the responsiveness is low. But with something like Deadly Combat or Wildcat, or TKHitStop, I don't have any faith in Papyrus - I am convinced that Papyrus isn't designed to respond that fast, and can't be relied on. The aync nature of various aspects of the Skyrim engine mean that we even see dialog updates lagged by Papyrus scripts, where custom conditions or pre-info scripts are involved, and most of dialog is handled in C++, and pre-calculated where possible. TKHitStop has a plugin, but also scripts; I'm not sure what to make of them.

 

I really don't want mods trying to do much on OnHit events, that is how you get stack dumped.

 

If DC, or Wildcat were SKSE plugins rather than scripts, I probably would have tried them by now.

 

Perhaps I'm overcautious, but anything that has such obvious script-overload capability built into its core concepts makes me nervous.

 

 

Worik said you need to take a bit of time adjusting to Wounds, and getting it set up right for you (though not all of that was on this thread). I think that's good advice.

 

Wounds has a big impact on your character. The debuffs are quite extreme, and can easily be made worse if you disregard them.

 

Also, treating wounds is sometimes a tricky proposition. If you're a slave, or you're simply stuck somewhere that you can't get access to the necessary ingredients, the most likely outcome is that they will kill you. It depends on how your needs mod deals with disease, but most needs mods amp up disease considerably, and death by disease becomes a possibility. Even if the disease doesn't get you, the debuffs can lead to death because you're so slow and useless.

 

If you're stuck somewhere remote, and need to get to civilisation, you may find that Wounds will get you, later rather than sooner, but either way, you're in some serious peril on that journey. If frostfall doesn't freeze you to death, you could easily fall to "weak" monsters due to debilitating wounds from an earlier fight.

 

As for slaves, I guess it turns out they have a high mortality rate in Skyrim. If you tweak it so that whipping can deliver cuts, you can genuinely be beaten to death, despite the efforts of SD+ and Slaverun to make this an impossibility. This suits me perfectly, but I should think a lot of people would not want it at all. However, without modification,  canes don't deliver cuts. Out of the box, wounds is merely highly punishing to the errant slave.

 

Magic Drains

Spoiler
n 1/19/2019 at 3:14 AM, sapho888 said:

SD+:  I wish being enslaved didn't completely negate your magic. As a healer character on quests with a master, I want to be able to heal him if necessary.  Whether it is because I have grown to love him or I fear becoming enslaved to the enemy even worse, that should be up to the player.  

Sometimes I've had the more recent SD+ not put a magic draining collar on the PC. They seem a bit random about it now.

Also, if you remove the collar and replace it with a different one, I don't think the master cares, as long as you do the swap out of his reach.

 

SGO. It so needs a quest to set it up. It promises a wonderful supply of free soulgems, but of course you aren't told you'll have to birth them.

 

SLS, yes RND is not great.

 

What I wish for though, is for more of these things to join up better. For wounds to be more aware of your needs mod, for wounds to handle slave tats injuries like apropos, for wounds and apropos to interact, and so on...

 

It's sort of where I want to go with SLD, making a way for the player to wire these things up how they want. So little time to work on it just now. Maybe in a few weeks, things will get sane. I held off needs with it because I had a needs mod of my own I was considering integrating, but better to monitor other needs mods I think - let people choose the one they want.

 

Wounds is Fierce

Spoiler

In the time that my character was able to earn enough money to train sufficiently to enter the College at Winterhold through RP, she still didn't recover from the cuts she got from the wolf attacks, and her leg is still cracked. Wounds is fierce.

 

The college needs a food vendor. Anybody know a mod that adds service NPCs like that?

 

How to lose at Devious Followers

Spoiler
On 1/19/2019 at 4:54 AM, sapho888 said:

While I like the idea of wounds, I found that it was hard to have fun with the game once you became too wounded.  I would basically just wait around until the debuffs went away.  It didn't seem to add enough gameplay to my games to make it worthwhile.  Rather, I just make it so that if I am in a losing fight, I don't just sprint away at warp speed.  I have the NPCs move a little faster than my normal movement speed so that they can catch me if they try.  And then all the slavery/ death alternative mods come into play.

These long imposed waits, where you have money going out, and no way to earn besides menial jobs like cooking, or solicitation are the "benefit" of it for me.

 

But I agree it's not ideal, and that (for example) a mechanism where you could simply spend a lot of money to get cured up fast, would streamline play in those cases where you have a cash reserve, and waiting out the recovery isn't really an obstacle, just a chore.

 

Being able to spend to improve recovery rate would help generally with increasing the playability of wounds.

 

These kinds of waiting periods were one of the things that made me unhappy with every existing needs mod.

 

There is no needs mod that lets you just say "I want to wait a week." In every case you have to handle the boring busywork of eating, sleeping, drinking, etc. If you have food decay, that may mean multiple shopping trips. Even if you have a mod with auto-eating, it's still a bind. RND does not auto eat/drink however, so it's particularly busywork heavy.

 

I don't play Skyrim to play "grocery shopping simulator" I have to do that s**t in real life!

 

That was why in my tiny needs mod, I made it so needs were invisible (and had no script load) except in situations where you did something unusual.

 

If you were in a player home, there were no needs checks at all, instead you'd be reset to fully rested, fed and watered simply by entering a home.

 

If you were went in an inn, there was a dialog "I'd like a meal please." I meant to add some follower handling, but never did.

You paid a flat fee, and got fully fed and watered.

 

There were no penalties for going a day without food, water or sleep, because why bother? It just makes busy work for normal adventuring.

This meant you could generally go inn-to-inn without worrying about buying and carrying food. Or do a dungeon without worrying about it.

 

 

If you got enslaved in SD+ though, hunger and thirst kicked in after the first day, and consumption of food and drink would be tracked. I based the satiation on a k0*weight + k1*value, where k0 and k1 were tweakable for the mod.

 

Also, if you gave oral, you'd get some satiation. I was interested in cum addition, and wanted to tie it into my skooma whore replacement. Didn't happen.

 

Alas, there were a lot of lazy things, and unconsidered cases. I started to fix it and basically ended up with it "in pieces" and not put back together. I wanted to add support for followers, and DCL + DF slavery. Also didn't happen. Well, DF kinda, as it was the first thing I supported, but DF's own food and drink support wasn't really sufficient to get any game play out of it.

 

It may get recreated as part of SLD. Possibly.

 

I like the approach of very low maintenance, low busywork, until you're in a situation where food and drink are a genuine constraint.

 

Problems with DF Lives

Spoiler
On 1/19/2019 at 3:14 AM, sapho888 said:

I establish this atmosphere using a lot of the mods already mentioned previously.  But the major one is probably Slaverun Reloaded which I actually use the cheat to have the cities enslaved but my PC not enslaved in the beginning.  I also turn off the naked law checks as I find having all naked females in cities to be rather strange.  Other mods generally already enforce some kind of nudity for slaves anyway.   Numerous money sinks do include SL Adventures and the the need to pay to leave cities and hire a follower.  One follower framework mod that I'm trying out is Nether's Follower Framework which just recently introduced a follower tax as I liked that idea in DF but I didn't like its lives system.  

This is an interesting idea. I might try it. But I've been trying to hold off Slaverun until a genuine release. I get the feeling that no genuine release is going to appear. Kenjoka is around, but hasn't posted in months. My guess is he doesn't have time to do anything, and might not ever, until the point it's all too old for anyone to care.

 

I'm happy with DF, and like it a lot, so no need for that feature in NFF.

 

If the only thing you don't like in DF is the lives (which seems a small reason to dump a mod that has so much funny stuff in it) then set the number of lives to be very high, and don't set them to be lost on rape. That basically disables them as an effective mechanic. Followers will still get tired and grumpy, even without losing lives. Maybe that is the part that annoys Sapho888 though?

 

Maybe the problem was followers walking on traps and losing lots of lives due to their dumb AI? That is annoying. There are mods that fix it, and some followers have the Lightfoot perk by default. I believe you can also add it via EFF menus, if you are patient.

 

 

I do not like NFF. Not based on experience of playing with it - I never have - but based on looking at the source so I could support it.

It's entirely retrograde, and takes follower framework coding backwards. EFF is much better engineered. Even AFT is better engineered.

NFF reads more like an early release of UFO than what we might expect from the hot new thing in follower frameworks.

 

Improving College of Winterhold

Spoiler
On 1/19/2019 at 4:54 AM, sapho888 said:

If you use some of the College of Winterhold overhauls, they often add more food laying around.  Otherwise, I just go to the inn outside the College for food. 

It looks like I could add Magical College of Winterhold into an existing game without disaster, but it's not quite what I was hoping for.

 

I think Deadly Wenches added a 'wandering' wench vendor in the college. I may recall incorrectly.

 

I don't want to have to go to the inn if possible, basically "because roleplay", and it's unimmersive anyway, as it's clear that most people in the College do not go there, and the character that does has a particular connection with Nalacar. My poor PC spent weeks whoring in that inn, and it's not exactly a happy memory.

 

I'm surprised there isn't a dining hall mod that adds a table of self-replenishing food. With these things, it often turns out there is one, if you can only find it.

 

Update: there is a dining hall and vendors in Winterhold College Improved.

 

On SD+ Masters (Owners)

Spoiler
On 1/19/2019 at 4:14 PM, sapho888 said:

As for DF and the lives system, you actually have it backwards.  I don't want the lives system at all because it keeps the master alive whether I want it or not.  If i fall into debt, there is no other recourse except to pay him back somehow.  I can't try to out think him by sneaking away or leading him into a trap.  And with the mods I have, money is always in short supply with most of it going to food and shelter and taxes.   At least that is how I understand it works.   I liked most of the rest of DF, but that 1 detail runs contrary to how I play and was a deal breaker for me.

That isn't really anything to do with the "lives" system at all. The lives system is a mechanism for punishing you for letting your follower get into bleedout. As a friendly follower can be (or is usually) set up in Defeat, or DCL, or even DA, so that you're only defeated once the follower and the PC are "down" (in bleedout), this ties neatly into situations where the follower was hurt, but you didn't go down.

 

There's a built in assumption that you're not a backstabbing murderer, who would kill a follower simply to escape debt. It's like the assumption that you'll accept enslavement to save some dumb NPC you don't even know in Slaverun - it's just how it is, a lazy bit of narrative with a cheap motivational device, and an outcome that runs on rails. If you don't want that outcome, you don't install the mod, so I understand that could lead to rejecting DF.

 

 

If you are both defeated, then you can escape from DF. Sometimes. If the outcome is Simple Slavery, you lose your existing follower, and your existing debt, and get sold, and may end up in SD+, or back in DF, or in whatever peril you enabled for SS.

 

 

But circling back, I would describe what you're talking about above, in DF, as "master is set essential".

That's pretty much core to the design, so you can't just rack up debt, then knife her in the back and laugh all the way back to Breezehome.

 

I suppose you could convince yourself that leading an SD+ master to his death is "out-thinking" him, but as he cannot think at all, and either moves randomly, or follows you blindly, it's not at all challenging to drag an SD+ master into a fatal combat - at least once you can get him outside and moving. However, in SD+ killing a master to escape is fundamental to the design, and it's had that approach since before there was a 'plus' on it. The flip side of this is that SD+ slavery is not particularly interesting in the vast majority of cases, and being able to rid yourself of it is a relief. It gets hilarious when you have a master who is so tough that he simply kills anything you drag him into combat with. When that happens, you have got a serious problem. If it's a creature, you cannot even serve your time, they keep you forever. I had this with a frost troll in a low level game. Due to how the troll was levelled, it could kill anything but a dragon. Eventually, it was killed by a dragon that breathed fire, but it killed two frost dragons before the fire-breather got him.

 

I'd like it if the victor of combat with your SD+ master attempted to enslave you in a fairly aggressive, hunting, tracking, chasing sort of way. But it doesn't have that. However, I was erroneously enslaved by the dragon that killed the troll, while using the beta, supposed to be impossible. Faction problems resulted, and I was killed by Stormcloak soldiers shortly after. Interference from Defeat may have been to blame.

 

 

If you come to DF expecting it to work like SD+, you're going to be disappointed. The odds of actually getting enslaved in DF are pretty slim. It's most likely you'll end up that way through Simple Slavery, not through DF itself. DF is about deals, and if you refuse to take them, then you get enslaved. If you take the deals, you won't get enslaved in the first place. The goal is to make you take the deals.

 

 

I get that it just seems wrong to some people. It can feel odd that you just do as the follower demands, when they have no obvious means to coerce you, or that they can just enslave you without you fighting back. There needed to be a bit more story and setup to resolve that, I think.

 

 

In DF the "game" is to escape from debt, within the restrictions applied - not so much slavery, but debt. I've played that game in some quite extreme poverty/scarcity conditions, and still found it interesting. While you're enslaved, you don't add debt, so earning your way out is generally always feasible. Slavery works as a sort of safety net for when you totally suck at debt management. (I don't mean that in a negative way, obviously, different games are set up with different financial conditions).

 

Deals also expire eventually, in a normal configuration, so if you don't keep taking them, eventually you will be able to get rid of them very cheaply. It's just a matter of surviving them. I like it as something you can mix in with SD+. Mixing it with Slaverun would be very interesting.

 

 

It re-opens that "joined up mods" can of worms I mentioned earlier though. If only the slavery mods had a coherent measure of submissiveness and willpower they shared. But they don't. SD+ has slavery levels. DF has willpower and resistance. DCL has ... nothing. Devious Cidhna has ... nothing. CD has a whole bunch of stats, but they rarely come into play. There's a willpower framework mod, but I don't think anything really uses it. It's all broken into silos; very disappointing.

 

An idea I totally forgot about... Hmm... Interesting...

Spoiler
 On 1/19/2019 at 4:32 PM, Darkpig said:

A soulgem based economy would be quite something though. Kind of reminds me of the Souls games.

I was thinking of tweaking up a modified DF to work on soul gems.

 

People have been looking for an alternative currency for it, for ages, and there it is, right there, obvious, yet somehow it wasn't.

 

Using SLD to fix Apropos2 weak debuffs (SLD has supported Apropos2 for a while, so this is quite an old post)

Spoiler
On 1/19/2019 at 11:43 PM, xboronx said:

I read that both defeat and submit are now too old and unstable, so they are better not used anymore. Is there a good replacement mod? I especially liked the multiperson/-creature rapes from defeat.

Submit is. It's pretty much dead. Defeat isn't, it's still working as well as it ever did. DA+Defeat is still pretty much a requirement for SD+, and if you don't have them, you can't get enslaved directly into SD+ unless you explicitly surrender. SS is an option with only Defeat or DCL combat defeat in the mix, but you need DA+Defeat for direct post-rape enslavement into SD+.

 

DF can only be reached via DF itself, or SS.

 

I don't have the problem you describe with PoP. Is it simply you set the bounties high? If you get up to a major crime bounty, you'll be arrested.

I typically allow three "hmmm" crimes before it becomes major and am force arrested, just based on the bounties I set in SL Adventures, etc.

 

Apropos2 is an OK W&T mod. W&T is not its core focus, but it takes it quite seriously. vlkSexLife also does W&T and replaces SexLab Aroused. vlkSexLife is not much used, but I found it works pretty well, is reliable and light-weight ... if you want its different arousal model. The SLA model is super-dumb. Ed86 has a mod with a different arousal model, but it's not aimed at regular characters.

 

When I release V13 of SLD, you'll be able to use it to turn Apropos2 into a monster.

 

On potions

Spoiler
On 1/19/2019 at 7:21 PM, worik said:

Buy the right potion, drink it, done.  ? Where is the problem?

Extremely limited availability of potions? Potions not really expensive enough at high levels, too expensive at low levels?

 

I know it's not the end of the world, I just want to be able to tune it more easily.

 

Why I liked DF better than SD+

Spoiler
On 1/20/2019 at 2:49 AM, sapho888 said:

 I've considered DCL's system but my issue has always been that it seems to concentrate more on putting Devious Devices on a PC rather than slavery.  The devices look sexy but then I just stand there in my rubber suit waiting to have them removed because they are debilitating for regular skyrim gameplay.  For me, restraints are a tool not really the end goal. 

Since the XDFF system was introduced for DCL, there isn't really any slavery in it, except Sasha in dominant mode. The XDFF could be used as a foundation to build a master-slave game, but it hasn't been, instead it just applies some randomly selected rules for a random duration and then changes, or doesn't. It feels as mechanical as it sounds. There's not much dialog, and not even the feeling you were progressing or failing that there was before - though the old system was made out of pure grind - what's in there now is directionless pure grind. 

 

I hope it improves in the near term, as it's a nice code demo, but in no way a slavery outcome.

 

 

I feel that at the moment, DF is better at delivering a feel of slavery than SD+. You have a lot of freedom, but you also have some limitations to work within. With a little imagination it can work very well.

 

SD+ is in a better state than it has been for a long while, but it's still a bit oblivious about devices added by other mods, or other quests, and doesn't deliver much for you to do as a slave. DF allows you to play Skyrim. SD+ is allowing more of that now, but it hasn't found the right balance point yet. There's been a will to fix this for some time now, but I believe that bug-fixes and finishing the main quest are the current priority.

 

On DCL Combat Defeat

Spoiler
 On 1/20/2019 at 1:26 AM, Slorm said:

Yes i felt the same with SD+ and I don't like DA in any case, unless it's improved of late it was pretty bug ridden when I last used it.

 

Personally I found the combat surrender option of DCL better than Defeat as it seemed to be more reliable, however you do need to doctor the FormID lists to add in all the races and creatures to get the best out of it. I'm still using DVL v6.1 so it may have changed in later versions though.

 

We could really do with a new combat mod though, not as overly complex like Defeat but with a bit more scope than DCL combat surrender.

SD+ is slightly less dull than it used to be, but still a bunch of tasks you probably can't do at the start, and a lot of standing around waiting to be raped before you get any chance to drag the master about - and you might never get that and just be sold on because you couldn't do any of the impossible tasks.

 

DCL combat defeat got fixes and new bugs in 7.X. In 7.3 it's got a bunch of fixes for most of the new bugs, so it's probably really solid now. I haven't tried them because it still doesn't do SD+ enslavement from combat.

 

I'm using DA+Defeat now, but sort of hating it. DA is buggy. Quite. There are times it will really screw up your game. Turning off anything to do with ragdoll and configuring carefully with respect to Defeat helps a bit. Also cautious bleedout settings and essential player. Even so, sometimes it does something ... really weird.

 

DCL just needs more outcomes, and more tuning for the outcomes. Maybe a few things could be hacked into it by hijacking the SS interface. Kimy did say she would probably allow SD+ enslavement, months ago, but didn't do it. I guess she just forgot. There is SD+ enslavement elsewhere in DCL, so it seems a bit odd. I guess it's not that hard to hack in, so I could put it in myself.

 

On Zaz and other things...

Spoiler
On 1/20/2019 at 4:04 AM, sapho888 said:

I have been very interested in all the interesting changes coming in the next Zaz animation pack by t.ara.  Its development doesn't seem to have the robust system that DD has, but it has a lot of excitement and experimentation going on there.  Its like the Wild West and I hope they strike gold.

I couldn't seem to find much information about this, beyond the usual posts of new restraint pics on the Zaz 8 forum.

If anyone has a link to these new Zaz 9 wonders, I'd like to see them.

 

Spoiler

I'm not involved in this, don't really follow it, and can't really find much information on it. But... it seems like the only person they have that can do scripting is Musje, who seems to have other things going, so I would expect it to be just Zaz 8 plus but more assets, and 8+ is already unwieldy, with a lot of assets nobody uses.

 

Zaz needs breaking up into tractable modules, not enlarging further.

For a start, the "replacement" animations it consumes are a resource that is not merely finite, they are tightly constrained.

 

Its use of other animations is also growing problematic; there is no way I'm going to FNIS XXL just because of Zaz.

I've already become selective about which FunnyBiz animations I install, so I can stay under the limit, but this was a non-issue prior to Zaz 8.

 

DD uses a lot of animations too, but I actually get some use out of them. In Zaz, most sit unused, just like all those assets it adds that are unused or barely used, and most that are used are used by just one mod.

 

I love the idea of those assets, but the approach to delivering them, all in one huge pack, is absurd, bordering on insane.

 

In most cases, the right way to manage those assets would be to distribute them as a "resource" and encourage mods to bundle in the handful they actually require.

 

As any given mod (Whiterun Brothel, and other T.ara showpieces that have no gameplay excepted) uses only a small number of them, it would be more efficient; and with overwrites you'd only be loading one copy of them into your game. (Whiterun Brothel Revamped did have gameplay, but has been pulled, and I'm sceptical it will return. That giant cell was a bad idea anyway. It was sluggish, even on my system, which normally runs Caffeine at 60FPS).

 

However, T.ara etc have become married to this idea of distributing a single monolithic framework that is supposed to be the be-all and end-all of bondage resources, and expecting everyone to install that behemoth alongside DD. It's not a workable plan for the future.

 

It seems to me to be just undermining and discouraging the uptake and use of those assets, instead of promoting them.

Plus, just adding furniture animation after furniture animation is pointless, when there are next to no animations for the dominants to use in combination with that furniture. Because of that limitation, none of those animations can add any gameplay, or even feel genuinely interactive or like a proper "scene".

 

There is no mod, and there never will be a mod, for which having twenty variants of the exact cage mesh with different textures, or five variants of the same tree, with slightly different restraints attached, will make sense. Each and every mod has highly selective needs. The vast palette of Zaz is also its weakness. There must be hundreds of assets in Zaz 8+ that aren't used by anything apart from the test cell; it's just not an efficient way to distribute those assets.

 

And the assets themselves seem designed without consideration of use. There is almost no way to fit some of them into a mod in a coherent way. Every time I wanted a simple, basic (furniture) restraint, I couldn't find it, only far more obscure things with much narrower use cases. It's not designed, it's just ... collected ... as if the whole point of it is to post screenshots and get applause, not really to enable modders.

 

For basic things, like chaining the PC to the wall, there is no straighforward shackles, only weird ones. The same with chaining to the ceiling. And the way it all works is horrendous. If you want to chain the PC up, then remove the restraints when they're not in use, there are a ton of steps. Add to which, the sheer amount of assets that have no helpful catalog or way to locate them bar looking in the test-cell and trial and error in the CK ... it's overwhelming, and a time sink. The focus is all on the content, not on making any of it actually usable. Chances are you end up using the exact same shackles that SS used, years ago now, and which are in Zaz 7 anyway.

 

Bondage Furniture World tries to do something with it all, but it's whipping or nothing. I like that BFW tries to get some use out of those assets, but in the end its use case is so narrow. It does almost nothing for my game apart from decorate towns.

 

 

Going back years, ME tried to make use of the various SexLab furniture scenes, and there's still scope to do some things with those - most aren't used by anyone but Delazon, or perhaps at all - but it should be self-evident that none of them require Zaz.

 

 

My personal experience is that there is no reason to use Zaz for sexlab playback now. If you already have DD, then that's (more than) enough. Writing to target Zap makes you have to deal with alternate code paths that are simply time wasted. The only reason to do that now is to support Zap items. I think Zap items were the right way to go, but they lost, DD won, its beta and VHS. We're stuck with DD and its constant performance-sucking spawning of placeatme items to obtain instances and that's a done deal now. At this point in Skyrim modding (or Fallout for that matter), Zaz is not going to make some amazing comeback. It is too late for that to ever happen.

 

It's hard to love the proprietary atmosphere that pervades both DD and Zaz "version X" development. I have misgivings about the way both groups behave, but the state of it all is still something you have to deal with if you want to make a BDSM mod. DD may be written by a tiny exclusionary clique, but at least they are a reliable exclusionary clique, who have some grasp of what their 'end users' need and want (and that's modders more than players). T.ara seems more oriented towards generating web traffic. If this were not so, what we call Zaz 8+ would be a collection of separate resource files for modders to download, not a giant pack for end-users to download. The giant pack has to exist so that players have to download it, driving traffic to T.ara's blog, the Zaz 8+ forum.

 

The politics around Zaz always seem uncertain. It doesn't inspire confidence; using it feels like building on sand. There's no clarity over what their direction is, and the existing product is disliked by a lot of players due to the tiny practical value it delivers in return for its huge size. That may be because mods aren't using it as much as they could, but it's a circular problem. Modders lack confidence to use it, because they don't know when it will disappear off the face of LL without warning AGAIN, only to return, equally suddenly, renumbered, or with a plus, or another plus, or who knows what, and the whole thing shrouded in rumours.

 

We've gone over a year now, with people wondering if building on Zaz 8 is a safe path for their mod.

Nobody wonders that about DD except Veladarius.

 

I originally started building a mod based on Zaz 8 (my SW replacement) and I came to regret it. That mod is in limbo now, largely because of that decision.

 

 

 

The Zaz pack, as it is now, is a solution in search of a problem, and has a history of disputes and poor technical quality that makes many modders nervous of using it.  If I had to make a bet, Zaz 9 will be more of that. Probably it will use so many replacements that you can't mix it with DD in an install, and if that's the case, it will be dead on arrival.

 

 

  On 1/20/2019 at 8:00 AM, Slorm said:

Like you I couldn't figure out the widget toggle key. I assumed it was an ascii code but that doesn't seem to work

Key configs for Skyrim are invariably key-codes, not ASCII, such as listed here: http://www.kbdedit.com/manual/low_level_vk_list.html

 

Of course, that doesn't mean that the key even works in the mod you're using, it could be broken.

Wow, posted so long ago, and ... nothing has changed ... except maybe now it's obvious that T.ara doesn't expect you to install DD at all, T.ara wants Zaz to be your only bondage mod. Possibly also wants it to be so big that you can't install any other mods ever :) 

 

On how DD isn't gameplay

Spoiler
On 1/20/2019 at 1:50 PM, sapho888 said:

But maybe I shouldn't have brought Zaz in the first place.  I didn't mean to make this thread into another DD vs Zaz debate ?

Yeah. I probably shouldn't have posted all that, but it's a sore point with me. I put a lot of time into trying to build on Zaz 8, and regret that.

 

My real concern remains the point at the end. The two mods are already almost incompatible due to animation resource consumption, and I only see that getting worse.

If Zaz 9 adds any significant number of replacement animations, there is no way you will be able to mix it with DD.

 

 

And the point that started this was made earlier, by others, about DD: just having devices put on you isn't gameplay.

 

There is a little play in DD, in key hunts and escapes, but DD is mostly used in a cheap way that doesn't add gameplay, because anything else takes time and effort, and modders lack time, they always lack time.

 

DCL's Captured Princess LAL start is a good example of play that uses DD as part of a quest, rather than just putting items on the player. It's a little rough in places, but there's some nice immersion, and it's not just "run to a place and don't die".

You could make gameplay with DD - there is a thread of mine on the Devious Contraptions forum about that...

 

On having too many mods and too many cash sinks

Spoiler

What I'm finding out now, is that I've overdone it a bit.

 

There are too many cash sinks, and too many skill blockers. Things start bad, then get worse. Then even worse.

 

With both FMEA and DCL making harvesting a hazard, and FMEA alchemy, it's just another hazard. You get narcosis or an allergic reaction, and you're very sick. When that's piled on top of maxed out Apropos2 W&T, you're in a bad state.

 

With a DF and all the other cash sinks, you can't really pay off the DF, and with more deals you're increasingly unable to pay them off. Pretty much any money you can make in RP goes to the DF follower, who you can't get rid of, because you're so deep in deal-debt.

 

And then, if you try to adventure, you quickly end up crippled by wounds, despite the follower, and can't afford to (or even find, in most cases) cure them with potions. You're left with a severe concussion, W&T maxed out, and maybe FMEA penalties too. You can barely walk. You can't help the follower much, as you have no skills, no spells, no health and no mana.

 

 

The only thing you can do, is RP work, and that keeps W&T maxed, and isn't enough to get out of debt, let alone buy any advancement.

And if you can find any loot from the follower's kills, you can't carry it, due to crippled stats and SL Adventures poverty stopping you carrying anything.

Just food and board alone are enough to soak most of the money, unless I get lucky. I daren't even undertake Military Camp trips, because travelling is too risky.

 

The setup needs some balancing.

 

Things went completely sideways for me after RP companions visit. Apropos killed me for that. I looked in a barrel and DCL hit me, then walking at a crawl, just trying to get to Riverwood, savaged by wolves while the follower faffed about not saving me, severe concussion, and more cuts.

 

 

In this kind of game, FMEA is overkill. I think that can be dropped. You could abuse the hell out of alchemy, you'd still be on the ropes most of the time.

 

DCL seems unnecessary too. Random bondage? You have a follower for that. Possibly, could keep FMEA and drop DCL.

Or possibly turn off both.

 

If you can actually go adventuring, the wounds are hazard enough.

 

SL Adventures Poverty can probably be turned off too.

 

RP doesn't have enough interesting going on to want to keep watching it, so adventuring has to be at least partially viable.

 

 

I'm starting to suspect that Wounds would be better if you could only get the more serious wounds (above bruises) as a result of going into bleedout.

That would be a good punishment for getting saved by DA bleedout mode and the follower.

 

If RP had some quests, possibly repeatable, where you have a bit more input than just going to a place and doing more sex scenes.

 

 

If only W&T and Wounds were a single integrated thing, it would be a lot easier to set up and balance, and you could potentially cure W&T or Wounds a bit more often. As it is, I can't cure either, as I can't get the ingredients for W&T, and I rarely see a Wounds potion for sale. If I do, I can't afford it anyway due to DF sinking all my cash.

 

I don't think DF is the problem here, it's doing what I want most of the time. It's sinking cash in a potentially interesting way. The problem with the other obstructions is that they aren't interesting, they just stop you doing anything but RP.

 

On problems with DCL and Apropos2's ideas of "balance"

Spoiler
 On 1/23/2019 at 12:31 AM, sapho888 said:

I've tried various W&T mods in the past but none really worked the way I wanted them to.

I think the damage in Apropos2 works reasonably. It doesn't account for duration, but it seems better than Apropos Classic.

 

However, the only ways to heal are time, or spider eggs, or chaurus eggs. Amusing choices, as obtaining either is generally risky.

Even more so, if you have Parasites installed.

 

However, as I can't get either kind of egg, that leaves only time, which I don't have either. Not the kind of time it takes to recover from maxed out abuse values.

 

 

The keep your arousal down game in DCL is ... something ... but it fails to really be a game as soon as some bothersome NPC sticks you in a belt with plugs, or some mod feels the need to make you unaccountably horny at the slightest application of a Devious Device. After that, you're just pegged at 100, so all you get are more DCL events. Bam! Bam! Bam! Full set for you! And as soon as you manage to get a few devices off, you get more.

 

DD is another insect in the ointment here, as it feels a need to decide you can never struggle out of, or cut a device off, due to some kind of 'fumbled check' or critical failure on escape. I get these far more often than I actually escape. That leaves you beholden to keys, which means looting containers, which leads to getting more devices.

 

You can always ask your DF to remove some devices, but the cost is problematic, and usually ends up with you indentured to wearing more devices anyway, so you're no better off with that. If you could earn money, it would be OK, but you can't earn the big sums you need to pay anything off; RP brings an income, but it's a capped income that increases only slightly as you level up your customers served. New service options don't always mean more money, and in many cases require travelling that is either impossible, or too expensive.

 

 

So, DCL isn't workable due to the mechanics, regardless of immersion issues. For a regular game, where you have a house, and a chest full of keys you looted, or at least money, and cached DD items you can trade to the Dollmaker, getting all bound up is usually escapable and survivable (though not always). In a game where you don't have those safety nets, a pair of slave boots can be a slow death sentence.

 

It's not just slider tweaking...

Spoiler
On 1/23/2019 at 1:05 AM, worik said:

Your mods are fine ? you just need to tune not-all-sliders-to-maximum !

Maybe just some.

You say that, but your setup is different enough from mine to be a another world. You have no DF, no DCL, no SL Adventures, and no RP; the play style is not even going to be close. It would take me all day to list the hazards you don't have that I do.

 

i.e. sure you have apropos, but you aren't getting gang raped by a entire guild of werewolves as a means of financial support. When that happens, apropos notices. And it should. That problem there is not apropos, it's RP thinking that even it just some harmless fun worth paying you 500 for, when it cost me 400 just to travel to Whiterun to have it happen! So, I take all that damage, for essentially zero profit. That would be fun, if that was the low point. The low point is narcosis and allergic reaction from picking a couple of herbs, compounded with a severe concussion, and an outfit made of rubber bondage rather than armor. I have two walking speeds. Very slow and totally frozen in place by some dumb min-speed fixer bug.

 

Your alchemy is harder, but FMEA poisoning me close to death is just a contributing issue, I already had no stamina or health before it took away my regen. So now I die if a wolf looks sideways at me. Also, I have Skooma Whore +Addicted lurking, ready to pounce, but that hasn't even hit yet.

 

 

My sliders are a helluva long way from maximum. Really.

 

 

My DF is set on very soft settings, and DCL is considerably turned down, and almost entirely disabled anyway apart from the core random items in containers.

 

My Wounds is substantially turned down, with base wound percentage reduced from default, and cuts, broken bones and concussion also turned down. The wounds count is turned down to 1 too (defaults to 3).

 

I've recently turned Wounds down further, with base wound chance now reduced from 15% (previous) to a mere 10% but that doesn't help me get rid of all the wounds I have.

 

 

FMEA, I turned off a lot, but the adjustments aren't really suitable to get any result that makes it worth leaving in, so it's just dead weight with almost all the grief turned off.

 

DCL has the same issues. It simply lacks the granularity to tune properly for low chances. As I have to set up for a 100 arousal configuration, if I manage to rid myself of the arousal DCL is basically turned off.

 

The alternative is arousal causes too many events, or arousal is tuned out, and has little effect.

 

At that point I start to wonder why I'm bothering with it. I have DCL to enable the events, not to make them super-rare, but even rare events can trigger an avalanche with all the other mods in play.

 

Too many variables, too many interactions, too many effects that can magnify each other.

 

If I want a half-stable game-state, I need to remove some.

 

And that's not even addressing how super-dumb SL Aroused (Redux) is, but I've been over that issue many times in the past. Writing a replacement has been on my TODO list forever. 

 

But with belts, and SLA as it is, arousal will clamp at 100 and stay there. That's just how DD has designed plugs and belts. You can't lose arousal and you gain it faster. The only fix for DCL in this case is to tune arousal out of the cursed loot chance, and then there is no arousal game.

 

 

As for Apropos2. I think the results it's generated are tame enough already. It's not the problem. In some ways, it's too tame. The problem is that my character is trapped in a situation of ceaseless whoring simply to avoid enslavement by the follower, and keeps abuse levels at max, or near max, which combined with all the other things starts to become quite a burden. Some of the other things need toning down that is for sure, and some just need removing.

 

I may well turn down many more things I have installed a bit (DF interest rate is a killer for example), but for now, the system needs a bit of simplification. Without a little simplification, tuning everything is impossible because it's chaos.

 

On configuring mods

Spoiler
On 1/23/2019 at 2:15 AM, Corsayr said:

I sort of thought you were heading in that direction, but I figured you knew what you were doing.

Haha. I don't think you can predict exactly how these things are going to interact until you try it.

 

That's why I started experimenting. My method is throw in everything and then erase what isn't helping.

 

 

Normally, DCL is a must-have, and without DF in the mix, it probably would be.

 

Normally, I'd use DCL combat defeat, not DA+Defeat, but I want SD+ to enslave on defeat sometimes.

That is SD+ at its most immersive. Being sold to an SD+ master via SS is a failure, I'd almost say don't select it as an SS destination if you have alternatives.

 

DCL rape is not needed due to SL Adventures; DCL bondage dialogs is a silly feature that exists pretty much to support one Dollmaker quest that barely works anyway.

 

DCL's NPC comments and actions are tolerable if you turn the action chance waaaaay down, and increase the cooldown so you aren't seeing dumb unimmersive comments all the time. There is nothing particularly fun about having NPCs almost constantly stick restraints on you simply because you already have restraints on you. It's just ... a weird mechanic.

  On 1/23/2019 at 8:36 AM, SkyAddiction said:

2. In DCL, use specific event chances, lower arousal weighting to negligible values, set max devices to 3 or 4/no full sets/no progressive bondage. Set rape conditions to 3 or 4/chance to get tied up to 5% or less, 1% chance of NPC actions/no follower/only when visibly bound, no public nudity/public sex crime/misogyny to 0.5% if you use it at all. Oh, and set hardcore events to level 15 or so.

Trust me, I know how to set up DCL :) In this circumstance, there's no immersion coming from it, and the gameplay has to be tuned down to almost nothing.

And I also know it adds quite a bit of load, especially on opening dialogs. So if you can not install it, that's a big win. I can't drop it from this game, but after more testing I'll be making a new LO, and it will be out for that one, due to being replaced piecemeal, or simply adding a class of hazards that don't fit with the game style/theme. Cursed Collar for example, or Rubber Doll, they're fun for a character who usually has it easy, but for a character who can barely feed herself, they're more like fatal catastrophes where you almost certainly can't survive the travelling involved. Being sent to SS with DCL quest items on is just a recipe for a broken game, so that's not a way out.

 

Normally, I don't use RP, or FMEA, or RRR, or JoS, and I'm still pretty new to Wounds.

This is only the second game where I've been using a "pay to advance" model, set up in SkyTweak, and All Trainers (Alternative).

It's the first time I've ever tried SXP, which is also offering advancement options (unlike the other game, where I'm doing pure pay-to-advance).

 

SXP is ... interesting ... there's a lot to digest about its impacts ... and advancement is certainly much slower than in vanilla.

 

 

I've used FMEA maybe only a couple times in the past, and hated it then. But those were early days for it, and it wasn't as polished as it is now.

I think, out of the box, it exists to pretty much disable most crafting. Really makes it a struggle to master alchemy, or anything but Smithing (which it doesn't cover).

 

For me, the negative effects can't be tuned sufficiently.

They seem to be set up for a vanilla game, where you have no other problems but FMEA.

In contrast to that, I have 99 problems, and an excessive supply of healing potions isn't one of them!

 

I have so little need of something like CtD that it's not funny. I don't have a single potion, and the only ones I ever had I looted in Helgen and ended up using almost immediately.

 

On how DCL quests and Simple Slavery do not mix

Spoiler

I just want to split out a point I covered in passing above:

 

DCL quest items and combat defeat outcomes via Simple Slavery

 

 

It's a long-standing problem in DCL that the quests can't be suspended somehow if you end up defeated.

Even a trivial defeat outcome, like being bound in the wilderness, isn't really compatible with DCL quest items.

 

Some items, like the Rubber Doll Suit, or the Cursed Collar render all other content blocked for all practical purposes.

 

If you're already fully bound, what can be added. And if you have no accessible holes (Queen Sarah) what is a bandit master from SD+ going to do with you?

 

With Cursed Collar or Rubber Doll, an SD+ master can't even collar you, because the collar is blocking.

 

 

DF was designed to work around this as much as possible, but SD+ and other "slavery" mods, like DCL's own Leon/Leah, or Devious Cidhna can't really cope with this.

DC for example, relies on you removing bindings to complete quest stages. It's fundamentally incompatible.

 

 

DCL quests are largely incompatible with any combat defeat slavery outcome, and many other defeat outcomes too.

If you're playing a game where you have those outcomes, you either have to disable those quests, or disable the outcomes, or kludge it with quit and reload on a case-by-case basis.

 

 

If DCL had some custom combat defeat outcomes for when you're on a quest ... for example ... escape from ruined tower ... escape after being thrown into a pit ... escape after being given to a specially designed master (probably the Dollmaker), possibly involving some tasks you have to do in the latter case, it would make for decent time-sinking and punishment, without having to use real-death, or total disablement of most outcomes.

 

On vlkSexLife and things I wanted to do with SLAX (but still haven't done)

Spoiler
 On 1/23/2019 at 4:38 PM, afa said:

YES! That's it! I was planning to gave that a try, but needing to start a fresh game was just enough of a huddle for me to put it in the backlog at the time.

As much as anything, I ended up with the feeling that many mods have been tuned around the dumb behavior of SLA(Redux) and so vlk ends up putting the PC under less stress, generally.

 

In DCL for, example, you rarely need to worry about arousal, because rape suppresses arousal for a significant duration afterwards, and DCL also results in rapes.

That means you no longer have the "arousal game" as DCL seems to intend it.

 

vlk is utimately a simulationist mod, just like SLA.

 

A gameplay based mod for arousal would raise arousal based on something the player can control, at some cost, or with some effort - giving the player choices.

 

On simulationist designs and SLD

Spoiler
On 1/23/2019 at 5:03 PM, SkyAddiction said:

Simulationist definitely describes both SLA and vlk, though vlk makes far more sense in its implementation given current mod systems.

The problem with having an arousal system that is driven primarily by sex acts, is that it is almost assured to have predictable feedback loops that have weird threshold points.

 

It's fundamentally dull, because the player can't control it, it's all just feedback in the same system.

 

 

To be a game, the player needs a handle (or two) they can pull that is not about having sex or abstaining from it.

And pulling that handle should have a cost, that isn't directly linked to sex acts.

Then, the player actually has a choice.

 

For example, Apropos will let you heal W&T by eating chaurus or spider eggs.

 

What if you could lower arousal, or even lower arousal time rate, by eating, or drinking something else?

 

What if something more available could be used to raise arousal, or simply change it according to some predictable rule?

 

Alcohol is one thing. Drink booze, sex seems more appealing.

It's easy to imagine some ingredient, or potion that has the opposite effect.

 

However, another substance could work based on current arousal.

 

Skooma might reduce arousal when you're already below 40, increase it if you're already above 60, and do nothing much if you're in the middle.

 

Bathing in cold river water => arousal set straight to 0.

Bathing in warm heated pool, inside => arousal bumped up to 60.

 

 

I could come up with many more simple mechanics like these to let the player mess around with their arousal level, if they are prepared to buy stuff, make potions, go places and use things, or simply do immersive stuff.

 

What we don't really need, is another arousal model based entirely around how much sex you have, no matter the actual model.

 

 

Personally, I'd like to see "sex addiction" handled by a specific mod, so you don't have it unless you install that mod, and if you do, you can customise it properly, so the effects of not having sex are more interesting than just getting some arousal.

 

SLD is aimed at handling some of these things, and I want to do more in future, but that in no way prevents someone making a dedicated sex-addict mod.

The frigid potions do something towards this...

Frigid potion should be a stand alone mod.

 

On ideas that seem to be heading towards SLAX

Spoiler
On 1/23/2019 at 7:06 PM, worik said:

So basically, we would need a flexible arousal modifying plugin/extension for SLA/SLAR ?

Not exactly. We need a shell that replaces the API to SLA(R), including emulating the internals touched on by DD and SLSO.

 

Then we can place any arousal model we like into that API shell.

 

More getting wound up to do something about SLA(R)

Spoiler
On 1/23/2019 at 8:37 PM, karlpaws said:

Eager NPCs has some potions and spells you might want to look at. If the mod itself is more than you'd want to use, maybe the mod author would let you extract that portion of the mod for a stand alone.

I used Eager NPCs for a while, but took it out because it added a lot of dialog to NPCs that - seemed to me - frequently out of place on them, and which was rather easy/tempting to exploit.

 

Oddly enough, I was thinking about whether it would make sense to bring it back into my game. After some consideration I decided it wasn't a good fit with RP. I'm not totally sure, but for now, I think it's staying out.

 

It's one of those things where I end up wishing mods were more joined up. If ENPCs and RP were more integrated they could potentially complement each other in interesting ways.

 

When I used to use it, I thought those potions needed a bit of balancing.

I couldn't decide if they were simply too easy a solution, too expensive, or too cheap.

I think what made me not like them was that simply spending cash to get that outcome wasn't what I wanted.

 

Going back a way, I did at one point start to write the aforementioned shell to replace SLA(R).

Then I found vlkSexLife and abandoned the effort.

It was only later I decided the vlk model wasn't making things more interesting.

 

SLD reads data from SLA(R); there are several ways to read the state, and the API for modifying it is very easy to use.

That ease is probably key to SLA(R)'s wide uptake.

People have asked for SLD to be able to modify SLA(R) values in response to certain conditions, and I'll probably deliver that in V15.

But I am determined not to start any new modding project that distracts from SLD, as I already have too many unfinished projects.

 

I have had some good suggestions on the SLD forum, and have enough ideas, to make a sex-addiction mod that ought to be fairly novel and entertaining, as far as such things go. Replacing SLA(R) will probably come then, if I ever start it.

 

However, if anyone else does it first, I won't feel a need to bother :) 

 

SLAX Goals?

Spoiler
  On 1/23/2019 at 8:06 PM, Darkpig said:

I never found the point in having in game arousal to be honest. If you get horny when your female character (or any gender) is fucking then the mod did it's job no need for an arousal mod. I go into Skyrim aroused as fuck and exit my room satisfied.

Good one.

 

 

But I'm sure you're aware a bunch of mods depend on SLA(R), and just locking it and setting any values you like is doing yourself out of certain kinds of play.

 

Some people give their character a weapon that one hit kills almost anything. Most people don't, because they want to play the combat game. There are other kinds of game too.

 

For some, the idea of their character being helpless in the face of overwhelming, uncontrolling arousal gets them all worked up.

For others, the similar idea of their character being addicted to sex is the thing.

 

Neither are exactly my thing, but I like the idea of mods like DCL not being totally random, and having ways to influence them.

In the context of the right kind of story, like Slaverun, the right arousal model can add immersion, and help hold a rather silly story together.

 

For some, the arousal is most important when it's used as an NPC stat.

 

But I'm sure you already considered this, so I'm not sure what you're really advocating.

 

 

It's a means to an end, and the ends are various. There might even be something it could do for you, if it worked in a way you thought was interesting. But I get the impression your focus is on minimalism? At least as far as gameplay changing mode go. In which case my bloated load-order should seem very puzzling to you.

 

More on why SLA(R) is not delivering what mods need

Spoiler
On 1/24/2019 at 12:18 AM, xboronx said:

A huge problem for me is also finding the sweet spot when configuring the various mods, very often it is almost impossible because it is either so hardcore that once you get helpless chances of getting unbound again are smaller than winning in the lottery.

This is the problem with a lot of mods, either through unpredictable chaotic behaviours, or through simple weak design.

 

Most of the mods that begin with some kind of simulation as the basis can never be balanced, because they are intrinsically unstable, and the only damping in the system is determined player efforts, which are inevitably going to get overwhelmed at some point. The designers of those mods created simplistic simulations they felt re-created their fantasy-version of reality, and gave scant consideration to how they would play in a game. Hence they do not really play well in a game.

 

 

SLA(R) is an obvious example of this. I never had a character that wasn't pinned at 100 arousal after a long enough game.

And prior to that, there may have been very long stretches of 0 arousal too. It's all extremes and rarely anything in between.

The zero exposure thing could probably be considered a bug though. Exposure's lower limit should be the default exposure level set in the MCM, but instead, appears to be zero.

 

Turning down the time-rate addition from orgasms slows the inevitable, but doesn't stop it - just tends to increase the length of the stretches of 0 arousal that occur in the lead-up to being stuck at 100. Or may not even do that, depending on what mods you have.

 

 

But SLA(R) isn't achieving this by itself. Installed alone, there'd be no sex, and arousal would stabilize at a very low value. SLA(R) by its nature, cannot exist in a vacuum. Once you introduce sex, it introduces more arousal, which introduces more sex, and so it goes until... Pegged at 100 arousal, and constantly refreshing the 100 time-rate back up to 100 with sex.

 

 

Ironically, the outcome of the plugged and belted "simulation" is backwards with respect to the outcome always presented in BDSM genre fiction...

 

With SLA(R), locked in a belt with edging plugs, arousal sky rockets almost immediately. But over the long term there are no orgasms. The genre story is that arousal should climb up and up to new and dizzying heights of desperation. What actually happens is that with no orgasms, there's no time-rate increases, and time-rate decays to 0, leaving base exposure as the only arousal contributor.

 

In contrast, if a plug allows orgasms (non edging) then super-arousal can arise. It's backwards from the genre fantasy, where a character who gets orgasms occasionally should be less frustrated.

 

 

Neither the fiction, nor SLA(R) represents reality, but that has no relevance at all.

 

The real problem is that the game play outcomes from SLA(R) are unstable, and they destabilize your game and create balance problems for mods that are attempting to build game-play on top of it - DCL being the most obvious, SLSO, SL Adventures, and Aroused Vampirism being other obvious candidates. Even MME considers arousal, but the consequences of being stuck at 100 are fairly benign in MME.

 

On Devious Training (and yay, it's finally moving again with v3.0)

Spoiler
On 1/24/2019 at 12:52 AM, chevalierx said:

DT device training is good for gameplay

like alert bandit ; reduce your skill ............etc

I liked where this was headed, but then development seemed to stop. No new release since Nov 2017.

A problem, because the existing release version is seriously buggy.

 

 

There was a beta of a new version, which I tried, and it was better, but still had some bugs and problems.

Alas, there was no further version after that.

 

By the time I'm done with SLD, it should be able to replicate a great deal of DT's functionality, and other things besides, but with more ways to configure it.

Footstep counting, won't be replicated though.

 

I would still be interested in a dedicated mod for this, if DT ever releases a new version, but it needs to address the gameplay balance somehow.

You get trained, and all devices offer some minor benefit. Great. But you got those benefits at the cost of armor, and the flip-side is that if you don't wear them, you're in a worse state than if you do. The end result is a significant combat debuff for any melee, while inconveniencing mages a lot less (though they do lose the ability to wear enchants they otherwise would).

 

It wipes out enchanting entirely as a strategy for any build, without offering alternative play paths.

 

In a perfect world where DT came with quest content to let you earn more compensations for the drawbacks, it would be great, though the idea of always being better off in bondage than not seems a little unimmersive.

 

The DT versions that were delivered were more fantasy simulation than game-play. For some, that is more than enough.

 

More on Arousal

Spoiler
  On 1/24/2019 at 9:04 AM, Darkpig said:

Perhaps I was hoping for a compromise. Controlling your character's emotions is what you do more than anything but the circumstances your character is in is generally up to the game. I get that there is a lack of circumstances that allow you as a person to feel any particular way I mean you aren't the one stuck in a chastity belt with obnoxious teasing vibrators in your hole(s). I don't know how that compromise can be made but I do know that many mods depend on it to work which is kind of a bummer in my opinion. I think systems like crime and slavery could definitely use some tweaking.

There's a common point here.

 

I want the player to be able to control things like arousal more than currently, for pure gameplay reasons.

 

I have the same feelings about stats like willpower or "slavery level" that some mods introduce.

When you can't control these stats, they're just a railroad.

When they're supposed to model some mental state that you are nominally supposed to be in total control over, it's worse: it's breaking the fundamental contract of the game for no benefit.

 

 

DF does let you control Willpower with some very basic tools, but other (more complex, simulationist) models, put forwards in ambitious framework mods moved further from this.

SD+ in contrast to DF, gives you scant control over slavery level (SL). The only real control you have is escape (which may not be an option), and the decay rate in the MCM.

Spoiler

The Bimbo Curse also, has limited input. You get the curse, it rapidly gets worse. Look for a cure. It's cure. It's gone. That is all.

If you could actively slow or resist the curse progression there would be more game play in it.

If the cure wasn't just "hand in an object to an NPC" it could also have gameplay to it.

As it is, the play is you're stuck with no combat skills, no meaningful compensations for losing them, and you need to get a rare ingredient that drops off almost nothing in the game.

If you've already done Bashnag, you're probably screwed, as that's the most reliable way.

There are probably some locations where you can just find what you need lying around, but they aren't common, and monsters that can drop it are ... rare appearances in just a few quests.

This is game design from the school of "Nirnroot is hard to find? You're joking. I'll show you hard to find!"

 

I guess I'm saying that Bimbo Curse misses a couple of chances at greatness, then finishes off by making it so hard to cure that you'll be thoroughly sick of it by the time it's over.

But that's an aside...

 

The problem is when some stat takes away control that is supposed to be yours. The basic contract of the game is that you can make decisions, you get to choose what quests to complete, to pick where to go, and crucially, you pick how to answer dialogs, you control your character's personality.

 

Stats like willpower or arousal are intended to immersively create the experience of "loss of control", which can be fun, even if they seem to violate the basic contract of the game.

 

However, if you can't do anything to genuinely control willpower or arousal, then it's just a railroad, with a single destination, and you'll be dumped there with no return ticket. Your only choice at that point is to disable mod behaviours to regain control of your game, or abandon it completely.

 

I can see how DarkPig concludes this is bothersome, because it obviously is bothersome :) What varies is how much it bothers individuals, and how much they enjoy the "loss of control" fantasy. For some, the trade offs are acceptable, for others, acceptable for a while, but there will always be some who just hate it.

 

For me, the mitigating factor, that lets me tolerate the bothersome aspects, is if control isn't simply removed, but changed.

 

e.g. Your character is enslaved. You still control things, but you have different choices to make. Some options are gone, some new ones are offered. That's genuine new gameplay, genuine new content. I'm fine if it's like that, and the narrative makes sense.

 

 

Slaverun Reloaded might be the best example of an attempt at this.

Spoiler

It succeeds in places, fails in others, but it's trying to make a game. By adding the back and forth between being a slaver and being a slave, offering ways for a slave to grow and have game options in the arena, it's made major efforts to deliver actual gameplay to what used to be a kind of interactive movie where you advanced quests by moving from one set of extreme rapes to another.

 

Alas, the narrative in Slaverun still leaves a bit to be desired, because it's so internally conflicted and muddled over the question of whether the slaves are happy or simply insane broken victims. It tries to have it both ways, undermining both the humour and serious sides of the story. It will take whichever approach seems easiest to make the next quest work, resulting in the odd reversals in the PC's direction and motivation.

 

 

On what were forthcoming SLD features. Now they're just SLD features.

Spoiler
On 1/24/2019 at 5:38 PM, worik said:

I have some ideas how to fix that for the PC, being itself a mix between RL elements and Skyrim's fantasy world.

But nowadays literally ALL mods where made under the assumption of SLA/SLARs current behaviour. Especially for the PC. So, changing that would be very problematic in the big picture.

I don't think it's that big a problem. It can be overcome if you plan to overcome it. vlkSexLife didn't do that.

 

If there is a good variation between extreme low and extreme high values, and ways to influence that, that are interesting to use, it should be fine.

However, a mod that delivers mostly moderate arousal would probably fail with DCL.

 

 

You need to look at what mods you want to work right and understand their behaviour.

I don't think there's a very long list to look at.

 

Basically:

  • assault/rape mods (DH, SLAdv, DCL, SL Kidnapped, Naked Dungeons, SD+)
  • buffs/debuffs(DCL, BWitch, DT, PE, Hormones)
  • ME, possibly Apropos
  • Aradia Devious Expansion
  • SLAV

 

SLD will also do rapes very soon, but you can configure that to work however you like.

 

On things that are fun or not fun

Spoiler
 On 1/24/2019 at 6:07 PM, worik said:

Basically, my idea was the opposite: fix the (lack of) arousal reduction.

Seemingly a tautology, but it's only interesting if it's interesting.

 

Simply fixing arousal reduction ... vlkSexLife makes rape shitcan your arousal for days ... it's not interesting because you can't control whether you are raped (kind of the definition of rape). If you can control it, it's in an MCM somewhere, it's not by playing the game.

 

 

But what I mean is that if you add ways to reduce arousal that are not interesting, and have no gameplay to them, they are just adding mechanics, or simulation.

 

If you add ways to reduce arousal (or raise it) that have gameplay to them, they're interesting and people will get "fun" out of them.

 

 

If you have a needs mod that makes getting drunk and having a hangover fun (somehow), then maybe reducing arousal that way is fun too.

 

 

 

You can legitimately ask "what is gameplay". There's a lot written on this. For the sake of this discussion though, I see it as...

 

The ability to take decisions in a "game" that influence the outcomes and events of the game in a way that is partially predictable, but with additional consequences that may be much harder, or in practice impossible, to predict.

 

 

Imagine a card game. If all you do is turn over cards, and highest wins, you make no decisions, there is no game play, it's moronic.

 

But in a game of Klondike, you decide whether or not to take a viable card from the top of the upturned deck, and further, you know what card is beneath it. The decision has immediate consequences you can understand, and long term ones that you might be able to understand. That is a game.

 

 

Let's say you have a mechanic to dump arousal, but the consequence is 'gamey'?

 

Let's say the mechanic is masturbation ... the obvious consequence is that masturbating in public is illegal. Outcome simple to predict, but...

 

Masturbating in a safe place, might be legal, but also have a consequence if your follower sees it, because they might decide to jam a belt on you. That's a little bit more like a game. And if the chance of the follower belting you now depends on how often you have or haven't had sex with them... Now it's even more of a game... And if you can choose to have sex with your follower, or not, but choosing it when their arousal is high gets you likes, and choosing it when their arousal is low gets you thumbs down... And it's also "plausible".

 

So a simulationist might see it as a simulation of a player relationship with the follower, but it wasn't designed to that end. It's designed to make the masturbation mechanic more complex, choice-driven, but not completely predictable. You can control it, but the levers aren't as easy to work as they first appear.

 

And now things I still want in SLD ... coming soon ... honest :) 

Spoiler
On 1/24/2019 at 6:46 PM, worik said:

And that is where my approach of "mirroring RL" ends without fun. Because RL is no fun here.

If every time some jackass NPC made a smartass comment, it reduced your arousal, you'd certainly be struggling to raise it above 20.

 

Real events are starting points if you're looking for ideas. Take something like "talk to boring assholes" and see what mechanics you could add to make it a game.

 

In DCL, the talking is like everything else in DCL, a random roll of the dice, that may (or may not) be influenced by current arousal.

 

The immersive weakness is that most of it wasn't written taking into account likely high arousal.

 

If "Are you a sex slave, or just the regular kind?" were gated on arousal to "Looks like that collar turns you on. Funny, it's turning me on too."

It could be made to serve as an immersive reminder of high arousal; a warning that risk levels are high.

 

 

The arousal mechanics of DCL are barely a game, but there's the idea that managing arousal won't be trivially easy.

Depending on other mods, it can be sort of a game, or pretty much not one at all.

 

 

SL Adventures is a mod that is ripe for adding more game play to it. There are lots of mechanics, but they aren't designed into any kind of coherent whole.

 

 

For example, I can imagine some stuff just based around outfits. 

 

Wear respectable town clothes, and you get respect, are cut slack by guards, get reduced fines, or none at all, buy and sell on better terms, and have more pleasant, less dangerous conversations with NPCs generally. Smiths and wizards will politely refuse your custom, suggesting you send the man of the family. General traders will try and sell you a pan.

 

Wear slut clothes, and you get contempt, propositions, harassed by guards, higher fines, or arrested for nothing, but ... prostitution works a lot better, you make more money, can collect fees more easily, customers seek you out, they pay more, treat you better in sex scenes, and offer you drugs at discount prices. Smiths and wizards won't even deal with you, except as a whore selling her wares. General traders will try and sell you a lockpick or a washout potion.

 

Wear armor, and you get fear, insults and passive aggressive sniping, and the guards behaviour flips on whether you are a thane or an outsider. Prostitution is impossible, and rape only possible if you're drunk, drugged, or bound. Intimidation is improved, and smiths and wizards will give better prices because you seem like you might know something about weapons or magic. General traders will want to buy at knockdown prices, but will sell you anything.

 

 

Outfit choices are thus actual choices, with no single best option. That's a choice, but it's not a game.

However, if changing outfits has more complex outcomes, then it starts to get a game mechanic.

If you show up as a whore one minute, and an armored tank the next, the NPCs might get confused, or annoyed, that you seem to be playing dress-up. Maybe they'll decide you are one thing or the other, and treat you that way no matter how you dress, until you make an effort to convince them otherwise. Or maybe there is a special place in their hearts for whores who want to be adventurers - and that special place is an awful lot like a slave cage - and might be reached through an organised ambush outside the city.

 

So, what if you can only change outfits safely in certain places?

Or respectable clothes require special maintenance?

Or whore clothes have to be specially made by a tailor who will work for whores?

Or carrying unworn armor undermines the effect of wearing other clothes.

 

That adds more complexity to managing your clothes. I'm not sure it sounds fun exactly. Could just be tedious. It matters how those things are delivered in the game.

If getting whore clothes is like a mini-quest, with funny dialog, and unexpected events (at least the first time), people might not see it as a chore, but as fun.

If you can't stash armor without a house, then the other clothing options are closed to you. Perhaps the rules need tweaking, in that case, to make the other clothing options more attractive, pushing you to make a choice to sell your armor, or take the trouble to buy property, or give it to your follower, who may or may not run off with it and stick you in a collar. See earlier.

 

It's possible to brainstorm these things at length. Easy. A mod like SL Adventures enables some of these possibilities, but not all. What could be added in another mod to fix that?

First decide what we really want ... because implementing new stuff take ages.

 

 

I really want to tune all sorts of things based on outfit, and that is something I'm definitely going to add to SLD. SL Adventures doesn't seem to be likely to add what I want.

I'm so keen to have this feature that I was going to put it in V13 of SLD, but as things have dragged on, and I spent a lot of time avoiding modding, I'm going to push V13 without - very soon now, but it will be the key feature of V14.

 

I also really want blackouts, bounties, and price variations in V14.

 

More on the mathematics of SLA(R)

Spoiler
 On 1/24/2019 at 8:56 PM, SkyAddiction said:

I'm massively shit with math, but SLA increases the rate at which arousal is gained per sex act, provided they're within a defined period of time, right?

I think it's quite simply per-sex-act, there is no time period or window. Every orgasm adds N time-rate, where the default is 5.

But you must orgasm. If you have sex and don't orgasm, there's no change.

 

  On 1/24/2019 at 8:56 PM, SkyAddiction said:

What if that gain was... controlled by a user-defined number equal to the number of sex acts performed within a given period?

So you're proposing X free sex-acts before you can start to gain time-rate?

 

It obviously would prevent a lot of time rate gains if you set it high.

In fact, would probably prevent almost all of them in the average game, that isn't Slaverun or prostitution.

It's hard for a full on, work 'til she drops whore to turn over clients faster than one per 1.5 game hours.

 

SD+ masters aren't anywhere near as horny as that. They only way you get lots of sex from them is insulting them over and over.

 

For normal PCs the timing is rarely more than a couple of acts a day, even with rapes, unless rapes are set with a low cooldown.

 

So setting a value of two, would negate almost all gains, using the system you describe.

 

 

There is no "base" arousal gain. Time-rate is that. There is only one number for time changes, and it's time-rate.

 

The other number "exposure" is something you accumulate due to particular events, like seeing a naked person, or having a plug edge you.

 

 

However, if you reverse the mechanic, so the number determines the number of sex-acts you can have before time-rate increases start being prevented, it would work more like you intend. Low sex act characters would get one or two acts of "gain", but after that would gain no more time-rate.

 

So spike events, like trying to escape the Rubber Doll Collar wouldn't leave them quite so dramatically scarred.

 

Or, you could divide time-rate gains beyond the first by a number that increases according to a value you set.

 

Or you could devise something fancy with a power function, or logs to make the falloff linear or on a curve.

 

But they're all schemes that come down to diminishing returns on time-rate gains for orgasms-per-day beyond N.

 

 

Such changes would have no effect on things that pump exposure, like plugs which is fine.

 

The issue here is that the player will have to play about with that constant, like they currently play about with the rate-gain-per-orgasm setting that already exists. It might be easier to tune, it might not. Would take some time and experimentation to make it do what you're talking about, even then, you've mostly just recreated vlkSexLife - though that actually has a model based around a nominal normal arousal level that can be pushed off centre briefly, or permanently disturbed by addicting events.

 

If the existing time-rate gain value would allow you to set fractional values (e.g. it had a decimal place) it would be easier to tune, but it moves in steps of 1.

Why?

The original SLA was all integer.

 

SLA(R) is internally floating point, with some exceptions. That value is "known" to mods, so it had to be left as an int.

 

 

I'm going to say that the "overthinking theory" is a case of Dunning-Kruger. Actually the simplest way to look at SLA(R) is as a purely numerical system, but that ignores how it interacts with its environment. SLA(R) doesn't run away simply because it's numerically unstable. The original author put in a decay mechanic that can dump any amount of arousal in a pre-selected number of days.

 

This should have prevented rapid runaway and pegging at 100, but it doesn't. There are reinforcing factors in the environment. Often characters end up in solicitation scenarios, or slavery due to a failure or catastrophe. This leads to sex-addiction, which leads to more failures, which leads to more sex addiction.

 

The system of failures is designed to generate the addiction. It's not an accident. If the PC lacks tools to dump addiction at will via some mechanic, they can't break the cycle without taking a big holiday from adventuring - which possibly they can't afford to do, or don't want to because a lot of sleeping is kind of boring, and kind of tedious too if you have RND.

 

Being forced to do something very dull to fix your game is ... very dull ... how much better if it was ... something fun?

 

A mod that handles clothing stats? Hmm, more SLAX wind-up...

Spoiler
 On 1/25/2019 at 6:24 AM, Darkwing241 said:

It would be disappointing to me to have to limit a mod to stock armors (tavern clothes are "slutty" all armors are "intimidating ect.)  Although this is probably(?) the easiest path.

RP and ME require you to manually register clothes as "work" clothes. RP starts with Tavern clothes registered already.

While making the player do this is a bit tedious, it's probably the best way, because the player can have the game they want.

Both have a UI for registering them. ME has a fairly complicated menu system for managing outfits.

 

Another example is Frostfall, which will let you configure warmth and coverage in-game on outfits, but also has a soft-dep API for modders to log Frostfall information on their clothes, that is harmless if Frostfall isn't installed.

 

However, if I had to devise a lazy way to guess if an item is "slooty", I would simply check if it's vanilla or not. If not vanilla, it's probably slooty :) 

Vanilla items come from low numbered modules, so are fairly trivial to identify.

 

Sure, there are mods that add sensible clothes, but the majority don't.

 

Spoiler
On 1/25/2019 at 6:24 AM, Darkwing241 said:

Building your own content off of this would be pretty easy as you could add blocking dialog or bouncers to certain areas/people. 

Hmm. A mod that just tracks scores for clothing?

 

That might be viable.

 

More on clothes

Spoiler
On 1/25/2019 at 1:29 PM, karlpaws said:

I don't remember if the schlongs of skyrim mod's option to mark an item as revealing saves to the JSON or not...

 

Do you mean SexLab Aroused (Redux)? Because that's where I set items as revealing or not.

It performs the arousal calculations based on whether it thinks you are naked or not.

 

Perhaps SoS has a setting too, but I never used it.

 

I don't believe SLA(R) writes a JSON file, but simply stores within the save file.

 

However, that doesn't mean its values can't be obtained.

 

 

The problem with this approach is that you use SLA(R) to flag clothes that are no better than naked - rubber suits, bikini armors that barely cover anything and so on - but clothes like tavern clothes, or Melodic's "Hello Santa" are not equivalent to naked, and I (personally) wouldn't set them as such in SLA(R) - but they still might signal to a customer that the wearer is not exactly a lady of virtue.

 

So it's not useless finding those "naked" clothes, but it doesn't find them all. It just saves the player from having to set them in two places.

 

And in some cases, the player might need to blacklist them. There are clothes I'd set as "naked" that definitely don't indicate a whore at work - they are kind of slooty, but also kind of scary, such as the Spriggan body from SD+, or Hermaeus Mora Priestess, or Daedric Freak.

 

Announcing SLD 13 ... wow, this is old

Spoiler

As I'm effectively done with SLD 13 for now, and just testing, I've been thinking about some kind of clothes mod that would change some social interactions - but not anything to do with combat stats or stuff like that.

 

The problem is how to handle vanilla NPCs generally.

This was discussed back on the SL Adventures forum, and possibly in some PMs with Teutonic.

 

Edits to vanilla NPCs and their core dialog, especially important ones like vendors are highly conflict-prone.

 

IIRC most of these dialogs are driven off factions. Clearly, changing the NPC factions is a non-starter, so the way forward is either edits to those vanilla dialog conditions, or blocking dialogs.

 

Blocking dialogs are their own kind of pain, but DCL seems to get away with doing it all the time. I guess as long as you can get past the blocking dialog, there won't be a problem.

 

Problem is, for this to work, sometimes you shouldn't be able to get past the blocking dialog.

 

Imagine some qualities that measure your visible status..

e.g.

Respectable - does the character look like a trustworthy upstanding citizen, of sound nordic morals? (Regular clothes, fine clothes are better).

Slooty - does the character look like a nymphomaniac on the prowl (a transparent rubber suit and a tutu)

Whore - does the character look like they are cruising for business (whore clothes)

Criminal - does the character look likely to rob you (thieves guild outfit)

Disgusting - does the character look dirty, unpleasant, or otherwise something you would not go near? (e.g. have living armor)

Dangerous - does the character look like they might punch your face in? (Heavy armor and weapons, covered in blood).

Powerful - does the character look like they could have you thrown in prison? (e.g. You are a known thane)

Ridiculous - does the character look like a joke? (A silly little man in a jester's costume?)

Pathetic - does the character look deserving of pity? (A beggar with a missing limb)

Helpless - can the character do anything to protect themselves? naked and gagged, in an armbinder

 

Could add more, or have less, that's another topic, probably...

 

I'm guessing these would have a small number of ranks:

0 - does not apply

1 - maybe, a bit

2 - yes definitely

3 - yes, and it's just about the only thing you can see about them

4 - the character is the very archetype of this concept, their whateverness is at a supernatural level

 

These are represented by adding or removing characters from factions, so you can even set them on NPCs if you want.

 

And for efficiency, there are some compounds (global values), that will tell us directly whether types of vendors will deal with you.

DealWithBlackmith, for example is Slooty == 0 && Whore == 0 && Disgusting < 2 && Ridiculous < 2 && Pathetic == 0

In this case, criminals can talk to blacksmiths but sloots, jesters, and people with a carrot stuck up their ass can't...

 

 

So...

Blacksmith gains blocking dialog, condition DealWithBlackSmith == 0

 

Info: I don't sell weapons or armor to the likes of you.

*  Nevermind

** Get away from here (goodbye).

*  But I must speak with you. It's important.

** There's nothing your sort could possibly have to say to me. (70%) (goodbye)

** Alright then. Out with it! (20%) - proceed to normal dialogs.

** Get away from me! (10%) (goodbye) further dialog blocked for 12 hours - all you get is "Get away from me" again, and it resets the timer.

 

So, in fact, you can deal with them, but you might have to repeat the dialog interaction, or you might get blocked.

 

The totally blocked scenario would block all vendors of that type (lock DealWithBlacksmith to 0)

This latter trick isn't perfect, but it's efficient. Trying to check on a per NPC basis is bothersome and costly.

 

With this approach, if you have a quest, or something you really must talk to the NPC about, you can do it, eventually. It might take you three or four days of trying if you're really unlucky.

 

A mod idea for solicitation mod synergy

Spoiler

I'm interested in doing something fun with characters dressed like whores.

Don't pay too much mind to this, it's really just some notes for myself :) 

Suggestions welcome though.

 

Getting a bounty from guards is one possibility, the obvious fallback.

 

Other possibilities:

 

Female citizens who aren't whores will not speak to you. (See above, but in this case the category is all females).

 

Add some generic female citizens who really hate whores, and will call the guard on you.

 

Guards eject you from the city unless you own property there. Could be a teleport, like vanilla prison, could be a leash walk.

- Once ejected, you must pay the guards to be allowed back in.

-- If you lack cash, they might accept something else.

- If they catch you inside again having not paid, you get a bounty and go straight to PoP if installed.

- If they catch you inside again having not paid, you get raped and robbed, and thrown out naked.

- If they catch you inside again having not paid, you get a trip to a Simple Slavery auction, and not as a buyer.

 

This sounds like a lot of work. But just adding bounty ... it's not much gameplay or immersion.

 

Coming back in without paying needs to be made a viable choice though.

And, in towns with no gate, you should probably always get a chance to pay.

 

Maybe, in the bad case, let the player choose between the bad outcomes: Pop/raped+robbed/enslaved.

 

The re-entry bounty needs to be high, and should apply for a limited duration. After 24 hours (or maybe 48), you should be allowed back in for free.

So the guards only have that time to catch you. After that you simply get thrown out again.

 

Whore catching behaviour should use a reasonable radius, so if you stay far enough away, or simply aren't in LOS, guards don't bother you.

 

Alternative payments:

- sex with guards, but should be more than one, sometimes this gets out of hand, turns into a massive gangbang in which every guard in the city gets a go.

- trade items - guards steal random items up to a certain value total - mostly they take cheap items first

- bribe the guard - you have 12 hours to bring the guard a bribe of around half the bounty - if you have the cash when you pick this, you just bribe the guard immediately.

-- if you fail your speech it's like being caught re-entering

 

Stolen items:

Maybe quest items can be stolen too. A special vendor gets ownership of *everything* stolen from you, quest item or not. The vendor is in the Nightgate Inn.

Vendor only sells your stuff and skooma.

They have a dialog that will give you possession of anything that looks like it's no-drop free of charge.

 

If you own property:

Whores who own property are a civic asset. Every time a home owner is caught by guards, they owe a freebie.

This involves guards showing up when you try to sleep in your house, and initiating an orgy of variable size.

Any female NPCs in the house will be involved. (Bah, I have no code for this, probably too much work).

If you're unlucky, it's a lot of guards. They might also bring Jarls, housecarls, advisors, who knows?

 

Very likely they will leave devious "gifts", but will not steal keys.

 

More on solicitation

Spoiler
On 1/26/2019 at 5:50 PM, worik said:

It would be a complex task to create the chart or a robust logic for the engine to detect and rank those. (and to be customized by the player)

The model for this is that the player assigns outfits they wear into these categories, or doesn't.

 

A given outfit can be in none, or all of the categories - I guess the MCM shows what you are wearing on the left and on the right toggle boxes for what you think it looks like. Except for helpless, which is off regular DD keywords. Now I've thought about this, sliders that range from -3 to +3

 

So that's that... It's not the gordian knot as far as problems go, unless you want a magic solution. I'll settle for workable.

 

 

As for how the factions interact, in a wonderful world, you could have an MCM that allows you to set the logic tests for each vendor faction.

 

In the world of "have time and can be bothered", the formulae are calculated according to my whim in a script file and if you don't like it you have to edit the script :) 

 

To quote from my post above, I gave one example:

 

DealWithBlackmith, for example is Slooty == 0 && Whore == 0 && Disgusting < 2 && Ridiculous < 2 && Pathetic == 0

 

And pointed out that it was quite arbitrary - but it's not something hard-coded into an ESP, so could ultimately be made MCM configurable.

 

Maybe, when you implement the factions, you realise a lot of those categories aren't needed - but they're still provided so that arbitrary future content can leverage them.
 

This circles back to the fairly extensive collection of factions and keywords I suggested should be easy for other mods to use.

So the first step is to put those factions (and the ones from above, or some better thought out version of them) into an ESP.

Second step is to make the dialog blocking mod.

 

 

I guess the endgame on this functionality is a prostitution mod that is more immersive and sandboxy.

But I think that's a way off, and may never even be started.

I kind of had a go at a prostitution mod with my Skooma Whore replacement, but that had problems with unfinished skooma quests, and diverse edits to conflict-prone cells. So this is a long-standing dream for me.

 

 

For example, in existing mods, a prostitute gains nothing by prettifying herself. But it could be made important, or have game mechanics.

 

What does it matter when she's on a one-way trip to becoming a broken ruin begging for skooma in a hangout in the sewers?

 

But what if she aims to be a high class courtesan, covered in jewels, with bodyguards to protect her, and a powerful wealthy patron to back that up?

 

Or ends up the slave of an indulgent Jarl, dressed up like a doll and expected to make extravagant displays of adoration while he toadies to the empire?

 

 

These kind of play options seem scarcely explored yet.

 

Step 1 - collect underpants

Step 3 - profit !!!

 

Some summary

Spoiler

So, for...

  Reveal hidden contents

Totally arbitrary solutions might look like:

 

General vendors: Disgusting < 2 && ((Respectable != 0 && Criminal < 2) || (Powerful >= 2)

Alchemists: (Respectable != 0 && Criminal == 0 && Slooty == 0) || (Powerful >= 2)

Clothes Vendors: Disgusting == 0 && (Respectable >= 2 && Criminal == 0 || (Powerful >= 2))

Innkeepers: Disgusting < 2 && Dangerous < 3

Food vendors: Whore < 2 && Slooty < 2 && Disgusting < 2 && (Criminal < 2 || Powerful >= 1 || Pathetic > 2)

 

 

And for some more on getting higher ranks:

High cash on person => powerful += 1

A thane =>powerful += 1

A follower => powerful += 1 if < 3

Known dragonborn => powerful += 1, dangerous += 1

 

Slooty, Whore, Pathetic, Helpless or Ridiculous => Powerful -= 1

 

No inventory value => pathetic += 1 

Low inventory value => pathetic += 1

Wet or cold => pathetic += 1

 

 

And so on. Just keep piling on tests, as long as they are simple. It won't be perfect, and there should be scope for external mods to put a +/- or lock onto them too.

So, Hormones Bimbo gets slooty locked to 4, and +1 helpless, no matter what.

 

Thinking of mods that have had a shot at this... Barefoot Realism blocks trading based on the most important thing of all! How clean are your feet?

I think maybe feet were given an over-prominent position in that mod, socially speaking. But it implements a lot of the stuff above (cash, inventory value) and the dialogue blocking. Though in BFR, there is no way around it apart from washing your feet.

 

If you think of others, bring them up.

 

Using the 'known attributes' factions from my faction system, which are either set by mods, or by the player, or possibly detected by esoteric means in some cases, you can get other adjustments, for example the known prostitute faction gives you a min value of 1 in whore. Legal slave gives a min value of 1 in helpless, and so on, depending on whatever plausible rules you can come up with, just working through the factions.

 

 

A total game-changer idea for DD ... just tossed in as an aside ... really must do this

Spoiler

Makes you think ... it would be so weird in an RPG to have to go to a private place to make certain clothes changes.

That thing where you just click in your inventory and it swaps to something else. Magical.

The bother that DD has to go through to stop this is ... a bit too much ... but it could be made into an interesting mechanic if it weren't such a pain.

 

 

I look at a mod like YPS IF, and think "This adds a lot of busywork for no obvious pay-off."

I don't want to do that. All the effort in YPS, basically so you can ask shopkeepers to paint your nails and play hair growing simulator!

Which has to the the second least interesting game since "watching cabbages grow".

Because it all matters so little, you can just play with it, and it has no impact one way or another so the game play can't be broken.

Though there is the fashion addiction, and feet training, you can turn them off if you think they're silly or annoying.

It's a huge amount of assets and such to get all those options though.

Yep. DD items that aren't keyed by an item, but by a place. So simple. So useful.

 

On body model polygon counts and texture mapping that isn't appropriate to the size boobs are inflated to

Spoiler
On 1/27/2019 at 4:25 AM, Darkwing241 said:

 

It's a great story to play through.  The addiction system makes it all feel fairly logical.  You are still playing an RPG, the game part of RPG is about making choices that improve your character and YPS IF does this very, very well.  

I wouldn't deny anyone their kink. What puts me off it is that it is an inevitable outcome, instead of making a gameplay based back and forth, it's pretty much headed one way. When you reach the end of it, you're stuck with a lot of menu-based busywork and NPC dialog back and forth, running in and out of shops.

 

I find that I spend more time doing that already than I do adventuring, or even travelling, so I look for ways to cut back on it.

 

This is sort of the problem with MME too. Once you're a milkmaid, getting crippled by a constant need to milk, and boobs the size of the rest of your body is almost inevitable. It's going to happen. This is partially due to long-standing bugs that meant lactation didn't reduce when it was supposed to, but that it's taken this long to even admit there was a bug indicates the priorities of the developer, and most players using it were aligned with the inevitable end. In short, most players wanted that outcome, so they never even tried to avoid it, and never came across the bug.

 

In contrast, for me, MME was always a threat or obstacle that I put in my game so I could fight against that outcome. Never did win though. Now I know why. Even breast reduction potions were busted for a long while, so you couldn't get anything from using those either. I would always get bored of how much milking became necessary.

 

 

 

If YPS has an appeal for me, it's just to mess about with appearances, and I'm certainly guilty of spending hours faffing around in race menu.

 

It seems an obvious choice for a "playing a weak and helpless girl" game, and yet it comes down to some very specific preferences.

 

But something like Immersive Jewellery ... as a compressed download it's 1.3GB, and then you've got the mods it depends on. It makes an 8K skin texture look like less of an indulgence. I can add a mod that turns my game upside down (DF) and it's a few MB. Is it worth using so much resource on some items you don't see that much in normal play, and that only incremental gameplay influence compared to a simpler left-handed-ring mod? That VRAM could be better spent on higher resolution environment, I think. I can't really go any higher res on that, but there are still a lot of ho-hum textures and meshes from Immersive Armor in my game, that look rather 2012 in appearance.

 

This brings me to something that bugs me about CBBE and UUNP, neither of them mapped nearly enough pixels to the breast area. This means that uber-boob characters have pixellated boob textures with out-of-scale veins and other defects. CBBE has slightly more pixels for boobs, but the difference is small, and the CBBE body looks low-poly, particularly in the arms and legs, where it often shows sharp corners once morphs are applied. Neither mapping offers nearly enough. Totally off topic, so I'll leave it there.

 

 

But if anyone knows a drop-in replacement for UUNP body that just has more polygons in it, I'd like to know :)  UUNP has a ton of polygons in the breasts, but it gets much more economical in other areas, and these days, there's no need, particularly if it's in a custom race.

 

On a success rather than failure based play-style

Spoiler
 On 1/28/2019 at 5:06 AM, Darkwing241 said:

I guess the TLDR is I think if weak/helpless is the way you want to go, then it would be easier to make a mod that has you successfully do (not intentionally try to fail at)  Skyrim things while making you feel weak/helpless rather than trying to build an entirely new set of things to do.  It would also be easier to integrate with other content mods this way.

Great call Darkwing241!

 

This is one of those concepts that is incredibly simple, and obviously true, but which gets little attention.

Spelling it out like this clarifies it, and crystallises the arguments about what weakness is meant to achieve in the game.

 

A lot of the motivation to introduce weakness is to increase difficulty and increase the chance of failure.

Alas, a lot of that is arbitrary, because once you're at the mercy of Skyrim AI, things fall apart at random.

And then you get some mod that makes enemies immune to followers!

 

So, adding new ways to succeed at the core Skyrim game would be a powerful tool in the box.

 

Playing a healer or support character doesn't work well in Skyrim, because of the way combat is balanced. The damage curve seems like a cliff. Your tank is either taking no damage and needs no heals, or goes down so fast you'd think you were playing Everquest. There's no middle ground, it's cakewalk or catastrophe. Reducing the damage rate doesn't help much, because the cliff is so steep.

 

There's a role as a 'loot collector', taking the risk of those DD traps. Ties perfectly into DF. However, you will soon come up against fights that the follower NPC cannot win, but they ought to. It blocks progress, and it's frustrating, because you know you could do it, it's just that the AI is so amazingly dumb. This forces you to level your way to success (hardly a path for a weak character) or simply fail at Skyrim, and it's not your fault. Failing at Skyrim still needs to be your fault, or else you might as well not bother, and play some "interactive novel" instead. Loot collector is a good job on the way to success, but it's not suitable to build an entire game around.

 

For playable Skyrim combat, the PC needs to be fit to fight, at least as a DPS, even if you can't tank - and the vanilla magic system lacks pure anti-magic spells that let you take on strong casters (assuming you have any). In "Balanced Magic" (misnamed, so misnamed), damage output on spells is much higher. The result is that caster DPS is insane. This is nice for you as a caster PC, but an enemy caster will burn you down very fast. You basically have to play a Breton, and stack magic resist enchants to have any chance of surviving an encounter with two at once. While it buffed some of the shields, it didn't consider pure anti-magic defences as a concept.

 

So, barring some epiphany, the path for a "weak" character is magic or archery. And you are going to have to get good at it - you can't be stuck as a crippled DPS. It's no good taking away every avenue the PC has to win fights. Reliance on followers is not effective, at least, not indefinitely. They do not scale well, and it's a bit boring anyway. Some people just add more and more followers to fix this, or super OP followers, like Yuriana. The latter would made more sense if she wasn't obviously built as a waifu for a strong male PC. Super OP follower is a fix for a lot of follower issues, but also makes for a dull Skyrim that is only interesting because of the other things going on - and there just aren't enough good other things going on. OTOH, big follower retinues have some immersive value (they make the player feel so much less important, just a tiny part of a big group) but they spend a lot of time jammed up on collision, failing to path, and failing to run their AI packages.

 

 

Stealth + archery is a path I've used for weak characters repeatedly in the past. It turns big fights into long drawn out, run away, sneak back again, snipe again affairs. Sometimes fun, but other times it gets repetitive.

 

 

While it's not the obvious path, it's also possible to reconcile a weak, and appearance fixated, character with a heavy tank. If you have good armor, and armor skills, and magic resistance, but poor DPS, you can still "feel" weak. There's the feeling that the character is only strong because of their gear.

 

I'm suddenly reminded of Elric: a weak, sickly character, who is dependent on a powerful magic item and some strong summon spells. He is unarguably weak, but he still wins fights and kills an awful lot of people.

 

A PC, based on a variant of the Elric archetype, who loses their items would be almost helpless again, and face a difficult struggle to regain their "strength". (just like Elric when he is without Stormbringer).

 

This is a good reason not to nerf enchants - they give a PC a way to create this kind of strength, but not instantly, you have to build up money and materials to make good enchants. Even if enchants are an "unfair advantage", they make sense in a game where you have a lot of other unfair disadvantages. Also, it finally provides a "balanced" use for all those stupidly OP armor items that are floating about. (Cocktail dresses configured as heavy armor better than dragonbone anyone?)

 

 

Having laid out some plausible archetypes for PCs - sorceress, stealth archer, gear-based tank - it remains to come up with fun ways to integrate game-play that plays to the weak archetype.

 

On follower-based easy-mode

Spoiler
On 1/28/2019 at 2:27 PM, Darkwing241 said:

I think it is Amazing Follower Tweaks that allows you to choose when followers level and how their skills are distributed? Sky tweak or any other cheat menu style mod probably has something that you could juice your follower with and/or nerf yourself.  Not the most immersive, but not really different then have a dedicated mod when you really think about it.  It's pretty tough to test that kind of thing though, going through all the levels...

EFF also has follower training. Alas, this doesn't solve any of the problem, which is deep in the mechanics of how Skyrim combat is designed to work - or wasn't.

 

Sure, you can power-up followers in various ways. You can, for example, pick a follower who is +10 levels based on yours, you can pick one with absurdly OP stats and procs, like Yuriana. Making them strong enough to win is possible, if you are determined to do that.

 

The downside is that a follower who can win the hard fights, which are few, is that they finish the easy fights before you even know they've started. You are reduced to a loot mule for them. And if that was explicit (say in DF) it would be cool during the early part of a game, but even DF doesn't support that immersively, and it's not really a fun way to play long-term.

 

But... Experiences vary. I'm using Skyrim Immersive Creatures, and have at times used other things, More Bandit Camps, SD Cages with Badass NPCs, the various Wenches mods, and I'm still using Buxom Wench Yuriana, though I haven't recruited the buxom wench herself as a follower, I'm just doing the other quests. BWY adds some numerous and non-trivial enemies to various dungeons and forts.

 

With pure vanilla, I probably wouldn't hit many hard enemies at all, but that would just leave me in boring easy mode, depending on a follower who wins every fight with a one or two hit kill.

 

On the Skyrim I want (but don't quite have)

Spoiler

 

With respect to combat difficulty, I want there to be some fights that are hard, and you have to abandon them, and come back later.

 

But, if you return after several levels, they should be achievable.

 

I want the occasional disaster, that stops the direct progression through the game, but this should never be the result of a single unlucky event.

 

A catastrophe should either require a series of unfortunate events (reference intended) or a series of bad moves and decisions on the part of the player (me).

 

Still, there should be plenty of potential for series of unfortunate events to occur.

 

Also, there should be net to catch you when things do go horribly sideways, and that net should not be a nice place to be.

 

I also want the basic combat to be difficult enough to be generally challenging enough that if I don't make an effort of some kind I won't win. I don't want to just walk in and win.

 

I don't want to spend forever on click for money skills, like alchemy, blacksmithing, cooking, or enchanting. I find repetitive clicking very dull.

 

I want some sex content, but it shouldn't be going on all the time. If it's going on "quite a lot", it should be like DF, with periodic interference from the follower or some NPC. DF has this sorted for me when it actually fires off.

 

I don't want to spend all my time running around time selling items, fiddling with my inventory, and managing cash.

 

I want the occasional surprise or at least somewhat unanticipated event.

 

 

I'm not really getting this right now because:

  • too much running about vending stuff
  • not enough random events to mix things up
  • most fights too easy, and hard fights too hard to run from in many cases
  • DF not putting enough pressure on, and no other source of unanticipated financial crises
  • too much sex content at the start, not enough now
  • advancement slow, because I can stave off DF, but can't afford to buy skills much

 

It's not completely unsatisfactory; the problem is mostly cash.

Because cash pays for both DF followers and advancement, I end up paying for DF, but not advancing.

If I had enough for both, it would be too generous.

To get more cash, I'm doing a lot of vending.

 

  • I've put some SLD measures in that can screw up my speech, badly. This (as I know from past games) is an occurrence that has the potential to block cash flow and lead to major financial problems.
  • I have SXP for advancement, so it's an alternate path. I'm starting to spend those points now, which is fixing the advancement issues.
  • I've lost some of the meaning of cash though.
  • Fight difficulties not really resolved.
  • I've made property very hard to afford, so I don't have that convenience.

 

On de-levelled Skyrim and other difficulty adjustments

Spoiler
On 1/29/2019 at 3:08 AM, xboronx said:

Which mods do you use to make enemies tougher? I only use Perma Zones so far and change ingame difficulty if needed. But is there a good mod which makes the normal Skyrim enemies a bit harder without altering too much?

More Bandit Camps - adds more banditry and is mild, difficulty-wise; doesn't make the bandits harder, just makes them more frequent.

 

Organized Bandits In Skyrim - does add difficulty to bandits, and more bandits generally. It doesn't claim to be harder, specifically, but it is.

 

Tougher Spiders - is a very modest patch that just buffs up the HP and damage on some super-weak spiders. I modified it further to buff several spiders it didn't, particularly "boss" spider encounters. Spiders still aren't hard with this, but at least they aren't completely pathetic.

 

Arachnophobia - makes spiders harder. Combine with Tougher Spiders for extra value. It's stupid really. Any spit that hits takes you down instantly. I think this old mod could be good with a few tweaks, but as originally designed, the one-hit-down mechanic is too arbitrary and lacks game-play. If a spider needed a number of hits to web you completely, with incremental webbing-effects you could choose to struggle, or ignore and keep fighting, prior to complete webbing, it would be much more interesting.

 

Skyrim Immersive Creatures - can be tuned to be very mild, or intrusive. You can also turn off some of the weirder creature types. It can sometimes spawn weird creature gangs that make little sense. Sure, wolves and wolf-cubs ... but a troll, with two sabre cats, and a pack of wolves as a group? It's not lore friendly, immersive, or well balanced. It adds a lot of buffed-up resurrecting skeletons that are quite good, but some other creatures it adds are sort of dumb-looking and stupidly tough. Spriggan Patriarchs for example. It's for the sort of person who likes having to run from encounters.

 

SD+ Cages - has an option for "Badass" NPCs, that are quite vicious. They add quite a big difficulty jump.

 

Skyrim More Immersive Zones - the exact opposite of what you want in terms of extent, but exactly the thing in mechanics. It modifies the levels of encounters in a widespread way, and locks the levels of most areas, so the difficulty of an area is fixed, not based on your level. Alas, the creator had some eccentric ideas, and thought draugr should be end-game enemies, completely blocking any hope of doing any of the major quests before you're about level 70. Even the bandits are vicious. This is a seriously hardcore mod that has a lot of potential to screw you up completely by locking you in a quest area, with no way out, and mobs 50 levels above you. Such scenarios are quit, go back ... a dozen saves ... and reload.

 

If this had been a modest, well considered mod, it would be exactly what you wanted, as it's a tiny thing that just changes how zones level - but the way it's executed it's overly impactful and breaks more or less all of the vanilla Skyrim experience with no real plan for how a player might level up through it.

 

I could probably say the same of PermaZones. If you read between the lines, both mods are for people who think the game starts at level 70 and who conflate minimum level and maximum level. The key determinants of what things you encounter are the max and level offset, and that's what matters at level 70; yet they insist on f**king up the low-level game because they believe no bandit should ever be level 6 and draugr should be "scary"? It's like difficulty curve is an oxymoron for them.

 

I'd steer clear of these mods as a group if you want subtle changes:

  1. Deadly Wenches - still milder than SD+ Cages
  2. Hateful Wenches - the number of wenches spawned, or draugr that wenches spawn in addition to themselves are unpredictable, and even limited numbers of wenches can result in huge numbers of other spawns. If you turn a lot of that off, they still add a lot of unbalancing loot, and enough extra enemies to throw encounters way off balance. Has some interesting additional "color" material, plus weird ghosts. A very mixed bag. Nothing subtle about it though.
  3. Forgotten Wenches - relatively well set up and not as crazy, unpredictable, or randomly broken as Hateful Wenches.
  4. Judgement Wenches - as above, but typically a bit harder.

Buxom Wench Yuriana - a quest, follower and dungeon difficulty mod all rolled into one. Adds content to bandits and undead. Adds some tough undead wenches with giant skeleton henchmen, as well as wench bandits. If you use any of the regular wench mods, it's hard to tell what is part of them and what is Yuriana. I suggest trying it by itself. The Yuriana follower is ridiculously OP. I have rarely ever seen a gang of mobs take her down, even if you don't assist her. With all her powers turned on, you probably won't go down either. Rarely, she can fail due to lame Skyrim AI, but other than that, she's bordering on invincible, especially in a regular game. To counter this, some of the added mobs are effectively immune to followers. This can cause a nasty surprise if you're using this mod but haven't recruited Yuriana.

 

On Deviously Enchanted Chests

Spoiler
On 1/29/2019 at 1:43 AM, chevalierx said:

deviously enchanted chests is better and simple then DCL

I tried Deviously Enchanted Chests a couple of years back and found it glitchy, unreliable and lacking customisation (that worked).

 

It's been developed more since then, so perhaps I should look at it again?

 

It's not a bad thing to take the original core of DCL and just do that.

So, if it has the customisation I want now, it might be good.

 

However, I do like the trapped plants and doors in DCL.

While FMEA also makes plants potentially horrid, it only does debuffs and EC+ rapes.

I discovered that Deviously Enchanted Chests is now very good. I thoroughly recommend it.

 

On how combat difficulty mods often make things worse, not better

Spoiler
On 1/29/2019 at 1:00 PM, afa said:

Anyways a lot of the combat "rules" and numbers behind Skyrim's system makes it very difficult to strike a balance for the game play that is needed for a somewhat reasonable "weak" but manageable playthrough.

All but one of the combat overhauls is simulationist and "realism" fixated.

 

Buried in those mods there is some idea that rendering the entire system even more twitchy and vulnerable to script lag, and putting more load on a collision system that was sketchy from the get-go, makes Skyrim better.

 

Skyrim doesn't even have hit locations, and while some mods try to add them, it doesn't have a control mechanism for melee weapons suitable for guiding attacks to specific locations either, so it's a lost cause.

 

 

Nobody has set out with the explicit intent of moderating the strong vs weak combat differential, so weak enemies are not so weak and strong enemies are not so strong.

The changes the simulationists have made only make this problem worse.

This suggests the opposite is also possible.

 

 

Skyrim's design relied on the level matching system to do most of this, so in theory, you're mostly fighting enemies close to your level. Because of that, they didn't worry much about a differential resulting in a slaughter.

 

The idea of locking area levels so they have a fixed difficulty only makes the combat differential problem worse. Much worse.

The best fix for this is to set the max level cap to 99 where reasonable, and set modest level offsets for most areas.

 

It's a start. The exact opposite of what most combat difficulty increase mods do.

Combat difficulty doesn't need increasing if you've nerfed the PC - so they don't have access to uber gear, or high skills, or possibly any skills at all.

 

Other ways to stop things being very sudden are decreasing damage for everything across the board.

 

 

I know lots of people would see this as heresy, or confuse it with "easy mode", but with the debuffs I had on my character for most of my current playthrough, she could barely take out a basic, not tougher-bandit by herself - and that was in full armor and with an adequate weapon. Tougher enemies remain unapproachable. A bear is near certain death. And then there are the wounds, with their long lasting consequences, that often result from the most basic of fights.

 

Being so fragile, running away was rarely an option. She'd be knocked down and zero stamina before she could even turn to run.

 

People clearly want different stuff, but to get the game I'm aiming for, something like Wildcat is the opposite of help.

Probably a basic corollary of my starting position "I don't like combat mods because they mostly don't work unless they're the only mod in your Skyrim."

 

On initial reservations about Dragonborn in Distress

Spoiler
On 1/30/2019 at 3:24 PM, sapho888 said:

Also, there seems to be a new Defeat/ Prison/ Addiction mod that just got released called Dragonborn in Distress... I haven't tried it out yet but it looks interesting.

Lots of stuff that in principle I like, but in detail have doubts about.

Alas, I'm not really in a position to install and try this mod just now. Too deep down another rabbit hole.

 

 

So, after defeat, it's almost impossible for you to run away or win a subsequent fight, and if you stay you get it worse, and if you run you get it worse. Not sure what you're supposed to do there... If you get devices on you, you won't be able to run or fight. So how does it end? Presumably this has been tested and balanced to some extent? I'm just not seeing how it will work from the description.

 

 

Then there are the high trauma levels, that are only addressed by EC+ and MME milkers? Some very narrow requirements there. MME is a bad enough one-way trip as it is.

 

And some of the forced stealing and drinking stuff... It wasn't that great in SW Addicted.

We already debated that issue where having decisions taken away from you has to have a good payoff and feel immersive, but I'm not sure it would. In SW A, it often happened without you even really noticing that much.

 

There are so many of these compulsive effects. It's sort of awesome, and I think it might be fun initially, but it will start to get old fast too.

 

If the mod provides ways to cure yourself that are interesting, then it could be a lot of fun, but if you just get like that, and then it gets worse, it's going to be another one way railroad.

 

However, from the description, there's no such mechanism (yet) and you have to wait it out.

 

 

If this was joined up nicely with DF, there might be some great synergy, but again, no sign of that, as is.

 

 

The basic mechanics are a lot like stuff I have, or was planning, for my Skooma Whore replacement, but the details of it are quite different. I was blocked on creating quests to end addictions, or that allows you to swap one addiction for another that would in some ways be worse, and others a lot more manageable. That was taking a long time to even plan, let alone execute.

 

 

What I'm reading from the description (and yes, it's just speculation) is that it quickly leads to a "bad end" but not one that is clearly defined. At some point DBiD wrecks your character so bad you can't really recover, but it's not game over, it's a sort of zombie game with no way forward. The lack of a clearly defined bad end might be a weakness here.

 

 

Of course, I'm thinking of a game with DF, where you also run into debt fast, and then you're enslaved, and addicted to devices, and have zero willpower, and you're often unable to loot, so you can't even make money in DF.

 

Seems that for this to work, you have to throw away a lot of the other mods you're used to using, because otherwise it will be inescapable double-binds all the way. I'd prefer it if it could interoperate well and have synergy with other mods (besides MME and EC+) rather than making them too risky to use.

 

Or it maybe that the "relief" is so bad, you always choose to wait it out. I had a lot of this sort of problem with FMEA and Wounds.

 

 

I'm hopeful, perhaps the author @Code Serpent will eventually expand on the cure mechanisms, and also provide more ways for dealing with the "broken" state than MME and EC+. It seems that at the very least, SD+ or DF slavery should fit in here somewhere, somehow.

 

I'm also not sure how swapping in PoP will work, and whether PoP will be able to generate trauma by some selective animation detection by DBiD or something.

 

One of the things I felt I did wrong with my SW replacer was that it was trying to do too much, and having to reimplement every mechanic so that things could work well, and I think there's a bit of it here.  Like, you want being a whore to result in addiction to it, but that ends up making you want to replace the prostitution mod, and it all snowballs.

 

I want to try it, but it seems like it has its work cut out.

I think I nailed that one... Others may disagree... I'm not sure what the latest DiD rewrite has delivered and I guess I'm not going to find out now.

 

Code Serpent's response in full

Spoiler

 

On 1/30/2019 at 8:41 PM, Lupine00 said:

Then there are the high trauma levels, that are only addressed by EC+ and MME milkers? Some very narrow requirements there. MME is a bad enough one-way trip as it is.

 

And some of the forced stealing and drinking stuff... It wasn't that great in SW Addicted.

We already debated that issue where having decisions taken away from you has to have a good payoff and feel immersive, but I'm not sure it would. In SW A, it often happened without you even really noticing that much.

 

There are so many of these compulsive effects. It's sort of awesome, and I think it might be fun initially, but it will start to get old fast too.

 

What I'm reading from the description (and yes, it's just speculation) is that it quickly leads to a "bad end" but not one that is clearly defined. At some point DBiD wrecks your character so bad you can't really recover, but it's not game over, it's a sort of zombie game with no way forward. The lack of a clearly defined bad end might be a weakness here.@Code Serpent

 

I think you are overestimating how cruel my mod is. Trauma increases the cost of power attacks and spell casting, the worst it can get is tripling the cost. That will affect gameplay, but won't outright stop it, and it is incredibly hard to become that traumatized. So, it is very possible to play while traumatized without seeking relief.

 

Also, my mod will never force you to use addictive things if you aren't already addicted, you have to choose to look for relief before becoming addicted. The mod won't force you to drink some ale or skooma, or force you to steal, or force you into devices and milk pumps. (Apart from devices added when defeated, but I'll patch it so that you won't become addicted to devices when defeated) So, you have to choose to start your downward spiral.

 

Once you've started down that path, you can still escape easily enough. Simply understanding how the addictions trigger, and playing so that you prevent that for a few days, should be enough to sober your character. For example, to combat alcoholism, you need to remove any alcohol you have in your inventory, avoid looking at any alcohol you come across in dungeons, and avoid talking to innkeepers. For the latter, every forced dialogue set has an option to avoid the addiction dialogue: "I wanted to speak with you" if you withdrawal is low enough, you should be able to talk to the innkeeper or other people normally by using that. Otherwise, you can just walk away.

 

If you feel you can't avoid those things, you can always use chastity and bondage devices to control your urges. If you become addicted to those, its just as straightforward to come clean: remove bondage devices, and avoid talking to guards and blacksmiths.

 

If any of this fails, you can always use shrines to decrease your addiction and withdrawal. Simply staying near a shrine for 4 in-game days will cure all addictions.

 

 

More on defeat mechanisms, mostly not DiD, even that that begins the topic...

Spoiler
On 1/31/2019 at 3:48 AM, Code Serpent said:

I think you are overestimating how cruel my mod is. Trauma increases the cost of power attacks and spell casting, the worst it can get is tripling the cost. That will affect gameplay, but won't outright stop it, and it is incredibly hard to become that traumatized. So, it is very possible to play while traumatized without seeking relief.

Quite possibly. I haven't played it yet, so I'm trying to figure it out from the write-up.

 

From the one post on the DBiD forum about their defeat experience, it sounds a little strange that you can walk off and they follow you, and then after a while aggro. Maybe that was just a quirk with that user and that bear, but...

 

 

It seems like the experience you get post-defeat, post-first-rape/trauma experience, is critical to the balance of it all, and details of design there have far reaching consequences. I don't know if it's good or bad as it is, but if you can get that spot just right, the mod will rock, and if you can't, people will keep on asking for options on top of options so they can try and fix it themselves.

 

You mention the minor issue of devices added by attackers possibly causing unintended relief, and how you intend to change to block that.

This is just one example of a detail in that defeat experience that has to be polished just right for the whole thing to shine.

 

In contrast, the "long tail" of the trauma, is going to be much easier to balance and work with; the player can make choices, seek trauma relief, continue despite the trauma, or simply wait it out. I can't speak to how it works yet, but it's clearly less brittle in terms of consequences.

 

 

So, I'm anticipating that you will continue to refine the initial defeat experience, and may also add more options for the player to customise it. People are already asking on the forum.

 

 

Just from a design perspective, I seems you need to add something to break the defeat-trauma-defeat-trauma looping for cases where escape is impossible. See anecdote that follows my thoughts on the MCM.

 

 

From the MCM screenshots, it seemed a lot of MCM to configure who rapes you, and how many rapists. For me, that stuff is in the "don't care, just do whatever" basket. I'd be happy with a single tickbox to enable/disable creatures and that's it. The mod can see what animations I have and choose based on that if it likes, it just doesn't matter to me. From a game perspective, it's just fluff.

 

It's the total number of sex scenes that I care about - how long am I sat watching SexLab animations before we move onto the next stage of the defeat?

 

 

This brings me to a little anecdote about DCL combat defeat.

 

Back around when DCL 7.0 came out, I was playing a game where I'd added a lot of tough draugr. I think they were coming from SIC or something.

While exploring Folgunthur, or somewhere like that, I got stuck in a narrow corridor between draugr in front and behind.

Due to being stuck, I got defeated.

And then there were some rapes.

 

DCL decided not to port me out.

So, the rapes ended, and I was stuck, jammed in a very narrow corridor between gangs of draugr.

 

After about twenty rape scenes, I finally gave up, quit and reloaded. There was simply no way out of that corridor. Once I regained control, there was no way to move, because the stupid Skyrim collision wouldn't let me past the draugr. I would get past one, and there were still another five or six backed up.

 

 

The old DCL combat defeat wouldn't have done that. It would have ported me to the dungeon start after the first rape.

While that had its issues, it ensured you wouldn't get stuck.

 

 

Defeat and DA both have a wide range of "port out" scenarios. These can (in cases) leave you with a broken dungeon. Shroudhearth Barrow is a case in point. You can set the levers so the entry gate it locked. If you are ported out while it's like that, you can't get back in (without cheating) until the cell resets, which will be quite a while. But though there are problems, the "port out" scenarios are critical to the practical function of those mods.

 

In another case, using only Defeat, I was in Solstheim due to a LAL start, with a level 1 character. That character was chain raped by Ash dudes about four-billion times, but still, if I got defeated twice in a row, I got a death and reload, I didn't get stuck watching the same three Ash guys playing SexLab animations, then trying to crawl away, getting raped again, and so on.

 

 

As a finisher, have you looked at Sexlab Kidnapped and how that resolves its sex chains?

 

I like the idea of being stuck there, while they gradually break your will, but in practice it doesn't work. The way it's implemented seems to bear no relation to the avowed intent. In practice, mostly you kill them all or die trying the moment you get your controls back, then find out the mod lost all your gear due to a bug, and then discover that it also broke several vanilla NPCs, and a vanilla quest, because it's so badly designed and written. But that's kidnapped.

 

It's [SL Kidnapped] an example of a great idea, executed just badly enough to be completely useless. A primer on what not to do, basically. Sometimes it can work great. Other times it can fail catastrophically.

And this difference of experiences and the argument over it was where I stopped posting to the thread much.

I made a couple more small posts, but that was it.

Looking back, Code Serpent clearly felt I had it in for DiD right from the start.

The notes on how you can't be addicted without seeking relief were plainly mistaken, as it was later explained by CS you could be sex addicted prior to capture without ever having had any trauma at all because it used the SLA(R) time rate as the addiction measure.

 

A link to All Trainers

Spoiler
On 1/31/2019 at 10:39 AM, nanashi50 said:

For the text in red, what mod are you referring to?

"All Trainers" - https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/43017/

Using the "alternative" mod, which scatters trainers across the different cities so you can't get everything in one place.

It does add a lot of trainer NPCs though.

 

 

A little note on experience and FMEA

Spoiler
 On 5/12/2019 at 5:22 AM, UnEvenSteven said:

With Experience you'll now have to leave the safety of town and explore the world and complete quests in order to level up. With the right mods leveling up could be difficult by making combat deadlier which results in nasty outcomes when defeated and requiring (devious) followers to have a chance of surviving.

I can see some people might find this useful, but for me, FMEA makes any kind of non-adventurer based levelling quite perilous. You can't really level off prostitution to start with, so that leaves craft skills, and FMEA makes them as dangerous as, if not more dangerous, than adventuring.

 

I guess there's a FMEA path where you buy training up to a fairly high level before you use any skills, but it would be so drawn out as to be discouraging simply due to the grind.

 

 

Here's the first discussion of the model I want to implement in SLAX - some rough ideas

Spoiler

Something I might try someday for an arousal model - mainly for use with mods that use a lot of chastity - it would take too long to explain properly.

 

He's the core intent:

 

1) split "underlying sex addiction" from transitory arousal level.

Character gets horny due to exposure, it's transitory, sex drops it all away. Easy to regain due to further exposures.

It also decays quickly with time, all by itself, unless something is adding to it.

 

Sexual disinterest increases with each sex act, and impedes getting more transitory arousal.

So, if you have lots and lots of sex, you start to stop getting aroused.

Sexual disinterest decays with time, gradually, fast enough that it would completely decay over a 24-hour period if you aren't having sex non-stop.

So, in theory, tomorrow, you're easily aroused again.

If you have constant sex, it may balance out, with disinterest decaying, but also growing due sex acts.

 

2) sex addiction is increased by longer-term events, and updates every 24 hours.

Uses stats like number of sex acts in a day, number of orgasms in a day, number of bondage orgasms in a day, etc. to track masochism, bondage addiction, sex addiction.

 

3) addictions reduce the rate you gain sexual disinterest, if you're doing things that match the addiction.

Addicted to bondage, then bondage sex adds much less disinterest.

 

Highly addicted, you barely gain disinterest, and can keep on getting transitory arousal quickly, over and over.

 

 

In a chastity situation - or just by not having sex for ages - you can build up a frustration score.

You would need to be without sex for 48 hours+ to gain any frustration.

Frustration grows and grows ... 

Each orgasm you get burns up a lot of frustration.

 

However, if you have frustration, it amplifies transitory arousal gains (scales them up), and if you have any frustration, you can't gain any sexual disinterest.

The higher frustration you've had in the last (some long period), determines how long you need to go without sex before you start to accrue frustration.

 

Spend six weeks in chastity, and frustration will be very high. That means after you get release, you can now go ... some number ... say six days ... before you start to accrue any frustration at all now. Previously it was only two.

 

i.e. You become trained to accept the belt - at least from an arousal standpoint.

Over time, with repeated sex starvation, you can go for longer and longer.

 

However, this also causes your chastity addiction to rise. Chastity addiction (always) adds to transitory arousal increases, so once you get it, it's very easy to make you horny.

Get enough, and will mean even minor events are causing transitory time-decay to be insufficient, resulting in perpetual arousal.

 

Plus, some kind of "content" to change these values, such as potions, games, quests, etc. would bring it all to life.

Plus, a set of dialogues that integrates with them.

 

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Thank you for collecting all of these ideas, Lupine.  Having trouble sleeping, just had to organize your thoughts first?  Been there.  ?

 

I like the weak girl model and I've used it myself.  I only skimmed some of this, but I'll come back later.  A few things though:

 

SL Adventures already has wearing armor as a crime.  It works well.

 

Disabling rapes in certain locations like inns is a new & interesting idea.  In my own games I do it little differently.  I turn off rapes while the PC is working as a prostitute on the idea that there's no need to get rough if a man can buy what he wants for a bit of gold.   That encourages prostitution, since it's a safe time.

 

In my skimming I saw a lot of sticks but not many carrots (I admit I might have skipped over important points).  Treading water to survive is okay for a while, but it's good to have the feeling of progress even if it's slow.  I like benefits to balance the threat of bad consequence.  In my prostitution example, the PC has to avoid the bad things so she turns to prostitution.  The obvious benefit is coin, but the second benefit is rape immunity while working (as long as she doesn't piss off a client, since RP does have rape outcomes for that).  An indirect benefit is that she satisfies for a time the potential rapists in that location by reducing their arousal, so if she's thorough she'll also be safe for a while after working. 

 

I also give the PC free room and a meal IF she meets the innkeeper's prostitution quota (which I have to set manually).  This might be too soft for some tastes, but I like the way that it encourages women to get into this line of work and get stuck there because they can get by.  It's a solid reason for selling herself.  But in the long run she has to do better if she wants to improve her life. 

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Being tagged multiple times here, I think it appropriate to respond - not to specific points, but to overall ideas.

 

Having said that, here's my ideal environment, in no particular order:

 

1. DD as armor: For the uninitiated, DD items use an enchantment to make them what they are. Consequently, you can make them both DD and 1) armored, and 2) possess an enchantment, logical or not. It's the latter that conjures interest.

 

2. Defeat mods should (1) Focus on the player recovering their items, or (2) Being down-leveled in some way or form that matters. I absolutely fall within that second category. I'd like death punishments, carry weight punishments, etc. If I can't have that, I'll 100% settle for a "Fuck the PC up" initiative. Rape, gangbangs, strong ability penalties, etc., give a sense that defeat is something you want to avoid at all costs. To the lore revisionists, Skyrim is rife with slavery, rape, and general sex - most mods fulfill the basics in one form or another.

 

3. I'd love some sort of unified defeat system. Currently, we have three which work according to plan: 1) SL Defeat 2) DCL Combat Surrender 3) DiD.

 

They each have their advantages and disadvantages, but DCL and DiD both have the right idea: 1) It's kind of up to the player, whether it's an MCM choice or accidental coordination, or 2) The player has complete control.

 

I'd advise prospective modders to cater to #2 just above as much as their design choices allow. That, not only because it leaves the door open to creativity, but because it offers people the basic chance to create something that could engross everyone, and make them mod-dependent - particularly regarding game-restart traps. If anything, we should all be looking for ways for people to become invested in a loss.

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That's strange.

?

I wonder how my own screenhot ended up as the picture for the linked thread. Ghosts in the machine? :classic_ph34r:

Spoiler

image.png.953f39a8446bcbe83eab1b509426d5b3.png

That's me on the left, Ciri (follower) in the middle and the POP jailer at the right.

 

 

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On potions:

Quote

Extremely limited availability of potions? Potions not really expensive enough at high levels, too expensive at low levels?

I use "Catch the dragon" and it's toxicity mechanic to make me think twice about using a potion. (Witcher-style inspired :classic_angel: )

 

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I looked over your text and there were a few interesting ideas. I don't know a lot about erotic fiction but your idea with having the chastity belt being less frustrating over time has me sold as the animation just gets old quick. Maybe if they did the animation as an interruptible sort of standing idle it wouldn't be a problem but I digress.

 

The main problem is that Skyrim is a combat game. Being weak and helpless isn't exactly it's greatest strength. Building a different type of game off Skyrim's engine is really not worth it for most modders and those that do kind of miss the mark. With the right story(Which Slaverun lacks) and gameplay or rather choice(Which Prison Overhaul lacks) it could work. It should have enough choices to make it feel like a game but not enough for it to derail the story. Deviously Cursed Loot seems to have a happy medium with some of their quests. You already mentioned the DCL Alternate Start but I must also mention that the the prison part of the mod was fun, trying to break out was fun and getting punished for trying to break out was fun. The rest of DCL is well... I'm fairly certain Kimy is more into coding than storytelling. I think it mostly comes down to having a "human"(Could be khajiit) element to the quests unless you like barrels. She missed the opportunity to call it Devious Barrels. I can hear Pewdiepie screaming in the background.

 

 

If you were going off the tried and true formula of Skyrim then if you were surrounded by strong men and/or women that would do the trick. Unfortunately the only real game play element would be support which is seriously lacking. I mean you got healing and that's it. The mod Petcollar provides some interesting options in terms of providing support for followers but I may have to look it over.  The Lady Stone from Andromeda gets you a pet tiger and an ability to reduce the armor of any who could kill you in one hit; the only problem is that you have no control over the tiger and no way to turn it off. One could make a mod that provides small buffs to your allies from you being tied up which is slightly more immersive than "you are a literal God in restraints". One example could be the armbinder along with leg chains or something similar gives you an atherial status while you have at least one follower that is able to fight and a small attack buff to all followers, I mean you're pretty much a useless chunk of meat otherwise. The collar would leash you up to a random follower that you have to be a certain distance from or else you get teleported to your leash holder but in turn give your leash holder faster health regen. Every other restraint gives a slight defense buff to followers. There could also be a special chastity belt where your allies get a big buff when having sex with you after they take it off of course. For the more active part I can only think of spell mods.

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The central contradiction between a weak PC playthrough and Skyrim mechanics has always been combat.  So why not remove it?

 

A lot of mods aimed at creating a weak PC focus on making combat more difficult, more humiliating, more onerous, or just generally changing it in a qualitative way.  The idea being to modify the likelihood of increasing defeat scenarios which I guess you want to avoid, but are usually more interesting and rewarding for the LL player than the actual combat.  So why have combat or defeat at all or at least, so easy to start?

 

I think in order to succeed, a weak PC playthrough has to make combat difficult to access.  In other words, the way to reconcile the PC-sociopath with the put-upon PC tormented by followers, harassment, rapes and devices is to gate combat.  Imagine a game instead where you enter a bandit lair and none of them takes you seriously.  Instead they slap your weapon out of your hand, take your stuff, bind you and kick you out the entrance.  A totally nonhostile world is also a recipe for making DD actually interesting.  And it makes logical sense.  Why should a weak PC have combat fluency at all?  It also opens up interesting noncombat strategies for extracting loot, which is way too easy to get.  It would also make alternate sources of income and weapons proficiency more viable.  Suddenly the granularity of SLS/DD/prostitution/enslavement mods is much less trivial.

 

The way to do this in practice is to gate combat with the Willpower stat from DF(C) or something like it.  Basically deprive the player of hostiles below a Willpower threshold, and create a set of mechanics for preventing the player from trying to attack passive NPCs that underline the PC's weakness as the reason.  I have some other ideas around mechanics that I think would be cool and challenging in addition but this post is long enough already.

 

Anyways if that thread vanished we should either just make a new one or continue here, it seems like there's a lot of good criticism in the ideaspace around this issue.  Thanks for compiling all those posts!

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I'm dissatisfied with mechanics that are all or nothing.  Lupine touched on this in the crime discussion, in that some illegal items should be harder to discover than others.  Rape mods are particularly bad about this.  The players can establish a set of vulnerability conditions and an NPC arousal threshold.  These either are met, or not met.  There's usually a "chance" modifier, which is simply a roll made on every polling cycle.  Hang around for long and it's almost certain to trigger. 

 

I'd prefer a more dynamic level of vulnerability.  It's still binary, but it could consider more factors, including positive ones.  Wearing armor or "full" clothing, or wearing panties with more revealing clothing, could reduce but not eliminate the chance of rape.  Why must having a companion either completely block rape or do nothing?  Better to have the presence of a companion discourage rape, but if it still triggers then you both get it.  Must female-on-female rape be all or nothing?  A higher (or lower if you wish) threshold seems better.

 

My own (poor) attempt at this kind of thing is to assign + or - values to things that make the PC more or less vulnerable, and manually adjust the arousal threshold in rape mods accordingly.  That's tedious, and NPC arousal has its own issues, but at least I can make something like the presence of a companion reduce but not eliminate the risk.  I'm safer, but never completely safe.  The same for friendship.  Can't a "friend" (that guy you did you fetch quest for) be sufficiently aroused to take a run at you?  Going a step further, shouldn't someone who raped you before be more likely to do it again?  He got away with it, and maybe even thinks you "consented".

 

This adds a whole layer of complexity.  I understand why these mods don't do it.  It's simple to check if the PC has an equipped weapon, no body slot clothing, or a companion, then either trigger the consequence or not.

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I'm still working through the collected thoughts, reading each one.

 

Concerning the "on rails" experience, naturally that's subjective depending on player experience.  For me, forced actions are fun as long as they don't take over my game, OR if they're a temporary consequence for a failure.  I still want to play the game.  In the case of a Devious Follower (DF), I'd like more assertive behavior, so the follower is less passive and I lose some control, depending on PC willpower, follower satisfaction, and general PC vulnerability.  I don't want to become a full "follower" with the DF making all the decisions (with exceptions for things like enslavement, which shouldn't last forever), but I would like the DF to make demands.  That can be as general as wanting to clear any dungeon (with a time limit) or travel to a major city, or more specific with low PC will (clear this dungeon, go to this city).  The current DF model actually works well, but it's basically a gold leech with some humiliation thrown in.  The DF seems awfully laid back about what the PC does as long as the DF gets paid.  There's room for something between that and having all your actions dictated.

 

On SLSO, I like the concept but I've been too concerned about incompatibilities to use it.  Those concerns aside, I'd like for it to be a real "game".  Button mashing doesn't cut it.  If I succeed, it just means that I the player am good at clicking buttons really fast.  I see room for a more strategic-level game, managing a resource that we might call "self control".  Something that regenerates over time based on character attributes, and must be spent carefully or the PC's self control crumbles and she can't resist orgasms. 

 

Regarding needs mods and food & drink, I like it at a basic level.  It's a weight penalty.  If I'm going dungeon delving, I'd better carry enough.  If I get robbed, I also have to worry about nourishment.  I agree that in a player home it's pointless micro-management.  I could live without it.  Sleep though is the big one.  That forces a substantial amount of down time and requires a bed in cities or a bedroll in wilderness, with various risks for sleeping in different settings including those damned panty thieves.

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1 hour ago, HexBolt8 said:

This adds a whole layer of complexity.  I understand why these mods don't do it.  It's simple to check if the PC has an equipped weapon, no body slot clothing, or a companion, then either trigger the consequence or not.

As usual, I am intrigued by your ideas, and want to subscribe to your newsletter.

 

It isn't much harder to have various factors act as weighted added/lowered risk modifiers instead of all-or-nothing or weighted-step-towards-a-threshold modifiers.  It just takes planning, and inevitably slows processing a bit, unfortunately.  Balancing is tricky but an interesting exercise, as you know from your own personal solution.

 

But while this would definitely impact a weak-girl game, I suppose it has broader applicability, so I'll leave it for now.

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22 hours ago, HexBolt8 said:

SL Adventures already has wearing armor as a crime.  It works well.

At the time I was posting on that thread, SL Adventures was just heading in that direction - and I did a lot of nudging - to get more options on what gear was and wasn't a crime.

However, SLS ended up rendering a lot of that moot.

The license system is more practical, as you can still wear armor.

It doesn't achieve the same end though.

I wanted wearing armor to only be a crime in town, not to block wearing armor elsewhere. SL Adv still lets you have this, and you can mix it with SLS licenses.

 

It isn't quite what I want though. My preferred solution (all along) was to reward the player for wearing appropriate clothes in town.

Maybe also to punish them a bit for wearing armor. Out of town it would be a non-issue.

It's just a lot of work.

 

18 hours ago, Darkpig said:

The main problem is that Skyrim is a combat game. Being weak and helpless isn't exactly it's greatest strength.

We had those conversations back on the original thread :) You had plenty to say at the time.

I think the point is that mode of play requires new mechanics to make it fun, and new things to do and struggle with.

If combat ends up hard, and based on poor Skyrim AI, that can be OK. I've killed enough draugr the regular way. I want new ways to play and new ways to use the draugr in my game (and all the other enemies too).

 

DF has always been in a comfy middle-ground where you can get into a bit of trouble but mostly can play Skyrim.

 

If we look to games like CoC and TiTS as a design pattern, it's clear that Skyrim could be made to work without blowing everything up.

It wouldn't be Skyrim. Maybe it would be fun. At least it would be different. I've kind of done vanilla Skyrim! (Actually, I've never finished Dawnguard, though I did get well into it. That may be because it's boring). 

 

3 hours ago, Kissinger said:

A lot of mods aimed at creating a weak PC focus on making combat more difficult, more humiliating, more onerous, or just generally changing it in a qualitative way.  The idea being to modify the likelihood of increasing defeat scenarios which I guess you want to avoid, but are usually more interesting and rewarding for the LL player than the actual combat.  So why have combat or defeat at all or at least, so easy to start?

CoC lets you win (most) fights by taking your clothes off. This is both hilarious, and naturally leads to a lot of sex scenes.

Combat isn't avoided, but it's not really combat either.

Alternatively, you can fight. It's a player choice.

 

However, some enemies are resistant to arousal attacks, and if you can't fight, you will get stuck in CoC. Usually the encounters can be avoided, but I think there are some exceptions.

3 hours ago, Kissinger said:

The way to do this in practice is to gate combat with the Willpower stat from DF(C) or something like it.  Basically deprive the player of hostiles below a Willpower threshold, and create a set of mechanics for preventing the player from trying to attack passive NPCs that underline the PC's weakness as the reason.  I have some other ideas around mechanics that I think would be cool and challenging in addition but this post is long enough already.

I actually had something like this in mind. I hadn't though of attaching willpower to it though!

 

I was inspired by the Wenches who seem to be fine siding with the monsters in different kinds of dungeon, and by the Ancient Nordic Princess start (or whatever it's called).

I was dreaming of a bunch of stuff related to this idea years ago, but still haven't got any close to making it. Too much posting on forums I think.

 

Imagine though, if your objective in a draugr dungeon, or dwemer ruin, wasn't to kill everything, but to advance to the end by other means?

You can do it now with SD+ ... up to a point. It's slow and boring though. And then there's some enemy you have to kill to get a "cleared" or to get a key item. Those things need patching.

 

 

I collected all this stuff here because that thread had a ton of good ideas in it. It built up a language for talking about these issues, and ways of looking at the patterns.

Not everyone wants the same things. There are many conclusions you can draw, or objectives you might have.

 

I don't think the topic is done, but the thread tapered off. If there's discussion on this topic elsewhere, please point me at it :) 

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3 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

Imagine though, if your objective in a draugr dungeon, or dwemer ruin, wasn't to kill everything, but to advance to the end by other means?

You can do it now with SD+ ... up to a point. It's slow and boring though. And then there's some enemy you have to kill to get a "cleared" or to get a key item. Those things need patching.

 

One way to solve this issue is to turn dungeons into Willpower checkpoints instead of noncombat/sneak/pickpocket opportunities.  This way a sneaky or manipulative player might be able to pick through some of a dungeon's loot without actually clearing the boss or progressing the objective.  In other words if the PC is noticed by an enemy they can't persuade, they are enslaved or expelled from the dungeon with penalties.  It's a different kind of defeat mod - the PC is too pathetic to take seriously except as a nuisance or as slavery-bait.

 

This also opens up further gamification of the willpower stat or whatever equivalent is used.  What if you want to clear a quest, but your character is short willpower?  Maybe you can buff yourself with e.g. alcohol or skooma and then clear the dungeon before the buff expires.  This also makes substances and addictions more purposeful.  They now have a upside in game mechanical terms instead of a quantitative buff that could be duplicated.  Implementing something like this would also make DFC followers into a more high risk high reward proposition, because willpower based predation has broader gameplay implications now. 


I think there would need to be a corresponding mechanic where players can trade cash for concrete willpower gains e.g. alongside skill gains from skill trainers.  Because combat is now less accessible, this also revalues skill training.  Taken altogether this means the player's overall optimal strategy should be to escape towns/cities where willpower penalties in exchange for gold are or should be more rampant.  The PC still needs to return to towns to perpetuate the core gameplay loop, and a follower that can manage DD's is still necessary.  There are some additional details (like how do you stop a player from simply squatting towns to grind cash through prostitution and using trainers to break the incentives) but I think there are some neat ways to solve this that are gameplay and thematically consistent.

 

Basically the idea is to complete the other half of the punitive gameplay design that DFC+SLS+DD introduce.  But in order to do so the incentives have to be structured right.  The PC should have an attendant cycle of degradation to manage or prevent in order to progress the game, and in a way that's thematically consistent, makes gameplay sense and is still erotic fun.

 

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28 minutes ago, Kissinger said:

This also opens up further gamification of the willpower stat or whatever equivalent is used.  What if you want to clear a quest, but your character is short willpower?  Maybe you can buff yourself with e.g. alcohol or skooma and then clear the dungeon before the buff expires.  This also makes substances and addictions more purposeful.  They now have a upside in game mechanical terms instead of a quantitative buff that could be duplicated.  Implementing something like this would also make DFC followers into a more high risk high reward proposition, because willpower based predation has broader gameplay implications now. 

Interesting synergy.

 

28 minutes ago, Kissinger said:

think there would need to be a corresponding mechanic where players can trade cash for concrete willpower gains

You can sort of do this in my current DF dev version, because you can donate money to get rid of willpower fatigue, which may in some cases lead to you getting more willpower - but a long-term gain.

 

I've been thinking about a non-combat way to do dungeons since I played CoC, and the vengeful wenches made it so plain. Why couldn't I be a vengeful wench? Why didn't the draugr attack them? Ultimately, I wanted to steal their dragonstone, but hey, they weren't using it.

 

I had some ideas for mechanics you have to use to maintain your status with a faction. Draugr don't just let you into their secret cave, even if you're weak and harmless. They want something. Maybe it's just a teeny weenie bit of your soul, or maybe it's cash? Or maybe it's juicy food and drink? I always wondered where all that fresh food in draugr tombs came from. Fearful, pathetic people must bring it as an offering. Perhaps the draugr even eat it. Being sort of dead, I thought they wouldn't eat, but Skyrim seems to think they do. Tombs have tons of food in them.

 

Similar approaches apply to other groups, falmer, dwemer sentries, bandits, conjurers, necromancers. They all want something. In the case of bandits you better make yourself more valuable free than enslaved, because unlike the falmer, they can exchange you for valuable goods and services. And as for the magic users, better watch out you don't end up part of an experiment that might be a little ... life altering (as Belethor's sister can attest).

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Some stuff that came out of re-reading the old posts I think is immediately useful:

  • Soul gems as currency in DF. Must be filled.
  • SLD adding bounties. Forgot I wanted to do that. Very useful.
  • Locations that act as DD keys. Great for scenario building.
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The concept of willpower checkpoints is interesting.  I like making DFC willpower affect more things.  A concept that I've been thinking about is somewhat like that, linking willpower (or similar attribute) to combat defeat.  The lower the PC's will, the higher the health threshold at which she will automatically surrender.  This lets the player choose whether to attempt combat with a high risk of surrendering.  With a good attack plan or a weak foe it could be successful.  The tricky part would be triggering the various defeat mods when the PC's health drops below the threshold.  Perhaps simply placing the PC in bleedout would accomplish this.  Some defeat mods pick up on bleedout, and for those that don't, the player can press the surrender hotkey to complete the process.  Just an idea.

7 hours ago, Kissinger said:

There are some additional details (like how do you stop a player from simply squatting towns to grind cash through prostitution and using trainers to break the incentives) but I think there are some neat ways to solve this that are gameplay and thematically consistent.

I'd suggested in the DFC discussion that the DF might be configured to prod the PC into getting out and doing things.  The DF might view sitting around town for days as boring; the PC is being lazy.  This of course requires a follower.  A weak girl would need to rely on a follower outside town, but might dismiss a follower in town.  However, a Devious Follower wouldn't be so easy to get rid of, so a DF could be use to encourage (or force) the PC to break some patterns that are too easy. 

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10 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

I've been thinking about a non-combat way to do dungeons since I played CoC, and the vengeful wenches made it so plain. Why couldn't I be a vengeful wench? Why didn't the draugr attack them? Ultimately, I wanted to steal their dragonstone, but hey, they weren't using it.

 

Word lol

10 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

I had some ideas for mechanics you have to use to maintain your status with a faction. Draugr don't just let you into their secret cave, even if you're weak and harmless. They want something. Maybe it's just a teeny weenie bit of your soul, or maybe it's cash? Or maybe it's juicy food and drink? I always wondered where all that fresh food in draugr tombs came from. Fearful, pathetic people must bring it as an offering. Perhaps the draugr even eat it. Being sort of dead, I thought they wouldn't eat, but Skyrim seems to think they do. Tombs have tons of food in them.

 

Similar approaches apply to other groups, falmer, dwemer sentries, bandits, conjurers, necromancers. They all want something. In the case of bandits you better make yourself more valuable free than enslaved, because unlike the falmer, they can exchange you for valuable goods and services. And as for the magic users, better watch out you don't end up part of an experiment that might be a little ... life altering (as Belethor's sister can attest).

 

Really good stuff.  I think giving factions different mechanics for a helpless character to endure is gold.  Stobor's mods (both Skyrim and F4) are very much in this headspace, in terms of creating weird empowerment/dispowerment relationships for PCs that are totally degrading and fun.  I think his enemy faction scenarios (bandit/pirate/necromancer/vampire/spriggan/forsworn, etc.) are basically what I'm thinking of when trying to re-conceptualize noncombat outcomes.  His mods are very deliberate about how they limit PC agency to create gameplay.  I think they are a good point of departure.

 

The difference is that instead of being self-contained quests to trigger with finite narratives and endpoints, you have something that's more core to the progression and integrated with all the cool new mods from the last 18 months or so.  This is narratively weaker but I think the trade off is very worth it, given the kind of emergent gameplay scenarios you can get out of it.

 

4 hours ago, HexBolt8 said:

The concept of willpower checkpoints is interesting.  I like making DFC willpower affect more things.  A concept that I've been thinking about is somewhat like that, linking willpower (or similar attribute) to combat defeat.  The lower the PC's will, the higher the health threshold at which she will automatically surrender. 

There's a few reasons why having a precombat checkpoint is superior in my view to all the defeat mods we have now. 

  • it's thematically more consistent and more degrading - the PC is too weak to bother taking seriously
  • the implementation is likely a lot less buggy and awkward - defeat and surrender mods are notorious for this
  • It introduces a new gameplay mechanic that can reinforce others that have been introduced with mods
  • Why would a PC with a low willpower be able to swing a sword or cast a spell at a hostile to begin with?

I think there are sort of enough defeat/surrender mods, and I think there's a few with conditional autosurrenders.  My personal view is that the combat gameplay loop that exists now where if you lose a fight you get raped or enslaved and sent to SS isn't actually that compelling to a weak helpless PC playthrough.  It's just kind of empty reinforcement.  You made a weak character and your character got served.  What next?  Either you resort to pure narrative quests or you create mechanics and scenarios that are more fun, dynamic and granular. 

 

The DD+SLS+DFC trifecta is the most promising attempt at the latter since Maria Eden 2.0, which was in my view the single best one stop mod in terms of the subject of this thread.  I think at some point SS needs to be replaced with something more realized.  In order to do this though the gameplay purpose of enslavement needs to be clarified.  Especially if combat gets reworked in the way we are discussing.  I'm unsatisfied with enslavement and I think the key is probably going to be in giving DFC masters/followers traits and personalities.  So basically getting sold is a way of rolling the dice on your DFC followers traits and hopefully trading up for more favorable/less demanding master in exchange for some gameplay penalties and a degrading slavery market interlude. 

 

I wanted to create a proof of concept around the combat aspects before talking about it, but spitballing ideas is easier I guess.  I doubt I will have time to try implementing any of this stuff in the near future but who knows.

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2 hours ago, Kissinger said:

There's a few reasons why having a precombat checkpoint is superior in my view to all the defeat mods we have now. 

I wasn't looking at it as either-or.  I like your concept for willpower checkpoints.  I'd want that in addition to a willpower factor for auto-surrender.  You're definitely right in pointing out that checkpoints are more straightforward to implement.  And I think you and Lupine are more on the same page (looking for non-combat game content) than I am.  That's all right, I was mainly putting the idea that willpower might affect surrender out there to fuel thought.  Making it work would be tricky.  But the idea might trigger something in someone's mind, and that's the benefit of brainstorming.  I'll probably never see the thing I suggested, but if that sparks an idea for some other fun feature that gets built, then everyone benefits. 

2 hours ago, Kissinger said:

Why would a PC with a low willpower be able to swing a sword or cast a spell at a hostile to begin with?

At very low will it wouldn't make much sense.  My thought was to incorporate it as factor in auto-surrender, so that as will decreases, the surrender threshold increases.  The PC reaches the "this is just too much" point sooner in a fight.  The PC could have moderately decent will but still be affected, though to a much smaller degree than at zero will.  And the attribute doesn't have to be DFC Willpower, it could be any metric of the PC's misfortune or decreased mental fortitude.  Just an idea.  Maybe something good will come of it in one form or another.

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On 12/30/2019 at 1:07 PM, HexBolt8 said:

At very low will it wouldn't make much sense.

It depends on what we decide willpower means. Imagine a scenario where it makes more sense to keep swinging because there is no plausible scenario where you can surrender? In theory, you can't surrender to a sabre cat, or wolves, or a frostbite spider. They want to eat you, and it's get eaten or keep swinging that sword.

 

Except, we have defeat mods that will let you surrender to wolves, or a sabre cat, or a troll ... who will prefer to rape you rather than eat you. Some people just wanted creature content, and weren't too picky about how it got delivered.

 

Not that I'm saying we should take away everyone's wolf surrender capability, but is it reasonable to suppose that the heroine knows that surrendering to wolves, or a spider, is possible?

 

I guess what I'm talking about is willpower vs desperation. A submissive slave may lack the will to disobey an order, but might have the bravery to face a dangerous enemy as the result of an order.

 

It might not be entirely realistic, but we're dealing with genre behaviour, not real behaviour.

 

 

As a mechanic, the "give up fighting" check might be based on MAX(willpower, desperation), where desperation is a measure of the player's fear of the consequences of not fighting. Those consequences might be "being eaten", or they might be "master will be angry". If the latter reminds the poor PC that she could end up being horribly tortured for a week, desperation could be high.

 

But desperation isn't a stat you gradually adjust, it's situational, and narrative. It needs context. It would be zero, unless we had a known threat, like being eaten, or a slavery mod that has sent the slave to fight in the arena, etc.

 

 

On 12/30/2019 at 11:05 AM, Kissinger said:

There's a few reasons why having a precombat checkpoint is superior in my view to all the defeat mods we have now. 

  • it's thematically more consistent and more degrading - the PC is too weak to bother taking seriously
  • the implementation is likely a lot less buggy and awkward - defeat and surrender mods are notorious for this
  • It introduces a new gameplay mechanic that can reinforce others that have been introduced with mods
  • Why would a PC with a low willpower be able to swing a sword or cast a spell at a hostile to begin with?

Clearly, I think we have caveats to that last point, but in terms of "less buggy", hmmm, let's think?

 

The problem with defeat mods is responsiveness. Also lack of anticipation that fights do not simply start and end cleanly, but mainly responsiveness.

 

The mod needs to detect a low-health situation and then stop the fight. It also needs to handle things like followers who fight on, while the PC is placed in some defeated state (bleedout for example). It has to stop the fight quickly enough for it to sequence properly, and the fight is already going, and the condition for surrender has already occurred. Any lag or delay is perceptible and impacts immersion and reliability.

 

With a pre-check, you can scan for enemies as far ahead as you like. As soon as the PC enters combat, you can start trying to handle it.

The PC may be taking hits, or the enemies may be running to melee range. We don't know how urgent it is.

 

So, a pre-check has to be as responsive as a post-check, but the problems you have to solve are a little different. The PC might end up defeated before the mod responds. That needs to be handled. I don't think pre-checks are inherently less buggy, but there are more options to handle things, and it does lead to more consideration of all the possibilities; you can do that with a post check too though.

 

One thing you are less likely to have to deal with is the combat where the PC confusingly surrenders after killing all the enemies, or after pushing the final enemy to the point where they are cowering fearfully, defeated.

 

However, we could often pre-detect enemies before the fight even starts. That's not an option in a post-check world. However, pre-detection of enemies is potentially quite costly.

 

Another approach is to set the faction on all the pre-combat-handled factions to neutral at the esp level.

This would probably need patches for mods that add new enemy factions that should be handled, though a runtime solution is also possible.

As long as the factions are set, and there aren't quests that mess with them, it should work reliably. It's one of those approaches where when it breaks, you immediately know why.

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9 hours ago, Kissinger said:

I think at some point SS needs to be replaced with something more realized.

The problem with SS is it does not work reliably in the simplest cases, and wasn't written with multi-follower handling or DDs in mind at all.

It's use of Zap restraints is ... quaint, but ultimately bothersome, as you can end up wearing them and DDs, and it's a mess.

The prices are nonsensical too.

 

The other problem is its design is ... absurd.

 

There's no reason at all that mods that want to use SS should need compiled in support.

It's a simple matter to make a registration API based on mod events.

 

In the event, they provide their name, and the name of the event to fire to enslave the PC into the mod.

Not even so much as a dependency required.

 

To be fair, a bit of hacking could add that to SS in a reasonable time frame. Nobody is asking for it.

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FMEA

Spoiler

Lupine, it sounds like you've soured on FMEA.  With its default settings, FMEA is too punishing unless perhaps it's your only consequences mod, but selective use can work well.  I particularly like what FMEA does to alchemy if I turn off all negative outcomes except spoiled potions.  I never wanted it to simply render alchemy useless.  That just removes part of Skyrim game play.  The spoiled potions outcome works because alchemy is still useful, but not the moneymaking powerhouse it is in vanilla Skyrim.  I fail a lot, wasting ingredients.  But sometimes I succeed and have a potion I can use or sell.  Expensive (powerful) potions fail more often, so I can choose to make a basic single-effect potion and probably succeed, or try for a better potion and maybe fail. 

 

I used to use CACO to eliminate the value of mixed-effect potions (those with both good & bad effects) but I didn't care for CACO so I dumped it.  Now I use just self restraint.  I don't make mixed-effect potions, and if I accidentally create one I throw it away as useless.  I make some money with alchemy and get some useful potions, and it feels balanced.

 

Apropos2 Healing and Duration

Spoiler

I only use Apropos 2 for wear & tear.  I have all the sex narrative turned off.  The negative effects can be brutal.  I didn't want to be incapacitated for days, so I reduced the healing interval and set the chance to 100%.  I still get nasty spikes, and I have to limit income from prostitution, but game play doesn't stop for days.  I'm satisfied with that.  I have consequence without spoiling my game. 

 

The mod's consumables text file can be edited to add more healing items, so it doesn't have to be just eggs.  One can add healing items, and with a bit of mod editing create new recipes for them.  I discovered that setting the healing amount to a negative value causes W&T damage, which has possibilities for consuming certain things. 

 

Introducing Keys to the World

Spoiler

I'm not running DCL, so I use DD Enchanted Chests to add keys to containers, with the added benefit that chests can have Estrus or Dwemer traps.  I disallow traps on common containers, so searching sacks and barrels is safe.  If I lose my keys, I know I can eventually escape one of those escape-proof restraints by checking enough containers.  Since only chests do bad things, that's viable and offers me a path forward.  I just have to keep playing.  And did I mention that chests can have Dwemer traps?

 

Changing Outfits

Spoiler

I very much like having NPCs react to PC clothing, as you described.  The obvious problem as you noted, is the ease with which outfits can be changed.  "However, if changing outfits has more complex outcomes, then it starts to get a game mechanic."  SL Adventures has an option to perform a single rape check whenever the PC changes body slot clothing.  That's a start, but it's fairly easy to break LOS with NPCs for the instant needed to swap an outfit. 

 

My preference is time interval.  It should take time to swap clothing, and during that time the PC is somewhat vulnerable with clothing half on and half off.  However, waiting for the PC to change outfits would be boring.  It seems best to simulate time passing by assigning a chance for success and letting that play out instantly.  If someone sees the PC, it automatically fails.  If the PC is out of sight, some determination of success chance would be made, possibly based on proximity of other NPCs who might come around the corner or barge in to the place where you're hiding.  If you're caught, then: 

 

"If you show up as a whore one minute, and an armored tank the next, the NPCs might get confused, or annoyed, that you seem to be playing dress-up. Maybe they'll decide you are one thing or the other, and treat you that way no matter how you dress, until you make an effort to convince them otherwise. Or maybe there is a special place in their hearts for whores who want to be adventurers - and that special place is an awful lot like a slave cage - and might be reached through an organised ambush outside the city."

 

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19 hours ago, HexBolt8 said:

Lupine, it sounds like you've soured on FMEA.

No. Not at all. But the problems I had with it were annoying, but they were more a cautionary tale of picking wrong settings, not a dismissal of FMEA.

Mixing a hard-settings FMEA with a hard-settings SLS or SL Adventures makes things too hard, probably.

 

If I have a lasting grumble with FMEA it is that the consequence effects are poorly described in the MCM so you cannot easily enable/disable the effects you want.

I think that may be an "English not first language" problem.

19 hours ago, HexBolt8 said:

The mod's consumables text file can be edited to add more healing items, so it doesn't have to be just eggs.  One can add healing items, and with a bit of mod editing create new recipes for them.  I discovered that setting the healing amount to a negative value causes W&T damage, which has possibilities for consuming certain things. 

That's useful to know. The Apropos2 MCM should tell you that. Maybe it does?

 

My problem with Apropos2 is ... it's still hugely bugged. If you ever modify the W&T value manually, or use the "test" feature, it's screwed forever.

That means you have to fix recovery problems by other means, and sometimes recovery seems to stick or break too.

The debug menu stuff to reset and restart etc is not working right either.

It still sometimes ascribes nonsensical damage, like daedric damage or creature damage from normal sex.

 

I reported some specific cases and they were fixed, but others remain.

I stopped reporting them as the author had a weird rage at me for daring to support his mod in SLD. It was ... strange.

I don't want to deal with people who go nuts when you report bugs for their mod. Some people are weirdly insecure about that sort of thing and see any bug report as a personal attack. They will claim it's "how it was phrased" but really, that's BS. The situation is inevitable because it goes like this:

Spoiler

A shorthand version of the way this plays out:

 

Lupine: Hey, when I talk to Blah Blah, he puts the Maguffin on me, even if it conflicts with a DD quest device.

AngryModder: No it doesn't.

Lupine: It's 100% reproducible. There's no check in the dialog conditions.

AngryModder: It's supposed to work like that.

Lupine: It causes problems because X and Y and Z. You should probably check for quest devices.

AngryModder: How dare you come on my forum making demands you entitled brat! Your attitude is disgusting!

AngryModderFan: So true. Lupine is always demanding things. So entitled! And rude! Lupine, you need to be more humble in the presence of AngryModder who has done so much for the community. But you shouldn't stop posting on the forum. Could you please stay here and just be a toady?

Lupine: WTF? Am I playing some screwed up version of Troubles of Heroine in real life?

 

Rinse. Repeat.

 

19 hours ago, HexBolt8 said:

I'm not running DCL, so I use DD Enchanted Chests to add keys to containers, with the added benefit that chests can have Estrus or Dwemer traps.  I disallow traps on common containers, so searching sacks and barrels is safe.  If I lose my keys, I know I can eventually escape one of those escape-proof restraints by checking enough containers.  Since only chests do bad things, that's viable and offers me a path forward.  I just have to keep playing.  And did I mention that chests can have Dwemer traps?

When first mentioned this I went and retried DDEC. I'm using it in my latest game instead of DCL. Partly because I suspect a new DCL release is coming soon, and partly because DCL adds a lot of update code that runs all the time even if you're using none of it and just want the extra items, LBA, etc.

 

I agree that DDEC has become good. I would prefer the chances to be shown as a percentage with a decimal place in the MCM, but that's a trivial quibble. What I miss from DCL is the extra items, including some of the special collars. However, latest game is Slaverun based, so they are probably overkill.

 

There are some other features in DCL that DDEC lacks too, but for most purposes it's a good choice.

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1 hour ago, Lupine00 said:

My problem with Apropos2 is ... it's still hugely bugged. If you ever modify the W&T value manually, or use the "test" feature, it's screwed forever.

That means you have to fix recovery problems by other means, and sometimes recovery seems to stick or break too.

The debug menu stuff to reset and restart etc is not working right either.

It still sometimes ascribes nonsensical damage, like daedric damage or creature damage from normal sex.

I noticed that about the daedric/creature damage coming from nowhere.  It's weird but it doesn't seem to hurt anything.  I added consumables for healing and inflicting wear & tear as a way to adjust levels.  Unfortunately there's no way to target it for a specific orifice.  I suggested that to the author.  He seemed favorable to the idea but he wasn't working on the mod then. 

 

On Solicitation and Clothing

 

Much depends on how NPCs view it.  In my vision of Skyrim it's sharply along gender lines.  Women despise it; men love it.  (I consider Argonians and Khajiit as uninterested in smoothskin sex practices.  And I made Tonilia in the Thieves Guild neutral to soliciting, since it's a natural for pickpocketing and casing homes, just part of the job.)  Men understand that an unmarried woman has few legit options for earning income.  It's not like she's capable of fighting or anything requiring reading or study.  Prostitutes provide a useful service, and are accepted as long as they register with a pimp.  It keeps them from begging, doing drugs, or being a nuisance.  They're pretty and show a lot of skin.  In my Skyrim, guards are some of the best clients. 

 

In my game I created a series of effects for my PC:  Whore, Known Prostitute, Well-Known Prostitute, and Renowned Courtesan.  Note that higher rank bears a certain respectability, like a high-priced call girl.  I key the ranks to Radiant Prostitution rank, and add one rank when the PC is wearing "working clothes", flaunting what she does.  Male merchants give her increasingly better prices, while females gouge her badly (the - with females is worse than the + with males).  I wanted to extend that further but bartering was the only thing I came up with that I could link to gender.  (Interestingly, there's no way to adjust speechcraft depending on who you're talking to.)

 

For flavor, I extended the "What have you got for sale?" responses for females to add things like "Take a look, but mind your hands, whore", "Just buy what you want and leave before honest customers see you in here", "I sell poultices, salves, even lubricants for whores" (alchemist), "I have jewelry, perhaps something to tart yourself up for whoring" (jeweler), "I had you figured for a whore, not a mage" (spell merchant), "What's a whore need armor for?  Never mind, just take a look" (smiths), and "I could fashion some crotchless armor.  You could just bend over for your foe" (smiths). 

 

As my PC advances in prostitution, it's more and more attractive to deal with male merchants.  I want female merchants to rip her off rather than refuse to deal with her.  I prefer choice over gating things.  I still have a choice, but it's painfully clear how they view the PC.  I'm okay with benefiting from good prices with men.  Not everything has to be a penalty.  Solicitation is a viable way to play.  My merchant pool effectively shrinks by half, though.  That makes me plan ahead for selling loot.  Sell items to a female merchant because she's the only one in town who'll buy those things, or lug them to the next town to sell to a man?  What's an honest whore to do?

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21 hours ago, HexBolt8 said:

I very much like having NPCs react to PC clothing, as you described.  The obvious problem as you noted, is the ease with which outfits can be changed.  "However, if changing outfits has more complex outcomes, then it starts to get a game mechanic."  SL Adventures has an option to perform a single rape check whenever the PC changes body slot clothing.  That's a start, but it's fairly easy to break LOS with NPCs for the instant needed to swap an outfit. 

 

My preference is time interval.  It should take time to swap clothing, and during that time the PC is somewhat vulnerable with clothing half on and half off.  However, waiting for the PC to change outfits would be boring.  It seems best to simulate time passing by assigning a chance for success and letting that play out instantly.  If someone sees the PC, it automatically fails.  If the PC is out of sight, some determination of success chance would be made, possibly based on proximity of other NPCs who might come around the corner or barge in to the place where you're hiding.  If you're caught, then: 

 

"If you show up as a whore one minute, and an armored tank the next, the NPCs might get confused, or annoyed, that you seem to be playing dress-up. Maybe they'll decide you are one thing or the other, and treat you that way no matter how you dress, until you make an effort to convince them otherwise. Or maybe there is a special place in their hearts for whores who want to be adventurers - and that special place is an awful lot like a slave cage - and might be reached through an organised ambush outside the city."

This comes down to how to implement it in a practical way.

Once you have an ability to detect clothes swaps, then you can do something about them.

 

SLD is already detecting this, so it could implement clothes swap consequences - if the swap isn't performed in an allowed location. Apart from player homes, the player would probably have to add locations. Inns are tricky. It's not like the check can be relied upon to occur quickly enough to use LOS checks.

 

Players may forgive the occasional timing issue?

 

A complex (and slightly tiresome) mechanic could handle this reliably.

 

1) Player indicates PC wants to change clothes.

Player gets the dressing debuff.

NPC checks are performed for location/viewers from now until cell-change, or swap complete.

2) Player can now change clothes freedly.

3) Player indicates done changing PC clothes.

NPC checks are stopped.

Dressing debuff is removed.

 

If the PC changes clothes without going into clothes change mode, other than stripping to enter a SexLab scene, or to add DDs, then they get the dressing debuff on a timer and a chance of rape.  The debuff would last about 120 real seconds, and include extreme debuffs to armor skills, move speed, stamina and magicka. If the timer is running, a clothes enter-leave sequence will not remove it prematurely.

 

This would discourage the player from swapping outfits without notifying that they're changing clothes, and some locations may also carry a risk.

 

I don't think such tedious measures are worth it.

 

A simpler way, is as already suggested, simply remember the worst (most disadvantageous) outfit seen that day or 24-hours, and always use the worst one the NPC has seen you in for the test/situation being checked.

 

 

Another way to add some interest to outfits is to cripple carry capacity but reduce the weight of worn items.

Then the PC is discouraged from carrying around a lot of clothes, or carrying much loot. It's a double impact.

This could be used with another punishment for quick-clothes changes for a multi-prong approach.

 

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20 minutes ago, HexBolt8 said:

As my PC advances in prostitution, it's more and more attractive to deal with male merchants.  I want female merchants to rip her off rather than refuse to deal with her.  I prefer choice over gating things.  I still have a choice, but it's painfully clear how they view the PC.  I'm okay with benefiting from good prices with men.  Not everything has to be a penalty.  My merchant pool effectively shrinks by half, though.  That makes me plan ahead for selling loot.  Sell items to a female merchant because she's the only one in town who'll buy those things, or lug them to the next town to sell to a man?  What's a whore to do?

I wanted something exactly like that.

 

Maybe more outfit dependent, less reputation. So they would be about 50/50 contribution to reaction.

 

The next step is for females to react badly to you if you aren't dressed as they think you should be.

They might interact with you, even if you don't try to talk or trade with them.

 

I would go for them remembering the worst outfit you've worn in the day.

 

Things they might be able to do:

  • Complain to the guards about you
  • Hurl insults from across the town square
  • Steal your things if you aren't careful - while you're sleeping/bathing/using smithy/alchemy table/etc
  • Sell you spoiled stuff and complain to the guards if you argue about it
  • Complain to their spouse/brother/uncle/father about you - in a scene - causing the male NPC to avoid you for the rest of the day
  • Offer to help you get married
  • Offer to trade your slooty clothes for nice ones
  • Put devices on you while you're sleeping
  • Attack you as a gang (like a rape) but no sex scene, but simply rip up your clothes and cover you in filth - or administer a DFW style beating
  • Attack you as a gang, or while you're asleep, bind you and dump you outside of town

 

I'm trying sexworker's life at the moment. Some things I like, some I don't. The text is a bit ... not English.

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11 minutes ago, Lupine00 said:

I would go for them remembering the worst outfit you've worn in the day.

Hmm, should memories be that short, a day?  It's not like wearing dirty shoes.  Women would remember that kind of thing.  People talk, and the lady next door probably rushed over to gripe about that awful new girl in town tempting the men.

 

14 minutes ago, Lupine00 said:

Put devices on you while you're sleeping

I like that, within reason.  Some devices make no sense though even for a heavy sleeper. 

 

15 minutes ago, Lupine00 said:
  • Attack you as a gang (like a rape) but no sex scene, but simply rip up your clothes and cover you in filth - or administer a DFW style beating
  • Attack you as a gang, or while you're asleep, bind you and dump you outside of town

Yes, I've thought about that.  I like it.  Probably not as a "first offense", but after they really come to dislike you.  They know the menfolk won't do anything so they take matters into their own hands.  That kind of attack could involve more serious restraints, too.

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45 minutes ago, HexBolt8 said:

Hmm, should memories be that short, a day?  It's not like wearing dirty shoes.  Women would remember that kind of thing.  People talk, and the lady next door probably rushed over to gripe about that awful new girl in town tempting the men.

Game logic? But it sounds like a job for a slider.

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