"What if you can use being defeated to achieve your ultimate Skyrim goals of "getting the loot" and "finishing the quest" ?"

This works already for me via SD+ enslavement, although it's a harsh fate for looting a chest sometimes.

You have some very good points there.

So far it's is realy hard to get a good defeat that isn't only rape, but also compatible with other mods and also works reliable.

(nooo I'm out of thumbs and have to actually type something)

So, reflecting on what you've written here, I'd like to point to a game called Kenshi, because I think some of its systems might be informative. Kenshi obviously doesn't have sex content and its modding tools are unfortunately not powerful enough to add it, but it has certain mechanical similarities to Skyrim (notably, the XP system works the same way) while achieving the goal of "losing fights is actually interesting."

So in Kenshi, the balance of the game is such that you pretty much expect that you will lose fights. The player is very weak starting out, and enemies are very strong. At least early on, in fact, you'll lose many more fights than you win. This seems like it would present a barrier to progression, but here's Kenshi's secret - losing makes you stronger. Sure, you might get beaten half to death and have your equipment stolen, but that isn't the end of the world. You still get XP from losing fights. You still get dodge XP from failing to dodge attacks, you still get sneak XP from failing to pass unnoticed, etc. So Kenshi gameplay tends to exhibit an arc where you try and fail and try and fail again and again until one day, you succeed instead of failing.

I think that's the route making defeat content more interesting should follow - not making defeat mechanics just a chance to mitigate failure, but a chance to, in a way, gain more than you lost, to become stronger for the experience.

Edit:

Oh, and I forgot - Kenshi doesn't have sex content, but it does have slavery content (of the more mundane variety). I don't think the exact mechanics of Kenshi's slavery would map particularly well to Skyrim, but there may be some interesting things to take from it.

In order to point out specifically how interesting losing a fight can be in Kenshi, I'd point to PixelRookie's "15 days a slave" video with the game.

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6 ) NPCs shouldn't always react first with violence, but should be alert for opportunity to get what they want by easier means.

7 ) Interactions should be streamlined, flowing and immersive where possible, rather than stilted and punctuated by invasive message boxes or unnecessary/redundant dialog.

8 ) There should be alternative ways to solve problems without combat.

9 ) Mods should aim for synergy and interoperability rather then each trying to create a walled garden of controlled features where events only join-up or make sense within the mod's own little silo of mechanics.

Especially those, up there ☝️!

As I am trying myself at dialogues right now (since christmas) I feel 7) will be the (my) hardest challenge.

Nevertheless a worthy one.

Interesting stuff

The biggest hurdle would be creating anything interactive after a defeat. While the idea of creating a negotiation opportunity after defeat sounds good on paper, what incentive would a victorious bandit (or group of bandits) have to negotiate? Obviously everything you have on you is theirs now anyway, including yourself. 

Once upon a time I proposed a Simple Slavery outcome that had your housecarl buy you if you had placed "bail money" in a special box in your home. (There is a variation on that outcome in a story on my blog "A Day in the life")

You could adapt a form of this as a defeat negotiation as a DFC outcome? Like "let me live and I am sure my Housecarl would pay you handsomely" which would set up a DFC situation with your housecarl (afaik all housecarls are potential followers).

But I am not sure how that differs from a SS DF outcome...

The old vanilla death and reload was abysmal, and a consequence driven death (to me anyway) has been the salvation of RPG game play, but just because it's light years better doesn't mean it is the pinnacle... I look forward to hearing more ideas on this.   

1 hour ago, Corsayr said:

While the idea of creating a negotiation opportunity after defeat sounds good on paper, what incentive would a victorious bandit (or group of bandits) have to negotiate? Obviously everything you have on you is theirs now anyway, including yourself. 

This has been a sticking point for me.  Once you've lost the fight, the bandits have everything.  A naked prisoner doesn't have much leverage for negotiating.  Except for this:

1 hour ago, Corsayr said:

Once upon a time I proposed a Simple Slavery outcome that had your housecarl buy you if you had placed "bail money" in a special box in your home.

Down the ages, freeing a prisoner for ransom has been a well established practice.  You wouldn't even need a housecarl, just an "agent" in a city to hold your ransom.  It does turn defeat into a robbery + cash drain, but it's a solution without violence, enslavement, or sex (at least if you can persuade the bandits to treat you well), though as a solution it's unexciting.  Maybe a chance for betrayal or turnabout at the ransom exchange point could enliven this, but I'd imagine that getting complex.

The "I can lead you to treasure" thing is also an old ploy but it would be messy to implement, leading a band of bandits or vampires through a dungeon.  And at the end why would they honor the deal?  Just sell you into slavery (profit) and keep your share (more profit). 

I don't mean to come across as overly negative.  I like options and more interesting interactions, and I certainly like game play to be fun, but a naked prisoner is in a very poor position.  (If you attack a group and maybe kill a few of their buddies in the process, naturally they will take everything that's not junk, remove all your armor & weapons, and render you helpless.  Because they can, and they're almost always not nice people.)

As to why mods don't integrate well, my take is that each author has a different vision for how things should work.  Mod authors tend to carve out a space and set up systems that work according to that vision.  Some, like DCL, are quite large, but they still have limits and won't necessarily play well with mods outside their boundaries. 

Fundamentally, each author builds a mod that that person would like to play.  (And without that motivation, mods wouldn't be created or shared, and we'd be playing vanilla Skyrim or paying for every mod.)  Good authors make mods highly customizable, but in the end a mod fulfills the author's desires, not necessarily the player's.  Many if not most authors are indifferent to what other mods offer, content to build their own "walled gardens". 

Sadly, most authors choose to build their own thing than try to master functionality in another mod, because other mods don't do exactly what the author wants.  So we see interesting frameworks like SexLab Sex Fame gather dust with very little real use.  Unfortunately, getting all those authors to work together seems harder than herding cats.  There are some good partnerships like Lupine & Monoman, but that's more the exception. 

I like the vision outlined here.  I hope others will buy into it, but that seems like quite an uphill road.

You are asking for a functional Defeat plus DA plus SD+ plus other DA scenarios that never existed...with the key take away being the functional part.

I believe Defeat has been falling out of date, DA never worked perfectly, and SD+ has its own limitation with NPC/master actions and interactions.

Defeat has a negotiation function, rather it is in depth enough or not is a separate point, but it is there. DA is supposedly able to handle different outcomes after defeat but only a few scenarios exist, and SD+ slavery is what it is.

Ideally if these mods work together to their fullest potential what you should get is combat defeat/surrender then negotiation/rape then DA spit out an outcome from a number of scenarios with possible enslavement via SD+, rescue, left for dead, etc...

But the transitions between them aren't smooth and each have minor to major issues of their own. At that point what it looks like is that a multi mods approach doesn't work which then lead to the creation of the later date monolithic mods that attempt to do it all like DiD and DCL...which of course has issues of their own.

You are looking at two different approaches that eventually ran into similar technical and limited time/resource/functions issues.

Outside of combat...well it is tricky but I think the two key things to overcome are NPC behavior and a goal for the PC.

Most slavery or temporary slavery mods don't work well because having NPCs do stuff outside of combat is flimsy and time consuming. Especially when multiple types of NPCs should behave differently.

Second point is more elusive. What's PC's "drive" to do whatever it is that she's doing? and the why and how? In vanilla there's the main plot of killing dragon, there's the civil war, there's each guild quest line. These things don't work nicely with forced sex + bdsm. Not without some major revamping if that's even possible. Outside of that we then need to look for alternative, mod-created, what, why, and how, which IMO only Slaverun has attempted to a decent extend, which is a wonder considering one person made all that, but I think we all see it is not quite complete, and could use some fine tuning in many places.

On 1/19/2020 at 7:03 PM, afa said:

You are asking for a functional Defeat plus DA plus SD+ plus other DA scenarios that never existed...with the key take away being the functional part.

I'm not asking  

This is more about where I wanted to get to when I first started modding, and clarifying that for myself.

Anything anyone else does in this direction, or cooperation they want to have, is entirely a bonus to me.

On 1/19/2020 at 4:44 AM, Corsayr said:

While the idea of creating a negotiation opportunity after defeat sounds good on paper, what incentive would a victorious bandit (or group of bandits) have to negotiate?

For the (narrow) issue of "What is there to negotiate, once you have lost?"

I think that the idea there is nothing the bandits don't have follows from the thinking implicit in the existing mods.

Once you put that thinking aside, you can see other ways.

On 1/19/2020 at 7:00 AM, HexBolt8 said:

Once you've lost the fight, the bandits have everything.  A naked prisoner doesn't have much leverage for negotiating. 

Defeat doesn't mean "captured, stripped and broken." That hasn't happened yet.

What does bleedout mean? You're not dead but you can't fight. You could get better in a flash with healing, and you still have your potions; you still have your magic; you still have your followers. Sure, maybe none of these things exist. The point is the bandits may not know your state with any certainty. They have to find out what might be in store for them.

Maybe when you drop to your knee, the whole thing is a feint, and you mean to spring up and stick your dagger through the throat of the bandit captain as he gloats over your defeat?

Even if you are defeated, and the bandits are confident they have you in their grip, they haven't consolidated that yet.

Maybe if they try to strip you, you'll fight to the death, suddenly vicious. Maybe you have some magical trap. Maybe you will kill yourself rather than let them take you prisoner.

And maybe there is still a fight going on, with followers that might well tear them to pieces.

And even if there isn't, there's no certainty a troop of guards, or a dragon, or a detachment of Stormcloaks, aren't following a few minutes behind you, and you were simply the scout.

The whole idea that the bandits act with complete information is flawed. They do not. They are fearful, lazy, greedy scum. You could be a lone adventurer, or you could be a trap. They don't know, but you can bet they want to find out.

Negotiation definitely shouldn't be over just because you lose a fight. There's a kind of narcissism that builds game mechanics around the idea that you work alone and are the only possible person the bandits need to fear.

Let's say you are wearing an Imperial uniform when you lose. What do the bandits conclude from that? Imperials do not work alone. Imperials work as a unit, with two exceptions. You could be a scout or a messenger, and they will want to know which. A messenger might think their message is more important than their life, and could move to protect it. A scout might be backed up by other scouts, or might presage the imminent arrival of a large force.

On 1/19/2020 at 7:00 AM, HexBolt8 said:

As to why mods don't integrate well, my take is that each author has a different vision for how things should work.  Mod authors tend to carve out a space and set up systems that work according to that vision.  Some, like DCL, are quite large, but they still have limits and won't necessarily play well with mods outside their boundaries. 

 

Fundamentally, each author builds a mod that that person would like to play.  (And without that motivation, mods wouldn't be created or shared, and we'd be playing vanilla Skyrim or paying for every mod.)  Good authors make mods highly customizable, but in the end a mod fulfills the author's desires, not necessarily the player's.  Many if not most authors are indifferent to what other mods offer, content to build their own "walled gardens". 

 

Sadly, most authors choose to build their own thing than try to master functionality in another mod, because other mods don't do exactly what the author wants.  So we see interesting frameworks like SexLab Sex Fame gather dust with very little real use.  Unfortunately, getting all those authors to work together seems harder than herding cats.  There are some good partnerships like Lupine & Monoman, but that's more the exception. 

I think the reason that mods don't get much synergy is a little more concrete than modders having a singular vision. I'm sure that contributes, but it's more than that.

SD+ is the real "Rosetta Stone" to decoding this mysterious language.

SD+ has a highly sophisticated interface for other mods to interact with it. Many mod events, Tons of StorageUtil values. Everything is exposed, and mostly documented.

Even if you do not like what SD+ does, you can save a lot of time by building on it and replacing the bits you don't like.

The reason nobody ever did that is probably this simple:

• SD+ is full of bugs that modder X cannot control the fix process for.
• SD+ could stop being maintained at any time. The current version could be the last.

You don't spend months building a mod on top of another mod, if you're afraid the foundation could be pulled from under you at any moment.

You don't spend months building on top of a mod, if you are afraid that serious bugs will never be fixed.

DD is used by other mods because the bugs are modest, and people believe that DD will go on even if Kimy vanishes.

They also believe that Kimy won't vanish. I believe that is probably wrong. Eventually, Kimy is going to get a full-time job she likes better than working on DD, and her interest in DD will dwindle away to nothing.

Kimy has tried to take proprietary control of DD, but ultimately, she can't, because it was first written by Min, and the assets were all made by people other than Kimy.

It's likely by the time Kimy is ready to give up that she will let DeWired etc carry it on anyway.

In any case, if she vanishes from the scene, the community will contrive a solution because there is sufficient incentive to do so.

In contrast, SD+, having no community of secondary users in the first place, has no group to carry it on if DBF quits.

There's also intent. DD and SexLab are created as foundations. SD+ is a standalone mod with quest content.

The focus for SD+ is that standalone content but the focus for SexLab is simply providing its API.

Consumer modders who use those mods understand that focus. They expect the mod author to stand by their framework.

They do not see or believe in that focus for SD+. They don't expect a stable API, or support from the API author.

Even Devious Framework got a little buy-in from consumer modders, despite being largely dysfunctional.

It's a chicken and egg problem. Nobody will use a mod without a community of users, and you can't have a community of users if nobody uses it.

SexLab and DD built those communities over a period of time, and in what is now a somewhat remote past.

It's simply impossible to build a new community the way those mods did, because the modding energy isn't there for Skyrim now.

Those mods filled those niches too successfully for LE.

Probably, nobody is going to make a new SexLab or DD on LE now - they might back-port an SSE sex-animation handler to LE, but that's a bit different.

That doesn't mean it's impossible to build a new community though. It just has to be done differently.

It has to be made a lot easier to join.

Also, doing the work on SSE is probably going to work out better. People are drifting away from LE, even though the ENB support in SSE is awful, there's a perception of stability to SSE, and the majority of important mods have somewhat functional ports or alternatives now. There are several sex-animation mods for SSE, including SexLab Lite.

Possibly, FO4 is an ever better place, technically at least.

Or a new TES game may appear, that is moddable, and not some walled-garden money-vampire-horror like FO76.

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What if negotiation is more like a  game of poker than a game of dice?

This is an interesting concept, I'll need to think about how that would work mechanically.

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6 ) NPCs shouldn't always react first with violence, but should be alert for opportunity to get what they want by easier means.

I agree wholeheartedly. Getting this to work is a whole different matter though. For starters everybody wants something different.

• Bandits want sex and cash so they may rape and rob the player
• Thalmor want to punish lesser races(This may be getting a little kinky)
• Animals generally want to be left alone. The cases of animals getting intimate with humans are rare. My suggestion is an offering of food should still allow the player to pass.
• Draugr are undead warriors. In game lore says that if they don't see you as a threat they leave you alone. What this means for sex mods is anyone's guess.
• Vampires will likely suck your blood so you may be anemic for awhile but it is likely they may also have desires of flesh and you just happen to be a beautiful maiden.
• I heard that dragons prefer to enslave humanity. How they do this? Maybe lore experts could give some insight.
• The falmer have slaves so if there is a will there is a way.
• Other creatures like trolls and Ice wraiths do not fit into the human or animal category and thus I have no clue what their desires may be.

How we go about doing this:

• Animals should be easy to please. Just have a lesser power that activates Voice of the Sky for a short time but requires a food offering.
• With bandits and other humanoid races we do not want the player to get off easily. The only way I see this happening is with the pesky force greet system. Maybe this could be done right but Bethesda fucked up with this big time with how it is implemented.
• Dragons... maybe have the player tied up with the words dragon sacrifice tattooed on her chest?

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What if you can use being defeated to achieve your ultimate Skyrim goals of "getting the loot" and "finishing the quest" ?

I'm not a modder, just an end-user, so a lot of this flew over my head, but on this point a text-based roguelike game called Trap Quest might provide some useful pointers. Trap Quest plays a bit like DCL, where in the course of your adventures you encounter NPCs and trapped chests that will equip bondage items on you and generally try to sluttify and mindbreak you. There are two ways to defeat the final bosses and "win" Trap Quest: (a) you overcome these challenges (generally difficult without savescumming), accumulate enough good gear and get powerful enough to beat down the final bosses.... or (b) you descend deeper into the crevasse, accumulate enough sexual stamina and become depraved enough to outfuck them (that is, fuck them into exhaustion).

I think I remember seeing a mod here on LL that tries to do something similar by casting a lethal curse on anyone you fuck. So an alternate way to kill a bandit camp might be to entice everyone to fuck you, then boom! Dead bandits everywhere. Can't remember what it's called though, wasn't my thing so I didn't download it.

What is DBF mod?

Too much text for me to read in the comments, I agree with the basic OP tho.

My impression of LL and Skyrim mods:

There are no standards/norms. That makes it a mess. Really. 
Maybe its my german doctrine or what, but I am writing game rules myself (tabletop) and I am a communications designer. 
So everything I do is based on:

- can it be understood by every dork via text and design?
- can it be upgraded and modulary with other content?
- do the core principles provide a dynamic and modular way to achieve things

It's actually kind of hard to believe I haven't read this until now...

If I could magically make any defeat mod I wanted, it'd go something like this:

1. You lose a fight.

1a. Creatures have a chance for creature anims if they player has them. Should keep critter lovers happy.

1b. Intelligent creatures (e.g.: Falmer, Reiklings, Giants) take your stuff, maybe use you. Again, anim-dependent.

1c. Humanoids can be negotiated with.

2. Aftermath.

2a. You get left for dead somewhere nearby. Dungeons port you back to the start, and you're beat to hell with reduced stats.

2b. You can run away. DiD actually does this fairly well, but I'd have a much more relaxed aggro and your captors wouldn't immediately follow.

2c. You're presented with a range of dialogue choices ranging from borderline tall tales (I'm scouting for a party of ten Companions, and they're going to be right behind me!) to simple requests (I'm Thane of X. Send a letter to the Jarl of X, and they'll let you go if you disband and leave). They can be bluffs. Maybe this would be speech-dependent and scaled so higher level characters couldn't always win? Anyway, you get to try from a menu of options which diminishes every time you fail. Fail enough, you're captured and they take all your stuff. Succeed and you get to go on your way with whatever consequences your choice had.

3. If captured in 2c, one of three things happens.

3a. You become the camp toy for a few days, then get thrown out with with an empty inventory. I'd make this the least likely.

3b. You run when the opportunity presents. Similar to 2b, but your captors aggro faster and you get a large boost to stamina regen. Don't get hit for X amount of time and your captors pacify. You get to try this during 3a.

3c. You get sold on. This happens if 3a or 3b don't work out for you.

4. The interesting option is really 3c. I'd have the player sold to bounty hunters for a fake bounty. Basically, the bandits, or whatever they are, take a payment from the bounty hunters, who then craft a bounty on the player for a higher cost and deliver the player to that hold. I'd hybridize DFW and SD+ travel control systems where your captor becomes your follower, you get a destination, and you get a gag, shackles, and a constricting collar in case you decide to run off. If the destination could always be the other end of Skyrim, so much the better.

You travel for a while, get a fade-out, and find yourself in a non-connected cell (Slaverun did this for carriages) when you camp. Here you'd have different escape room scenarios. Wait 'til the guards go to sleep and sneak off. Seduce a guard. Get them drunk. Poison them. You get away, you do so without the bounty and in unfamiliar territory, possibly even hostile territory, and potentially bound if you've made certain major choices in the game to that point. There are a ridiculous number of scenarios here, and it's actually kind of hilarious that this is the easiest part to write.

After some traipsing about and ideally three or four camp opportunities, you reach your destination where your bounty is handed in and you either go to prison or to SS if you have it. Obviously, this would need DD, SS, and a base defeat system to handle it, and yes, I'm well aware this would take something like 2,000 hours to code and test since the CK is a bitch. It's magical thinking at its finest. ?

Anyway, that's what I would do if I had a magic wand. The main problem with defeat mods is, to put a finer point on it, not what happens after defeat, but what allows the PC to reengage with the game world after failure. You can build whatever you want, but if you don't offer a cogent reintegration, it's too jarring. That is, I suspect, the reason so many players use things like Apropos and SLD to create punishments for rape and other extremely harsh consequences - it's the cudgel instead of the stick and no carrot to rationalize the lack of transition and consequence. I know that's what I do, and while impossibly severe consequences sort of make up for the lack of defeat transition, it would be nice to have something more robust.

Hopefully this spreads some ideas around. It'll be quite a while before I'm capable of such a mod, and Skyrim LE might be dead by then.