Trapped in Rubber - Six Years On
Entry posted by Lupine00
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I'm replaying Trapped in Rubber right now, and sure, there are a few technical obstacles, but overall it's a fairly solid mod that still works quite reliably.
People are saying TiR is dead. I'm not sure why. It's just ... unmaintained. Has been for years.
The effort required to play it is minor compared to a Delzaron mod 
Nearly everything is still working about as well as it ever did.
Sure, there is a sad lack of support for features people take for granted now, such as needs, bathing, SLSO, modern-DD (+Lore), PoP, defeat mods, Simple Slavery, Slaverun Reloaded, rape mods, other slavery mods, and of course it fits poorly with newer mods like DF, SLS, or STA...
Most of the things it ignores were already around when TiR was peaking. Like CD, TiR assumes you're going to drop everything else from your LO, drink the CD/TiR koolaid and just play that for a while. You're supposed to build a LO around TiR, and that LO demands you pick your other SL mods carefully.
Assuming you don't introduce anything that conflicts too much, it mostly goes along smoothly.
So far, I've come across some scenes sticking for no obvious reason and some ever-so-slightly game-breaking device script bugs, and often as not, a vital NPC will lock themselves in an unreachable location (sigh), but that seems to be a -thing- with a few mods.
The slot conflicts are a major show-stopper, but they are easy to resolve once you hit them.
It is a long way from "every single quest is broken, every NPC is in the wrong place, nobody has a quest marker, the quest objectives are mostly confusing gibberish" Things in the Dark territory.
For me, the biggest flaws in TiR are the oldest and deepest. It never created much atmosphere and it's focused on the external world, while the interesting genre-specific part is the internal world of the tower. So much of it is doing vanilla-style Skyrim quests while you just happen to be in a rubber suit, and that makes the whole TiR aspect nothing more than "playing Skyrim with no armor", which is like half-a-dozen naked-Skyrim mods. You might as well play SLAV for example. And later, you get armor - lots of armor - so even that disappears and you're just left with some quite familiar-feeling quests and a shiny outfit.
As quest mods go, it's still pretty good quality. Yes, there are loopholes and gaps, but it's not like you have to spend all your effort tip-toeing around them. There are some mods where the challenge is getting it to work at all, and TiR isn't like that.
However, it never integrated well with DD content, and that's even worse now (probably). To the point you must disable all those things in your game, which makes it feel rather bare. TiR feels like there should be appropriate peril, risk of capture, enslavement, a sensation of being at the mercy of deranged masters and mistresses and trying to escape it, or being broken and remade so you can't cope without it. But TiR doesn't really do enough to fill those gaps. Sure, there are episodes that ought to fill those gaps, but they don't.
It ends up feeling like you're some tough super-spy rather than a slave being overwhelmed by rubber enclosure.
Time has not changed that. It's how it was then, and it's how it is now.
The Mistress feels inconsistent as a character, and that was always a flaw. On one hand she's preaching "mutual trust" but your entire enslavement is built on happenstance, trickery and deceit. In so far as she comes off as reliably insane and conflicted, she is consistent.
None of the deep issues with TiR are technical; it's the disconnect between the dialog and the events, and the emphasis. It goes for comedy where maybe nobody is really expecting comedy. The core story is, at heart, deeply non-comedic, so scenes like the Rubber School while wonderfully executed, don't meet audience expectation (unless you played it already and are used to it).
When things crank up, later in the story, the enemies are still buffoons, and are exactly like The Mistress: crazy as a sack of mutant monkeys. You can tell them this to their faces, but they don't care and it never matters. At the end of the story, you remain untouched by it all. The idea of picking the ending where you want to help the Mistress is ludicrous. There is never a point where the mod seriously sells you the idea that you owe her anything, or need her for anything. She is a parasite, a smug, over-capable parasite, but you're the one doing all the hard work. Any illusion that you could ever feel a connection to her is entirely the work of the player - wanting that and imagining it so - the mod does nothing to build it for you.
CD never made those mistakes. CD is thematically consistent and stays in-genre the whole time. Technically, it's less stable than TiR. CD was frequently extremely fragile, and required a lot of care and feeding to get it through an enslavement. The coherent feeling and strong atmosphere of CD was enough to make people forgive its technical foibles.
It seems to be the case that most slavery-related/BDSM mods can't do comic -relief- while staying on-theme and holding a stable tone. SLAV is all-over the place and it's only attempting pure comedy. What kind of comedy? It doesn't really know. Slaverun is undercut by deeply variable mood and tone, with a very mixed up approach. And DCL ... there's not much narrative there to start with. Dagonar is fairly bleak and brutal, but inherently stupid and ridiculous silly, while the Chloe line is played mainly for laughs but runs out of them about half-way through and ultimately becomes grind-heavy (there's a lot of walking long distances very slowly). The other Dollmaker quests feel like the eclectic set of random events that they are, as do the collars. DCL is not even trying to tell a story. It could, but it doesn't; it's completely episodic, and the order rarely matters.
As Kimy took great exception to my remarks about DCL here, I will clarify them. What I'm implying above is that I don't believe Dagonar is intended to be taken seriously; it is purposely silly. It is undeniable. That's not a criticism in itself; that choice to keep things light and silly is clearly popular and accessible. I enjoyed Dagonar, but it's not even attempting to be much of a story. Where I wish DCL had attempted more story, is with the Dollmaker, as a concept she hooks you in, but ultimately goes nowhere, figuratively speaking. Literally you go around and around quite a lot, but you end up back in Dawnstar, and nothing has really changed, and that is how all the other DCL episodes end: episode over, back to normal - an intentional design decision that makes DCL useful and flexible, but less of an immersive experience.
There are a lot of other mods that play it all for laughs (SLS for example), and that's fun and all, but it takes more than one flavor to make a good meal.
As a contrasting example, SD+ has ambition. It isn't unrelentingly bleak, but it tries to take itself a little seriously. That makes a nice change in a line-up of BDSM mods that seem to be saying "don't worry, nothing scary here, just fun". It doesn't throw up its hands at the first difficult moment, break the fourth wall and say "just kidding".
Sex Slaves (Dominant Andrew) hit a good balance on tone, but fell down on other areas (repetition, repetition, repetition) and of course, it's greatest failing was that one day the author just stopped and left it. Right at the point it seemed like you'd finally earned some payoff, it just stopped.
I guess the problem was that the target audience for Dominant Andrew either didn't exist, or wasn't vocal enough. Maybe it was just me?
It didn't quite pull off its intentions, and I think the author set out to make a mod to please others rather than himself. I've written about that on its own forum, so no point going on about it here.
There's a place for serious-ish mods with an appropriate amount of comic relief to prevent them feeling overly pretentious or bleak, but its hard to find mods that are like that. Arngrim's Apprentice maybe?
Imagine, just for a moment, a different TiR from the one that we were gifted with.
Imagine, a mod about a descent into a world of rubber. Where little by little, isolation from normality recalibrates your reality to the point where you struggle to exist outside that safe rubber haven. A mod where every trip out into the cold, bright outside world isn't a return to business-as-usual, but an reluctant foray into a place where you no longer belong and which feels increasingly alien as your rubber indoctrination splits you off from normal life. The same basic events of most of the TiR story might transpire, (albeit with a very different start), but with an entirely different perspective, and augmented with scenes from the inner world of the tower that completely refocus it all.
For example, instead of a pony race where you basically get an outfit and then run your first race...
Imagine, a series of fairly simple, (probably somewhat grindy) training scenes where it's a chore to eat as a pony, where it's a chore to drink as a pony, where it's a chore to walk the proper pony way. You learn to not use language, not just have a joke spell cast on you. You are forced to race around, and around, and around, practicing until you wonder if it will ever end. It doesn't have to go on too long, but just long enough to build the "feel" of it and make you never want to go back to it.
Also, a basic game-play feature for pony races is to add jumps, where if you fail to execute them correctly, you lose time getting out of the hole. Pony races without this are missing out on something Skyrim can give you "for free".
Imagine this as like operating like Rubber Waitress, where you need to build up a score to finish training. Each time you use human words, you lose points. Each time you fail to make a jump, you lose points, and at first it's set up so it's really easy to lose points, and hard to get them. Your trainer adds incentives as you fail, and they help you improve. Your human dialog options disappear one by one, replaced with pony options. Learn to use the right ones to get food, water, sleep, sex, practice time, etc. or just to please the trainer. You always have one option left to speak, but using it always costs points. Earlier on, you need the human options to get essentials. Later on, you can use the pony versions and gain, instead of lose, points. It's simple, but it's not really a game, it's just to build a feeling.
By the time you enter the first race, instead of it all being "no idea what I'm doing here, these people are nuts", you've spent the last three game weeks in full pony costume. You've forgotten what it was like to have arms, and the race is now the biggest most exciting thing you could possibly be doing. Your entire existence is focused on it. Finally, this pony thing is going somewhere? And in this version, you care deeply about pleasing The Mistress, desperately want to please her, because if you don't you can reasonably expect more hours of being a pony - which is awful. This woman has total control of your existence, and she can drive you insane. Maybe she already has? She tells you that if you don't win she's considering extra-intensive pony training for a month afterwards.
Maybe there's an option to go nuts and kick her until she's a bleeding mess on the floor and the other masters pull you off. I imagine you get punished pretty badly for that... You probably have to redo pony training and the race again if you take that path.
When you lose that race, you (as the player) should literally be in tears. No, no, no! No way. How did she get past me?
And you want to tell The Mistress that the other girl cheated, but you don't want to do it, because that would mean breaking character as a pony.
Of course, if you try to tell her, she should stop you and send you for punishment for that very reason, without hearing your explanation.
And so you go back to pony training, which has now been made even more unfair than before.
But of course, it's sorted out later and you're sent on some other job, because nobody really wants to spend twenty hours mining ore, or running circles in an armbinder. There comes a point where you need to stop doing that. Ideally, it comes before you get sick of the mod.
Players just want to feel like it was forever, when really they spent an hour on it, and half of that was one-handed.
When The Mistress takes you away from pony training, you would be genuinely grateful for the plot device, rather than simply feeling that it was all rigged from the start, you had no choices, and it was just a bit boring.
Imagine (once more), if TiR hadn't been a mod where you play regular Skyrim in a rubber outfit, but a mod about living in a rubber world and being forced to go outside it to deal with regular Skyrim? It could have made use of all the vanilla content/quests as stages that progress TiR. The Mistress sends you to Helgen, then to Whiterun, then to the Greybeards, and so on... TiR-plot-specific events fit in here and there. You're playing Skyrim, as normal, but you aren't, because your perspective is changed. It's not "Hey Balgruuf says I should see these Greybeard guys, so I'll slot it into my schedule", instead, you obediently return to The Mistress and report. She says that maybe one day you will be ready for something like that, but for now you're only one step up from a sex-slave, naked except for a rubber-suit, and she will let you know when you're ready, if you ever are. When you finally set off to climb those steps, perhaps she sends two rubber guards to look after you, who ensure you don't speak to anyone but the Greybeards (and pick up the Klimmek quest for you). Everything is changed. The illusion is that you have no agency at all, and in a way you don't because a lot of the time you have to complete Skyrim in the order The Mistress decides. If you go off-course, presumably the suit (or your minders) will set you back on the straight and narrow. Go to the wrong town, or take too long and your suit develops a habit or arm-binding you. Take too long away from the tower and end up crippled by hunger. Enter locations that are off limits and get blindfolded too. Not really for gameplay, but for atmosphere.
SLAV pretty much serves as the tech-demo on how to do all this, but SLAV is no slavery mod and its only atmosphere is relentless absurdity.
We can imagine...
The actual TiR is nothing like the above. Maybe most people are happier with it the way it is?
CD was intensely loaded with grind, and yet people loved it for the atmosphere.
Just being allowed to be a maid felt like a big achievement.
And then you spent so long in that mansion that any trip away from it started to feel special.
You spent so long "being" a maid, that doing anything else in Skyrim felt odd. The only other games that have the same impact are Beyond: Two Souls and things from the same creator.
And when you were sent on those courier jobs, the fear of failure was ... immense. So much tension. Incredible.
CD has a lot of fans. TiR did too, but CD made a much bigger impression I think.
I believe that's because it made you feel something different to normal Skyrim. It created a different world and took you there.
I would imagine that Trapped in Rubber isn't going to get any changes now. I doubt its creator would ever have been remotely interested in my perspective on it, even when they were actively working on it. It's been untouched for five years, so we can safely assume it isn't going to change, and realistically any work done now would likely be a few minimal bug-fixes to keep it playable. That's all that's needed. Anything like the mod I'm dreaming of would probably be best off as some completely fresh project.
Alas, for those seeking more than a regular Skyrim quest, Trapped in Rubber is not really about being trapped, or being in rubber. It's just some nifty Skyrim adventures with a bit of dress-up and a nod towards exhibitionism.
It makes a nice change from regular Skyrim adventures, but in the end, you can do much as you like. The "trap" is hardly any kind of trap at all.
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