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I think I've, finally, settled on a configuration for Devious Followers-centered Skyrim that works pretty much as I want it to (as I laid out previously). The relevant settings being: Trade and Barter: fBarterMax 8.00, fBarterMin 2.00 Scarcity: 2x loot rarity .esp SexLab Survival: 50g toll, non level-based Devious Followers Continued: 500/50 base/level-based debt, 50% interest, 1000/1000 deal agreement/removal Perseids Inns and Taverns: 50% of default rental I was on the right track before - using Trade and Barter to tune down the prices vendors were willing to give was the key. Offloading loot in town does kind of feel a bit unsastifying now as I get basically peanuts for most items sold, but it's probably the least unsatisfying compromise. To balance Skyrim's loot economy to my liking, it seems like one of three things must be true: recurring resource sinks must be tuned very high, the amount of loot must be severely reduced, or vendors must pay a lot less for loot. But the payoff in the kind of game environment it creates is so worth it. For the first time in... maybe ever, I don't feel like I have to vigorously DM my own Skyrim playthrough just to not completely break the immersion. With a few small exceptions (no carriages), I'm finding myself actually trying my best and using all available (in-universe) tools to solve problems the game throws at me. It's also had positive effects on the Devious Followers side of things. When I took my first deal on the road to Markarth after realizing I didn't have enough daylight to reduce my 2K debt before the day's interest kicked in, it genuinely felt like a defeat. Speaking of DF. I've been running with Belrand (spellsword merc at the Winking Skeever) as my Devious Follower this playthrough. He fits the role surprisingly well. My original intent was to hire him to clear Ahtar's mission, then replace him with Ahtar as a long-term follower, but I ended up deciding to stick with Belrand. He is kinda charming in an old-man kind of way and he has that balding, lanky hairstyle that fits the "creepy uncle" trope to a tee. That plus him being an old mercenary hanging out in a bar suggest a certain kind of dynamic that is quite different from the one my other characters had with Sven. In my mind my hedge mage character initially latched on to him as a sort of father figure, though (of course) the wily old merc had other designs on his hapless ingénue. I also envision him as a bit of a drunk, which is a good excuse to handwave all the random times the follower AI will shit itself. Belrand stuck somewhere not helping out in this bandit fight? Oh, he's just shitfaced again. And with follower needs turned on in iNeed he just goes through all the booze I offload to him super quick, and he complains when he's out of drinks, which would normally be a little annoying but is a fortuitous bit of mechanical storytelling in this case. (As an unrelated aside, I've been moving away from the original pure healslut character concept and going into Destruction magic, and goddamn. Having some offensive capability bypasses so much frustration related to the follower AI being dumb as bricks sometimes. Follower inexplicably ignoring an enemy archer taking potshots at him? That's okay, I can deal with them myself.)

Quick follow-up from my previous post, having played a new game for about six hours. So, of course, the in-hindsight entirely predictable outcome of removing/gutting all other major resource faucets in my game except for alchemy is, alchemy is even more relatively profitable than before. And it really is shockingly profitable once you discover the high-value potions. (For instance, blue butterfly wing plus blue mountain flower, both cheap and relatively common ingredients, make a two-effect potion that sells for 80-100g.) The house rule I set to not loot bodies feels bad. It feels like leaving money on the table. Plus there's a certain lizard-brain satisfaction to running through a dungeon and coming out laden with the possessions of your vanquished enemy. That satisfaction feels like a core appeal of Skyrim, and taking it away lessens the thrill of dungeon diving. I think the obvious solution of a mod that blanket nerfs the rates merchants are willing to give you, while inelegant, might be the way to go. I always kind of dislike that in RPGs merchants will give you like 20g for an item ostensibly worth 100g, but I see the necessity here. Trade and Barter looks good. I also really liked the idea of Trade Routes but apparently it has some unpredictable interaction with Ordinator perk trees. I've set the Devious Follower debt to a base of 500 daily, with a level-based increase of 100 per level (previous I went with 1000 base and 50 level-based). I'm not sure yet as the effects haven't kicked in, but I think this should have the desired effect of cranking up the financial pressure as I start to level up. Live Another Life is great. I started arriving on a boat to Solitude, which actually works really well. I come through the gates, and get to witness Roggvir's execution, a dramatic introduction to Skyrim and the Imperial/Stormcloak subplot. Though a bit later I did find a couple of radiant encounters on the road that would have made a lot more sense in Whiterun - the Honningbrew revelers and the two Alik'r harassing a random Redguard woman. I always assumed they were tied to a location, but apparently they are chained to the player character, wherever she might be. ----- At this point, with a few restarts under my belt, I want to try to codify what I feel is the "ideal" playthrough, for me. What kind of experience do I want out of a playthrough of Skyrim + Devious Followers? In a nutshell, I want to be put in the mindset of a struggling adventurer living hand-to-mouth. dungeon-clearing should be lucrative but not excessively so - ideally I should come out of a daily dungeon loop (kill-loot-return-craft-sell) with roughly enough to pay the follower, the toll collector plus a room at the inn. Sometimes I should come out ahead, other times I should make a loss. If anything goes wrong, like if the follower gets downed a few times or I don't plan my trips well enough, that should put me in the red unless I've had a long streak of moderate success beforehand and built up a nice nest egg. the various money sinks: inns, tolls, food etc., and alternate money faucets like waitressing, begging and performing should remain relatively relevant. financial ruin ideally shouldn't be reliant on big RNG "nukes" that I have no control over such as everything being stolen while I sleep. If/when I go into debt, it should be by incremental cuts and failures. I should be able to see it coming and either fail despite my best efforts or pull through to fail another day. I should feel comfortable enough to really actually do my best within the confines of the game mechanics, without relying on limiting myself with house-rules so as to not break the game. in a similar vein, I want to not have to constantly fiddle with the MCM mid-game to adjust settings, either in my favor or otherwise. the Devious Follower's demands should escalate steadily at roughly the rate or slightly above the rate of my increasing ability to make money (due to higher Speech, better potions, more valuable loot). At some point I should be pressured by economic necessity to start taking deals. Is such an experience even possible to configure for? And more importantly, will I get there before my interest runs out? I don't think I have an unlimited amount of restarts in me. At some point (soon, I suspect) the novelty of replaying the first dozen hours over and over again is going to run thin.

Not strictly speaking a topic for LL, but eh. I'm here. I've been thinking about the economy loop for Skyrim. The very core of the problem here is that it is really easy to make lots of money in vanilla Skyrim - you very quickly get into a post-scarcity situation where you have so much gold and nice things that you have no more compelling reasons to engage in the game's "kill-loot-sell" core gameplay loop except for its own sake. And every aspect of Skyrim seems designed to funnel you into and facilitate this kill-loot-sell cycle, so when it breaks, the game can start to feel quite hollow. So getting that economy balance right is, to put it mildly, Quite Important. There's actually two distinct sub-problems here: the resource faucets are too generous. You can clear a couple of dungeons and come away thousands of gold richer, potentially, not to mention all the other lucrative things the game lets you do like alchemy, ore transmutation and smithing. there are not enough recurring resource sinks. You don't actually need to eat, sleep or heal. You can get through the game never buying a single piece of gear. You don't need to pay followers more than once. You can buy property, but why? You don't need a place to sleep, and safe barrels to stash your stuff are everywhere. (I don't really like training as it feels basically like paying to bypass level progression.) So far I've been playing with mods that tackle this latter sub-problem. Making it so that you have to eat and sleep in proper beds. Making sure your followers need to get paid. Introducing city tolls and taxes. I've come to the growing realization though that it's only a partial solution, because if you really want to put your nose to the grindstone, the game gives you multiple ways to make a shocking amount of gold in a really short time, so these sink mods all have to be tuned absurdly high to even have a hope of keeping up: licenses in SexLab Survival cost thousands. My Devious Follower demands over a thousand gold a day. I could tune these resource sinks even higher, but even at this level it's already kind of distorting the game's incentives. Sure I could run all the way up Dragonsreach to claim the 100 gold bounty from Proventus Avenicci, but the time it takes to do that already cost me more than 100 gold in recurring costs. They also completely overshadow more modest sinks like inn, food and gear repair costs, as well as making features like begging from SLS or performing from Ordinator less viable than they might otherwise be. So it's clearer to me now that the other half of the solution is tackling that first problem - the resource faucets. My first instinct is to just download a mod that guts the loot tables like Scarcity and be done with it, but thinking about it some more, a big chunk of my looted income actually comes from selling armors and weapons looted from bandits, which I don't think Scarcity touches. It might make more sense to also have a house-rule that I can't strip the armor and weapons off bandits (it always felt kind of unrealistic, anyway). I'm not 100% sure this is the way to go - what might end up happening is that dungeon-diving becomes so unrewarding it no longer makes sense for my timid civilian character to want to do so, which is not something I want. Another house rule I'll probably go with is to not use the transmute spell, when I find it. It is really strange that this this is not a bigger thing in the lore, anyway - for instance no one seems to think about transmuting all that mined silver to gold in Markarth (yeah, I know they're called the Silver-Bloods but still). Alchemy, the last big faucet, I will probably leave as is. I really like having a reason to tinker with the ingredients and discover various combos. Unrelated but I'm excited to try out Live Another Life, which I just downloaded, for my next start. Will probably go with the shipwreck or just the ship arrival start. The escape from Helgen is pretty dramatic but there's only so many times I can run through the exact same narrative beats in a short span of time without my eyes glazing over ("yes yes, mead with juniper berries in it; oh look here goes that horse thief; the dragon is gonna burst through this wall in 3..2..."). I'm interested to see if the flow of the early game still makes sense when starting not in Helgen-Riverwood-Whiterun.

Been playing a healslut run with a modlist built around Devious Followers Continued. Generally, the idea is to play support for a follower who does all the actual fighting while I deal with all the “boring” stuff like looting, gear upgrades, selling stuff, getting leads for bounties, setting up camp. In combat I'm a healstick cowering behind my follower buffing his health while he goes on the attack with a melee weapon. I've played almost 150 hours over four playthroughs, and there have consistently been two frustrating issues that keep cropping up: Firstly, the sex-upon-defeat system. In theory, I'd like a setup where I can be raped while my tank is preoccupied with other enemies; maybe he comes back in time to split open the skull of my would-be rapist, maybe he doesn't get back until the deed's been done. The idea being to add an element of vulnerability and peril to fights, but not fatal peril, because I want to play through my mistakes instead of getting a scot-free redo. In practice what I've seen happen is that I get attacked, which (I think) puts the attackers into a non-hostile faction, then the follower AI goes "cool, no more hostiles, coast is clear" and proceeds to stand around while I get assaulted. D'oh. Or, I manage to struggle and throw my attacker off, in which case everyone just kinda sheepishly shrugs and ignores one another for a bit, which is also immersion-breaking. I haven't tried a SexLab game that is solo (I got into SexLab modding explicitly to play healslut with a Devious Follower), but I strongly suspect these defeat sex mechanics just don't work that well with a follower, and especially not with a Devious Follower. I'm sure there's a combination of mods and settings somewhere in the labyrinth that works, but if there is I haven't found it. As a result I've been slowing paring back on my use of this system - at this point I use Death Alternative and nothing else. I miss the threat of rape on failure, but it is more functional. The second big issue is more one with base Skyrim itself rather than any mod: followers are terrible. The game is very clearly designed around having a combat-competent player character, and to be fair, when you're cleaving through masses of bandits yourself your incompetent follower isn't really a glaring issue. They help a little, but you deal the majority of the DPS. I don't think I noticed this when I first played through Skyrim. But of course as a passive healslut, you need your follower to be the killing machine that is usually the player. There are a couple of related problems as I've noticed that makes this hard: follower AI is just bad. Give them a bow and they will prefer to plink away at the enemy with the bow, even if (a) the enemy is getting close and winding up a melee power attack and (b) there are multiple archers. They also don't seem to have any situational awareness - I've often seen them completely ignore charging enemies at the start of combat, only responding when the enemy gets a hit in. Finally, the AI also has trouble with obstacles like tables, chairs and occasionally stairs. Interior tiles like the "bandit fort" one seem to cause the most problems. followers don't scale well. I'm not even talking about how they tend to level slower, though this also appears to be true. Even if you use a mod to make them level together with you, the game's enemy scaling assumes you're going to fight smarter and better when you're leveled up, so it throws tougher and more dangerous enemies against you. So take the snow troll on the way up to High Hrothgar at around lvl 12 for instance. As a player what I would do against this tough enemy is to get quick hits in then retreat out of melee range, especially when the troll telegraphs its attacks; maybe kite it a little as I drink potions or fire off a spell. It's I think what the game expects you to do. The follower of course does none of that, even with a follower framework that ostensibly improves the AI. He goes right up in the troll's face and proceeds to just facetank it and exchange blows, with the predictable outcome that he gets pounded down into the ground in record time. The result is that the follower becomes more and more useless and prone to going down in a couple of hits as the game goes on, which puts a big dent in the fantasy, which, to me at least, requires a powerful dom full of unstoppable brute strength and killing power. Otherwise what is left is the squalid reality of a small man gaslighting and emotionally abusing a partner. Which is probably more realistic as far as how real-world versions of DF relationships go, but... that's not a fun fantasy. I have been exploring partial solutions, a follower framework mainly. Been tinkering with the settings in Nether's Follower Framework, and I think I've found a setting that works okay. Regular legendary difficulty (x3 damage output for everyone but the player) and an additional x5 follower-specific damage output. It's unclear to me if that means the follower is putting out five times normal damage, or fifteen, but hey, it works, at least.

Finally committed to setting up a brand new Skyrim setup after some years. My old computer died in 2021 and took my entire load order, custom tweaks and all, with it. And then the AE modpocalypse kerfuffle happened and I went and got really into Final Fantasy XIV for a while. What really gave me the final push to dive back in was playing Dragon's Dogma 2. That game is severely flawed in many fundamental ways, but the support healer playstyle is actually viable in that game and it tickled a part of my subby backbrain that had lain dormant for a while and made me go "I wonder how Skyrim/Devious Followers is doing, I should call her". It's been a fun homecoming. Not just on the lewd side, but on the non-lewd side as well. The Skyrim mod community appears to have weathered a second sundering and coalesced around the new "AE" version, more or less. Having a new rig that didn't have mediocre specs a decade ago has broadened my horizons, too. On the LL end, it's been interesting to see myself basically speedrun over the same ground I tread before in terms of rediscovering my mod preferences. It's been long enough that I've forgotten most of the institutional knowledge, but at the end of the day my preferences are the exact same. Lots of strange moments of deja vu like "I have no memory of this place... but I've been here before". Thought I'd make a record for future me of the "cornerstone" mods I use for a DF-style game: Devious Followers Continued SE (of course) Basically unchanged since I stopped playing. There is a Redux version that looks promising with a bunch of modernizations, but the page went down and I think is still waiting to be picked up. The old Lupine version works well though. The core idea and implementation of the mod remain really solid and is generally the mod I build my lewd load order around. I really love the slow fall. There's always a period in the beginning where almost no lewd stuff is happening, but that early period is crucial because it gives you an emotional context for the "status quo" so that it feels so much more powerful when that idyllic status quo is subverted later. I go light on the other lewd mods when I play a DF game. They tend to be unneeded distractions when the main meal is the slow-bubbling tension that is your shifting relationship with your devious follower. Basically all you need is Devious Followers, plus maybe a mod that does cursed chests, for those unpredictable spikes of debt that can kickstart the DF debt spiral. The default settings mostly work. I went with the Hard exponent curve, which seems to work well in always threatening to put you on the back foot. I wanted initially to grab Torvar as my DF (drunk junior Companion who just joined to fight), and I also considered Erik the Slayer in Rorikstead, but in the end I gravitated towards Belrand again. The wily old sellsword trope is a natural fit for this kind of story. Plus he has a pretty good XVASynth voice set, on top of an unusual amount of vanilla lines. ----- Deviously Enchanted Chests I find what tends to work here is setting it so keys only drop when you have devices on you, and then also tune the key drops to lower rates, because they drop from even sources like gathering nodes. This just works if all you want is cursed loot with no extra frills. The other alternative I tried I found very intrusive and terminally bloated. It's that old-fashioned style of mod that has such severe scope creep that it's essentially an idiosyncratic grab bag of the creator's fetishes and reaches its tendrils into far-reaching parts of the game it has no business touching. (I'm a little grumpy about it.) ----- SM Essential Player SE Similarly a lightweight mod that does mostly one thing - make the player essential. No need for baroque defeat mods with a billion finicky options that are impossible to parse and troubleshoot, since combat failure is already punished heavily by Devious Followers. You do want the player to be essential, because otherwise the game lets you off the hook by automatically reloading to a save before when you fucked up. Remain in this bad timeline and suffer the consequences of your own incompetence. ----- Dynamic Timescale SE I use this to increase the timescale in the wilderness and reduce it in cities and interiors. I use 36-6-3 for non-combat timescale in wilderness, cities and interiors respectively (with 3-3-3 for combat). I find this works in making the province feel bigger, and long-distance travel is a major, risky undertaking. In my current DF playthrough when I made the trip from Whiterun to Ivarstead lots of things went wrong in the interim and around Hilgrund's Tomb. I had to make a decision to either turn back to Whiterun to convert my loot to gold I can pay my debt with, or push on to Ivarstead and risk the merchant there having only a small purse. A genuinely interesting dilemma that I had to think hard about, and it came about organically. (Of course at the time I forgot that Ivarstead had no general merchant at all...) It was a tough decision because with the wilderness timescale set so high, the journey takes about two in-game days, and those days aren't free - my DF needs his fair share, too. It synergizes with DF in a pretty perfect way. ----- Living Takes Time / Time Flies SE I used LTT this time, but I think I used mostly the latter before. Both work. The main purpose is to make it so you can't just do a bunch of crafting and instantly gain a bunch of gold. With every potion crafted taking time now, it's a risky tradeoff - alchemy and enchanting can still be incredibly lucrative later on but early on you really have to budget some time and buffer pay to level them. I set crafting potions to take about 15 mins. ----- Immersive Spell Learning - DESTified Makes learning spells take time as well. It's pretty elegantly implemented for maximum compatibility - when you first get a spell tome, you get a popup to make notes, which destroys the tome but doesn't teach you the spell yet. You then have to spend a certain amount of hours modified by your skill at that discipline studying the notes before the spell unlocks. For normal playthroughs I'd usually go for x1.5 to x2.5 time to study since I like the idea of learning spells taking special effort, but for DF the default x1 is more sensible. In the context of DF, I feel it adds some interesting tension to the DF experience as it's yet another time sink that has to be weighed against going out there and getting loot to pay debt. Do I want to go do that dungeon now, or can I afford to let debt accumulate a bit so that I can learn this new spell that might save me from paying for a bunch of follower bleedouts when shit hits the fan? ----- House rules: - no reloading except to fix bugs. The devious follower will attempt to get away with some blatantly unfair bullshit, and it's important to let him get away with it. It's easy to cheese by savescumming, but you shouldn't. It should feel majorly unfair - that's the appeal at the core of DF, I think. You can see the exploitative dynamic you're trapped in and feel yourself losing ground, but you're still forced to play your devious follower's games. - no fast travel. This is a big one. Fast travel tends to make the map feel small, and points in between quest and vendor hubs tend to fade away into "flyover country". In exchange I bump my carryweight up significantly with "player.modav carryweight". - do not loot armor or clothing, unless enchanted. I think this started out as a roleplay thing (didn't want to strip dead bodies naked), but I find that cutting dungeon loot proceeds by half does help with not completely outpacing the devious follower's debt demands. A house rule I'm no longer that keen on: - no attacking enemies directly, support your tank like a good little healslut. I love the idea of being a weak pathetic healer cowering behind a tank doing all the murder. But the problem is that follower AI in this game is staggeringly incompetent on a basic level if you remove player aggression from the equation. It's annoying to see Devious Followers artfully build up an image of the DF being highly intelligent and in control through dialogue and mechanics only for that illusion to shatter when you see the devious follower repeatedly take arrows to the face in combat because he cannot wrap his tiny brain around the concept of stairs. ----- I have a slightly different set for lewd-flavored Skyrim that isn't centered on Devious Followers, but I'm still figuring that one out. Anyway. I don't know how to wrap this up. I like this game, It's a blast. Thanks for coming to my ted talk The end of the prologue. Driven to desperation by mounting debt imposed by a devious follower, Sister Daena, stranded in Skyrim, makes a deal. The fall begins here. "That mouth was not made for prayer, slut. Get to work."