What are your custom RP starts?

[Dazzle]

Hi, I am making a smutty fantasy IF, nothing fancy, and want to pin down the starting experience to smooth people into the character, and set up the premise. It's a wee, tiny bit ambitious, so even just explaining how you set up your adventures helps me make a few more steps of progress, so much appreciated.

You can lay it out however you like, but if you can try to get something along the lines of "I start of as a [blank] which wants to [blank] but [blank]"  that would be great since that help me get what's the desired dramatic tension (I like to overthink smut, it's my fetish) and also help me collate it into a spreadsheet for easier parsing.

Sorry if this doesn't belong here.

[Mister X]

Heyho,

 

for my current setup, I had a quite simple base premise: as Skyrim endures a civil war, money is needed but hard to come by.

In detail: I used a Needs mod, so my PC needs food, water and shelter. Together with that, I use mods so you can't find much money in dungeons anymore and the prices for items are different. Selling lower but buying higher from the PCs pov. In conjunction, there are more requirements for the guilds. The Thieves Guild won't recruit a random stranger anymore, the Mages Guild has high study fees per semester, for the Bards Guild an instrument must be learned, and ACTUALLY learned by playing.

So, money is needed but hard to come by. Of course, some people try to take advantage of that situation. Barkeepers are happy to hire whores for their inn and a shady new transportation service (S.L.U.T.S.) is on the rise ...

To top that off, as it's war, there are deserters and bandits roaming the roads who will do whatever they want if they have the luck to catch a woman.

 

That's the framework where I simply can put a character into (in my case normally female): eg a young daughter of a farmer who comes back to her home from fetching herbs one day only to find her family slaughtered by bandits? Or (my current story) an Imperial who wants to visit her older brother in Skyrim only to shipwreck at the coast and losing everything?

Basically, it's just a young beautiful woman who looses everything one day and now has to humiliate herself to survive and get the money to start a new living. Maybe, in the end, she even likes it?

 

If you like them, I've added in Devious Devices, loosely coupled to the story with Devious Lore and my idea, that some whicked Black Mages with a weird sense of humor invented a spell to trap containers and spread mimics across the land. Some people like that kinky stuff, so there's already the first shop selling these devices. As it's quite new, there's still some help needed ...

 

Is that what you've wanted?

[Grey Cloud]

1. Avoid anything vanilla.

2. Enjoy a hiking holiday with violence paid for by selling skooma and sex.

3. Have a laugh at all the weird and wonderful things my game throws up.

[woodsman30]

High level game play all weapons armor ect. available right from the start and NPC use them as well. Hard core combat, survival, needs, weather all things level to me or above always a shit show but it keeps me playing. Followers are a must as you cannot survive alone in my game.

[Guest]

Depends the character. There are a few choices I like from Alternate Start - LAL. But every single play through, I will temporarily increase my enchantment at start and console command vanilla or mod armor/clothing to increase experience and stamina rate to skill up faster because, at this point, and for the longest, I have no interest in going at a slow pace with the game. I still have to put in the work to skill up, but it isn't incredibly slow. And with that, I tend to start Bleak Falls Barrow around high 30s to mid 40s. with most of my skills at 100. I avoid potions at all cost because if there is one obvious flaw Bethesda did, it was health regeneration and not restricting magic if you play as a warrior, barbarian, thief or archerer. This is why I fail to see Skyrim as an RPG because it's limitless in what you can do allowing you to be everything in game. So even if I play as any of the mentioned classes, I will resort to skill up restoration because it's more convenient than spamming potions because Bethesda allowed for that amount of freedom. Had there been restrictions, which I'm definitely all for, I would resort to potions and food for health points restoration.

[moody132]

I like to start as a normal character, not a warrior, mage, thief, not even a killer, just a normal person.

Only backstory i care is how my character ended in Skyrim. Now i am a Dunnmer so i was escaping from Morrowind, and my ship crashed. Also i like starts with least amount of equipment.

My first goal is finding a shelter, city, town, whatever, getting food, normal stuff, surviving. So I roleplay about 1-2 hours as a normal person, then I lose single fight, combo defeat+death alternative+sd++simple slavery+other LL mods starts, my PC gets raped 50 times, drugged, and my game is telling to my pc 'skyrim isn't place for milkdrinkers.

Then after getting my freedom back my character is broken, and slowly turns into madness, doing everything to survie.

Then i like to start as thief-like, so stealing food from people houses, etc, but sooner or later i'm in jail and another LL mods combo starts. then my character decides that she needs to learn to fight. at end im becoming master wizard, through whole playthrough i can do everything. It is kinda stupid being Archmage and then becoming thief, so i figured that this path make sense.

 

Make rules for yourself. Additemmenu items costs filled black soul gem each + like double gold of actually item value + considerable amount of cojuration skill. In my lore i get thoose items from Oblivion.

I also do not loot armors. Avoid Smithing+Enchanting+Alchemy Combo, it kills game. For smithing there is mod Honed Metal, blacksmith can make and upgrade every smithable weapon for gold. 

I have Ordinator with 50% slower leveling in Uncapper, 2.5x damage dealt and taken in SkyTweak. I Always let death alternative etc scenario happends and do not reload when i die, unless i died in some bullshit way.

 

Also  i prefer to have defined goals and do that rather than going everywhere and doing everything all the way. I am level 10 with leather gear, trying to ambush some travelling merchants, and follower is like 'look a cave. wonder what's inside.' First time I can actually go check it, because my PC is new in Skyrim and it may be worth taking a risk but second time i know what's there. 40 falmers and 20 chauruses, and 10 falmer whores from Forgotten Wenches, which resurrects and summons each other 50% of times, so no, thank you. 

 

Avoid vanilla shit, install some dungueons and quests mods, when i first time fighted fist boss in Vigillant with fast 2h sword, strong nord woman with not skimpy nini armor, warpaints etc, custom animations, dodges, and new music kicked in it was best experience i had in Skyrim in many years. Seriously, new locations are way to go. 

 

I am playing LE so there is no reliable drinking potion animation mod, so a only drink potions when i am in safe distance from enemies, and only one at time

Also Familiar Faces is great mod, i actually cared about my followers. with little effort you can replace any NPC appearance with your follower, so it will have more dialogues that way. 

 

 

[Dazzle]

Thanks everyone, this is really useful.

 

@Mister X Yeah, basically what I'm looking for. I need to figure out the "narrative hooks" from normal fantasy into the depraved, and you captured it.

So both scarcity of resources and as @moody132 described, off-kilter enemy levels are being implemented to aid that. I'm only trying to get the "flavouring" of the starting 30 minutes right to avoid a rather drab Isekai start.

[The Man in Black]

I play as myself. Either I play it as a traditional isekai where I inexplicably wake up on the cart, or where Skyrim is a theme park similar to Westworld.