[IDEA / PROTOTYPE] Mod for playing as an NPC's follower

[firespectrum]

A potentially immersive way to hook in could be for a courier to give PC a note to give to their master (and hey, maybe master wants PC to "tip" the courier for his troubles). The note is the "job" your master has been hired to do and it initiates either:

 

a. The dungeon drag base mechanic you are working on here or...

 

b. A vanilla radiant quest where PC's master has been re-scripted to be the quest-giver

 

If PC's master is commanding PC to go to the objective, I think that gets around the immersion-breaking of the PC seeking the quests. Maybe you could add a timing mechanic where the master harasses or punishes the PC if they haven't reached the first waypoint in enough time.

 

It would be cool if the master would drag the PC to a city every so often, using the mechanic you're developing.

City event could be:

 

1. Master pays their respects to the Jarl (offering PC's body of course), and while PC is doing the respecting, master gets the next job from the steward.

2. Master goes to the tavern, prostitution/humiliation ensues, master gets the next job 

3. Master pays some debts around town (adventuring ain't cheap after all)

4. Master wants PC to steal something for them (potential pathway to prison mods, but I would want this toggle-able in MCM)

 

I'm not putting anything on the list that Submissive Lola would already do because I would definitely what to run that mod at the same time.

 

My holy grail would be for faction quests to be re-scripted to fit this scenario.

 

For example:

 

Dark Brotherhood:

1. Master drags PC to Aretino residence to start "Innocence Lost"

2. "With Friends Like These..." triggers. PC's master is one of the prisoners tied up. If PC kills master, Astrid becomes PC's new master.

3. Master drags PC to Sanctuary for more or less vanilla Dark Brotherhood quest line

4. If Astrid is PC's master, Astrid releases PC to kill the emperor alone

5. At the end of "Death Incarnate", PC belongs to the Dark Brotherhood. If Astrid was PC's master, Nazir becomes PC's new master.

 

 

Could you have a mod quest trigger if a certain vanilla quest ID is active? The idea being that you could have a parallel mod quest that is dragging the PC to predetermined locations based on a vanilla quest stage. Obviously, there would need to be varying degrees of re-scripting of the vanilla quests to make the dialogue make sense, but perhaps it's a framework?

[Darkwing241]

12 hours ago, firespectrum said:

1. Master pays their respects to the Jarl (offering PC's body of course), and while PC is doing the respecting, master gets the next job from the steward.

2. Master goes to the tavern, prostitution/humiliation ensues, master gets the next job 

3. Master pays some debts around town (adventuring ain't cheap after all)

4. Master wants PC to steal something for them (potential pathway to prison mods, but I would want this toggle-able in MCM)

 

This is just slaverun or radiant prostitution.

[firespectrum]

5 hours ago, Darkwing241 said:

 

This is just slaverun or radiant prostitution.

Really? I've never run that. Are you referring to this?

 

It doesn't look like it has the dom/sub theme I think we're going for here. Looks like a Dragonborn decides to be a whore mod, but I've never played it.

 

I've always wanted to play Slaverun, but I have never gotten it to work in my load order.

 

[Darkwing241]

1 hour ago, firespectrum said:

It doesn't look like it has the dom/sub theme I think we're going for here. Looks like a Dragonborn decides to be a whore mod, but I've never played it.

 

I've always wanted to play Slaverun, but I have never gotten it to work in my load order.

RP has the typical "loan the PC to a guy for a sex scene" stuff that a lot of people like.  It includes some pretty rough stuff.

 

Slaverun's main storyline is basicly the PC being sent around skyrim and being traded to various NPCs to further spread slavery to one hold after another.

 

Devious followers also has a 'loan you to the jarl' event similar to what you described. 

 

Honestly you described the vast majority of story line mods on loverslab.

[firespectrum]

16 minutes ago, Darkwing241 said:

RP has the typical "loan the PC to a guy for a sex scene" stuff that a lot of people like.  It includes some pretty rough stuff.

 

Slaverun's main storyline is basicly the PC being sent around skyrim and being traded to various NPCs to further spread slavery to one hold after another.

 

Devious followers also has a 'loan you to the jarl' event similar to what you described. 

 

Honestly you described the vast majority of story line mods on loverslab.

 

Gotcha. The PC as sub rabbit hole seems cool at first, but I've found the PC as dom mods to be more immersive/playable because most of the content is written with the PC as a demi-god already and there is just so much in the game that breaks the PC as sub immersion. That's why I like this idea of a dom follower mod where the PC would actually have to follow the dom. Submissive Lola is the only such mod that I've gotten to work reliably, but the fact that the PC is still driving really breaks the immersion. If Visio can get a framework like this up and running, it would be worth the pain of putting a PC as sub load order together.

[Visio Diaboli]

I have a few comments I intend to respond to in here, so apologies for the delay. I haven't been in the Skyrim modding headspace for a bit now, so I'll have to post a longer update/response later. It seems to take an arrangement of conditions beyond my understanding for me to want to work on modding, and seemingly they are not present right now. Though, since as far as I can tell, PW is in a stable state, I do want to prioritize turning this into a well-realized mod, before the next big PW expansion. Just not sure when it'll be.

[Darkwing241]

21 hours ago, firespectrum said:

Gotcha. The PC as sub rabbit hole seems cool at first, but I've found the PC as dom mods to be more immersive/playable because most of the content is written with the PC as a demi-god already and there is just so much in the game that breaks the PC as sub immersion. That's why I like this idea of a dom follower mod where the PC would actually have to follow the dom. Submissive Lola is the only such mod that I've gotten to work reliably, but the fact that the PC is still driving really breaks the immersion. If Visio can get a framework like this up and running, it would be worth the pain of putting a PC as sub load order together.

 

Lupine00 was developing a similar Idea for deviousfollowers, but they haven't been on in over a year.  There was a lot of discussion around these idea's in the DF thread.

 

My personal desire is to see a barebones/framework style player follower system.  Avoid delving to deep into specific misogyny/objectification/slavery kinks. So that the mod can service a large number of styles of roleplay.

 

Too much work put into giving the follower TOTAL control is going work out so well.  Saguine's debauchery has an enslavement system with a follow mechanic where the PC would literally follow a NPC to a destination and then kink stuff would happen there... It wasn't very fun to be honest, or even very sexy fun.  It was just walking places.  Deepbluefrog put some damn impressive work into it so just makeing 'a better version of that' clearly isn't going to make the mod good

 

Even something as similar as a plugin for devious followers that allowed the follower to 'pick a quest' and then maybe set a timer or something would be pretty neat.  Having the PC be under orders with some incentive to follow them can be easily framed as slavery, while still leveraging the fact that skyrim is a game designed for the player to making all the choices.  A careful decision needs to be made between the Player being enslaved and the Player's character being enslaved.

[firespectrum]

5 minutes ago, Darkwing241 said:

 

 A careful decision needs to be made between the Player being enslaved and the Player's character being enslaved.

Well said.

[Anunya]

I really like the idea of this mod and am looking forward to seeing it being realized  

 

I too have a handful of comments and questions:

 

Question 1

 

Are you envisioning this as something that could be played alongside mods like SubLola or DFC, or do you expect having an IoP "follower" to be an alternative to those mods?

 

Question 2

 

Do you expect IoP to be able to handle multiple follower scenarios (I personally use NFF and love it)? If you do, do you think it'd be one "primary" IoP leader and the others be just regular followers, or do you think there's a way for the PC to be a follower shared among the party?

 

Comment 1

 

Upgrading the PCs gear is a very cool concept. I think it'd be even cooler if there was a mechanism for the player to have some input into the potential choices - and ideally in a way that wasn't too difficult for the technically challenged among us. Basically, there are SO many different outfit mods (not to mention body types) out there that really enhances people's games, but obviously tastes differs quite a lot. Letting the player define the scope of the options for gear upgrades - or add to it - would extend the appeal of the mod I think.

 

Comment 2

 

IMO there are at least four major components to the idea behind IoP (and probably more):

• The micro gameplay elements, supporting the leader in the dungeons with "heal slut" or similar gameplay.
• Decisions about character growth via gear upgrades, where the leader "follower" decides for the
• Having the leader take larger scale "strategic" decisions like "which region do we travel to" and "what quest do we take next".
• The day to day narrative reflecting the PC as follower rather than the heroic dragonborn. This I'd divide into two main groups:
  • The language of quests and events, so instead of "you slew the dragon" or "you cleared the dungeon here's the reward" it becomes "the leader your follow is so great, he slew the dragon / cleared the dungeon".
  • Day-to-day activities where the PC is expected to do support things to create the experience of being a follower. I'm thinking things like "rent me a room at the inn", "set up the camp", "it's time to eat, take out food from your pack and feed everyone", "go wash our clothes", "go sharpen my sword" etc.

To the extent you implement these (and probably have your own priorities here), I'd like to suggest giving the player the opportunity to toggle different elements on or off via and MCM so people can tailor their play experience and to make it easier to integrate with other mods.

 

You did a great job with that with PW, so I'm pretty optimistic on this point

 

Comment 3

 

I absolutely appreciate your plan to build a non-sex version of the mod. It makes sense. Personally I'm in it for sex bits too, but depending on the design objectives it could potentially be handled by having an IoP leader be a SubLola master simultaneously.

 

Comment 4

 

If pacing out the activities purely via AI becomes unwieldy (either in terms of gameplay or in terms of implementation) a possible middle ground would be to leave the player with the ability to ask the leader questions like "where are we going to next" or "where do you stand on the civil war" to trigger new leader decisions. This could help shape the storyline around possible challenges without the PC having any real agency (and the player having not that much).

 

... these are just some thoughts and questions, do with them as you will. In any case, I'm going to follow this thread and I'm looking forward to see where this goes  

Edited March 4, 2023 by Anunya

[ScroodPooch]

On 2/6/2023 at 6:41 PM, Darkwing241 said:

 

Lupine00 was developing a similar Idea for deviousfollowers, but they haven't been on in over a year.  There was a lot of discussion around these idea's in the DF thread.

 

My personal desire is to see a barebones/framework style player follower system.  Avoid delving to deep into specific misogyny/objectification/slavery kinks. So that the mod can service a large number of styles of roleplay.

 

Too much work put into giving the follower TOTAL control is going work out so well.  Saguine's debauchery has an enslavement system with a follow mechanic where the PC would literally follow a NPC to a destination and then kink stuff would happen there... It wasn't very fun to be honest, or even very sexy fun.  It was just walking places.  Deepbluefrog put some damn impressive work into it so just makeing 'a better version of that' clearly isn't going to make the mod good

 

Even something as similar as a plugin for devious followers that allowed the follower to 'pick a quest' and then maybe set a timer or something would be pretty neat.  Having the PC be under orders with some incentive to follow them can be easily framed as slavery, while still leveraging the fact that skyrim is a game designed for the player to making all the choices.  A careful decision needs to be made between the Player being enslaved and the Player's character being enslaved.

Unfortunately, this never came to any kind of fruition.

He posted a blog about it, then later came back and said he wouldn't be developing the idea.

 

[Darkwing241]

16 hours ago, Anunya said:

The day to day narrative reflecting the PC as follower rather than the heroic dragonborn. This I'd divide into two main groups:

• The language of quests and events, so instead of "you slew the dragon" or "you cleared the dungeon here's the reward" it becomes "the leader your follow is so great, he slew the dragon / cleared the dungeon".
• Day-to-day activities where the PC is expected to do support things to create the experience of being a follower. I'm thinking things like "rent me a room at the inn", "set up the camp", "it's time to eat, take out food from your pack and feed everyone", "go wash our clothes", "go sharpen my sword" etc.

 

The first part would be incredibly difficult to do ( and reminds me of another lupine00 idea that they called "glass ceiling").  Having to write dialogue for nearly every npc would make this a mega project, and would also potentially make compatibility with other mods a big problem.

 

You could try to work around this problem by just having the dialogue for a few key events, or at events that are likely to be repeated.  Innkeepers and Jarls Bounties for example.  The problem with doing a limited dialogue overhaul is that you end up running into tons of unexplained inconsistencies.  At that point is the dialogue really even helping to build immersion?  There's also a potential big problem for players who intend to use a female follower.

 

I think a good alternative would to be build a "lead from behind" style follower.  A follower that for whatever reason avoids public social credit.  Maybe the narrative is something like the follower is more concerned with convincing the Player Character that they are the real hero, they could still take the rewards ect. but at then the only dialogue scenes that would need to be written would be between the follower and the PC. 

 

The nice thing about this style is that inconsistencies are explained automatically,  the fact that there is not special dialogue for that obscure fetch quest in a random village makes sense because the follower isn't interested in that.  It would also leave narrative space for if you do want to write a big scene for a major skyrim quest.

 

[Anunya]

Yeah it's definitely a non-trivial amount of work and it may not be ideal for this mod - but it's potentially part of the package, especially if there are clever (i.e. less work intensive) ways to make it happen. But I tend to agree that you're probably better off picking strategic places to do it in the story line (if you want to do it at all).

 

Regarding a "lead from behind" type of follower (leader), my impression is that this mod's goal is to lead from the front as much as possible. It'll be interesting to see how it turns out in the end.

 

Another way to recontextualize the vanilla dialogue is to put follower-PC dialogue before or after them. Stuff like:

PC: "What do we do next?"

Follower-as-Protagonist: "We're going to Whiterun to warn the Jarl that a Dragon destroyed Helgen."

[Anunya]

Another thing I would love for this mod is the ability (for the player) to substitute the follower-as-protagonist into Sex Lab scenes instead of the PC.

 

Imagine the PC supporting the follower-as-protagonist as he (or she) goes through the various Amorous Adventures quests and boinks Camilla Valerius, Ysolda, Mjoll, Carlotta Valentia, Elisif, and so on. It would unlock a lot more content for the PC-as-sidekick style of game - and at least to me it makes way more sense than doing all these quests so the PC can get laid a bunch.

 

... I have no idea how practical it is, of course.

[decaluka]

On 3/4/2023 at 10:20 PM, Anunya said:

Another thing I would love for this mod is the ability (for the player) to substitute the follower-as-protagonist into Sex Lab scenes instead of the PC.

 

Imagine the PC supporting the follower-as-protagonist as he (or she) goes through the various Amorous Adventures quests and boinks Camilla Valerius, Ysolda, Mjoll, Carlotta Valentia, Elisif, and so on. It would unlock a lot more content for the PC-as-sidekick style of game - and at least to me it makes way more sense than doing all these quests so the PC can get laid a bunch.

 

... I have no idea how practical it is, of course.

Sexlab Solutions has this feature - you can select a follower to be used in its scenes instead of you

[Anunya]

4 hours ago, decaluka said:

Sexlab Solutions has this feature - you can select a follower to be used in its scenes instead of you

 

Never been able to get it to work... but then I didn't try that hard and forgot about it. Thanks for the suggestion - I'll give it a go

 

Thing is, I'd like to differentiate on a case by case basis.

 

The Riften Guard needs some sexual favours to let the party in? PC does it.

 

One of the Amorous Adventure questlines have been been finished and Ysolda is ready for a bit of fun? Follower does it.

[asdfabcd]

On 3/16/2022 at 5:42 PM, Visio Diaboli said:

UPDATE: Prototype available for testing (do not add to LO permanently yet): Inversion of Power v0.0.1.zip

 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

I'm on hiatus from Public Whore at the moment but I recently decided that there's another mod that I want to exist.

A lot of the time, the characters I play, or want to play, do not take on a 'main character' role in any conventional sense. They end up taking commands from an NPC, or enslaved, or as a support role in combat. And yet when it comes to the decision making, I, as the player, am still the one in charge - followers that should be commandeering end up following my character's lead. This partially destroys the illusion of authority that these NPCs have.

 

So what I would like to create is a framework allowing an NPC to assume objectives of their own, and then proceed to lead the way towards them, letting the player follow along as their own followers ordinarily would, occasionally receiving specific orders. Whether/how this would include sexual content, I haven't decided yet - I've put this in the adult request&find because my intent is to include it in some way eventually, but likely as an adjunct mod.

 

I've been tweaking a prototype I made of such a mod - so far the follower can be asked to take the lead, then will guide the player to a dungeon, and maybe clear it. When it works, it for sure feels like the player/follower roles have been reversed. When it doesn't work, however, I end up watching my follower walk into a 1-foot-tall rock for 3 minutes.

 

Skyrim's AI is wonky at best, and so in order to have it resemble any form of intelligence I will need help. This means people willing to test out dungeons for complete feasibility or infeasibility, and assess the ones that are somewhere in between. Advice from people who work with behavior packages frequently would help too, as well as from anyone who understands how packages work at a Creation Engine level.

I wouldn't post if I thought this was impossible, as I like to think that, from what I've seen, there's some potential for engaging gameplay with this. If you'd like to help test locations, or have any suggestions from a technical standpoint, let me know. I can't promise it'll get fully developed so for now consider this in 'research/experimentation'.

I have ZERO experience with making mods for Skyrim, so keep that in mind as I suggest some things.

 

Firstly, the Submissive Lola Expanded mod has been pretty good with forcing my player character to follow. Granted, it's a simple point A to point B thing, but that might be worth looking into.

 

I'd also like to suggest a potential hybrid approach. Maybe you could make it so the player is TECHNICALLY in control, but the follower can basically force the player to go wherever and do whatever they want. That way, you keep the lack of control without having to go crazy staring into the abyss of Bethesda NPC pathfinding. You could also do an MCM thing that would allow the player to customize how much control the follower has.

 

One final note: if there's not sexual content in this mod out of the box, I'd love to see sex mods built on top of this one. I quite like the idea.

[atticadayz]

I sometimes come back to this thread hoping there will be a version 0.0.2. It's such a great concept.

[Visio Diaboli]

It'd be great to see it completed - if anyone stumbles across this and wants to take a stab at it feel free. When I wrote the post I thought I'd encounter something that made it impossible, but I never did. I'm still fairly convinced it would be worth developing, even if the final result is inevitably a little clunky

[NymphoElf]

This would be a gargantuan project to fully realize. It's certainly doable, but this would definitely turn the entire game on its head.

 

Major considerations:

1. Pathfinding for Skyrim's AI is fairly primitive and simplistic.
   • AI will advance towards a node, then check for the next node to path towards, taking the most direct route possible. In combat, this node is another Actor, whether that be the Player or another NPC. For this mod to work, there will need to be a LOT of pathfinding nodes placed around the world if you want the NPC to act in even a semi-realistic manner. However, when an NPC reaches a node, they typically stop or slow down for a moment before moving on to the next one, which will make "exploration" less fluid, but in some sense it may be more realistic. This will be very time consuming, and if the nodes are not meticulously categorized with a solid naming convention, you will almost certainly get "lost in the sauce" at some point.
2. Skyrim's Nav Mesh isn't always reliable
   • The Creation Engine's Nav Mesh system can be a hassle to work with sometimes, from what I understand. This is particularly apparent in very narrow paths, which is likely why there are relatively few of them. There will likely need to be some Nav Mesh work done, and mods that patch or otherwise modify Nav Meshes will need to be considered.
3. The decision logic tree will be quite extensive (if you don't want every NPC to effectively be the same as a leader)
   • Some considerations would need to be the NPC's bravery value, possibly a defined "job" if one exists, sex, crime willingness, and so on in order to make the NPCs feel unique. These factors would also need to be considered when thinking about a player's 'consequences' for failing to perform an NPC's order or requests. Some may be forgiving, some may scold you, some may take away gear or imprison you, or in the worst case try to kill you. This logic tree will require a robust script structure to prevent Papyrus Overload in even the simplest decisions the NPC will make.
4. There needs to be a way to differentiate between a Potential Leader and the Active Leader by the game
   • This could be easily accomplished by a Faction assignment, and modifying/checking the NPCs rank in that faction (0 = Potential, 1 = Active)
5. There will need to be a large amount of new dialogue, and dialogue edits
   • Most of these will be for the Active Leader, with variations of the dialogue based on the factors mentioned in the Logic Tree consideration. Potential leaders will need far less. Additionally, since it's the NPC that's the true leader of the party, NPCs would need to be written as addressing the NPC in many cases instead of the player, and voice lines may either not match the dialogue or need to be detached from the dialogue.
6. Quests will need to be altered to recognize the NPC leader's actions and decisions
   • Quests are impossible to entirely separate from the player, and are all built to take player input in some way. Interestingly though, all non-dialogue based objectives don't strictly require the player to perform them - even including Dark Brotherhood contracts. Therefore, Quests would need to be reworked to take the NPC's decisions in the dialogue sections, and in some cases new Quest sections will have to be developed if the Quest is to remain completable - though I suppose your "choice" of leader could be an interesting aspect of the mod due to certain Quests being "locked out" and non-completable a result.
7. What happens if/when your leader dies?
   • Is this game over? Can you get a new Leader? Do Potential Leaders have a reaction to your previous leader's death?
8. This will likely conflict with MANY mods
   • This mod will effectively re-write half of what Skyrim is, if not more, and the number of mods that would potentially break or otherwise simply not work correctly could be huge. However, this kind of mod COULD be the kick the Skyrim modding community needs to see any kind of return to the glory days.

 

These are all of the big things I can think of right now. Also, I'm not trying to discourage you (or anyone) from trying to tackle this. I'm just pointing out how much this is likely to involve. I'm sort of "thinking out loud" here.

 

If this project is taken seriously, I would actually recommend starting with a non-sexualized version and release it to NexusMods, then make an extension which implements Sexlab and post it here. As great and relatively popular as LL is, it's not exactly the best place in the world for mod exposure as a whole. Plus, you can get some money from NexusMods by opting into their Points system. Personally, I wouldn't want to tackle something this big without getting something in return. But that's just me.