Playable transport to the Simple Slavery Plus Plus auction instead of teleport?

[Smoke Dazazar]

Hi hi, this is my first post so I hope this is the right place for it.

 

SS++ is one of my favorite mods, but something that'd make it even better would be immersive transportation after defeat instead of being warped right to the auction. As part of a caravan, horse drawn cart and cage, walking along in a collar, etc.

Skyrim has a robust road network that connects most of the map so I imagine this must be possible? Does a mod for this already exist?

Otherwise what would it take to implement this?

 

Other users have discussed this in the LE version so there is a small demand: 

 

Thank you for reading.

[CaptainJ03]

Intriguing idea, unfortunately I see no way that someone could implement this.

 

The vanilla carriages never move, your travel is done with a fade to black. If you've ever played SLUTS you surely experienced the four-wheeled sky rocket bug, that sends your carriage into the orbit, never to be seen again. Wouldn't want to be in that cart as a prisoner.

Only moving carriages I've seen was in Beyond Reach - on a broad, plastered road which the mod author build expicitly for this task, not the bumpy roads of Skyrim.

 

Being force walked by the game AI is nice and really makes you feel helpless, but for any longer stretch it wouldn't work. LBS has some, but that's inside Laura's shop, POP has some, but resorts to teleport after a few seconds, because even inside a city you get stuck quite fast. 

SubLola has mechanics to shock the PC when they stray too far from their owner during the Parade event, which works in most cases, but when the city is too crowded, Mistress may teleport to her goal and you get zapped to oblivion just because the game mechanics suck.

If you've ever tried to follow an NPC from one city to another (I tried it once with Ulfric going to High Hrothgar) you get bored after five minutes, and haven't even left Windhelm yet. A good mod punishes the PC, not the player.

 

TLDR: no, not possible.

[Smoke Dazazar]

Thanks for the fast reply and your explanations. I have some follow up questions:

 

What about the moving carriage from Helgen at the start? Is it different because it's a cutscene and only used on that specific road?

If carriages are no good and following NPCs automatically is too technologically challenging, is there any possibility to just have a basic escort that's "player-run" to avoid bugs? So in other words, there's no punishment for straying too far (due to the tech difficulties), and the responsibility is on the player to simply "roleplay" themselves being escorted? All this would require is NPCs to spawn and head towards Riften. Or would this not be possible too?

 

Well, speaking for myself alone, I don't mind it being a long stretch, thinking of it as suspenseful...

[CaptainJ03]

33 minutes ago, Smoke Dazazar said:

What about the moving carriage from Helgen at the start? Is it different because it's a cutscene and only used on that specific road?

Yes, that's a cutscene, and comparing that stretch of road with, say, the road from Riverwood to Whiterun, it's more or less straight with no serious obstacles. I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't even in Skyrim, but in it's own worldspace.

 

38 minutes ago, Smoke Dazazar said:

is there any possibility to just have a basic escort that's "player-run" to avoid bugs? So in other words, there's no punishment for straying too far (due to the tech difficulties), and the responsibility is on the player to simply "roleplay" themselves being escorted? All this would require is NPCs to spawn and head towards Riften. Or would this not be possible too?

I'm no modder myself, just a mod user and long-term reader in the threads, so take my answer with a reasonable pinch of salt.

 

I should be technicalls possibly to spawn a follower that follows close by, while dismissing all your self-chosen followers. With DDs installed, you're put in a yoke or armbinder (and get complaints from every 2nd user that DDs are to be avoided al all cost 😈 ) and walk or fast travel to Riften. You should be temporarily put in the Kynes Peace faction to avoid animals becoming hostile, maybe also in the bandit and necromancer ally faction (and whatever other random encounter could happen on the road)

Your controls to pickup stuff and fight should be disabled, too.

Depending on the defeat mod, all of your belongings should be gone, either robbed or already put in the SS++ holding chest.

Your captor could randomly zap or whip you, if they think you're taking too long or walk in the wrong direction - but not too finicky, because i.e. when going from Whiterun to Riften you're going in the wrong direction 80% of the time...

And, as this is LL, the PCs arousal should be set to zero, your captor preventing anyone to rape you. Your captor still wants to realise a decent price for this nearly virgin slave.

 

Sooo yes, a mod where you're walking to the slave market, accompanied by your captor, should be possible to make. But doesn't exist as far as I know.

 

[jfraser]

this was actually a function with the original Simple Slavery thanks to the ingenious Devious Framework by Legume and a connection to SL Defeat thanks to Guobo. When the player was defeated, the nearest bad guy would attach a leash (a real leash, not an invisible one) and walk the character all the way to Riften.

 

It was fabulous when it worked. Unfortunately, given Skyrim's very spotty pathing, it was impossible to get it to work every time and then Legume and Guobo disappeared from LL around the same time, so when Lozeak took over with SS+, the DF portion was dropped.

 

If you happen to still be using LE, this system should still work.

 

my original plan was to have a cutscene montage of being taken by carriage to Riften but i never got around to it and people probably would have just griped about how long it took anyway - some already want to remove the auction part of the auction mod.

Edited October 4, 2025 by jfraser

[Hex Bolt]

Another consideration is that the road system isn't as robust as it might appear to be.  NPCs treat roads as the preferred path, but they will take shortcuts.  I had an experience with POP that tried to march me from Morthal to Whiterun.  The captors chose to cut through the Labyrinthian exterior area rather than follow the roads; it's a much shorter path.  They kept getting stuck on steps and wouldn't progress.  I would have to spring into the leader to dislodge him, just to see him get stuck again.  It was not at all immersive.  Being naked and unarmed, I had to save & reload to avoid being killed by the trolls (which would trigger Defeat again).

 

The trip was fun for the first few minutes, but then it really wasn't.  After that, I turned off the walk to destination feature.  Skyrim's pathfinding just isn't reliable enough, and road encounters pose the threat of triggering Defeat (and possibly Simple Slavery) again.  Getting everything to work reliably would not be simple.  I think mods are best when they strive to follow the It Just Works principle.

[Smoke Dazazar]

Thanks again for all the info everyone.

 

No, I don't have LE sadly, it is interesting to know that it was once a feature though.

 

Hex Bolt, thank you for your work. I have a question then. I've not used the CK in a decade and never for Skyrim but surely it must be possible for someone to create a script that spawns the player and NPCs near Riften and then you only have to walk a short walk of five minutes along a scripted path to get there? That's a nice compromise that accounts for the tech difficulty and wouldn't be too disruptive with road encounters?

 

I am willing to experiment with this myself.

[Hex Bolt]

On 10/5/2025 at 2:02 PM, Smoke Dazazar said:

I've not used the CK in a decade and never for Skyrim but surely it must be possible for someone to create a script that spawns the player and NPCs near Riften and then you only have to walk a short walk of five minutes along a scripted path to get there? That's a nice compromise that accounts for the tech difficulty and wouldn't be too disruptive with road encounters?

A forced walk works better for prison mods like POP, where the escorts are bounty hunters who caught you for a crime, than with Simple Slavery where the cause for enslavement is more variable.  Different mods might have a follower sell you or an NPC might decide you're a runaway slave because you're wearing a collar.  Sure, it's possible that the person who decides to sell you might choose to use an intermediary to walk you to Riften rather than taking you there personally, but the less plausible that is, the more immersion breaking the walk becomes with a generic armed escort.  Simple Slavery won't necessarily know which NPC sold you or whether it's okay to substitute that NPC for the escort (particularly for a Defeat event where your vanquisher despawns as soon as you leave the area), which would add complexity and chances for something to break.

 

When the circumstances are unclear to a mod, the benefits of guessing correctly are often outweighed by guessing wrong.  If the player expects a walk to the market under the watchful eye of generic enforcers, then showing that is a plus.  Call that +1.  You saw what you expected.  However, if that doesn't fit the situation, showing the wrong thing breaks immersion.  Call that -3.  Even if a forced walk were a toggle, players usually have more than one way to get enslaved, so sometimes it might fit, but other times it really might not.  It's not worth risking the -3 for the hope of getting the +1.

 

What about followers?  Should they blindly accompany and not help, protect you but let you be sold into slavery?

 

Beyond that, there are the technical issues.  When a mod sends the player to Simple Slavery, it expects the player to get enslaved.  Simple Slavery must not drop the ball along the way.

 

Even for a short walk along a road, a dragon attack (or vampires, or that annoying follower of Boethiah, or POP bounty hunters (you might also have a bounty), or encounters added by mods) could result in player death and possibly another Defeat outcome, which might be Left For Dead or some other non-enslavement result this time.  Or, it might trigger Simple Slavery again, which would have to handle re-entry before getting you to the market.  Also, mods that care when the player is enslaved and listen for the enslavement event will receive the notification that you were enslaved twice before getting notified what the auction outcome was.  What's that going to do to those mods?

 

If it's the first visit to Riften, it is possible to fail the persuasion challenge to get in and not have the gold to buy entry (especially after a defeat where your gold was taken).  Should Simple Slavery modify a vanilla conversation and risk a conflict with another mod that changes it too?  Should it just warp you through the gate when you get close and hope that works okay?

 

The current approach keeps the "simple" in Simple Slavery.  It reliably delivers the package to the destination without introducing a situation that might be immersion breaking.  Some players are perfectly fine with mods that do interesting things but sometimes get stuck or fail.  You see that reflected in support topics when a player encounters a problem and, rather than ask "What did I miss?" or "What did I do wrong?", the question is "What SetStage command should I use when this happens?"  These players are accustomed to having to nudge mods along with console commands, certainly not very immersive.  My preference is for mods to just consistently work, even if that sometimes means giving up something that's cool but risky.

[jfraser]

One thing that worked well was the original Maria Eden function where on defeat the people who defeated you just kept you chained up nearby for a few hours and then a caravan of khajiit showed up and bought you, and then the blackout happened that transported you to the slave market. Something like that might be a good compromise. 

 

 that would be well out of the purview of simple slavery,  of course. It would need to be part of its own defeat mod.

[belegost]

On 10/4/2025 at 6:32 PM, CaptainJ03 said:

I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't even in Skyrim, but in it's own worldspace.

It is Skyrim. If you tfc during it you can look around and see all kinds of weird stuff happen.

It can also break and cause bumpy ride, shoot the carriage to the sky, kill Hadvar's horse, or swipe him under the terrain so he won't be present at the execution. The most notorious mod that would always break this scene for me was LOTD. Every single time I had it installed, the ride was always bumpy, at the very least.

 

In regards to force walk or leash, I recall earlier versions of SD+ had it, as a simulation of your owner keeping you close by, and pulling the leash if you walked too far away. It was fucking horrible and would break easily. So easily in fact, DBF removed it from later versions because there was no way to make it work reliably.

Edited October 8, 2025 by belegost

[shrtjsrtj]

When getting transported in Being a Cow, you get transported to custom locations that are set up to be camps for the night instead of going all the way to the destination in one go. There are other mods that do a similar thing with SS being the end result but I'm brainfarting on what they are, I think maybe BaboDialogue is one of them?

 

I could see something like that being added to a defeat mod, where you get a montage of your trip to the market. Instead of going straight to the auction house you go to a small campsite location where some scenes can play out and you get another chance to escape. Chance to escape is key though, if there's no player agency people will just do it a couple of times, get bored of it and either reload when it happens again or turn that feature off.

 

There's still a lot to think about though, like what to do with followers or your loot. But if it's tied to a defeat framework it could probably be figured out.

[belegost]

4 hours ago, shrtjsrtj said:

BaboDialogue

It has copy of unfurnished version of Breezehome for a specific scene, a custom interior location for another and uses vanilla interior bandit dens for yet another. All 3 break easily. So easily in fact I stopped using it, even though the idea behind it all is fucking brilliant. A pity, but if shit breaks down more easily and more often than Slaverun did, it's not worth the frustration.