[Idea - Input wanted] Nudity law for a city in Skyrim

[WaxenFigure]

Ok, here's how I thought I could justify the nudity law. After your last encounter with Potema it was decided to secretly swap her bones with her least favorite brother who happened to be famous for his debauchery (it's actual to the game lore). Those bones were used by some loyalist followers to resurrect her and as a part of that resurrection they gave her very strong powers but imagine their surprise when the resurrected Potema turn out to be her brother Antiochus. Antiochus is unaware of his power or even his death and wanders the castle as an oversexed, unkillable but otherwise ignored presence however his debuched nature uses the power he was granted to extend his debauched nature to the whole city.

 

As a result of that power Elisif issues some strange decrees...

 

A quest can be built to find the Potema followers who gave their power to Antiochus and kill them so that his power to influence he town fades and the town returns to normal as the decrees are rescinded but of course you don't have to accept that quest or can put it off until you're tired of running naked.

 

 

This approach is actually somewhat lore friendly and doesn't involve taking over the city by a faction and yet provides an excuse for the demure Elisif to change her behavior and start issuing these decrees and for why her city would accept those decrees and follow them. It also allows for the possibility of reversing the effects and shutting down the mod cleanly for anyone who tires of it.

[ErisL]

Clothes protect us.  They protect us from the weather, against hot and cold, they can be a barrier against infection, and they can keep us safe while we engage in what would otherwise be a dangerous activity.  Not only that, clothes often represent status.  The clothes of the beggar are not the same as the clothes of the merchant, which are not the same as the clothes of the noble.  To be utterly deprived of all clothing separates you from this. You are being stripped, not only of adornment, but of social standing. Being naked is being vulnerable. More so for a woman than for a man, but it applies to both genders.  Being forced to be naked is therefore an exercise of power over the one so forced. 

 

If a non-nudist city has laws which require that all women be naked, someone is engaged in an astonishingly far-reaching power trip.  Those women are being 'othered' in a big way, and that's going to be mostly about power and control.  It's emphasizing their vulnerability, taking away any barrier they might wish to have between their bodies and the men around them, literally putting their bodies on display, stripping away what power and status they had and making them all essentially the same.  The noblewoman is no better than the commoner: they are all just flesh on display.  

 

There are major implications for the sort of society that would do this, and how they would view women.  Especially in a harsh land like Skyrim, where warm clothing is literally the difference between life and death (further forcing all the women in the city further into the control of the men, as escape means death in a harsh and unforgiving environment that cannot be endured without the very clothes they are denied). At the very least, they would be culturally different from most of what we see in Skyrim, and other places and peoples would probably think them barbarians. 

[ErikModi]

Excellent analysis.

[Quisling]

only thing that bugged me about slaverun was the fact that you was told to be nude yet the games basic talk kept happening about put some dam clothes on XD if you could nail that to remove that bloody comment it would be helpfull to streakers

 

No Naked Comments - http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/13050/?

[xboronx]

Your quest idea is very nice, WaxenFigure.

 

I just hope that you can export those laws to some other holds too. As i said before, imho many Skyrim fractions or jarls would make nudity laws in their holds immersive, namely

Riften because of the thieves guild, Windhelm because of stormcloak racism, Marcath because of forsworn paranoia and Falkreath because Siddgeir seems so sleazy.

[WaxenFigure]

Excellent analysis.

True in the real world but irrelevant to a game that is mainly juvenile fantasy to start with, we are just adding the sexual fantasy parts to the game. That's the point of fantasy in fact, you can explore the kinds of things you know would never be right in the real world simply because of the cost to real people. Honestly how often do you have to fight a bandit to the death in the real world after all? What would people say if you went into a coke den and killed everyone inside while stealing all their money and belongings and yet that's the premise of most of the quests in the vanilla game.

[afa]

Well there's some good ideas in that rather it is too real or not. It could easily slide into narratives that introduce social unrest, classism, power struggle. Adding gender specific nudity on top there can be even more variation to how everything can play out.

[ErikModi]

 

Excellent analysis.

True in the real world but irrelevant to a game that is mainly juvenile fantasy to start with, we are just adding the sexual fantasy parts to the game. That's the point of fantasy in fact, you can explore the kinds of things you know would never be right in the real world simply because of the cost to real people. Honestly how often do you have to fight a bandit to the death in the real world after all? What would people say if you went into a coke den and killed everyone inside while stealing all their money and belongings and yet that's the premise of most of the quests in the vanilla game.

 

 

Oh, I agree.  The perverted nerd in me would love to see forced nudity situations in a game like this.  But there's a lot of potential in this concept that could be explored by an optional add-on, companion, or alternative mod that can make more than just "ooh, boobies."  Not that there's anything at all wrong with "ooh, boobies."

[ErisL]

While there's nothing wrong with the porn-without-plot style experience that a lot of the current sexlab mods showcase, there's a whole lot of really complex adult themes that could be explored here.  There can more to adult gaming than just sexual fantasies.  Just like there can be more to adult movies than porn.  There are stories that can be told with the NC-17 rating that just can't be done with an R.  

 

(Well, that once could have been told.  Not so much anymore, what with the NC-17 rating having become a death sentence to a movie, which means that actual adult movies either don't get made or have to have their sexual content watered down to an R-appropriate level.)

[WaxenFigure]

 

My thoughts on this was that the influence of the resurrected Antiochus would result in a lowering of moral standards for the town, It would use a MCM menu to select what sort of new laws were to be enforced and was not planning to make it females only must be nude as the Slaverun mod does. There were some great ideas about outsiders vs insiders but the reality is that the cities in Skyrim are sparsely populated so they are almost exclusively "insiders".

 

Having the ghost of the mad Pelagios influencing the court is another option with an emphasis less on sexual and more on just madness.

 

Still working on a script to enforce the Slaverun rules for that mod so anything done on this would be a while anyway but I keep looking for how this could be developed into something more compelling with a way in, a story and a way out when you grow tired of it.

[traveller_phi]

In my mind, one advantage of the insider vs. outsider would be to get some variety in the dress. Being nude isn't as impactful if everyone is nude. It provides a stark contrast between the privileged (clothed) group and the oppressed group. Otherwise it just starts looking like a nudist colony rather than an source for drama/conflict. Not that there is anything wrong with nudist colonies in Skyrim, but just seems a shame to miss out on the extra depth.

 

A big disadvantage of insdier vs. outsider is defining the terms, especially considering the possibility of other mods adding new residents and visitors. The best solution may just be running off of a faction list. Everyone who is a member of a faction on the list is an insider, everyone else is an outsider.

 

Finally I would recommend keeping this as a framework/player driven MCM mod. Then you can have other mods like Slaverun plug into some sort of API to set the laws as appropriate, and update them if and when the mod's quest leads to an update of the laws. This saves you from having to do all the quests for all the cities yourself.

[xboronx]

An idea might be to force lower classes to wear a coloured collar to show their status, dividing the citizens of the city into 3-4 classes:

 

-Highest class would wear no collar and clothes and can demand sex or stripping from all lower classes

-second highest class would wear a golden collar and clothes, and can order lower classes to strip or have sex with them

-third class would wear a silver collar and only be allowed skimpy clothing

-fourth class would be forced to always be naked, and maybe also wear some devious devices bondage items

 

Solitude citizens would be all 4 classes, travelers from outside always start with fourth class, but there should be ways to bribe e.g. Elisif to increase your own rank or increase/decrease the rank of any citizen.

[WaxenFigure]

In a nudity culture you would still have jewelry, shoes, hats, gloves and even tattoos and body piercings to help define status. In most historical cultures nudity simply meant a person who was so poor they couldn't even afford clothing and it's only recently that the common person could so readily afford to have more than a couple changes of clothing. Even now much of the third world still cannot reach that level of wealth.

 

The clothes worn in Skyrim are built around "outfits", all NPCs have an outfit which defines the clothing they have on their person and the items they can wear. Sadly most clothing/armor mods don't add outfits to their mods and while a Papyrus script can change which outfit an NPC wears it can't change the contents of an outfit and it can't create new outfits either. Both are serious oversights by Bethesda who foolishly thought that Papyrus was such complete scripting engine there wouldn't be a need for a script extender.

 

I have to wonder if it would be possible to write a SKSE extension that would allow outfit creation/modification. Something I think I may need in order to make this work without serious lag problems (set an outfit and the game enforces the dress code, without outfits a script has to scan everyone and do it the slow hard way).

[OH1972]

In a nudity culture you would still have jewelry, shoes, hats, gloves and even tattoos and body piercings to help define status. In most historical cultures nudity simply meant a person who was so poor they couldn't even afford clothing and it's only recently that the common person could so readily afford to have more than a couple changes of clothing. Even now much of the third world still cannot reach that level of wealth.

 

That might apply to historical cultures in parts of Africa, the Mediterranean and Asia, and possibly America, but the moment you go significantly further south or north, come winter, there's a name for nude people: corpse. We still have people freezing to death every winter WITH clothes, because those clothes are not enough to protect them from prolonged exposure.

[Pinute]

 

In a nudity culture you would still have jewelry, shoes, hats, gloves and even tattoos and body piercings to help define status. In most historical cultures nudity simply meant a person who was so poor they couldn't even afford clothing and it's only recently that the common person could so readily afford to have more than a couple changes of clothing. Even now much of the third world still cannot reach that level of wealth.

 

That might apply to historical cultures in parts of Africa, the Mediterranean and Asia, and possibly America, but the moment you go significantly further south or north, come winter, there's a name for nude people: corpse. We still have people freezing to death every winter WITH clothes, because those clothes are not enough to protect them from prolonged exposure.

 

 

*waves hands* magic clothing.

 

Vanilla bandits wearing only a halter top during a blizzard was the thing that, for me, permanently broke the 'realistic immersion' of Skyrim. I dealt with it by assuming that the Nords, who came from an even colder land than Skyrim, have been imbuing their clothing with cold resistant spells for so long they don't even think of it as magic anymore. 

 

Fortuitously, that means nudity in a snowstorm is doable

[sen4mi]

"You know what's the problem with Skyrim these days?"

 

"Everyone is obsessed with death."

 

"Let's do something about that."

 

 

[pinky6225]

"You know what's the problem with Skyrim these days?"

 

"Everyone is obsessed with death."

 

"Let's do something about that."

 

Naked cult attacks one of the imperial controlled villages, enforces nudity on the entire village

 

"They attacked at the break of dawn, I'd formed the men into a shield wall just outside the village and almost as soon as they formed the line cultists charged are shield wall, not a single arrow or javelin was fired at the charging beauties as the men just stood there transfixed.

 

Within moments they had closed the distance and the first three ranks fell to chaos as the cultists worked there way among us, some dropping to there knees and tearing at the mens loins, others tackling the men to the ground and riding them like beasts and still more tripping the men and pulling them down ontop of them

 

Seeing no way to restore order to the situation and to preserve the few men from the rear ranks that hadn't "counter" charged the cultists I have retreated to solitude to await reinforcements to restore imperial control to the village"