Deviously Cursed Loot LE 9.0 (2021-03-09)

[thenintendobox]

is the uh dialouge option that locks you in bondage coming from this mod?

[TurboNerd]

2 hours ago, thenintendobox said:

is the uh dialouge option that locks you in bondage coming from this mod?

Yes.  It think that debug mode was left on unintentionally.  This was supposed to be a compatibility patch for DDi 4.0 but not everything got fixed as you can see by reading previous posts in this thread.

[Lupine00]

I'll try not to quote, because it would make this post massive.

 

1) I already use Eager NPCs, and I know what it does. But the sex-addiction mechanic is a band-aid on a gaping wound. Arousal is implemented is woefully designed, and only functions for a very narrow range of circumstances. It breaks down with trivial ease in any sex-heavy or device-heavy game. It was fragile to start  with, and never accounted for all the mods that have equated bondage/punishment with arousal increase.

 

2) It's not really the case that  it takes 24 game hours for a character with 100 exposure to reach 100 arousal from zero, with an expose of 100. A character with plugs in can reach 100 in minutes, and even without them will reach it in a few hours. 24 would be the absolute maximum time, in a situation where there is nothing else adding arousal, but there is almost always something else, be it bondage, piercings you can't remove, naked NPCs strutting around, exhibitionism, or some other effect. Try life enslaved to Leah and see how well you can "manage" your arousal. But I guess if you suck down a 1000 septim cure potion every time your exposure goes over 30, you won't see these issues. Try doing that in Slaverun, or in SD+, or in CD... Try doing it while you're locked in Queen Sarah's chastity set. (Though her set effectively stops other DCL events anyway).

 

3) I completely agree that the Bondage Lover being enabled by default leads to a lot of forum posts asking how to turn it off. It's hard to find, and shouldn't be on by default. It is, in any case, an option that isn't needed. Want to keep items? Then keep them. Job done. 

 

The problem with this feature is that it's not smart enough to be fun.

If it only forced me to keep one of an item for each slot, picking the most severe, or most matching, so I am forced to build up a set, I would LOVE this feature.

Then it wouldn't become an inventory lint, encumbrance nuisance.

 

4) The idea, and I am quoting here: 

19 hours ago, Ytheria said:

Disagree.  That's not how DCL works.  The outcomes should be unpredictable to a typical user.  For instance, the MCM allows the user to determine whether arousal has an effect on device comments/reactions, but gives no indication what this effect will be.

--- chop ---

There is no doubt that DCL does not have a well designed UI.  This is an inevitable outcome of the ad hoc way that features are added.  I doubt that the mod will ever reach a final form.  But it doesn't matter that much, because the experience is supposed to be confusing and frustrating to the player.  Think of the MCM as a multi-lock device you're trying to manipulate in mittens.  I for one would rather have a mod bursting with creativity than one with an impecable UI.

What? What? You really think that players should not be able to get predictable results from their MCM?

That DCL is designed to frustrate and confuse?

I don't believe it is. Even if it was, it shouldn't be.

Nor is creativity a zero-sum game with clarity.

It might take time away from something else to reorganise the UI, but that's a different matter, and in any case, the UI doesn't need huge changes, it just wants a few things re-ordering, and a tiny handful of defaults changed.

 

Are you honestly suggesting that it's a good thing that a player has to waste ages faffing around with the trial and error, and experimentation with the MCM to get some desired outcome, or are you just joking around? That understanding the mod and its MCM is some kind of challenge or rite-of-passage that you have to overcome to be worthy? You want a configuration system that wastes the player's time and makes the mod do stuff they don't want and never wanted that they could have turned off, if only they knew how? That's just smug elitism trying to create an exclusionary community. Even Microsoft aren't that malicious.

 

But if an MCM like a multi-lock in bondage mittens is your definition of ideal mod behaviour, I don't think we have any common ground for a discussion.

 

Of course we want random events, but shouldn't we know how they are random? If a mod offers us a way to choose what random events we get (and DCL offers lots), shouldn't we be able to understand them?

 

5) I absolutely agree that arousal management is a potentially fun mechanic (at times), and that DCL enables lots of great penalties for arousal. It could be even more fun if arousal was properly designed game-mechanic, instead of a broken simulation with poorly chosen bounds and constants. See point (1).

 

If you choose to pivot your game enjoyment on such a fragile and ill-balanced system, it will only be fun if the outcome you wanted was to be almost always tied up, helpless, and hot to trot. Maybe that's the outcome most people prefer, but it's a stacked game that only really offers 'escape' as a false hope (if you do get out of the 'hole', you'll be back in it again real soon). It's like playing with hardcore SD+ and DEC set on impossible. You're going to spend most of the game enslaved with brief moments of freedom. Fine if that's what you wanted, but you've reduced Skyrim to an enslavement mini-game, and you can't play the rest of it. The same applies to over-emphasis of "arousal management". If you reliably "win" at that, you won't get to have sex, and you'll avoid wearing all the devices you installed four mods to give you.

 

For it to work in a game, there has to be a balance point, and that requires a self-stabilising system, not an unstable one.

 

I didn't install all these sex and bondage mods just so I could not have sex or bondage... But sometimes I want to play some skyrim, fight, kill some monsters, and DCL amps up the risk there too, and an extra bonus from all those mods I installed, right?

 

For me, and my play, I don't factor arousal into the risk, and I still have the random chance (unless I set it to zero, which I do when I decide I want to actually progress the quest instead of faffing around). It's simple, I choose whether I want the risk on, or off based on what is most fun for me at the time.

 

If arousal was designed, and fit into a broader context of meaningful mechanics, it would be great. But is isn't, and it doesn't. Most of the mechanics around it (DCL excepted) are junk - the same kind of pseudo-simulation nonsense that make needs mods so dull. It's way off topic here to get into why most needs mods (and I include Skooma Whore here) are boring stat and inventory management grinds, when they ought to be fun, so I'll move on past that.

 

Immersion is not numbers. Immersion is not a hidden buff/debuff, hiding away in the magic menu. Game-play doesn't arise from drab simulationist mechanics that mainly add clicking in the inventory, and studying numbers in the MCM.

 

What makes DCL sizzle, (apart from it does practically everything), is that the devices are visible, the animations are in-your-face, the consequences of restraint are immediately visible and highly impactful to what you can do in the game, and the situations where you end up in them are genuinely perilous.

 

I thought it odd that the new DD turns off key consumption, because that's a primary game-play element for me. If I have keys, I can escape, but if I'm not careful enough, I run out of keys. Way more fun than trying to figure out the fourteen different mods and factors impacting on my arousal rate so I can "manage" my arousal. I turn off most key stealing, and turn on consumption. This gives me so many "lives" before I'm screwed. Sometimes I might have to be choosy about what I unlock. I don't ever wear lucky charms, as they defeat the point of the mod. I get they were designed to enable uninterrupted dungeoneering, but I prefer fine control, not the simple on/off the charms offer.

 

6) I won't even get into how PSQ changes the arousal game, but there arousal is, once again, functioning as a switch.

[Reesewow]

18 minutes ago, Lupine00 said:

5) I absolutely agree that arousal management is a potentially fun mechanic (at times), and that DCL enables lots of great penalties for arousal. It could be even more fun if arousal was properly designed game-mechanic, instead of a broken simulation with poorly chosen bounds and constants. See point (1).

While I personally am perfectly satisfied with how arousal functions and works in my game, that doesn't mean someone couldn't produce an amazing bondage-centric arousal framework to replace it.  Even the current version of Aroused could probably be used better by bondage mods if they were designed to be more hands-on with the values.  A good example IMO is the DCL tentacle armor, who's entire gimmick is that it ramps the player up to 100 arousal insanely fast and then causes an orgasm event, draining it back down.

 

The reality unfortunately, is that unless someone makes the effort to produce a replacement mod *and* other mod creators choose to adopt it as the framework they hook into, Sexlab Aroused is all we have.  We do have decent control of the framework values as users, so the options are to either tweak the numbers until they give the best results for individual gameplay style, or simply ignore the fact aroused exists (disabling any arousal-based triggers available in mods or literally locking the player to 0 arousal).

[rjn]

And ... that's why I use the vlkAFSexLife mod.  It *does* replace Sexlab Aroused and has a completely different arousal calculation system that just works.  Also no need to remove Sexlab Aroused from your load order and mess up dependencies  (although it will be inactive and all settings are in AlkAFSexlife - Arousal) It also has a nice wear and tear module.

[Lowezar]

3 hours ago, rjn said:

And ... that's why I use the vlkAFSexLife mod.  It *does* replace Sexlab Aroused and has a completely different arousal calculation system that just works.  Also no need to remove Sexlab Aroused from your load order and mess up dependencies  (although it will be inactive and all settings are in AlkAFSexlife - Arousal) It also has a nice wear and tear module.

Wow, thank you for the link! That sounds great! SLAR mechanics always irked me as weird and counter-intuitive. As it's said in the linked mod description, that "timerate" thing is just absurd.

 

UPD: tested. Works as advertised. And indeed, W&T is nice. I never thought to have something like that before, but now that it was already built in I decided to give it a go and now I'm confused why I didn't think it would be fun to have.

[Ytheria]

10 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

I'll try not to quote, because it would make this post massive.

 

1) I already use Eager NPCs, and I know what it does. But the sex-addiction mechanic is a band-aid on a gaping wound. Arousal is implemented is woefully designed, and only functions for a very narrow range of circumstances. It breaks down with trivial ease in any sex-heavy or device-heavy game. It was fragile to start  with, and never accounted for all the mods that have equated bondage/punishment with arousal increase.

I get it: SLAR doesn't work for your play-style.  This isn't the SLAR thread though.  For DCL's purposes we have to work with what we've got.  Somebody posted a link to an alternative, but that looks even more "simulationist".  Personally I'm not sure whether the concept of "wear and tear" has much use in a fantasy game, for instance.

10 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

 

2) It's not really the case that  it takes 24 game hours for a character with 100 exposure to reach 100 arousal from zero, with an expose of 100. A character with plugs in can reach 100 in minutes, and even without them will reach it in a few hours. 24 would be the absolute maximum time, in a situation where there is nothing else adding arousal, but there is almost always something else, be it bondage, piercings you can't remove, naked NPCs strutting around, exhibitionism, or some other effect. Try life enslaved to Leah and see how well you can "manage" your arousal. But I guess if you suck down a 1000 septim cure potion every time your exposure goes over 30, you won't see these issues. Try doing that in Slaverun, or in SD+, or in CD... Try doing it while you're locked in Queen Sarah's chastity set. (Though her set effectively stops other DCL events anyway).

I have tried both SD+ and CD at various times (SD+ quite recently in fact, because it went to version 3.6a).  They have some great elements but I ultimately find them unsatisfactory because:

• I have never found a player-slavery mod which is at all fun to play.  DCL's player-slavery is probably the least obnoxious, but even that doesn't really work.  Fundamentally, player-slavery cuts too far against the game that Skyrim is.
• The Dreamworld part of SD+ is kinda fun, but it just doesn't go anywhere.  That modder's kinda frustrating actually, because he clearly has lots of creative ideas, but his mods are rife with incomplete features.  It would be nice if he could finish something.  But, heh, nobody's getting paid for this.
• CD is kinda immersion breaking, or at least it doesn't fit with the game I'm playing.  It's just not the sort of shop that you find in Skyrim.  And why would the Dragonborn ever go there?
• The Master and I have a fundamental difference of opinion when it comes to chastity.

I'm playing the game so that much of the time it looks more or less like vanilla Skyrim (with a bunch of graphical mods, but you know what I mean).  My character is usually fully dressed (well, ish) and at liberty, going about her ordinary world-saving day.  But then occasionally, bang, she gets tied up and she needs to find a way to escape.  She needs to do that quite quickly, because being restrained puts her at risk of being more restrained, as well as sex attacks, and there's some danger of a vicious spiral, where she ends up impossibly restrained and permanently horny, everyone she meets either fucks her or ties her up and Alduin destroys the world.

 

I don't have a bunch of naked or restrained NPCs running around Skyrim.  In my mind, the Dragonborn is uniquely unfortunate in that respect.  It's some quirk of her dragon-blood or game of the daedra which means that she keeps getting into these situations.  (It's a curious feature of DCL's misogyny that notionally it's directed at all women, but you never see Nazeem demanding Ysolda goes down on him, do you?  Olfina says that it's not easy being a woman in Skyrim, but I don't think she really does know.)

 

10 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

 

3) I completely agree that the Bondage Lover being enabled by default leads to a lot of forum posts asking how to turn it off. It's hard to find, and shouldn't be on by default. It is, in any case, an option that isn't needed. Want to keep items? Then keep them. Job done. 

 

The problem with this feature is that it's not smart enough to be fun.

If it only forced me to keep one of an item for each slot, picking the most severe, or most matching, so I am forced to build up a set, I would LOVE this feature.

Then it wouldn't become an inventory lint, encumbrance nuisance.

I agree with you here.

10 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

Are you honestly suggesting that it's a good thing that a player has to waste ages faffing around with the trial and error, and experimentation with the MCM to get some desired outcome, or are you just joking around?

I'm mostly joking, but I do have the impression that Kimy genuinely likes to surprise us from time to time.  The real point is that, for a whole bunch of reasons, this mod (like most mods) will never reach a "release version", in the sense of being approximately complete and bug-free.  It's continually having new features added to it, and has numerous dependencies, many of which are also under active development.  It's actually kinda wonderful that 7 years after Skyrim released, we still regularly get major mod updates.  That means there's never a right time to redesign the MCM, because we don't know all the features it needs to cover.  If you read the code, you can see a number of values intended to be set in the MCM but not implemented.  Do we want Kimy to spend her time fixing the MCM, or would we rather she got on with putting the DDe4 devices in containers (and maybe even fixing public indecency)?

 

That said, I don't think there's anything stopping you from fixing it yourself.  Maybe you're right and it would be a big improvement.  If it's not much work to do, you could post the file here and other people could use it if they liked.  I don't know whether that's considered good form or whatever, but it's certainly within the licence conditions (provided you post the source code), and I guess Kimy might even adopt it if it's good enough.

 

A related point is documentation.  The top post is really not a good explanation of what this mod is or how it works.  The problem is that text has been added (or not) on an ad hoc basis as features are added.  I feel I could write a better description, but I don't know how useful that would be.

10 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

Immersion is not numbers. Immersion is not a hidden buff/debuff, hiding away in the magic menu. Game-play doesn't arise from drab simulationist mechanics that mainly add clicking in the inventory, and studying numbers in the MCM.

I completely agree with you here.  That's why I don't think it's necessary for the player to understand exactly how the sliders work.  That is to say, the player doesn't need to know what formula is being implemented: they can just tune things up or down as required.  Really, if DCL were a game intended for a general market (which would be a very different world!), you would have to say that the current MCM has far too many options.

10 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

I thought it odd that the new DD turns off key consumption, because that's a primary game-play element for me. If I have keys, I can escape, but if I'm not careful enough, I run out of keys. Way more fun than trying to figure out the fourteen different mods and factors impacting on my arousal rate so I can "manage" my arousal. I turn off most key stealing, and turn on consumption. This gives me so many "lives" before I'm screwed. Sometimes I might have to be choosy about what I unlock. I don't ever wear lucky charms, as they defeat the point of the mod. I get they were designed to enable uninterrupted dungeoneering, but I prefer fine control, not the simple on/off the charms offer.

Whatever works for you, but I don't get it.  You object to lucky charms (which protect you once), but you wonder round with a stack of keys?  To my mind it's kinda anticlimactic if my character gets trapped in a restraint ... and then frees herself with that key she happened to be carrying around.

[BlastRadius]

Not sure if this will help anyone, but I was having some major problems with the new build, which also had me installing DDI/DDE 4.0.  Basically, my papyrus log was talking about a lot of DCL quest and object properties that didn't exist anymore as well as Zaz animations not having an animation slot(?).  Removing Captured Dreams from my build solved my issues and this seems to be working fine for me now.

[Zor2k13]

I think captured dreams mod is not compatible right now which is why those problems were happening.

[Clea Strange]

that's odd I use SD+ and Captured Dreams together and I haven't notice anything odd. 

 

I use Sexist Guards with this to have the npc's make comments about my character

[Zor2k13]

Do you use DD4 and zap 7?

[Teutonic]

MO tells me I still have 5.8 installed, but the latest build is 6.2.7. Can someone give me a rundown on what has been added since then? I can't find a version history anywhere.

[chaimhewast]

1 hour ago, Teutonic said:

MO tells me I still have 5.8 installed, but the latest build is 6.2.7. Can someone give me a rundown on what has been added since then? I can't find a version history anywhere.

The version history is in the readme included in the mod (Docs/Deviously Cursed Loot/ReadMe.txt). However, a brief rundown:

 

6.0 added a Live Another Life plugin, a couple new quests for the Dollmaker, loot boxes courtesy of the Dollmaker, and a variety of new enchanted dresses that are exclusively in those loot boxes.

6.1 was a bugfix update, mainly for the new features added in 6.0.

6.2 is the DD 4.0 compatibility update, although it has a couple issues right now - Kimy's debug switch was left on, there's a dialogue topic added to every NPC that binds you (unofficial fix here), and it doesn't detect the new POP due to a changed plugin name (unofficial fix here).

[asdfasdf883]

There is no MCM option for bondageadventure cooldown timer and the bondageadventure dialogue does not seem to have a cooldown in game allowing it to be spammed still.

[Dekkergun]

i tried this mod and my problem is this mod doesnt play any sex animations. i keep regenerating fnis and still the same problem. Anybody know how to fix this?

[Reesewow]

8 hours ago, Hiderius said:

I use Sexist Guards with this to have the npc's make comments about my character

Second this, Sexist Guards works great with DCUL since the player character and followers will make comments about your bondage gear without needing to enter actual dialogue.  Nipple piercings and cuffs especially have lots of dialogue lines.

[Black Justicar]

MCM options are not locked when PC is restrained.

 

Has anyone found a solution yet?

[JuliusXX]

2 minutes ago, Black Justicar said:

MCM options are not locked when PC is restrained.

 

Has anyone found a solution yet?

I think it is because Kimy has forgotten the test mode on. Just wait for an update.

[WaxenFigure]

9 minutes ago, Black Justicar said:

MCM options are not locked when PC is restrained.

 

Has anyone found a solution yet?

Answer is in the previous posts.  In fact it's on the same page of posts as your question but only if you know what "debug switch" means to the mod.

 

Disable the debugging option in the MCM menu and then things should start to work more like expected. (Note: Not the debug logging option which is a different option).

[Crota]

I keep crashing when Claudius tries to teleport me to Ustolfs mansion for the Leon Quest. Anyone know a what might be going wrong? If its the new update or just some other mods i have installed messing with it?

[dankmemesxd]

Hi, first of all, I must say that the mod is very impressive. Great job. But I am not into cursed loot thingy, but would like to use it other features like night assualts etc. Is turning the event chance to "0%" on cursed loot, turning dangerous chests completly? Thanks in advance

[LazyBoot]

4 minutes ago, dankmemesxd said:

Hi, first of all, I must say that the mod is very impressive. Great job. But I am not into cursed loot thingy, but would like to use it other features like night assualts etc. Is turning the event chance to "0%" on cursed loot, turning dangerous chests completly? Thanks in advance

On the debug menu there's an option for "cursed loot events", I think if you turn it off it will still give you most events, but it disables the chests.

[SleepyJim]

26 minutes ago, dankmemesxd said:

Hi, first of all, I must say that the mod is very impressive. Great job. But I am not into cursed loot thingy, but would like to use it other features like night assualts etc. Is turning the event chance to "0%" on cursed loot, turning dangerous chests completly? Thanks in advance

I'm not sure if it's the same option you're talking about, but you can set the base cursed loot chance to zero. You would also, however, need to set the arousal weight to zero on the same MCM page to ensure it never happened. Even at zero base chance, if you have arousal as a factor you can still get hit with loot if your character is aroused enough.

[DragonFly23]

I looked around in TES5Edit and I cannot find registry for the SpikeBall Outfit. Is this an error? Also, the pink armbinder animation does not seem to run, it is only that armbinder that I have trouble with.

Cheers

[Texmarker]

14 hours ago, WaxenFigure said:

Answer is in the previous posts.  In fact it's on the same page of posts as your question but only if you know what "debug switch" means to the mod.

 

Disable the debugging option in the MCM menu and then things should start to work more like expected. (Note: Not the debug logging option which is a different option).

Can you help me? I can not find the option you speak of. There are two options with "debug" in them. "Debug screen messages", which is disabled by default and "Debug log messages" which is enabled by default. Disabling this does not affect the MCM like you said.