Roleplaying as a weak, helpless girl.

[Lupine00]

1 hour ago, worik said:

And that is where my approach of "mirroring RL" ends without fun. Because RL is no fun here.

If every time some jackass NPC made a smartass comment, it reduced your arousal, you'd certainly be struggling to raise it above 20.

 

Real events are starting points if you're looking for ideas. Take something like "talk to boring assholes" and see what mechanics you could add to make it a game.

 

In DCL, the talking is like everything else in DCL, a random roll of the dice, that may (or may not) be influenced by current arousal.

 

The immersive weakness is that most of it wasn't written taking into account likely high arousal.

 

If "Are you a sex slave, or just the regular kind?" were gated on arousal to "Looks like that collar turns you on. Funny, it's turning me on too."

It could be made to serve as an immersive reminder of high arousal; a warning that risk levels are high.

 

 

The arousal mechanics of DCL are barely a game, but there's the idea that managing arousal won't be trivially easy.

Depending on other mods, it can be sort of a game, or pretty much not one at all.

 

 

SL Adventures is a mod that is ripe for adding more game play to it. There are lots of mechanics, but they aren't designed into any kind of coherent whole.

 

 

For example, I can imagine some stuff just based around outfits. 

 

Wear respectable town clothes, and you get respect, are cut slack by guards, get reduced fines, or none at all, buy and sell on better terms, and have more pleasant, less dangerous conversations with NPCs generally. Smiths and wizards will politely refuse your custom, suggesting you send the man of the family. General traders will try and sell you a pan.

 

Wear slut clothes, and you get contempt, propositions, harassed by guards, higher fines, or arrested for nothing, but ... prostitution works a lot better, you make more money, can collect fees more easily, customers seek you out, they pay more, treat you better in sex scenes, and offer you drugs at discount prices. Smiths and wizards won't even deal with you, except as a whore selling her wares. General traders will try and sell you a lockpick or a washout potion.

 

Wear armor, and you get fear, insults and passive aggressive sniping, and the guards behaviour flips on whether you are a thane or an outsider. Prostitution is impossible, and rape only possible if you're drunk, drugged, or bound. Intimidation is improved, and smiths and wizards will give better prices because you seem like you might know something about weapons or magic. General traders will want to buy at knockdown prices, but will sell you anything.

 

 

Outfit choices are thus actual choices, with no single best option. That's a choice, but it's not a game.

However, if changing outfits has more complex outcomes, then it starts to get a game mechanic.

If you show up as a whore one minute, and an armored tank the next, the NPCs might get confused, or annoyed, that you seem to be playing dress-up. Maybe they'll decide you are one thing or the other, and treat you that way no matter how you dress, until you make an effort to convince them otherwise. Or maybe there is a special place in their hearts for whores who want to be adventurers - and that special place is an awful lot like a slave cage - and might be reached through an organised ambush outside the city.

 

So, what if you can only change outfits safely in certain places?

Or respectable clothes require special maintenance?

Or whore clothes have to be specially made by a tailor who will work for whores?

Or carrying unworn armor undermines the effect of wearing other clothes.

 

That adds more complexity to managing your clothes. I'm not sure it sounds fun exactly. Could just be tedious. It matters how those things are delivered in the game.

If getting whore clothes is like a mini-quest, with funny dialog, and unexpected events (at least the first time), people might not see it as a chore, but as fun.

If you can't stash armor without a house, then the other clothing options are closed to you. Perhaps the rules need tweaking, in that case, to make the other clothing options more attractive, pushing you to make a choice to sell your armor, or take the trouble to buy property, or give it to your follower, who may or may not run off with it and stick you in a collar. See earlier.

 

It's possible to brainstorm these things at length. Easy. A mod like SL Adventures enables some of these possibilities, but not all. What could be added in another mod to fix that?

First decide what we really want ... because implementing new stuff take ages.

 

 

I really want to tune all sorts of things based on outfit, and that is something I'm definitely going to add to SLD. SL Adventures doesn't seem to be likely to add what I want.

I'm so keen to have this feature that I was going to put it in V13 of SLD, but as things have dragged on, and I spent a lot of time avoiding modding, I'm going to push V13 without - very soon now, but it will be the key feature of V14.

 

I also really want blackouts, bounties, and price variations in V14.

[Lupine00]

42 minutes ago, SkyAddiction said:

SLA would 100% work out of the box for every single mod if the user could control the base arousal modifier as a multiplier based on sex acts engaged in within one 24h game period. Want your PC to be a raging addict? Set it to 1; odds are you're looking to get her fucked anyway. Boom, born whore. Want your PC to be on the other end of the spectrum where the vast majority of sex is consensual and "normal" by any given definition? Set it to a mod-defined cap of 10-20.

You're welcome to try this  

 

If we had a shell we could drop arousal models into, you could try it easily in that too.

 

I confess though, I don't actually understand what mechanic you're proposing. You may have to explain more carefully. What gets modified? Exposure, Time rate, or the resultant total? And what is the formula for modification? final-arousal = arousal * Sex-Acts / K, or is there a threshold in there? Sorry for being obtuse.

 

You could attempt this (whatever it actually is) with the existing SLA(R) source.

 

It might improve matters, but regardless, with just tweaking the numbers ,I don't think it will add a lot of fun - see previous discussion of gameplay for why.

Aroused lacks player interactions. It doesn't do much to help your game, instead it plays itself and you watch.

[SkyAddiction]

58 minutes ago, Lupine00 said:

You're welcome to try this  

 

If we had a shell we could drop arousal models into, you could try it easily in that too.

 

I confess though, I don't actually understand what mechanic you're proposing. You may have to explain more carefully. What gets modified? Exposure, Time rate, or the resultant total? And what is the formula for modification? final-arousal = arousal * Sex-Acts / K, or is there a threshold in there? Sorry for being obtuse.

 

You could attempt this (whatever it actually is) with the existing SLA(R) source.

 

It might improve matters, but regardless, with just tweaking the numbers ,I don't think it will add a lot of fun - see previous discussion of gameplay for why.

Aroused lacks player interactions. It doesn't do much to help your game, instead it plays itself and you watch.

 

I'm massively shit with math, but SLA increases the rate at which arousal is gained per sex act, provided they're within a defined period of time, right? What if that gain was... controlled by a user-defined number equal to the number of sex acts performed within a given period? So, say if you set it to 1, any sex act beyond 1 per day increases the arousal gained per check. If you set it to 10, you have to have sex 11 times to increase arousal gain per check. If this is a 24h in-game system, it's intuitive to pretty much everyone. If you fail to hit the user-defined setting, arousal gain per check begins to decrease toward base, whatever that's defined as. You could easily set the upper limit to 30-50 just to make it so everyone can define their own game. (Can you actually, realistically, force a PC to have sex more than 40 times per day outside skipping animation stages?) I'd have to actually take some time to work out the math on paper to see how it would play out, but instinctively I can see almost total user control if the limits are properly defined, and all that without seriously changing the way the mod works. That retains some degree of familiarity for users.

 

Just another idea...

[Lupine00]

3 hours ago, SkyAddiction said:

I'm massively shit with math, but SLA increases the rate at which arousal is gained per sex act, provided they're within a defined period of time, right?

I think it's quite simply per-sex-act, there is no time period or window. Every orgasm adds N time-rate, where the default is 5.

But you must orgasm. If you have sex and don't orgasm, there's no change.

 

3 hours ago, SkyAddiction said:

What if that gain was... controlled by a user-defined number equal to the number of sex acts performed within a given period?

So you're proposing X free sex-acts before you can start to gain time-rate?

 

It obviously would prevent a lot of time rate gains if you set it high.

In fact, would probably prevent almost all of them in the average game, that isn't Slaverun or prostitution.

It's hard for a full on, work 'til she drops whore to turn over clients faster than one per 1.5 game hours.

 

SD+ masters aren't anywhere near as horny as that. They only way you get lots of sex from them is insulting them over and over.

 

For normal PCs the timing is rarely more than a couple of acts a day, even with rapes, unless rapes are set with a low cooldown.

 

So setting a value of two, would negate almost all gains, using the system you describe.

 

 

There is no "base" arousal gain. Time-rate is that. There is only one number for time changes, and it's time-rate.

 

The other number "exposure" is something you accumulate due to particular events, like seeing a naked person, or having a plug edge you.

 

 

However, if you reverse the mechanic, so the number determines the number of sex-acts you can have before time-rate increases start being prevented, it would work more like you intend. Low sex act characters would get one or two acts of "gain", but after that would gain no more time-rate.

 

So spike events, like trying to escape the Rubber Doll Collar wouldn't leave them quite so dramatically scarred.

 

Or, you could divide time-rate gains beyond the first by a number that increases according to a value you set.

 

Or you could devise something fancy with a power function, or logs to make the falloff linear or on a curve.

 

But they're all schemes that come down to diminishing returns on time-rate gains for orgasms-per-day beyond N.

 

 

Such changes would have no effect on things that pump exposure, like plugs which is fine.

 

The issue here is that the player will have to play about with that constant, like they currently play about with the rate-gain-per-orgasm setting that already exists. It might be easier to tune, it might not. Would take some time and experimentation to make it do what you're talking about, even then, you've mostly just recreated vlkSexLife - though that actually has a model based around a nominal normal arousal level that can be pushed off centre briefly, or permanently disturbed by addicting events.

 

If the existing time-rate gain value would allow you to set fractional values (e.g. it had a decimal place) it would be easier to tune, but it moves in steps of 1.

Why?

The original SLA was all integer.

 

SLA(R) is internally floating point, with some exceptions. That value is "known" to mods, so it had to be left as an int.

 

 

I'm going to say that the "overthinking theory" is a case of Dunning-Kruger. Actually the simplest way to look at SLA(R) is as a purely numerical system, but that ignores how it interacts with its environment. SLA(R) doesn't run away simply because it's numerically unstable. The original author put in a decay mechanic that can dump any amount of arousal in a pre-selected number of days.

 

This should have prevented rapid runaway and pegging at 100, but it doesn't. There are reinforcing factors in the environment. Often characters end up in solicitation scenarios, or slavery due to a failure or catastrophe. This leads to sex-addiction, which leads to more failures, which leads to more sex addiction.

 

The system of failures is designed to generate the addiction. It's not an accident. If the PC lacks tools to dump addiction at will via some mechanic, they can't break the cycle without taking a big holiday from adventuring - which possibly they can't afford to do, or don't want to because a lot of sleeping is kind of boring, and kind of tedious too if you have RND.

 

Being forced to do something very dull to fix your game is ... very dull ... how much better if it was ... something fun?

[karlpaws]

9 hours ago, SkyAddiction said:

What if that gain was... controlled by a user-defined number equal to the number of sex acts performed within a given period? So, say if you set it to 1, any sex act beyond 1 per day increases the arousal gained per check. If you set it to 10, you have to have sex 11 times to increase arousal gain per check. If this is a 24h in-game system, it's intuitive to pretty much everyone.

I think you'd need a check box for aggressive/consensual and straight/gay/bi options as well. A lesbian forced into prostitution wouldn't likely have her arousal go up much when she's raped 4 times a night by men.

6 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

I think it's quite simply per-sex-act, there is no time period or window. Every orgasm adds N time-rate, where the default is 5.

But you must orgasm. If you have sex and don't orgasm, there's no change.

 

as a side note, it seems often lesbian animations don't include an orgasm trigger, so girl on girl animations do not reduce arousal often.  I suspect that's tied into Sexlab, not any arousal mod.

[Darkwing241]

9 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

I really want to tune all sorts of things based on outfit, and that is something I'm definitely going to add to SLD. SL Adventures doesn't seem to be likely to add what I want.

This is a dream mod for me.  Skyrim is severely lacking in mods that deal with appearance from a beauty/sexy/intimidating/rich/poor type of perspective.  I absolutely loved the slut armor deal in Devious Followers.  I assume these mods don't exist because it's difficult to attach rules to all the various mod added armors people may or may not use.

 

YPS immersive fashion add's some framework for these types of things but only with high heels, piercings, makeup and hair, not with clothes.  It gets around the custom armor issue by only dealing with the easily identifiable HDT heels or NIoveride Heels.

 

It would be disappointing to me to have to limit a mod to stock armors (tavern clothes are "slutty" all armors are "intimidating ect.)  Although this is probably(?) the easiest path.  DD and some other you register certain types of armor/clothes as inner/outwear for the purposes of hiding devices.  It should be possible to build a a similar MCM menu where you register wearable items as sexy/intimidating/respectable ect.  You could even make it possible to tag things with multiple categories.  A sexy/respectable evening dress, a sexy/intimidating tera armor, a sexy/un-respectable whore outfit, a respectable intimidating imperial uniform.  Then you just have an export/import button.  YPS immersive fashion does this with custom hair styles, letting you designate length/braided/permed ect.

 

You could then calculate simple scores for each category that  define if your character is looking sexy/respectable or not.

 

Building your own content off of this would be pretty easy as you could add blocking dialog or bouncers to certain areas/people. 

 

-Smiths don't sell if you are too sexy

-You can't talk to the jarl if you are not respectable. 

-If you look poor you unlock a mini quest with the beggar

 

This doesn't solve the "not a game" issue but adding some simple exploration/questing would help, and it gives the player a reason to encounter other content.  It also gives more levers to pull for quest making.

[SkyAddiction]

9 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

I think it's quite simply per-sex-act, there is no time period or window. Every orgasm adds N time-rate, where the default is 5.

[...]

Being forced to do something very dull to fix your game is ... very dull ... how much better if it was ... something fun?

 

Fair enough. SLA clearly doesn't work quite the way I thought it did.

[Visio Diaboli]

Not sure if it's been suggested but you could use player.forceav commands to dramatically reduce your stamina/health recovery rates, resistances, etc.

[Lupine00]

3 hours ago, Darkwing241 said:

It would be disappointing to me to have to limit a mod to stock armors (tavern clothes are "slutty" all armors are "intimidating ect.)  Although this is probably(?) the easiest path.

RP and ME require you to manually register clothes as "work" clothes. RP starts with Tavern clothes registered already.

While making the player do this is a bit tedious, it's probably the best way, because the player can have the game they want.

Both have a UI for registering them. ME has a fairly complicated menu system for managing outfits.

 

Another example is Frostfall, which will let you configure warmth and coverage in-game on outfits, but also has a soft-dep API for modders to log Frostfall information on their clothes, that is harmless if Frostfall isn't installed.

 

However, if I had to devise a lazy way to guess if an item is "slooty", I would simply check if it's vanilla or not. If not vanilla, it's probably slooty  

Vanilla items come from low numbered modules, so are fairly trivial to identify.

 

Sure, there are mods that add sensible clothes, but the majority don't.

[Lupine00]

6 hours ago, Darkwing241 said:

Building your own content off of this would be pretty easy as you could add blocking dialog or bouncers to certain areas/people. 

Hmm. A mod that just tracks scores for clothing?

 

That might be viable.

[karlpaws]

6 hours ago, Darkwing241 said:

It would be disappointing to me to have to limit a mod to stock armors (tavern clothes are "slutty" all armors are "intimidating ect.)  Although this is probably(?) the easiest path.  DD and some other you register certain types of armor/clothes as inner/outwear for the purposes of hiding devices.  It should be possible to build a a similar MCM menu where you register wearable items as sexy/intimidating/respectable ect.  You could even make it possible to tag things with multiple categories.  A sexy/respectable evening dress, a sexy/intimidating tera armor, a sexy/un-respectable whore outfit, a respectable intimidating imperial uniform.  Then you just have an export/import button.  YPS immersive fashion does this with custom hair styles, letting you designate length/braided/permed ect.

 

2 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

RP and ME require you to manually register clothes as "work" clothes. RP starts with Tavern clothes registered already.

While making the player do this is a bit tedious, it's probably the best way, because the player can have the game they want.

Both have a UI for registering them. ME has a fairly complicated menu system for managing outfits.

I don't know if this is possible, partially because I don't remember if the schlongs of skyrim mod's option to mark an item as revealing saves to the JSON or not... but could item ids and keywords be saved for sharing or cross-save / playthrough use?

 

In a way, some sort of cross-mod "item identification" mod would be nice, so you could save SOS Revealing, SLA revealing, or "scary as fuck +10 to Intimidate" clothing keywords. Would it become too difficult to manage with all of the required masters, or could it detect, on load, which of the supported mods you have installed and correctly identify the load order prefix for each?

[Lupine00]

36 minutes ago, karlpaws said:

I don't remember if the schlongs of skyrim mod's option to mark an item as revealing saves to the JSON or not...

 

Do you mean SexLab Aroused (Redux)? Because that's where I set items as revealing or not.

It performs the arousal calculations based on whether it thinks you are naked or not.

 

Perhaps SoS has a setting too, but I never used it.

 

I don't believe SLA(R) writes a JSON file, but simply stores within the save file.

 

However, that doesn't mean its values can't be obtained.

 

 

The problem with this approach is that you use SLA(R) to flag clothes that are no better than naked - rubber suits, bikini armors that barely cover anything and so on - but clothes like tavern clothes, or Melodic's "Hello Santa" are not equivalent to naked, and I (personally) wouldn't set them as such in SLA(R) - but they still might signal to a customer that the wearer is not exactly a lady of virtue.

 

So it's not useless finding those "naked" clothes, but it doesn't find them all. It just saves the player from having to set them in two places.

 

And in some cases, the player might need to blacklist them. There are clothes I'd set as "naked" that definitely don't indicate a whore at work - they are kind of slooty, but also kind of scary, such as the Spriggan body from SD+, or Hermaeus Mora Priestess, or Daedric Freak.

[karlpaws]

1 hour ago, Lupine00 said:

 

Do you mean SexLab Aroused (Redux)? Because that's where I set items as revealing or not.

 

Perhaps SoS has a setting too, but I never used it.

 

I don't believe SLA(R) writes a JSON file, but simply stores within the save file.

 

SoS has an option to set whether an armor item conceals the schlong or not.  I think, looking at it, that it does not save those settings, just the MCM options.

 

It would be nice though if such values, and others, couldn't be saved and recalled on another save. It would avoid having to have all of your clothes adding mods use a master with the various keywords, plus having to add them (though if a framework mod was created, one person could add the keywords and distribute the modified files... as long as permission was obtainable and people had the same ideas... neither of which are terribly likely.)

 

I could see ( SLA(R) ) based at least, a sexually arousing others, exibitionist (self arousing if seen wearing), arousing or non (itchy uncomfortable clothing with signage, for example or your spriggan skin) for your non-whore or irritated-whore options.

[Lupine00]

As I'm effectively done with SLD 13 for now, and just testing, I've been thinking about some kind of clothes mod that would change some social interactions - but not anything to do with combat stats or stuff like that.

 

The problem is how to handle vanilla NPCs generally.

This was discussed back on the SL Adventures forum, and possibly in some PMs with Teutonic.

 

Edits to vanilla NPCs and their core dialog, especially important ones like vendors are highly conflict-prone.

 

IIRC most of these dialogs are driven off factions. Clearly, changing the NPC factions is a non-starter, so the way forward is either edits to those vanilla dialog conditions, or blocking dialogs.

 

Blocking dialogs are their own kind of pain, but DCL seems to get away with doing it all the time. I guess as long as you can get past the blocking dialog, there won't be a problem.

 

Problem is, for this to work, sometimes you shouldn't be able to get past the blocking dialog.

 

Imagine some qualities that measure your visible status..

e.g.

Respectable - does the character look like a trustworthy upstanding citizen, of sound nordic morals? (Regular clothes, fine clothes are better).

Slooty - does the character look like a nymphomaniac on the prowl (a transparent rubber suit and a tutu)

Whore - does the character look like they are cruising for business (whore clothes)

Criminal - does the character look likely to rob you (thieves guild outfit)

Disgusting - does the character look dirty, unpleasant, or otherwise something you would not go near? (e.g. have living armor)

Dangerous - does the character look like they might punch your face in? (Heavy armor and weapons, covered in blood).

Powerful - does the character look like they could have you thrown in prison? (e.g. You are a known thane)

Ridiculous - does the character look like a joke? (A silly little man in a jester's costume?)

Pathetic - does the character look deserving of pity? (A beggar with a missing limb)

Helpless - can the character do anything to protect themselves? naked and gagged, in an armbinder

 

Could add more, or have less, that's another topic, probably...

 

I'm guessing these would have a small number of ranks:

0 - does not apply

1 - maybe, a bit

2 - yes definitely

3 - yes, and it's just about the only thing you can see about them

4 - the character is the very archetype of this concept, their whateverness is at a supernatural level

 

These are represented by adding or removing characters from factions, so you can even set them on NPCs if you want.

 

And for efficiency, there are some compounds (global values), that will tell us directly whether types of vendors will deal with you.

DealWithBlackmith, for example is Slooty == 0 && Whore == 0 && Disgusting < 2 && Ridiculous < 2 && Pathetic == 0

In this case, criminals can talk to blacksmiths but sloots, jesters, and people with a carrot stuck up their ass can't...

 

 

So...

Blacksmith gains blocking dialog, condition DealWithBlackSmith == 0

 

Info: I don't sell weapons or armor to the likes of you.

*  Nevermind

** Get away from here (goodbye).

*  But I must speak with you. It's important.

** There's nothing your sort could possibly have to say to me. (70%) (goodbye)

** Alright then. Out with it! (20%) - proceed to normal dialogs.

** Get away from me! (10%) (goodbye) further dialog blocked for 12 hours - all you get is "Get away from me" again, and it resets the timer.

 

So, in fact, you can deal with them, but you might have to repeat the dialog interaction, or you might get blocked.

 

The totally blocked scenario would block all vendors of that type (lock DealWithBlacksmith to 0)

This latter trick isn't perfect, but it's efficient. Trying to check on a per NPC basis is bothersome and costly.

 

With this approach, if you have a quest, or something you really must talk to the NPC about, you can do it, eventually. It might take you three or four days of trying if you're really unlucky.

[Lupine00]

I'm interested in doing something fun with characters dressed like whores.

Don't pay too much mind to this, it's really just some notes for myself  

Suggestions welcome though.

 

Getting a bounty from guards is one possibility, the obvious fallback.

 

Other possibilities:

 

Female citizens who aren't whores will not speak to you. (See above, but in this case the category is all females).

 

Add some generic female citizens who really hate whores, and will call the guard on you.

 

Guards eject you from the city unless you own property there. Could be a teleport, like vanilla prison, could be a leash walk.

- Once ejected, you must pay the guards to be allowed back in.

-- If you lack cash, they might accept something else.

- If they catch you inside again having not paid, you get a bounty and go straight to PoP if installed.

- If they catch you inside again having not paid, you get raped and robbed, and thrown out naked.

- If they catch you inside again having not paid, you get a trip to a Simple Slavery auction, and not as a buyer.

 

This sounds like a lot of work. But just adding bounty ... it's not much gameplay or immersion.

 

Coming back in without paying needs to be made a viable choice though.

And, in towns with no gate, you should probably always get a chance to pay.

 

Maybe, in the bad case, let the player choose between the bad outcomes: Pop/raped+robbed/enslaved.

 

The re-entry bounty needs to be high, and should apply for a limited duration. After 24 hours (or maybe 48), you should be allowed back in for free.

So the guards only have that time to catch you. After that you simply get thrown out again.

 

Whore catching behaviour should use a reasonable radius, so if you stay far enough away, or simply aren't in LOS, guards don't bother you.

 

Alternative payments:

- sex with guards, but should be more than one, sometimes this gets out of hand, turns into a massive gangbang in which every guard in the city gets a go.

- trade items - guards steal random items up to a certain value total - mostly they take cheap items first

- bribe the guard - you have 12 hours to bring the guard a bribe of around half the bounty - if you have the cash when you pick this, you just bribe the guard immediately.

-- if you fail your speech it's like being caught re-entering

 

Stolen items:

Maybe quest items can be stolen too. A special vendor gets ownership of *everything* stolen from you, quest item or not. The vendor is in the Nightgate Inn.

Vendor only sells your stuff and skooma.

They have a dialog that will give you possession of anything that looks like it's no-drop free of charge.

 

If you own property:

Whores who own property are a civic asset. Every time a home owner is caught by guards, they owe a freebie.

This involves guards showing up when you try to sleep in your house, and initiating an orgy of variable size.

Any female NPCs in the house will be involved. (Bah, I have no code for this, probably too much work).

If you're unlucky, it's a lot of guards. They might also bring Jarls, housecarls, advisors, who knows?

 

Very likely they will leave devious "gifts", but will not steal keys.

[worik]

3 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

Imagine some qualities that measure your visible status..

e.g.

It would be a complex task to create the chart or a robust logic for the engine to detect and rank those. (and to be customized by the player)

 

Frostfall could work as an example, how to do that.

It had the same need for new attributes, but only with 2: warmth + coverage. And that is already quite complex.

 

Your 10 attributes would need a priorization, take the top ranking 2 or 3 and handle that subset.

I would sort them by relevance, by detectability and plausibility. ?

E.g.

1. helpless (relevant and sounds easy detectable)
2. respectable (probably easy to detect and certainly relevant)
3. attractive

I drop many other since they are either opposite ends of the same scale or sound too difficult at first glance.

 

To my knowledge there where at least 2 mods that tried to tackle these ... ? arrrggh, braincells are low on ☕ cant remember the names.

 

[Lupine00]

2 hours ago, worik said:

It would be a complex task to create the chart or a robust logic for the engine to detect and rank those. (and to be customized by the player)

The model for this is that the player assigns outfits they wear into these categories, or doesn't.

 

A given outfit can be in none, or all of the categories - I guess the MCM shows what you are wearing on the left and on the right toggle boxes for what you think it looks like. Except for helpless, which is off regular DD keywords. Now I've thought about this, sliders that range from -3 to +3

 

So that's that... It's not the gordian knot as far as problems go, unless you want a magic solution. I'll settle for workable.

 

 

As for how the factions interact, in a wonderful world, you could have an MCM that allows you to set the logic tests for each vendor faction.

 

In the world of "have time and can be bothered", the formulae are calculated according to my whim in a script file and if you don't like it you have to edit the script  

 

To quote from my post above, I gave one example:

 

DealWithBlackmith, for example is Slooty == 0 && Whore == 0 && Disgusting < 2 && Ridiculous < 2 && Pathetic == 0

 

And pointed out that it was quite arbitrary - but it's not something hard-coded into an ESP, so could ultimately be made MCM configurable.

 

Maybe, when you implement the factions, you realise a lot of those categories aren't needed - but they're still provided so that arbitrary future content can leverage them.
 

This circles back to the fairly extensive collection of factions and keywords I suggested should be easy for other mods to use.

So the first step is to put those factions (and the ones from above, or some better thought out version of them) into an ESP.

Second step is to make the dialog blocking mod.

 

 

I guess the endgame on this functionality is a prostitution mod that is more immersive and sandboxy.

But I think that's a way off, and may never even be started.

I kind of had a go at a prostitution mod with my Skooma Whore replacement, but that had problems with unfinished skooma quests, and diverse edits to conflict-prone cells. So this is a long-standing dream for me.

 

 

For example, in existing mods, a prostitute gains nothing by prettifying herself. But it could be made important, or have game mechanics.

 

What does it matter when she's on a one-way trip to becoming a broken ruin begging for skooma in a hangout in the sewers?

 

But what if she aims to be a high class courtesan, covered in jewels, with bodyguards to protect her, and a powerful wealthy patron to back that up?

 

Or ends up the slave of an indulgent Jarl, dressed up like a doll and expected to make extravagant displays of adoration while he toadies to the empire?

 

 

These kind of play options seem scarcely explored yet.

 

Step 1 - collect underpants

Step 3 - profit !!!

[Lupine00]

So, for...

Spoiler

 

Respectable - does the character look like a trustworthy upstanding citizen, of sound nordic morals? (Regular clothes, fine clothes are better).

Slooty - does the character look like a nymphomaniac on the prowl (a transparent rubber suit and a tutu)

Whore - does the character look like they are cruising for business (whore clothes)

Criminal - does the character look likely to rob you (thieves guild outfit)

Disgusting - does the character look dirty, unpleasant, or otherwise something you would not go near? (e.g. have living armor)

Dangerous - does the character look like they might punch your face in? (Heavy armor and weapons, covered in blood).

Powerful - does the character look like they could have you thrown in prison? (e.g. You are a known thane)

Ridiculous - does the character look like a joke? (A silly little man in a jester's costume?)

Pathetic - does the character look deserving of pity? (A beggar with a missing limb)

Helpless - can the character do anything to protect themselves? naked and gagged, in an armbinder

 

Totally arbitrary solutions might look like:

 

General vendors: Disgusting < 2 && ((Respectable != 0 && Criminal < 2) || (Powerful >= 2)

Alchemists: (Respectable != 0 && Criminal == 0 && Slooty == 0) || (Powerful >= 2)

Clothes Vendors: Disgusting == 0 && (Respectable >= 2 && Criminal == 0 || (Powerful >= 2))

Innkeepers: Disgusting < 2 && Dangerous < 3

Food vendors: Whore < 2 && Slooty < 2 && Disgusting < 2 && (Criminal < 2 || Powerful >= 1 || Pathetic > 2)

 

 

And for some more on getting higher ranks:

High cash on person => powerful += 1

A thane =>powerful += 1

A follower => powerful += 1 if < 3

Known dragonborn => powerful += 1, dangerous += 1

 

Slooty, Whore, Pathetic, Helpless or Ridiculous => Powerful -= 1

 

No inventory value => pathetic += 1 

Low inventory value => pathetic += 1

Wet or cold => pathetic += 1

 

 

And so on. Just keep piling on tests, as long as they are simple. It won't be perfect, and there should be scope for external mods to put a +/- or lock onto them too.

So, Hormones Bimbo gets slooty locked to 4, and +1 helpless, no matter what.

 

Thinking of mods that have had a shot at this... Barefoot Realism blocks trading based on the most important thing of all! How clean are your feet?

I think maybe feet were given an over-prominent position in that mod, socially speaking. But it implements a lot of the stuff above (cash, inventory value) and the dialogue blocking. Though in BFR, there is no way around it apart from washing your feet.

 

If you think of others, bring them up.

 

Using the 'known attributes' factions from my faction system, which are either set by mods, or by the player, or possibly detected by esoteric means in some cases, you can get other adjustments, for example the known prostitute faction gives you a min value of 1 in whore. Legal slave gives a min value of 1 in helpless, and so on, depending on whatever plausible rules you can come up with, just working through the factions.

[Lupine00]

Makes you think ... it would be so weird in an RPG to have to go to a private place to make certain clothes changes.

That thing where you just click in your inventory and it swaps to something else. Magical.

The bother that DD has to go through to stop this is ... a bit too much ... but it could be made into an interesting mechanic if it weren't such a pain.

 

 

I look at a mod like YPS IF, and think "This adds a lot of busywork for no obvious pay-off."

I don't want to do that. All the effort in YPS, basically so you can ask shopkeepers to paint your nails and play hair growing simulator!

Which has to the the second least interesting game since "watching cabbages grow".

Because it all matters so little, you can just play with it, and it has no impact one way or another so the game play can't be broken.

Though there is the fashion addiction, and feet training, you can turn them off if you think they're silly or annoying.

It's a huge amount of assets and such to get all those options though.

[Lupine00]

There's a test version of SLD 13 up, if anyone wants to play with it. I already found one bug.

[Darkwing241]

5 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

A follower => powerful += 1 if < 3

Firstly everything your wrote looks pretty amazing, but I'll try to poke some holes in order to maybe solve some problems at the planning stage.  The idea of also tying in non-clothing categories is a good idea, and gives room for some great room for growth, you could even tie them into appearance themed quest rewards

 

-get your makeup done

-you're covered in cum

-you're officially "employed" somewhere

-you employ someone else

 

The disadvantage of some of these I see is potential conflict with content mods.  In this case devious followers, makes it so you are the employee not the employer.  I don't know if there is a great way to automatically, but you seem way more knowledgeable than me, I'm just a modeler.  I guess my request as a user would be to just make sure there is a MCM toggle for some of these.  DF is one of the best content mods to come out in a long time it would be a shame to conflict with it

 

5 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

 

I look at a mod like YPS IF, and think "This adds a lot of busywork for no obvious pay-off."

I don't want to do that. All the effort in YPS, basically so you can ask shopkeepers to paint your nails and play hair growing simulator!

Which has to the the second least interesting game since "watching cabbages grow".

Because it all matters so little, you can just play with it, and it has no impact one way or another so the game play can't be broken.

Though there is the fashion addiction, and feet training, you can turn them off if you think they're silly or annoying.

It's a huge amount of assets and such to get all those options though.

 

This is a totally understandable reason to dislike YPS IF.  Kink is a weird thing sometimes you either have it or you don't, but other times its about mindset.  There is a big set of players out there that love to sit in character editors for hours playing dress up, I think its the same impulse that makes custom armor mods so popular.  The hair growth thing just makes character redesign fit more organically into your game.  It's not why I use the mod but it is useful to understand what may appeal to someone else.

 

The draw of YPS to me comes from the fashion addiction part. Objectification kinks are at the core of a lot of Skyrim kink mods.  One of my favorites is forced dressing, when a woman is forced to wear something (mostly slutty, but really anything) against her will.  Now almost every bondage mod plays to this to some extent but YPS IF plays it differently with its fashion addiction system. 

 

-First the mod encourages you to to beautify for reward (a simple speech bonus) at a cost (speed debuff/gold), so maybe you just dress up while you are in town.

-Then you get further into fashion as the drawback go away (heel training, high speech gold glut, more gold in general after you've been player a while)

-Now you are staying dolled up and in heels all the time

-Eventually the confidence buffs diminish and you instead get a a debuff for NOT beautifying

-Now your Character is trapped, her high heels are as locked on as any devious device

-The fashion is bondage, after a time all that's left is that you look like slut and your feet hurt

 

It's a great story to play through.  The addiction system makes it all feel fairly logical.  You are still playing an RPG, the game part of RPG is about making choices that improve your character and YPS IF does this very, very well.  

[Lupine00]

16 hours ago, Darkwing241 said:

 

It's a great story to play through.  The addiction system makes it all feel fairly logical.  You are still playing an RPG, the game part of RPG is about making choices that improve your character and YPS IF does this very, very well.  

I wouldn't deny anyone their kink. What puts me off it is that it is an inevitable outcome, instead of making a gameplay based back and forth, it's pretty much headed one way. When you reach the end of it, you're stuck with a lot of menu-based busywork and NPC dialog back and forth, running in and out of shops.

 

I find that I spend more time doing that already than I do adventuring, or even travelling, so I look for ways to cut back on it.

 

This is sort of the problem with MME too. Once you're a milkmaid, getting crippled by a constant need to milk, and boobs the size of the rest of your body is almost inevitable. It's going to happen. This is partially due to long-standing bugs that meant lactation didn't reduce when it was supposed to, but that it's taken this long to even admit there was a bug indicates the priorities of the developer, and most players using it were aligned with the inevitable end. In short, most players wanted that outcome, so they never even tried to avoid it, and never came across the bug.

 

In contrast, for me, MME was always a threat or obstacle that I put in my game so I could fight against that outcome. Never did win though. Now I know why. Even breast reduction potions were busted for a long while, so you couldn't get anything from using those either. I would always get bored of how much milking became necessary.

 

 

 

If YPS has an appeal for me, it's just to mess about with appearances, and I'm certainly guilty of spending hours faffing around in race menu.

 

It seems an obvious choice for a "playing a weak and helpless girl" game, and yet it comes down to some very specific preferences.

 

But something like Immersive Jewellery ... as a compressed download it's 1.3GB, and then you've got the mods it depends on. It makes an 8K skin texture look like less of an indulgence. I can add a mod that turns my game upside down (DF) and it's a few MB. Is it worth using so much resource on some items you don't see that much in normal play, and that only incremental gameplay influence compared to a simpler left-handed-ring mod? That VRAM could be better spent on higher resolution environment, I think. I can't really go any higher res on that, but there are still a lot of ho-hum textures and meshes from Immersive Armor in my game, that look rather 2012 in appearance.

 

This brings me to something that bugs me about CBBE and UUNP, neither of them mapped nearly enough pixels to the breast area. This means that uber-boob characters have pixellated boob textures with out-of-scale veins and other defects. CBBE has slightly more pixels for boobs, but the difference is small, and the CBBE body looks low-poly, particularly in the arms and legs, where it often shows sharp corners once morphs are applied. Neither mapping offers nearly enough. Totally off topic, so I'll leave it there.

 

 

But if anyone knows a drop-in replacement for UUNP body that just has more polygons in it, I'd like to know   UUNP has a ton of polygons in the breasts, but it gets much more economical in other areas, and these days, there's no need, particularly if it's in a custom race.

[Darkwing241]

9 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

What puts me off it is that it is an inevitable outcome, instead of making a gameplay based back and forth, it's pretty much headed one way.

I agree wholeheartedly.  The whole thing is really a lot of bloat for what is essentially just one story line.  I don't know if I agree that the one-line-ness is necessarily a problem though, not every mod needs to be expansive.  Skyrim is a game of choices and fashion addiction line is just another path to walk down.  If there are hundreds of paths, isn't that a choice?

 

I don't think a beauty mod needs to be the type of mod that dominates your play through.  Devious Followers is more the type of mod that does the "this is a DF playthrough" to your game.  It offers a lot of varied choices but, the vast majority of what your doing needs to be focused on it.  A beauty system doesn't really need to be that, it's just like a lens or filter that adds color to everything else you are doing.  In the case of DF it gives a thematic way to get gold out of your pockets, which helps active DF.

 

I think if you really want to game-ify the beauty elements of the game you really need to tie it all back into the core gameplay of Skyrim, questing and looting.  If a mod like YPS was to have items scattered throughout the world to find, rather than just in shops.  Or you need to at least be able to quest for them, even if its a simple quest.  Now with the clothing score system you don't even need to make these quests, because you already get many of these items through regular skyrim game play.  Combine with a mod like Book of UUNP  and you get to have a spectrum of different sexiness in your outfits. 

 

You just have to go search for the ones that fit you needs.

 

I think this is a place where beauty/appearance has huge potential for a weak/helpless character.  You have incentive to go out and search for regular game items, there is just a change in what is valuable to you.  Instead of high armor (not useful to a non-fighter) you are now looking for something pretty so you can woo a follower to take care of you, or increase you gold income at the tavern.  Instead of a weapon maybe you prize that sneak potion that will let you clear "dungeons" easily as it improves your ability to cower in the shadows from the scary monsters.

 

I guess the TLDR is I think if weak/helpless is the way you want to go, then it would be easier to make a mod that has you successfully do (not intentionally try to fail at)  Skyrim things while making you feel weak/helpless rather than trying to build an entirely new set of things to do.  It would also be easier to integrate with other content mods this way.

 

 

 

[karlpaws]

2 hours ago, Darkwing241 said:

Instead of high armor (not useful to a non-fighter) you are now looking for something pretty so you can woo a follower to take care of you, or increase you gold income at the tavern.  Instead of a weapon maybe you prize that sneak potion that will let you clear "dungeons" easily as it improves your ability to cower in the shadows from the scary monsters.

Instead of a skooma whore, you're quaffing potions of Courage and Invis like a fiend.

 

Although, I don't know if there are potions of courage... and I don't mean booze (which is technically a poison of bravado and clumsiness). ?

[Lupine00]

7 hours ago, Darkwing241 said:

I guess the TLDR is I think if weak/helpless is the way you want to go, then it would be easier to make a mod that has you successfully do (not intentionally try to fail at)  Skyrim things while making you feel weak/helpless rather than trying to build an entirely new set of things to do.  It would also be easier to integrate with other content mods this way.

Great call Darkwing241!

 

This is one of those concepts that is incredibly simple, and obviously true, but which gets little attention.

Spelling it out like this clarifies it, and crystallises the arguments about what weakness is meant to achieve in the game.

 

A lot of the motivation to introduce weakness is to increase difficulty and increase the chance of failure.

Alas, a lot of that is arbitrary, because once you're at the mercy of Skyrim AI, things fall apart at random.

And then you get some mod that makes enemies immune to followers!

 

So, adding new ways to succeed at the core Skyrim game would be a powerful tool in the box.

 

Playing a healer or support character doesn't work well in Skyrim, because of the way combat is balanced. The damage curve seems like a cliff. Your tank is either taking no damage and needs no heals, or goes down so fast you'd think you were playing Everquest. There's no middle ground, it's cakewalk or catastrophe. Reducing the damage rate doesn't help much, because the cliff is so steep.

 

There's a role as a 'loot collector', taking the risk of those DD traps. Ties perfectly into DF. However, you will soon come up against fights that the follower NPC cannot win, but they ought to. It blocks progress, and it's frustrating, because you know you could do it, it's just that the AI is so amazingly dumb. This forces you to level your way to success (hardly a path for a weak character) or simply fail at Skyrim, and it's not your fault. Failing at Skyrim still needs to be your fault, or else you might as well not bother, and play some "interactive novel" instead. Loot collector is a good job on the way to success, but it's not suitable to build an entire game around.

 

For playable Skyrim combat, the PC needs to be fit to fight, at least as a DPS, even if you can't tank - and the vanilla magic system lacks pure anti-magic spells that let you take on strong casters (assuming you have any). In "Balanced Magic" (misnamed, so misnamed), damage output on spells is much higher. The result is that caster DPS is insane. This is nice for you as a caster PC, but an enemy caster will burn you down very fast. You basically have to play a Breton, and stack magic resist enchants to have any chance of surviving an encounter with two at once. While it buffed some of the shields, it didn't consider pure anti-magic defences as a concept.

 

So, barring some epiphany, the path for a "weak" character is magic or archery. And you are going to have to get good at it - you can't be stuck as a crippled DPS. It's no good taking away every avenue the PC has to win fights. Reliance on followers is not effective, at least, not indefinitely. They do not scale well, and it's a bit boring anyway. Some people just add more and more followers to fix this, or super OP followers, like Yuriana. The latter would made more sense if she wasn't obviously built as a waifu for a strong male PC. Super OP follower is a fix for a lot of follower issues, but also makes for a dull Skyrim that is only interesting because of the other things going on - and there just aren't enough good other things going on. OTOH, big follower retinues have some immersive value (they make the player feel so much less important, just a tiny part of a big group) but they spend a lot of time jammed up on collision, failing to path, and failing to run their AI packages.

 

 

Stealth + archery is a path I've used for weak characters repeatedly in the past. It turns big fights into long drawn out, run away, sneak back again, snipe again affairs. Sometimes fun, but other times it gets repetitive.

 

 

While it's not the obvious path, it's also possible to reconcile a weak, and appearance fixated, character with a heavy tank. If you have good armor, and armor skills, and magic resistance, but poor DPS, you can still "feel" weak. There's the feeling that the character is only strong because of their gear.

 

I'm suddenly reminded of Elric: a weak, sickly character, who is dependent on a powerful magic item and some strong summon spells. He is unarguably weak, but he still wins fights and kills an awful lot of people.

 

A PC, based on a variant of the Elric archetype, who loses their items would be almost helpless again, and face a difficult struggle to regain their "strength". (just like Elric when he is without Stormbringer).

 

This is a good reason not to nerf enchants - they give a PC a way to create this kind of strength, but not instantly, you have to build up money and materials to make good enchants. Even if enchants are an "unfair advantage", they make sense in a game where you have a lot of other unfair disadvantages. Also, it finally provides a "balanced" use for all those stupidly OP armor items that are floating about. (Cocktail dresses configured as heavy armor better than dragonbone anyone?)

 

 

Having laid out some plausible archetypes for PCs - sorceress, stealth archer, gear-based tank - it remains to come up with fun ways to integrate game-play that plays to the weak archetype.