Roleplaying as a weak, helpless girl.

[Tiress]

47 minutes ago, Lupine00 said:

I was surprised people were jumping at L&D earlier in this thread. I'm interested in why they think it's important to playing a weak character.

All I'm seeing is a minor cash sink, or possible a small random chance a combat will be lost, in an unfair way that only effects the player - am I missing something?

For this purpose I don't think it should be used alone. When you need to dump money because your income is too high, there are multiple ways to achieve that. You can pay salary to your follower, modify buy/sell values of items, restrict inventory capacity... there are many. And the best way in my opinion is to combine them. Not all of them necessarily, but at least some of them. Because this way you won't have to increase the sink of a single mod that much and eventually beyond what's believable.

 

For me it's more of a way to wear different armors though.

 

In a vanilla game I just crafted the best armor I could and I used it for like 5-10 levels as there was no need to change it which is real shame because there are many great armors I'd have liked to wear, but why intentionaly penalize yourself because of it?

In my modded setup I have tons of armors and clothing so the need to change them grows exponentially. Of course I could buy them, but this adds another layer of motivation to actually do that.

 

By the way, Naked Dungeons has this implemented too in a very basic way. Configurable OnHit chance from animals and power attack from humanoids and all that separately for cloth, medium and heavy armor. Viable option if you use the mod as alternative to Defeat.

[Lupine00]

2 hours ago, Corsayr said:

After alchemy, enchanting is the 2nd most game breaking mechanic in Vanilla Skyrim (IMO). Giving a max armor set custom enchantments can really give you a significant advantage especially since NPCs rarely have multiple enchanted items. 

 

If you want to take away your alchemy advantage there are various choices, but I didn't see much discussion of them in this thread.

How are people dealing with this?

 

I have often considered, but never actually bothered, to install a mod that prevents insta-potion-guzzling.

 

The reason for this is, I don't generally need it. Due to robbery, dangers of plant harvesting, and other disruptions, I'm more likely to get useful healing potions as quest rewards or loot than by making them, and will often be very low, or completely out of healing potions. Other potions, like resists, you don't chain-chugg anyway, so it doesn't help with those.

 

The one potion I used to abuse to extreme, was cum potions from PSQ, but generally not in combat, that wasn't what they were about anyway. As PSQ would just give you them as a by-product of sex, and they were a valuable store of satiation, I would burn satiation to buy stats, perks, skills, spells, etc, then refill from the potions. This usually involved chugging about twenty of them, but it was not an in-combat action so...

 

PSQ is the opposite of "weak character" though, it's more like insta-win ... and being able to fly ... it's fine if you just want to smash through a main quest completion or explore some vanilla quests you might have missed before.

 

 

Enchantments though... The change I always thought made sense for enchanting is that you should be able to get some benefit from disenchanting items with enchantments you've already seen, so it serves as a sink for items, without yielding cash.

 

I can imagine a mechanic where you have to use a "material" you get from disenchanting previously seen magic to maintain enchantments on items you use. That material could possibly just be filled soul gems, or something new, or could come in flavours, so you need to disenchant more aggressively, or can't always keep your enchantments running.

[Lupine00]

Reviewing some things:

 

When it comes to making the PC weak, we have plenty of options:

• Stronger enemies
• Limiting skill increases
• Limiting starting skills
• Capping skills
• High risk combat mechanics, such as deadly combat, or simply turning up damage scaling
• Combat consequences (like wounds)
• Limiting armor or weapon availability
• Limiting combat enchantments
• Limiting combat potion use

Maybe I missed something, but the summary is: no shortage of choices here.

There are enough ways to make the PC weak in combat that you can pick from dozens of flavours and approaches.

 

 

Making the PC weak is just the starting point. What sort of game is it supposed to deliver?

 

 

More often than not, the aim is some kind of slavery, or prostitution game.

I think it's fair to say that most people who read LL forums aren't doing this so they can play a candlestick maker or a blacksmith, even if they might consider it as a briefly amusing distraction, it's not the focus or intent of making the PC weak.

 

In the same vein, the goal isn't simply a harder game, though that is a side effect I suspect most people interested in this sort of thing would consider beneficial.

 

 

So, once you've made it so that the player has a high risk of enslavement, and is very likely forced into prostitution, simply to keep the character "functional", what sort of gameplay are we expecting from that slavery, or prostitution?

 

 

Given what's currently available, it seems like the best part of the "weak character" approach is the difficulty increase "side effect", and the slavery and prostitution is ... a bit underwhelming as a game, with almost no content, and content that is often dull.

 

 

Slaverun is probably the biggest "content pack" for this, and there's lots of good stuff but ... also lots of grind: dull travel back and forth quests, or sex scenes that drag on for hours with no meaningful player interaction.

 

RP has some prostitution quests. Not a large number, but there's something. Most don't really have that much player involvement though. You get to a place, and then things happen, and you might get the odd dialog option. Mostly, it's about grinding sex scenes. Over and over.

 

SD+ and ME have content that is more like a sandbox, and ME offers a fair bit of button pushing, but it's hard to find much of a game in either.

 

SD+ fetch tasks pivot on pure luck as to whether the required items are available nearby, and the SD+ main quest is mostly just a bit of searching and dialog; though there is some combat at the "end" of the currently available quest. It's not finished, and has been like that for ... a long time ... though perhaps this year we'll see it tied off.

 

ME is more of a pure sandbox, with no story content. A lot of what exists as "escape" challenges seems broken. If you end up as a brothel slave, you probably aren't getting out. Ever. Not by design, but because the mechanics don't work as they claim to. If we imagine that content worked properly, it would still be little more than an extremely repetitive grind of sex scenes to earn your freedom.

 

CD is another chunk of content. With a struggle you can play through it, but it has a number of bugs, most of which result in task failures, or jam up its main quest completely. Setstage and property hacks can resolve much of this, but it erodes most of the fun that would otherwise be present. We've been waiting years for a serious revamp of this, to fix the bugs, and there's nothing in sight. It's hard to speculate where it's headed, but it seems like new problems/tasks (the changes in DD for example) are arising faster than it's progressing.

 

When CD works well, it can be great, and there's lots of immersion, but there's a lot of grind too. Whether it's mining, making butt-plugs, or chopping wood, it's grind.

 

 

There are other mods with conventional quests, some now old and broken, others still maintained. Devious Cidhna, DCL, etc. all have up-to-date working quests that are fun to play from time to time, and may (or may not) fit well with the weak character game.

 

 

The pattern that repeats here is repeated attempts to extend a small amount of content with cheap "content extender": grind. Whether it's chopping logs in a maid uniform, or watching a thousand sex scenes, it all becomes grind after a while. The Slaverun and CD grind is perhaps the most classical in a game-design sense; they both go out of their way to make the player do repetitive, time consuming tasks to gain access to tiny packets of rewarding unique content.

 

 

With RP and SD+ it's often the case that the design doesn't distinguish between grind and the "good stuff", as if the author feels there is no difference. In those mods, the grind is also the spice. It works longer or better for some people than for others.

 

 

DF, in contrast, leverages vanilla Skyrim gameplay, and adds a few little packets of spice to it. This works very well, but you are playing regular Skyrim most of the time. It's a tricky fit for the really weak PC, who can't fight at all, particularly if they lack tools to help the follower. Also, you're beholden to Skyrim follower AI, which is by no means capable, and which often suffers at the hands of bad nav-meshing, both by Bethesda, and modders. On the up-side, you're not too beholden. It's not like mods that drag the player. In DF the player drags the follower, and if they won't path, you can always port them to you. Sad as that is, that's followers in Skyrim.

 

DF doesn't add a lot of content of its own (though there might be more than most people think), but it lets you play Skyrim while keeping the "weak player" feel. It's probably the best content at the moment, but you need a setup that lets you help the follower.

 

 

PoP is another contrast. There is no real attempt to deliver gameplay, it's more a kind of "misery simulator". It really does work as a disincentive to go to prison, because being stuck in PoP is genuinely horrible. It's fun, once. And then it's not, instead it's tedious, and you just want it to end as fast as possible. This sure serves as part of a game, but it's not the content we're looking for, it's what we get when we fail. It makes us appreciate the alternatives. It's a stick, not a carrot.

 

 

Another approach of note, is SLSO, which adds some interactivity to otherwise repetitive sex scenes. Sadly, SLSO's interaction is basically just a way to pick an orgasm outcome - an alternative to a random number generator. It's not trying to deliver a "game" as such, though you do have some limited decision making capability.

 

 

How could something like SLSO be made into a real game? Not key-rotation, like DA or Arachnophobia, or key-mashing, like Defeat, that's for sure.

How can we introduce tactics, or even a deeper strategy to a mechanic like that?

 

 

What sort of content could we add to mods like RP to make them feel like there are choices? Presumably, any such content has to be fairly re-usable, because as with the authors of all these mods, we don't have a team of level-builders, and a team of scripters, and a team of content designers, to make all this stuff, we have no animators, or model artists - if we want assets, we have to make them ourselves, and it takes a helluva long time. We have to get some incredible return on effort. A lot of the play just has to be emergent or sandbox based to make the development time investment worth it.

 

 

There's no other way to make enough content as a modder.

It's not through laziness that Slaverun, or CD, or RP work the way they do. In their own way, they're simply trying to give the player more.

 

 

Given those constraints, what content would deliver the most return on development effort?

[Corsayr]

1 hour ago, Lupine00 said:

If you want to take away your alchemy advantage there are various choices, but I didn't see much discussion of them in this thread.

How are people dealing with this?

CACO does a good job of this

 

I set it for 5-second effects so the potions are ticks per second over 5 seconds and they do not stack. Also, CACO makes the more common ingredients super weak so like a Wheat/Blue mountain flower healing pot is like 1/4 strength of something that uses a more exotic ingredient. 

[Corsayr]

12 minutes ago, Lupine00 said:

Combat consequences (like wounds)

never tried wounds, have you ever looked at Wildcat?

 

 

[worik]

3 hours ago, Corsayr said:

never tried wounds

You should. It took a bit to set the settings so that they fit my style but I like it. One smash from a dragons claw can shatter a bone and its time to take a few days off.

The various types of wounds and their healing is wonderful, because it puts me at risk to abandon even "low level" dungeons, hobble home, heal and come back again after a few days.

I combine that with "chasing the dragon"

 

Not everyones taste though

[Lupine00]

6 hours ago, Corsayr said:

never tried wounds, have you ever looked at Wildcat?

I've looked at Wildcat several times, but I had (still have) a low level of trust that Papyrus script could respond quickly enough to deliver that sort of thing in a satisfactory fashion.

 

With Wounds, the results can kick in a few seconds, or even minutes later, and it's OK, because the main impact is how they force downtime on you. It doesn't matter if the responsiveness is low. But with something like Deadly Combat or Wildcat, or TKHitStop, I don't have any faith in Papyrus - I am convinced that Papyrus isn't designed to respond that fast, and can't be relied on. The aync nature of various aspects of the Skyrim engine mean that we even see dialog updates lagged by Papyrus scripts, where custom conditions or pre-info scripts are involved, and most of dialog is handled in C++, and pre-calculated where possible. TKHitStop has a plugin, but also scripts; I'm not sure what to make of them.

 

I really don't want mods trying to do much on OnHit events, that is how you get stack dumped.

 

If DC, or Wildcat were SKSE plugins rather than scripts, I probably would have tried them by now.

 

Perhaps I'm overcautious, but anything that has such obvious script-overload capability built into its core concepts makes me nervous.

 

 

Worik said you need to take a bit of time adjusting to Wounds, and getting it set up right for you (though not all of that was on this thread). I think that's good advice.

 

Wounds has a big impact on your character. The debuffs are quite extreme, and can easily be made worse if you disregard them.

 

Also, treating wounds is sometimes a tricky proposition. If you're a slave, or you're simply stuck somewhere that you can't get access to the necessary ingredients, the most likely outcome is that they will kill you. It depends on how your needs mod deals with disease, but most needs mods amp up disease considerably, and death by disease becomes a possibility. Even if the disease doesn't get you, the debuffs can lead to death because you're so slow and useless.

 

If you're stuck somewhere remote, and need to get to civilisation, you may find that Wounds will get you, later rather than sooner, but either way, you're in some serious peril on that journey. If frostfall doesn't freeze you to death, you could easily fall to "weak" monsters due to debilitating wounds from an earlier fight.

 

As for slaves, I guess it turns out they have a high mortality rate in Skyrim. If you tweak it so that whipping can deliver cuts, you can genuinely be beaten to death, despite the efforts of SD+ and Slaverun to make this an impossibility. This suits me perfectly, but I should think a lot of people would not want it at all. However, without modification,  canes don't deliver cuts. Out of the box, wounds is merely highly punishing to the errant slave.

[worik]

4 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

Wounds has a big impact on your character. The debuffs are quite extreme, and can easily be made worse if you disregard them. 

 

Also, treating wounds is sometimes a tricky proposition. If you're a slave, or you're simply stuck somewhere that you can't get access to the necessary ingredients, the most likely outcome is that they will kill you. It depends on how your needs mod deals with disease, but most needs mods amp up disease considerably, and death by disease becomes a possibility. Even if the disease doesn't get you, the debuffs can lead to death because you're so slow and useless.

That's what I like about wounds.

3 days in Inte's POP prison with whipping left no issues to the vanilla health. But the bruises were so severe I could merely crawl. Even a low level dungeon was a tough thing for my 30+ PC and only do-able when I came back a week later.

I never leave home without bandages, needle and a healing potion for the worst.

 

Yet, I don't know if the bruises can even grow more severe or transform into other wounds ... a thing to test

[sapho888]

This is an interesting thread as I normally play like this as well.  I generally play a low health healer that is forced into hunting, thievery, and prostitution by the harsh misogynistic atmosphere of Skyrim. 

 

I establish this atmosphere using a lot of the mods already mentioned previously.  But the major one is probably Slaverun Reloaded which I actually use the cheat to have the cities enslaved but my PC not enslaved in the beginning.  I also turn off the naked law checks as I find having all naked females in cities to be rather strange.  Other mods generally already enforce some kind of nudity for slaves anyway.   Numerous money sinks do include SL Adventures and the the need to pay to leave cities and hire a follower.  One follower framework mod that I'm trying out is Nether's Follower Framework which just recently introduced a follower tax as I liked that idea in DF but I didn't like its lives system.  

 

To make RP's waitress mini game a but more interesting, I roll a D20 die on each item the customer wants.  If I roll a 1, I auto-fail the the game and won't be able to earn money in an honest way for the rest of the day.

 

I try to have a mix of RP elements from mods as well as keep some of the default combat and quests of Skyrim in play to allow for varied gameplay when SL mod quests get stale.  So basically I start out as a regular peasant of Skyrim (I use the Orphan start for CCAS).  Whether I become the dragonborn is up to the player but I generally try to play a "normal" game of Skyrim with the SL mods putting restrictions and punishments in place that I have to overcome.   Inevitably I will fail either by losing in battle and becoming enslaved (via SD+, Simple Slavery, Slaverun, etc.) and getting too high bounties as I try to stay alive but the goal of my PC is to live a peaceful and comfortable life... perhaps with a loving family.

 

 

A few things that I wish I could change with my current setup...

      SD+:  I wish being enslaved didn't completely negate your magic. As a healer character on quests with a master, I want to be able to heal him if necessary.  Whether it is because I have grown to love him or I fear becoming enslaved to the enemy even worse, that should be up to the player.  

      Soulgem Oven:  A more immersive reason for birthing gems.    I usually just RP saying that a slaver has used some kind of ancient dwemer artifact (piercings) that turn females into sources of soulgems and it is also contributed to why the dwemer went extinct.  

      Milk Mod Economy:  More reason for NPCs/ slavers to want to milk the PC.  

      SL Survival:  This mod has been great but I also wish that it did not have RND as a hard dependency.  RND has probably the worst user experience of any of the Needs mods out there now.

 

[Lupine00]

52 minutes ago, sapho888 said:

SD+:  I wish being enslaved didn't completely negate your magic. As a healer character on quests with a master, I want to be able to heal him if necessary.  Whether it is because I have grown to love him or I fear becoming enslaved to the enemy even worse, that should be up to the player.  

Sometimes I've had the more recent SD+ not put a magic draining collar on the PC. They seem a bit random about it now.

Also, if you remove the collar and replace it with a different one, I don't think the master cares, as long as you do the swap out of his reach.

 

SGO. It so needs a quest to set it up. It promises a wonderful supply of free soulgems, but of course you aren't told you'll have to birth them.

 

SLS, yes RND is not great.

 

What I wish for though, is for more of these things to join up better. For wounds to be more aware of your needs mod, for wounds to handle slave tats injuries like apropos, for wounds and apropos to interact, and so on...

 

It's sort of where I want to go with SLD, making a way for the player to wire these things up how they want. So little time to work on it just now. Maybe in a few weeks, things will get sane. I held off needs with it because I had a needs mod of my own I was considering integrating, but better to monitor other needs mods I think - let people choose the one they want.

[Lupine00]

In the time that my character was able to earn enough money to train sufficiently to enter the College at Winterhold through RP, she still didn't recover from the cuts she got from the wolf attacks, and her leg is still cracked. Wounds is fierce.

 

The college needs a food vendor. Anybody know a mod that adds service NPCs like that?

[sapho888]

29 minutes ago, Lupine00 said:

In the time that my character was able to earn enough money to train sufficiently to enter the College at Winterhold through RP, she still didn't recover from the cuts she got from the wolf attacks, and her leg is still cracked. Wounds is fierce.

 

The college needs a food vendor. Anybody know a mod that adds service NPCs like that?

If you use some of the College of Winterhold overhauls, they often add more food laying around.  Otherwise, I just go to the inn outside the College for food. 

 

While I like the idea of wounds, I found that it was hard to have fun with the game once you became too wounded.  I would basically just wait around until the debuffs went away.  It didn't seem to add enough gameplay to my games to make it worthwhile.  Rather, I just make it so that if I am in a losing fight, I don't just sprint away at warp speed.  I have the NPCs move a little faster than my normal movement speed so that they can catch me if they try.  And then all the slavery/ death alternative mods come into play.

[Slorm]

22 hours ago, worik said:

+ sword, bow, dagger, ... that's why I stumbled upon it.

The vanilla "sharpening" of a sword at the grindstone felt just stupid to me. Now, it makes sense again

Thanks both (worik and Corsayr), definitely seems worth a look as it just using the main slots doesn't bother me

[Lupine00]

9 hours ago, sapho888 said:

While I like the idea of wounds, I found that it was hard to have fun with the game once you became too wounded.  I would basically just wait around until the debuffs went away.  It didn't seem to add enough gameplay to my games to make it worthwhile.  Rather, I just make it so that if I am in a losing fight, I don't just sprint away at warp speed.  I have the NPCs move a little faster than my normal movement speed so that they can catch me if they try.  And then all the slavery/ death alternative mods come into play.

These long imposed waits, where you have money going out, and no way to earn besides menial jobs like cooking, or solicitation are the "benefit" of it for me.

 

But I agree it's not ideal, and that (for example) a mechanism where you could simply spend a lot of money to get cured up fast, would streamline play in those cases where you have a cash reserve, and waiting out the recovery isn't really an obstacle, just a chore.

 

Being able to spend to improve recovery rate would help generally with increasing the playability of wounds.

 

These kinds of waiting periods were one of the things that made me unhappy with every existing needs mod.

 

There is no needs mod that lets you just say "I want to wait a week." In every case you have to handle the boring busywork of eating, sleeping, drinking, etc. If you have food decay, that may mean multiple shopping trips. Even if you have a mod with auto-eating, it's still a bind. RND does not auto eat/drink however, so it's particularly busywork heavy.

 

I don't play Skyrim to play "grocery shopping simulator" I have to do that s**t in real life!

 

That was why in my tiny needs mod, I made it so needs were invisible (and had no script load) except in situations where you did something unusual.

 

If you were in a player home, there were no needs checks at all, instead you'd be reset to fully rested, fed and watered simply by entering a home.

 

If you were went in an inn, there was a dialog "I'd like a meal please." I meant to add some follower handling, but never did.

You paid a flat fee, and got fully fed and watered.

 

There were no penalties for going a day without food, water or sleep, because why bother? It just makes busy work for normal adventuring.

This meant you could generally go inn-to-inn without worrying about buying and carrying food. Or do a dungeon without worrying about it.

 

 

If you got enslaved in SD+ though, hunger and thirst kicked in after the first day, and consumption of food and drink would be tracked. I based the satiation on a k0*weight + k1*value, where k0 and k1 were tweakable for the mod.

 

Also, if you gave oral, you'd get some satiation. I was interested in cum addition, and wanted to tie it into my skooma whore replacement. Didn't happen.

 

Alas, there were a lot of lazy things, and unconsidered cases. I started to fix it and basically ended up with it "in pieces" and not put back together. I wanted to add support for followers, and DCL + DF slavery. Also didn't happen. Well, DF kinda, as it was the first thing I supported, but DF's own food and drink support wasn't really sufficient to get any game play out of it.

 

It may get recreated as part of SLD. Possibly.

 

I like the approach of very low maintenance, low busywork, until you're in a situation where food and drink are a genuine constraint.

[Lupine00]

11 hours ago, sapho888 said:

I establish this atmosphere using a lot of the mods already mentioned previously.  But the major one is probably Slaverun Reloaded which I actually use the cheat to have the cities enslaved but my PC not enslaved in the beginning.  I also turn off the naked law checks as I find having all naked females in cities to be rather strange.  Other mods generally already enforce some kind of nudity for slaves anyway.   Numerous money sinks do include SL Adventures and the the need to pay to leave cities and hire a follower.  One follower framework mod that I'm trying out is Nether's Follower Framework which just recently introduced a follower tax as I liked that idea in DF but I didn't like its lives system.  

This is an interesting idea. I might try it. But I've been trying to hold off Slaverun until a genuine release. I get the feeling that no genuine release is going to appear. Kenjoka is around, but hasn't posted in months. My guess is he doesn't have time to do anything, and might not ever, until the point it's all too old for anyone to care.

 

I'm happy with DF, and like it a lot, so no need for that feature in NFF.

 

If the only thing you don't like in DF is the lives (which seems a small reason to dump a mod that has so much funny stuff in it) then set the number of lives to be very high, and don't set them to be lost on rape. That basically disables them as an effective mechanic. Followers will still get tired and grumpy, even without losing lives. Maybe that is the part that annoys Sapho888 though?

 

Maybe the problem was followers walking on traps and losing lots of lives due to their dumb AI? That is annoying. There are mods that fix it, and some followers have the Lightfoot perk by default. I believe you can also add it via EFF menus, if you are patient.

 

 

I do not like NFF. Not based on experience of playing with it - I never have - but based on looking at the source so I could support it.

It's entirely retrograde, and takes follower framework coding backwards. EFF is much better engineered. Even AFT is better engineered.

NFF reads more like an early release of UFO than what we might expect from the hot new thing in follower frameworks.

[Lupine00]

9 hours ago, sapho888 said:

If you use some of the College of Winterhold overhauls, they often add more food laying around.  Otherwise, I just go to the inn outside the College for food. 

It looks like I could add Magical College of Winterhold into an existing game without disaster, but it's not quite what I was hoping for.

 

I think Deadly Wenches added a 'wandering' wench vendor in the college. I may recall incorrectly.

 

I don't want to have to go to the inn if possible, basically "because roleplay", and it's unimmersive anyway, as it's clear that most people in the College do not go there, and the character that does has a particular connection with Nalacar. My poor PC spent weeks whoring in that inn, and it's not exactly a happy memory.

 

I'm surprised there isn't a dining hall mod that adds a table of self-replenishing food. With these things, it often turns out there is one, if you can only find it.

 

Update: there is a dining hall and vendors in Winterhold College Improved.

[Darkpig]

Is there a mod out there where you have to pay someone in soulgems?

[sapho888]

1 hour ago, Darkpig said:

Is there a mod out there where you have to pay someone in soulgems?

I've never seen a mod that uses soulgems as currency if that is what you mean.  The closest thing i can think of would be quests that have you fetch certain types or amounts of soulgems.

[sapho888]

2 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

This is an interesting idea. I might try it. But I've been trying to hold off Slaverun until a genuine release. I get the feeling that no genuine release is going to appear. Kenjoka is around, but hasn't posted in months. My guess is he doesn't have time to do anything, and might not ever, until the point it's all too old for anyone to care.

 

If the only thing you don't like in DF is the lives (which seems a small reason to dump a mod that has so much funny stuff in it) then set the number of lives to be very high, and don't set them to be lost on rape. That basically disables them as an effective mechanic. Followers will still get tired and grumpy, even without losing lives. Maybe that is the part that annoys Sapho888 though?

I don't know if Slaverun will ever be finished either but having the cities enslaved and the enforcer part of the mod causing horny NPCs to go looking for slaves to screw already fulfills a lot of what I want out of the mod.  The enslavement quests are well done but after a few times, it gets old and takes a long time.  But I love the atmosphere it creates where a slave has to move carefully around a city or become the target of a train of horny men, so I wanted to keep that.  Also, with the way the mod is designed, I still have being enslaved by Slaverun as a possible outcome for Simple Slavery so it can still happen to my poor PC.

 

As for DF and the lives system, you actually have it backwards.  I don't want the lives system at all because it keeps the master alive whether I want it or not.  If i fall into debt, there is no other recourse except to pay him back somehow.  I can't try to out think him by sneaking away or leading him into a trap.  And with the mods I have, money is always in short supply with most of it going to food and shelter and taxes.   At least that is how I understand it works.   I liked most of the rest of DF, but that 1 detail runs contrary to how I play and was a deal breaker for me.

 

Regarding NFF, I don't know enough about its coding to argue with that.  I'm still trying it out in a new playthrough but if it does what I want, then I don't care if they coded it in pig latin

[Darkpig]

22 minutes ago, sapho888 said:

I've never seen a mod that uses soulgems as currency if that is what you mean.  The closest thing i can think of would be quests that have you fetch certain types or amounts of soulgems.

I suppose that will have to do. I was thinking along the lines of you have to fill X amount of soulgems for your (daedric?) master in an x ammount of time or else you will get punished.

 

A soulgem based economy would be quite something though. Kind of reminds me of the Souls games.

 

[Lupine00]

51 minutes ago, sapho888 said:

As for DF and the lives system, you actually have it backwards.  I don't want the lives system at all because it keeps the master alive whether I want it or not.  If i fall into debt, there is no other recourse except to pay him back somehow.  I can't try to out think him by sneaking away or leading him into a trap.  And with the mods I have, money is always in short supply with most of it going to food and shelter and taxes.   At least that is how I understand it works.   I liked most of the rest of DF, but that 1 detail runs contrary to how I play and was a deal breaker for me.

That isn't really anything to do with the "lives" system at all. The lives system is a mechanism for punishing you for letting your follower get into bleedout. As a friendly follower can be (or is usually) set up in Defeat, or DCL, or even DA, so that you're only defeated once the follower and the PC are "down" (in bleedout), this ties neatly into situations where the follower was hurt, but you didn't go down.

 

There's a built in assumption that you're not a backstabbing murderer, who would kill a follower simply to escape debt. It's like the assumption that you'll accept enslavement to save some dumb NPC you don't even know in Slaverun - it's just how it is, a lazy bit of narrative with a cheap motivational device, and an outcome that runs on rails. If you don't want that outcome, you don't install the mod, so I understand that could lead to rejecting DF.

 

 

If you are both defeated, then you can escape from DF. Sometimes. If the outcome is Simple Slavery, you lose your existing follower, and your existing debt, and get sold, and may end up in SD+, or back in DF, or in whatever peril you enabled for SS.

 

 

But circling back, I would describe what you're talking about above, in DF, as "master is set essential".

That's pretty much core to the design, so you can't just rack up debt, then knife her in the back and laugh all the way back to Breezehome.

 

I suppose you could convince yourself that leading an SD+ master to his death is "out-thinking" him, but as he cannot think at all, and either moves randomly, or follows you blindly, it's not at all challenging to drag an SD+ master into a fatal combat - at least once you can get him outside and moving. However, in SD+ killing a master to escape is fundamental to the design, and it's had that approach since before there was a 'plus' on it. The flip side of this is that SD+ slavery is not particularly interesting in the vast majority of cases, and being able to rid yourself of it is a relief. It gets hilarious when you have a master who is so tough that he simply kills anything you drag him into combat with. When that happens, you have got a serious problem. If it's a creature, you cannot even serve your time, they keep you forever. I had this with a frost troll in a low level game. Due to how the troll was levelled, it could kill anything but a dragon. Eventually, it was killed by a dragon that breathed fire, but it killed two frost dragons before the fire-breather got him.

 

I'd like it if the victor of combat with your SD+ master attempted to enslave you in a fairly aggressive, hunting, tracking, chasing sort of way. But it doesn't have that. However, I was erroneously enslaved by the dragon that killed the troll, while using the beta, supposed to be impossible. Faction problems resulted, and I was killed by Stormcloak soldiers shortly after. Interference from Defeat may have been to blame.

 

 

If you come to DF expecting it to work like SD+, you're going to be disappointed. The odds of actually getting enslaved in DF are pretty slim. It's most likely you'll end up that way through Simple Slavery, not through DF itself. DF is about deals, and if you refuse to take them, then you get enslaved. If you take the deals, you won't get enslaved in the first place. The goal is to make you take the deals.

 

 

I get that it just seems wrong to some people. It can feel odd that you just do as the follower demands, when they have no obvious means to coerce you, or that they can just enslave you without you fighting back. There needed to be a bit more story and setup to resolve that, I think.

 

 

In DF the "game" is to escape from debt, within the restrictions applied - not so much slavery, but debt. I've played that game in some quite extreme poverty/scarcity conditions, and still found it interesting. While you're enslaved, you don't add debt, so earning your way out is generally always feasible. Slavery works as a sort of safety net for when you totally suck at debt management. (I don't mean that in a negative way, obviously, different games are set up with different financial conditions).

 

Deals also expire eventually, in a normal configuration, so if you don't keep taking them, eventually you will be able to get rid of them very cheaply. It's just a matter of surviving them. I like it as something you can mix in with SD+. Mixing it with Slaverun would be very interesting.

 

 

It re-opens that "joined up mods" can of worms I mentioned earlier though. If only the slavery mods had a coherent measure of submissiveness and willpower they shared. But they don't. SD+ has slavery levels. DF has willpower and resistance. DCL has ... nothing. Devious Cidhna has ... nothing. CD has a whole bunch of stats, but they rarely come into play. There's a willpower framework mod, but I don't think anything really uses it. It's all broken into silos; very disappointing.

[Lupine00]

46 minutes ago, Darkpig said:

A soulgem based economy would be quite something though. Kind of reminds me of the Souls games.

I was thinking of tweaking up a modified DF to work on soul gems.

 

People have been looking for an alternative currency for it, for ages, and there it is, right there, obvious, yet somehow it wasn't.

[afa]

The what do in game is the million dollar question, how to achieve it is certainly a daunting task, but at its most base state you can argue it is a series of dice rolling with a coat of paint over it.

 

Slaverun sort of works because it is big enough to carry its own weight despite occasionally over engineered.

It also works as a backdrop and a looming threat gameplay mechanic; slavery is out there. The game is then PC try to stay away from it (with somewhat adjustable difficulty), and if/when she falls victim there's a whole another story line where she tires to appease it or escape from it.

 

Also for me personally I need some kind of PC, NPC, and world interplay and recognition for each other as the PC's journey rises and falls.

[orgs1n]

Just stumbled onto this thread and will follow with interest.

 

Regarding NFF, I like it because your followers:

- sandbox when not active, making them seem more alive;

- can be set to not revive when defeated in combat. Essentials Ragdoll on Knockdown makes it look like they get knocked out, and then they stay down until revived. That way they don't just stand around and watch while the PC undergoes the consequences of defeat.

[worik]

5 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

These long imposed waits, where you have money going out, and no way to earn besides menial jobs like cooking, or solicitation are the "benefit" of it for me.

That pretty much sums it up!

And the nice thing in Wounds is that you can simply MCM the slider to the healing rate that you like for YOUR play style.

5 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

Being able to spend to improve recovery rate would help generally with increasing the playability of wounds.

Buy the right potion, drink it, done.  ? Where is the problem?