Sexlab Survival

[Monoman1]

Strategic points are good but you will learn where they are and how to avoid them. There are many ways into these towns. I think a combination of static and patrolling is the way to go. 

 

17 minutes ago, Lupine00 said:

and then mostly they would just get killed.

Who says there should be just one of them out on patrol between towns?

Travelling alone is dangerous these days afterall.

18 minutes ago, Lupine00 said:

Adding some dialogs and a bit of script logic doesn't take so long.

No offense but it doesn't matter how long it takes you to do something when you're not the one doing it. ?

 

Besides most of it is testing the ai packages. Just a small example: early on you could avoid the guards chasing you if you just ducked inside somewhere so I had to add a way to determine if one of them saw you enter and follow you if so. Lots of simple problems like this pop up and the solution usually isn't as simple. 

 

Or just testing to see how you can break things or escape without consequences and plugging those holes. 

[Lupine00]

11 minutes ago, Monoman1 said:

Strategic points are good but you will learn where they are and how to avoid them. There are many ways into these towns. I think a combination of static and patrolling is the way to go. 

Those positions would make it hard, but not impossible to avoid.

 

In Riverwood, probably impossible to avoid inspection.

In Dawnstar ... probably not hard ... but there're only two shops of any use there and it's in the middle of nothing, so if you go there, it ought to be easier.

For the other towns, it doesn't matter, they have an alchemist or a lumbermill, if you're lucky.

 

I forgot Ivarstead, but it has no shops to speak of either.

 

If the inspectors are too effective, they might end up turned off. If it's impossible to raise money, then how does the PC raise money to buy a license?

Or pay for an expensive follower?

[Lupine00]

39 minutes ago, Monoman1 said:

No offense but it doesn't matter how long it takes you to do something when you're not the one doing it. ?

That wasn't the kind of point I was making. It took you so long because you chose complicated ways to solve problems instead of simple ones.

My way of thinking is that if I spent a long time on a feature, I did something wrong, or I need to learn a better way for next time.

 

It's like your implementation of cum consumption check is highly complex, but functions no more reliably than a much lazier check that would simply fire on any animation with males, a female, and the oral keyword. Actually, given the way most threesome (and up) animations are set up, you could probably take a safe bet than almost any group animation with multiple males and one female will include cum consumption because all holes get filled in those animations in the vast majority of cases.

 

It was an interesting idea looking for an open mouth, but as you said yourself, a lot of animations don't set that correctly.

 

Or this...

39 minutes ago, Monoman1 said:

Besides most of it is testing the ai packages. Just a small example: early on you could avoid the guards chasing you if you just ducked inside somewhere so I had to add a way to determine if one of them saw you enter and follow you if so. Lots of simple problems like this pop up and the solution usually isn't as simple

That's a good point. I'm aware of issues in a great many mods (including SLD) that occur if you transition through a doorway while being chased.

And yet nobody has ever reported the bug in SLD I know is there, because it's such an edge case it's probably not worth the time investment to try and mitigate it. It can never be genuinely completely fixed due to the nature of script execution in Skyrim. You never know when there will be a fifteen second delay between making the check and executing the code you are trying to gate, and if you add another check, that can't fix it either, it just makes it worse. It's an example of the weak locking (anti)pattern, and it's broken, and that's that. You can't fix the weak locking anti-pattern with anything but real locking, and Skyrim will not let you lock the things you need to.

 

My lazy solution to guard chase would probably just be to restart the chase as soon as you leave the building, which requires a global variable and very little complexity. Lozeak's knack of turning lazy solutions into advantages is what makes DF so clever, but not complicated.

 

 

It's up to you if you like to do things the hard way, but presumably when you do those things, you do it that way on purpose, for fun, because it's a challenge?

 

 

Patrolling randomly spawning gangs of inspectors sound exactly like something that takes three weeks solid in front of the CK, but its your three weeks of fun challenge time. I can't complain  

[Lupine00]

On this general topic, I never found a piece of technical debt that I didn't regret not fixing later.

There's always some pest with a feature you didn't plan for, that suddenly becomes essential.

 

There must have been dozens of times I decided that something was working fine, and didn't need a rewrite, only to end up having to wedge in new functionality at the last minute, and ending up wasting twice the time the rewrite would have taken because the structure wasn't appropriate.

 

I've learned my lesson, but that doesn't mean you can convince everyone on a team, and so the same old problem repeats and repeats.

 

Case in point, right now there's a "phase" system in SLD's sex animation system, that lets me build up activities dynamically, scanning for participants, checking for possible joiners, transitioning from one kind of sex event to another, and so on. You can start a masturbation, then be spotted, then have rapists run at you while you're still masturbating, then get set upon and raped while masturbating. Then be raped, and have participants continue to join the rape gang as they wander nearby, and the rape progresses. Sounds great...

 

But the phases are not distinct enough, and the cross-phase bindings are too wide. It's extremely nasty to maintain, or extend.

Because of that, I didn't add the misogyny-like feature I wanted, because it would take too long to lever into the existing structure.

 

I could take the time and rewrite that code and make it clean, and then have an easy time creating arbitrary sex events, or I could leave it as it, and spend days adding each new event, with a tangled mass of callbacks and dependencies. As it's my solo thing, I can and will clean it up.

[Monoman1]

I'm curious as to how you see the inspectors catching you. I mean how does it work in your mind? You get within a certain distance or in line of sight and they force greet you or something else? To me if they're put in one spot you might as well not have any inspectors. They'd be as effective as a chocolate fireguard. 

 

I'd picture them moseying about town and if you happened to get too close then do a force greet. Slaverun does this with its slave agents. They're easy to avoid most of the time but sometimes they can corner you. 

 

And don't forget a lot of people will run town mods that add shops etc.

 

 

While I'd agree that simplicity is always best some times theres no room for simplicity within the scope of a feature. If you want it to do X and you have to do Y to do it then that's what'll take. In those cases it should be optional if possible. Escaping a chase by ducking inside is just a bit lame imo. But each to their own. And the checking is the player's mouth open isn't that complicated. It's a built in sexlab function. And if the animator doesn't open the mouth it's hardly my fault. Plus if it's a 2p animation the animation tags can trusted even less than the mouth being open in my experience. How many animations start with a blowjob and end in vaginal/anal. And it's also more accurate with SLSO (for 2p at least. 3p+ and anything can be anywhere)

 

1 hour ago, Lupine00 said:

general topic, I never found a piece of technical debt that I didn't regret not fixing later.

You're assuming I'm someone that knows about structured programming. I'm just some schmuck that wanted to add some things to skyrim

[Guest]

Just wanted to check in and say that I'm loving the toll evasion system. Being the criminal scum that I am, I now have an actual reason to want to avoid guards while creeping around at night, while I'm in the middle of some dirty deeds for the Thieves Guild.

 

To weigh in on the inspector/non-unique-celled cities issue, I think Slaverun's Slave Agents would be the way to go. Like yeah yeah I know people like to shit on Slaverun for being too in-your-face, but the wandering authority figures looming just around the corner are one of my favourite parts of its more passive elements (and most people I've seen also seem to prefer Slaverun's passive stuff too; Kenjoka's done a great job on the technical side, but the writing and quest design had turned me off to the main thing after an hour of it). Roving inspectors that stop you for a license check would really help shore up a lot of the discrepancies of towns with no gates. Though I'd caution against extending it too far beyond civilization; any inspectors looking to enforce the law in the wilderness would logically end up facedown in a river with their throats cut, and their stuff taken to be fenced towards my new license.

 

I think the vendors (male ones at least!) acting as a kind of mini-checkpoint for licenses (asking to see one before doing business with you) idea would be a great one in spirit, but will probably be a little too oppressive for most people, especially if it's an immediate game-over by calling the guards. Perhaps a bounty, or even just refusing to buy/sell anything you don't have a license for - sort of like the stolen tag but applied both ways? - might be a better solution. Personally I don't think this would tip the kettle, but you never know.

 

I think you should stick to your guns and go with your gut, regardless, Monoman; there's been a lot of suggestions for many different types of ideas flying around, but a combination of select other mods already adds a lot of atmosphere already (for example, my current setup uses SLS for all of its features, including the miscellaneous ones like kennels and simply knocking, but I also use SL Adventures for its daily "visitors' tax" - acting as a kind of free woman tax -, making magic completely illegal (outside Winterhold of course) and Slaverun for spontaneous NPC sex, with the strip function only apply to left and right hand slots, so females are forbidden from carrying weapons but still wear clothes/armor; I've spent a lot of time hand-picking armor models and textures and I'd like to see them!).

 

People can solve a lot with headcanon and effort on their own part. You just do you, and don't feel pressured by your audience.

[Shion11]

i have a problem with EFF not adding the followers (1 female and 1 male) one of them being kharjo who owns the dragonborn now, and some custom follower that has tiddies for days.

Had to lower the amount of followers required to 0. 

 

i'll keep an eye on any fix.

[Reesewow]

4 hours ago, Monoman1 said:

To me if they're put in one spot you might as well not have any inspectors. They'd be as effective as a chocolate fireguard. 

 

I'd picture them moseying about town and if you happened to get too close then do a force greet. Slaverun does this with its slave agents. They're easy to avoid most of the time but sometimes they can corner you. 

 

And don't forget a lot of people will run town mods that add shops etc.

Agreed on these points - I personally think you'd want both strategic inspectors at the intended entrances/choke points, and wandering inspectors to catch those that are willfully trying to dodge those static inspectors.  I think it would be much more fun to leave a building that formerly was safe to get into, only to find an inspector had patrolled close to the door and caught you leaving. 

 

If the inspectors are 100% static, then I know after a fairly short while I'd understand where was safe or not safe in the towns I typically visit - at that point it isn't a risk of getting caught - it would be a conscious decision to get caught.

 

 

On the discussion of licenses - would a "day pass" type licence cover some of the gameplay Lupine00 is looking for with hold-based licences?  If there was a licence option that only lasted one day/a few hours and essentially existed for someone to recover their gear and do short-term business in a hold for a day - it would play similarly to having individual hold licences (as they would expire before you could get to the next major town).  If a player made these reasonably priced and all other licences expensive, they could survive off day passes only and nearly always be under threat of inspectors or other mods taking their money (DF for example).

 

 

 

Few more misc licence ideas:

 

One thing I do think could be a nice addition for long-term play - could there be NPCs available that sell licences but are not quartermasters?  Thinking they could be posted at the gates of the major cities, so you can "get legal" before entering and losing all your stuff.  Perhaps inspectors could also sell short-term licences at inflated prices as an option for when they catch you for those that want a "keep playing the game" option that won't land them in jail, if they have the money.

[Tenri]

1 hour ago, Shion11 said:

i have a problem with EFF not adding the followers (1 female and 1 male) one of them being kharjo who owns the dragonborn now, and some custom follower that has tiddies for days.

Had to lower the amount of followers required to 0. 

 

i'll keep an eye on any fix.

EFF has a known issue with this mod. EFF doesn't actually register that you have more than one follower, at least not in the way SLS checks, so you have to leave it at 1 or 0, if you want to require 2 or more you just have to honor system it with EFF for now.

[Shion11]

4 minutes ago, Tenri said:

EFF has a known issue with this mod. EFF doesn't actually register that you have more than one follower, at least not in the way SLS checks, so you have to leave it at 1 or 0, if you want to require 2 or more you just have to honor system it with EFF for now.

funny thing was it failed to register a single follower using EFF and didn't change the show a change in show playerfollowercount

[Tenri]

9 minutes ago, Shion11 said:

funny thing was it failed to register a single follower using EFF and didn't change the show a change in show playerfollowercount

Strange, I've never had an issue leaving town with 1-4 followers (follower count set to 1) and I've only ever used EFF for my follower overhaul.

[Monoman1]

23 minutes ago, Shion11 said:

funny thing was it failed to register a single follower using EFF and didn't change the show a change in show playerfollowercount

Can I get a screen cap of 'sqv dialoguefollower' in console.

 

Edit: it also might be worth loading your complete load order in tesedit and make sure that eff is the winning override for quest dialoguefollower

[Monoman1]

3 hours ago, Sam0016 said:

wanted to check in and say that I'm loving the toll evasion system. Being the criminal scum that I am, I now have an actual reason to want to avoid guards while creeping around at night, while I'm in the middle of some dirty deeds for the Thieves Guild.

Thanks

3 hours ago, Sam0016 said:

think the vendors (male ones at least!) acting as a kind of mini-checkpoint for licenses (asking to see one before doing business with you) idea would be a great one in spirit, but will probably be a little too oppressive for most people, especially if it's an immediate game-over by calling the guards. Perhaps a bounty, or even just refusing to buy/sell anything you don't have a license for - sort of like the stolen tag but applied both ways? - might be a better solution. Personally I don't think this would tip the kettle, but you never know.

I was thinking to just deny service tbh. It'll be a little more difficult when you have either a weapon or armor licence but not the other and you're talking to a blacksmith etc...

3 hours ago, Sam0016 said:

think you should stick to your guns and go with your gut

Ah a little healthy debate is fine. It'll be good for the mod in the long run. I'll always do what I think will work for the mod in the end. 

1 hour ago, Reesewow said:

On the discussion of licenses - would a "day pass" type licence cover some of the gameplay Lupine00 is looking for with hold-based licences?  If there was a licence option that only lasted one day/a few hours and essentially existed for someone to recover their gear and do short-term business in a hold for a day - it would play similarly to having individual hold licences (as they would expire before you could get to the next major town).  If a player made these reasonably priced and all other licences expensive, they could survive off day passes only and nearly always be under threat of inspectors or other mods taking their money (DF for example).

Kind of seems like it would undermine existing licences. 

Can't afford proper licences? get the day pass, sell all your shit, go get more shit, get another day pass etc etc.

1 hour ago, Reesewow said:

One thing I do think could be a nice addition for long-term play - could there be NPCs available that sell licences but are not quartermasters?  Thinking they could be posted at the gates of the major cities, so you can "get legal" before entering and losing all your stuff.  Perhaps inspectors could also sell short-term licences at inflated prices as an option for when they catch you for those that want a "keep playing the game" option that won't land them in jail, if they have the money.

Nmm yea maybe. I'll think about it. 

[Clea Strange]

enjoying this mod, I use this with Sexlab Adventures cause think it would go good with that imo

 

 

I'm of the opinion that there is no such thing as too oppressive, more oppressive the better in game imo

[Reesewow]

32 minutes ago, Monoman1 said:

Kind of seems like it would undermine existing licences. 

Can't afford proper licences? get the day pass, sell all your shit, go get more shit, get another day pass etc etc.

Yea, likely wouldn't use them myself - I'm current enjoying short term licences at a week, so I'm just spitballing what might be useful knobs for users to be able to turn. 

 

If you do end up blocking vendors in some way while unlicensed - perhaps a "day pass" wouldn't unlock vendors and would exclusively be for retrieving your items and allowing a window of opportunity to do quests or buy food and other supplies.  It might be better themed as "bribing" the local corrupted authorities to let you have your stuff back, knowing that if they see it again after a short grace period they'll just take it away again.  What damage could your little weakling Dragonborn possibly do with them anyway, and she'll probably just get captured by bandits and become someone else's problem.

 

That being said, I'm also realizing that a user could just crank down the duration of a "short term" licence to make their own version of a day pass since you already had the foresight to make the duration a slider.  So unless the day pass was somewhat different in functionality, it would be kinda redundant.

[lanastara]

Hi again,

 

after reading some of the discussion here I had an idea that might be interesting.

 

The ability to acquire counterfeit licenses from sleazy characters either for cheap or if you can "persuade" them for free.

 

Of course the forgeries aren't perfect and so there is a chance that if you get checked the guard realizes that they are fake and either add a bounty or you could ask them really friendly to let it slide just this once (not for free of course)

[Hex Bolt]

15 hours ago, Monoman1 said:

Anyway. Inspectors. How do people see them working before I even open the ck.

I suggest an alternate, keep-it-simple approach with citizens reporting you rather than actual inspectors.  Sure it would be fun to try to detect and evade inspectors.  But that's a lot of development effort to do right.  Inspectors at predictable locations are easy to avoid.  The more the mod attempts to add random encounters or inspectors that actually patrol an area, check inside shops & inns, and behave intelligently, the greater the effort and the chance that something will break and have to be fixed. 

 

Therefore, as cool as actual inspectors would be, why not make them abstract?  Simply poll the PC from time to time.  If wearing prohibited armor and not in a player home or dungeon loc, roll against a user-configurable chance of being reported.  This still adds risk, but with little complexity and development time invested.  The player still manages the risk.  The longer and more often armor is worn, the greater the chance to be reported.  If reported, you get approached by guards at the next town.  And you won't know if you were reported until you visit a town.  You knew you were taking a chance out there.  Did you get away with it this time? 

 

Touching on another point that was raised, the original direction of the mod was adding simple and effective survival challenges:  map & compass, begging and kennels, followers that steal from you, and risk for stashing your stuff where someone can see you.  Restricting armor obviously adds challenge too, but that one feature seems to be swallowing up the others, so it might be a good point to reign in the complexity and free yourself to work on some of the other cool ideas you have. 

[Monoman1]

5 hours ago, HexBolt8 said:

I suggest an alternate, keep-it-simple approach with citizens reporting you rather than actual inspectors.  Sure it would be fun to try to detect and evade inspectors.  But that's a lot of development effort to do right.  Inspectors at predictable locations are easy to avoid.  The more the mod attempts to add random encounters or inspectors that actually patrol an area, check inside shops & inns, and behave intelligently, the greater the effort and the chance that something will break and have to be fixed. 

 

Therefore, as cool as actual inspectors would be, why not make them abstract?  Simply poll the PC from time to time.  If wearing prohibited armor and not in a player home or dungeon loc, roll against a user-configurable chance of being reported.  This still adds risk, but with little complexity and development time invested.  The player still manages the risk.  The longer and more often armor is worn, the greater the chance to be reported.  If reported, you get approached by guards at the next town.  And you won't know if you were reported until you visit a town.  You knew you were taking a chance out there.  Did you get away with it this time? 

 

Touching on another point that was raised, the original direction of the mod was adding simple and effective survival challenges:  map & compass, begging and kennels, followers that steal from you, and risk for stashing your stuff where someone can see you.  Restricting armor obviously adds challenge too, but that one feature seems to be swallowing up the others, so it might be a good point to reign in the complexity and free yourself to work on some of the other cool ideas you have. 

Ok I know I just said it but sometimes simple isn't always best

Polling + a cloak quest + town detection (you probably don't want to run it everywhere) is going to add more papyrus load than having a couple of Npcs running a built-in AI package strolling around town and extra papyrus load is something I'd like to avoid. My towns (especially the ones without walls) are already struggling for frame rate. Plus people are allergic to script polling (almost unjustifiably really). More work for sure though. Of course adding extra npcs to towns isn't going to help my frame rate but I think it's probably the best route. 

 

And yes you're right. At some point I'm going to have to put a line under it and call it done. But right now I just feel as if it's not 'complete'. It's kind of a terrible thing knowing exactly how a mod work. You know all the ways you can escape any consequences

 

9 hours ago, lanastara said:

Hi again,

 

after reading some of the discussion here I had an idea that might be interesting.

 

The ability to acquire counterfeit licenses from sleazy characters either for cheap or if you can "persuade" them for free.

 

Of course the forgeries aren't perfect and so there is a chance that if you get checked the guard realizes that they are fake and either add a bounty or you could ask them really friendly to let it slide just this once (not for free of course)

Yea I think that was suggested before. It's a good idea and I might do it eventually. I think adding the actual counterfeit system itself might not be that difficult but it's the side-effects that might cause conflicts with existing mechanics such as not being stopped at gates if you don't need to be stopped. These conflicts may require some major overhauls of existing systems. Because of this and the whole 'putting a line under it' point above I'll probably put this one on ice for the moment. 

[Lupine00]

16 hours ago, Monoman1 said:

I'm curious as to how you see the inspectors catching you. I mean how does it work in your mind? You get within a certain distance or in line of sight and they force greet you or something else? To me if they're put in one spot you might as well not have any inspectors. They'd be as effective as a chocolate fireguard. 

They should have a radius of about 2000 by default, but let the player modify it in the MCM.

 

That's probably enough that if you used the spots I suggested they would not be "chocolate fireguards" but more like "almost unavoidable" - the shop door and Alvor in Riverwood would both be within the radius.

 

 

I feel they should shout at you when they see you, demanding you come to them. You have a few seconds to get within normal forcegreet range, and if you don't, they start to chase. If they have to chase for more than a few seconds, they declare you a runner. If you run, you go on the punishment list whether you escape or not. Clearly getting caught means immediate punishment.

Assuming you aren't declared a runner, you are forcegreeted, and treated to normal gear confiscation (plus an escort check). If no escort ... something bad happens.

 

This makes escaping by simply running for it something you can do (and keep doing) but should accumulate bounty, and punishments.

Then, when you go into a walled city, trouble will catch up with you, unless you are super-stealthy or something.

 

Maybe you can tweak the existing guard behaviour to get what's needed?

Just my take on it.

 

 

The idea of roving caravans of inspectors, like slave caravans, or the khajit, or imperial and stormcloak groups (and others, such as vigilants and bandits) you run into is good in itself. There's obviously examples of how to do that, more or less. But I think a moving gang would probably be very easy to avoid unless it wandered along while you were busy with something else.

 

For example, how many times have you got into trouble with a gang of wandering bandits? It's the same sort of thing. It depends a lot on visibility on the road. In most towns visibility is very good. With some roads you can crest a hill and ... there they are ... and with others you would see them a mile off.

 

The question is, why invest so much manpower in a task that presumably only ever catches one person? It feels unconvincing. For the same investment in men, you could put a man on each shop door and get better results, and the men wouldn't get eaten by spiders, or set upon by trolls.

 

I like the wandering gangs in Hydra's, especially the comedy characters like Gruella, but they also do a lot to sweep wandering hostiles off the roads, making the game easier.

 

It starts to get more complex. All these things interact together.

 

For example, suppose there were wandering caravans that a weak character could use to escort them between cities? Interesting if you're playing "weak girl" style. I usually start with no skills at all, no gear, no magic, and FMEA making tradeskills perilous. The start is tough. Whoring is an easy cop-out to earn money in a game like that - getting from one city to another is extremely hard, with carriage prices out of reach. Add a DF, and you are basically playing the DF's lackey, collecting the loot and selling it. But with SLS, you can't even sell most of it. It's very hard to keep the follower paid (though I often think they should be paying me). It's not the whole game, but it's a starting position. Eventually, you get skills, equipment, etc.

 

Before adding time consuming features, consider some different play styles, think what will happen in each case.

 

Right now, with SLS, it seriously slows down initial earning, and there's a chance you'll end up enslaved to the DF - which apart from DF's tendency to crash during enslavement - it can be a boon because now the follower is free. And you weren't contributing much anyway.

 

Then, as you get to level 20 or so, and have some skills, you're still reliant on the follower, but SLS is just sucking a constant cost - a tax - before you can sell. Even with the increased license prices I use, it's still much cheaper than the follower. The real pain with SLS is I can't (or won't) pay for two licenses, so I have to deal with the magic collars. If I had a heavy melee build, this would be a non-problem - would just wear the collar full-time. Sometimes results in DCL putting my character in heavy bondage though. It feels stupid, immersion wise, but it does create cost spikes that can be hard to bear - follower removes the worst items at a steep price.

 

And so on from there. But imagine I wasn't using DF? Or I wasn't playing a weak girl start? It would be different. With no DF, what is the point of blocking the player selling? It's all but irrelevant. For a player with no DF, they may as well not go to town at all. There are alchemy tables and forges to be found elsewhere. What if I wasn't using FMEA? Different again...

 

I think a lot of what is being talked about now is Slaverun-centric. If not Slaverun, you need DF. How can it play on its own?

 

Part of the problem is that there is no middle-ground PC slavery mod besides DF, and DF has troubling bugs in enslavement.

SD+ is fragile, and, yes, overly intrusive. You can't play any Skyrim at all when an SD+ master gets hold of you. It's starvation/sleeplessness rape-simulator time. That's OK if it's just a punishment for combat failure - but it limits the utility of SD+.

And DCL has all but removed its own slavery mechanics. They're just bondage-wheel-of-random now.

I guess some might say that Slaverun fills this middle ground - yes, it does, and it doesn't, because in Slaverun there are about three RL days of play where you are trained, which is mostly sitting waiting for dialog to go past in between endless rapes. It's three rapes a minute, interspersed with three-minute rapes, and any conversation with an NPC is bookended by some rapes. Slaverun's scenes are something I probably don't want to sit through again. It would wear out my space key.

 

With wandering patrols, SLS would be wandering into the territory that Devious Framework tried to map and failed - slave caravans - slavers in towns buying and selling - slave economy. It's not exactly headed directly there, but it seems like it might stumble into that place. I think that's a great mod idea, but possibly not SLS as we know it.

 

 

 

[Hex Bolt]

22 minutes ago, Monoman1 said:

Polling + a cloak quest + town detection (you probably don't want to run it everywhere) is going to add more papyrus load than having a couple of Npcs running a built-in AI package strolling around town and extra papyrus load is something I'd like to avoid.

It depends on how simple you're willing to make it.  Polling maybe once a real-time minute plus location type checking should be computationally very light.  Eliminate the cloak and just assume that if the user-set probability check passes then someone somewhere (maybe a farmer taking a leak behind a tree whom you didn't notice) saw you and reported you.  It doesn't matter if there's no true in-game NPC nearby; we know there's a lot more people in Skyrim than the ones we actually see.  It could be just that simple and still offer a risk for cheating the armor restriction.  Just putting the idea out there.  If that's not what you want, then it's not what you want and of course you should make this the way you like it. 

[Monoman1]

17 minutes ago, Lupine00 said:

They should have a radius of about 2000 by default, but let the player modify it in the MCM.

That actually sounds a lot more difficult than what I had in mind. I'd like if the player had a decent chance at avoiding them altogether but has a good chance of stumbling into them or getting inadvertently cornered by them. Risk vs. reward and all that. It would add a healthy dose of paranoia when around town. Obviously I'll have to try different things out and see how it works first. 

23 minutes ago, Lupine00 said:

The idea of roving caravans of inspectors,

Oh hey, I won't be rushing out to put this in. It was just an idea. First towns for definite. 

And I for one have hidden behind an imperial patrol in the past when I've lost everything/been tied up in the middle of nowhere. Sure it can make things easier but adversity has got to work both ways. It's not as if you're guaranteed to run into a patrol. 

 

Side point @anyone:

Would it be worth adding a perk that would add a random amount of gold/valuables (rings etc) to Npcs when you pickpocket them maybe? Encourage your criminal side. I've often found pick pocketing useless as npcs seem to have nothing worth taking. The problem for me though is that crime is a bit binary in skyrim. "Death to the chicken killer!"

Are there any mods that give you options other than jail or death after being caught picking pockets?

 

[Reesewow]

2 minutes ago, Monoman1 said:

Side point @anyone:

Would it be worth adding a perk that would add a random amount of gold/valuables (rings etc) to Npcs when you pickpocket them maybe? Encourage your criminal side. I've often found pick pocketing useless as npcs seem to have nothing worth taking.

 

Funny enough that is straight up a perk in the newer perk mod that I've been using lately - Vokrii (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/95938).  Haven't invested in that particular perk to test it out for functionality, but something like that could be a useful MCM menu option if you want people to have more options to make money in town.

 

• 80 - Conspicuous Wealth: The richest citizens carry more valuables such as gems, enchanted jewelry, and spell tomes.

[Lupine00]

29 minutes ago, Monoman1 said:

Are there any mods that give you options other than jail or death after being caught picking pockets?

The vanilla pick pocket bounty is so trivial you just pay it and move on, even as a starting character - so there was no need for this in the "Nexus Community".

 

Maybe what you want is Bondage Furniture World (Crime and Punishment)?

 

You get put in furniture and whipped senseless by vigilantes if you accidentally pick up a tankard.

 

If you're using Wounds, those nutters can practically kill you - certainly cripple you for weeks.

 

 

I use it, but turn down the percentage a lot, so you never quite know when vigilante justice may strike.

And of course, there's PoP. It is just prison, but ... it's not ... for small crimes you can be in and out inside a day, just a few hours being whipped or locked in a pillory and raped. Rape is almost the primary form of interaction in Skyrim it seems.

[Lupine00]

36 minutes ago, Reesewow said:

Funny enough that is straight up a perk in the newer perk mod that I've been using lately - Vokrii (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/95938).  Haven't invested in that particular perk to test it out for functionality, but something like that could be a useful MCM menu option if you want people to have more options to make money in town.

I would love that mod if it were trivial to modify only certain perk trees with it.

 

I guess I could delete the trees I don't want in the CK though - that's not trivial, but it's a way.

 

 

Having that particular pick-pocket perk via a tickbox in SLS would be nice.

[Monoman1]

12 minutes ago, Lupine00 said:

Maybe what you want is Bondage Furniture World (Crime and Punishment)?

What the hell. I'll give it a whirl. 

13 minutes ago, Lupine00 said:

And of course, there's PoP. It is just prison

To be fair. It's a fantastic deterrent. I'll do anything to avoid going to pop prison