Slaves of Tamriel: Intro and Planning

As mentioned, the next mainline project is Slaves of Tamriel Redux (SOTR); my attempt to create a new player slavery mod in the vein of Slaverun and continue where the original left off. This will be a lengthy effort and as promised, I will be working on shorter term stuff in parallel. As always suggestions and feedback is very welcome.

I tried out a couple other player slavery projects with a more analytical lens to get a feel for what kinds of common problems and design issues plague this category. Accordingly, here are some design principles I'll be following for this project:

• Gameplay-Oriented: Most existing mods try to fight or override vanilla mechanics. This leads to significant stability problems and usually shortens the engagement the mod provides. SOTR must offer a varied, diverse set of experiences that leverage and recontextualise existing mechanics instead of trying to replace them. Survival horror provides an excellent blueprint for this sort of experience since games in this genre are predicated on dis-empowering the player while still presenting them with engaging gameplay options like combat, stealth, exploration, and looting. For instance, fighting can still be immersive in this context when you're forced to do it against impossible odds, forced to wear something humiliating while doing it, and forced to hand your items back and step into a cell when its done. You're stripping the player of their ability to decide what to do but still giving them challenging, interesting decisions to make within that experience.
• Repeatable: there are some truly great mods in this category but most are one-time experiences that offer little permutation on subsequent playthroughs. For a mod like this to be effective over multiple games, its quest design needs to be sufficiently radiant. The jobs you're given, the order they're given in, and the locations they take place at are all things that can and should change from game to game. If the systems are effectively interlocked, this should ideally lead to all sorts of emergent role playing scenarios.
• Stable: the mod should start simple with a super solid foundation that works 99% of the time (or whatever the best we can do in the Creation Engine is) and then gradually add more complexity over time in small updates allowing easy rollbacks and fixes when things go bad. On one hand, this results in a less impressive first impression but on the other hand its an effective way to build stronger, stabler experiences. Given the number of mods that have tried before, I'm erring on the side of caution.
• Compatible: the mod should aim to provide 3rd party integrations over homebrew systems. If a player wants whipping debuffs the first approach should be leveraging Punishing Lashes  instead of attempting to build a custom system. However, it should still provide simple fallbacks when these mods aren't installed. See Public Whore's fallback reputation system when SLSF isn't available. This reduces conflicts between different mods and makes it easier for users to drop SOTR into their existing LO instead of needing to build something around SOTR.
• Modular: instead of attempting to shove every new quest into a single ESP, content should instead be split into separate submods that can be independently installed and maintained. This ensures the core systems remain intact and stable and any new experimental stuff can be easily swapped in and out until stabliised. With light plugins, the impact to load orders is minimal.

So what does that actually mean to the player?

When enslaved by SOTR through something like Simple Slavery, a player can be sent to one of a multitude of locations. Locations are intelligently selected. For example, if you're Thane of Whiterun it stands to reason that you won't be enslaved there. On the other hand, if you're a Stormcloak, the Imperials may be more likely to make an example out of you.

Each location implements a bespoke slavery gameplay loop consisting of four major elements: jobs, punishments, events, and releases. The first location is of course, Dremir Mine. [This is partially adapted from an earlier post.]

• Jobs are your day to day quests which will have a direct impact on your compliance score. At Dremir, the primary job is mining with cleaning, pest control, being a maid at the Thalmor embassy, or "entertainment" for the guards down the line all being added over time.
• Punishments occur when your compliance falls below certain thresholds and generally make escaping tougher by applying debuffs. Right now, this is simple furniture whipping.
• Events are random occurrences that should spice things up. For example, nightly "visits" from a guard or if you're unlucky a group of them.
• Releases trigger on certain thresholds like # of jobs completed, amount of money earned for your captors, etc. Similar to events, this gives players a guaranteed "out" to keep SOTR from taking too long to complete. Releases are crucial in allowing for greater variety. Not only do they give you an out to other mods, they can be used as transitions to different SOTR locations. Solitude could be another spot that you might be sent to as part of "release" which implements its own gameplay loop.

This frees up each location to have its own narrative, background, and flavor while giving the player a consistent set of mechanics to interact with.