Spanking Mechanics

Spankers and Spankees,

Since this is the third Sunday of January, as promised here are my thoughts on a more fleshed out spanking mechanic than the silly gimmick we currently have. Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Most, but not all, enemies will be spankable. Typically, if you’re facing a non-humanoid enemy (i.e. a dinosaur of some kind or another), then you won’t be able to spank them, and they won’t be able to spank you. Furthermore, if I decide that the spanking your opponent
in mid-fight would ruin the atmosphere of fight, I may disable the spanking option. This will be very, very rare, however. I can only think of one fight against a humanoid opponent where I plan on disabling the Spank option, and that’s not going to be a conventional fight anyway. Furthermore, once I implement an Options menu, there will be an option to either disable in-combat spankings, or use a more simplified version of the mechanic. The first for those of you want a little bit less spanking in your spanking porn, and the second for those of you who don’t want to think too hard when you’ve got one hand down your pants  (nothing wrong with that. I enjoy a bit of mindless masturbation as much as the next guy/gal).

Before we get started, please note that these are preliminary thoughts. I can guarantee that things will probably have to change once the ability is implemented and the beta testers and I start balancing it.

Anyway, on to the highlights:

0.  Spankings will rely primarily on the grapple stat. Willpower will play a role in determining how long the “humiliated” status lingers after a spanking. Willpower also affects the chances of a spankee successfully casting a spell while being spanked.

1. A successful spanking lasts at least 1 turn, but may last more and administers the “humiliated” status. Originally, “humiliated” gave opponents a blanket -1 to all primary stats. However, I’ll be making two changes. First, “humiliated” will only affect your enemy’s
highest primary stat. Second, for every turn that the spanker spends spanking the spankee, the spankee receives another -1 to their highest (before the spanking started) primary stat. When the spanking ends, the spanker and spankee are still grappled (unless someone else successfully broke the grapple). Note that the humiliated status does not stack with itself. You won’t be able to repeatedly spank an opponent until their stats are all -100.

2. There will be three classes of positions: over the knee, the spanker is standing, the spankee is on the ground. The spanker is standing will be relatively easy to pull off, but  relatively hard to maintain. Spankee on the ground positions are relatively hard to pull off, but relatively easy to maintain. OTK is balanced.

4. (Maybe) The player will be able to equip certain spanking implements. When spanking an opponent, the player can then choose to use either that implement or their hand. Implements will have a severity rating and a difficulty rating. The severity rating will give
a boost to how the duration of “humiliation,” while the difficulty of the implement effects how easy it is to successfully administer a spanking. Typically, implements will make it harder to administer a spanking (one of your hands is occupied with the
implement) but will make the effects last longer. They will not have a significant impact on the spanking text.

Now for the details. First, we’ll discuss what impact a spanking has on the flow of battle.

A spanking will tie up both the spanker and the spankee for some number of turns. For every turn that the spanker spends successfully spanking the spankee, the spankee receives an additional -1 to their highest (before the spanking started) primary stat. While the spanking is going on, it is easier for others to hit both the spanker and the spankee. However, if someone successfully physically attacks either the spanker or the spankee, or successfully breaks the grapple, then the spanking is broken.  Some spells may also break the spanking, such as the Spectral Spanking family of spells. The spanker may end the spanking at any time. Note that ending the spanking does NOT take up one turn. The spanker’s commands will look something like this:

(Enter) Spank <SPANKEE NAME>  (A)ttack (C)ast (T)hrow …etc

So if you want to continue spanking away, just hit (Enter). If you want to do something else, select that command. The spanker will end the spanking and administer that command. The spankee does still lose that turn.

The spankee meanwhile will have the commands:

(Enter) Struggle (C)ast (E)ndure

Struggle gives the spankee a chance of breaking free, depending on their grapple skill. Cast allows the spankee to try to cast a spell. However, there is a chance (depending on Willpower) that the casting will fail. Second, any spell that has a chance of breaking a  normal grapple (Spectral Push/Shove, Spectral Spanking/Strapping/Caning) will always break a spanking when successfully cast. Furthermore, the spanker suffers a penalty to her willpower when targeted for a spell, because her attention is on spanking her opponent, not resisting enemy spells. If a character Endures, then they won’t try to break themselves free, but they suffer only half the penalty for that round, rounded down (so a -1.5 penalty is the same as a
-1 penalty). Instead, it’s up to her allies to break her free. Typically, a character with a high grapple (relative to her opponent) will want to struggle. A character with high willpower will want to try to either cast a grapple-breaking spell, or a spell that reduces the spanker’s grapple or willpower.

If a spankee evades a spanking, they will automatically attempt to reverse the spanking. If they successfully reverse the spanking, then the spankee becomes the spanker, and the spanker becomes the spankee.

Pulling someone into a spanking will always be the last thing that happens in the round. There are a few reasons for this.

1. Spankings will become much less useful if your high-grapple character pulls their opponent into a spanking at the beginning, then gets stabbed by someone else, breaking the spanking before it could truly begin.

2. Throwing a firebolt, or stabbing someone with a spear takes a lot less time than wrestling someone over your knee, so it makes sense that the spanking attempt would take longer.

The normal rules of initiative apply if two grapplers are trying to spank each other (note that I will probably be changing the normal rules of initiative as well. But that’s a separate matter).

The stats that affect a spanking are as follows:

1. Grapple affects your chance of successfully administering and evading a spanking, your chance of evading and successfully administering a reversal, and how long the spanking lasts.

2. Willpower affects how long the “humiliated” status lasts after the spanking. The higher the spanker’s Willpower is relative to the spankee, the longer the “humiliated” status will last.

The positions (over the knee, spanker standing, spankee on the ground) are not concrete positions, but rather categories. This is to give the writers freedom to use slightly different positions for different enemies when writing the flavor text. For example, for one enemy, the writer may choose to use over one knee for the OTK position, underarm for the standing, and backwards riding for the on the ground. For a different enemy, the writer may use Japanese style OTK for the OTK position (spanker is sitting on her heels, with spankee across her lap), standing (spanker has grabbed spankee around the arm and is swatting spankee’s bottom while both are standing straight) for the spanker standing, and diaper for spankee on the ground.

However, in both cases the gameplay effect are the same: standing positions are easy to start, but easy to break out of, spankee on the ground are hard to start, but hard to break out of, and OTK is neither easy nor hard to start, and neither easy nor hard to break out of.

And there you have it. This system is actually going to be quite a bit richer than I originally envisioned (the spankings-lasting-multiple-turns thing didn’t occur to me until I sat down to write this). Unfortunately, what that also means is that this will be trickier to implement, and balance than what I’d originally intended. The original plan had just been to give grapplers a way of inflicting a status-ailment in one turn, with the factors behind the potency and duration of the humiliation stat largely behind-the-scenes. However, I think this will make it a lot more fun, and a lot more sexy. So my plans on implementing and releasing this mechanic are as follows:

1. Release the pre-dungeon interactions of episode 2.

2. Release the dungeon, with the auto-map, new stat improvement mechanic, and no random encounters implemented. Make no changes to the spanking mechanic.

3. Implement the system I’d originally envisioned: a one-round spanking with some flavor text, with the positions influencing chances of success, reversal, and potency of humiliation. Have beta testers and
players focus on giving feedback on frequency of successes, failures, and reversals.

4. Add the multi-turn mechanic. This mechanic will also be added to the Spectral Spanking class of spells as well, with rolls depending on the grapple skill depending on the magic skill instead. However, the spells will only administer damage at the end of the spanking,  when the spankee gets flung into the ground.

5. Release the post-dungeon act of Episode 2 (this will probably be relatively short, considering all the crap above).

I probably won’t let you use implements until Episode 3. Those may also undergo some changes as well to make them useful, largely because I’m not sure at this point whether duration of humiliation will be all that important. If you have a fight last 8 rounds, and four of them are spent spanking your opponent, the fact that Humiliation will last seven rounds as opposed to three really doesn’t matter. I’m not going to lie, this is going to take a while, and I’ve got a pretty busy semester coming up. We very well may not have the spanking mechanic implemented until next fall, and it may not be balanced well enough to neither be game breaking nor useless until next winter/spring.

However, I’m also really really excited about this. Not only will this be a fun (and frustrating) mechanic to implement and balance, but once it’s been implemented and the worst of the kinks (there’s a pun in there somewhere, I just know it) worked out, it will be a ton of fun to play. Furthermore, since I’ll be eliminating random encounters, I can make the battles last for more turns, so this kind of mechanic would be more viable. Of course, if I implement longer battles, I’ll probably have to include a way of saving during battle (or periodically auto-saving) at some point. That’ll be a butt. But I could probably put that off to an Episode 3 improvement.

Hell, now that I think about it, it might be kind of interesting to have a small number of marathon battles against generic enemies, rather than a large number of short battles. Especially since the lack of random encounters and instant travel from the beginning to the frontier of the maze means that there’s less incentive to preserve mana from battle to battle. However, if the battle is long, there would be some incentive to preserve magic turn to turn. Hmm…

7 thoughts on “Spanking Mechanics

  1. Hey, just wanted to say that I’m super glad that this project exists and that you’re putting this much thought into the actual mechanics. Loved episode 1 and am looking forward to future installments

  2. You’re certainly putting a lot of thought into the spanking mechanic. But it also sounds like it will be a lot of work, so if you want to streamline it a bit, I’m sure no one will mind. One thing you have to careful about is save file compatibility. Make sure save files generated in versions using the updated mechanics (and weren’t you considering a new bum status description mechanic as well?) are compatible with older files. Because it might be annoying if, when you release Ep3, people have to replay it all the way from the beginning because old saves no longer work.

    1. Your concerns are perfectly valid. I may not implement the multi-turn mechanic until episode 3, especially considering that I also need to implement an automap and the like. I may also temporarily streamline the mechanics to a certain extent, and gradually add additional depth as we go. We’ll have to see. I may also push more writing responsibility onto my volunteer writers for this episode, so that I can spend more time on the coding, without slowing down the episode too much.

      As for save compatibility, I am well aware of this concern, and I absolutely do not want to force people to restart. In this case, however that’s not a concern, because the spanking mechanic won’t have any impact on save files. All the information associated with the spanking (flavor text, mostly) are a part of the enemy definitions, and those aren’t a part of the save file. Furthermore, the implements in the first episode already have a severity rating.

      However, there are some changes I want to make that will affect save files. For example, I’m thinking about removing armor completely, so that you just have clothing, and streamlining weapons so that the player can have one each of a sword, spear and a dagger (one of which is your family weapon, whichever you chose to start with). You then improve your equipment by finding enchantment gems, and enchanting your equipment with those gems. That will obviously affect save files, but in that case if a player has say the quality dagger from defeating the episode 1 boss, then I’ll replace it with an enchantment gem, and if they don’t have their family equipment I’ll put it back in their inventory. I’ll replace the armor with enough gold to buy a replacement shirt.

    2. First, I want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing. I’m not eliminating the armor slots (shirt, lower clothing, underwear). I’m eliminating the armor equipment (leather armor, chainmail, plate armor). You will still have clothing.

      Anyway, asking what’s a medieval fantasy game without armor is like asking what’s a medieval fantasy game without a save the world plot. Just because 99% of other fantasy games have armor, doesn’t mean it’s somehow a fundamental part of the genre. A medieval fantasy game without armor is just a medieval fantasy game without armor. That being said, there are a few reasons for this:

      1. Armor is military equipment. Large armies that spend the vast majority of their time walking and training, and only a relatively small amount of time engaged in brutal, deadly battles in careful formations. Your character is basically engaging in street brawls: disorganized fights between individuals. So, your character wearing armor would be like a bouncer wearing kevlar.

      2. Your character is dirt poor. While your character may become less dirt poor, they’re never going to be rich. Most armor (except possibly for gambesons) are rich people things.

      3. Armor and spanking don’t really go well together. Spankings in combat strain suspension of disbelief enough. Imagine if you or your opponent were wearing plate. Then either we’d have this weird situation where slapping a chunk of metal with your bare hand somehow hurts the person wearing the metal, or we need to imagine that the spanker is somehow able to remove that bit of armor, and give a spanking in the time frame of a battle. Or we’d have to make anyone wearing the heavier armors immune to spankings. I definitely don’t want to do that last one. This is a porn game, and the following choice should never be forced onto a player of a porn game: “Do I make this intelligent gameplay decision that eliminates whole swaths of potential porn situations, or do I make this stupid gameplay decision that actually lets me enjoy whole swaths of porn?”

      Obviously, you may have to make this decision on a round-by-round basis during battle, but that’s a part of making the spanking mechanic a balanced part of the game, and even then you’re not “eliminating whole swaths.”

      4. Clothing will still be around, and you will be able to enchant clothing. So we can get the same basic gameplay mechanic (enhanced defense) by enchanting your clothing with particular enhancement gems. Furthermore, this way you can make a smart gameplay decision (higher defense) without having to give up your preferred outfit.

    1. 😀

      Though I’ll probably have to tone it down a little. As it is, it’s a little bit overpowered. I’ll probably also have throw in some largely nonexistent shirts and pants, like arm and leg bands (or maybe boots and gloves) for people who want to wear just the bikini, but don’t want to lose out on enchantment slots.

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