The King is Dead, Long Live the King

Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),

So I have some bad news. I’ve decided to put Potion Wars in a coma. I’ve been having a lot of trouble writing the second episode, mostly because of massive tone clash. The premise just demands a very dramatic, down to earth tone. Dramatic, down to earth tones really do not mix well with spanking porn. Rape, torture, and incest porn? Sure. Just look at the success of Game of Thrones. But spanking has just too much whimsy to really work well with a story about a drug war being fought along racial lines.

Some of you are probably slapping your forehead and saying “No duh, dumbass!” In my defense, the story kind of got a little bit out of my control. Stories do that sometimes. Note that I’m not doing this lightly, and it’s absolutely not because I got bored and found a new, shiny idea. I love Potion Wars, I love the story that’s taking shape, and I very much want to tell it. This just isn’t the right place.

So the next question is, what now? One option would be to take Potion Wars, rip out all the porn, and release it somewhere as a vanilla game. However, this website is called “spankingrpgs.” Not “baitandswitchrpgs.”  I’m going to write a full-fledged spanking RPG if it kills me. I just need to be careful to select a premise and tone that are conducive to spankings. So here are my constraints:

  1. The game needs to be an adventure tale that is ostensibly dramatic. It does not have to be serious and angsty, but I’m not a comedic writer. The content should be dramatic, even if the tone is not.
  2. The game should have an element of whimsy, silliness and absurdity. Spankings are absurd, and they will fit much better if there are other elements of absurdity already.
  3. There needs to be plenty of natural opportunities for spankings, both top and bottom. Ideally without making the spanker look like a total douchebag (unless the spanker is villainous and they’re supposed to be total douchebags).

After considering these constraints for a while, I decided that one of the genres that best fits is the superhero genre. Particularly, Silver Age superheroes. Silver Age superhero comics were more than a little absurd, but the characters took them more or less seriously (so we get a rather absurd tone, but also some drama). Furthermore, a Spider-Man style superhero (i.e. a part-time superhero whose trying to balance work, life, and superheroing) provides a ton of natural spanking opportunities. First, we get the obvious superhero-supervillain showdowns. You can spank supervillains for trying to take over the world for the umpteenth time, and supervillains can spank you for trying to foil their plans for the umpteenth time. Plus, Silver Age supervillains tended to be ridiculously over the top, and I could totally see a Silver Age style supervillain giving a Silver Age style superhero a sound spanking, and vice versa. Furthermore, there are plenty of opportunities for spankings as the player tries to live a normal life. You stood your boyfriend up, because you were fighting across a bunch of rooftops? That’s a paddling. You slept through class because you were up all night trying to find the villain’s hideout? That’s a paddling. Forgot your mother’s birthday? Paddling.

My basic thoughts are the following, at least for the first season:

Each episode of the first season will have a new villain. You’ll have an initial encounter with the villain, that will be fought either to a draw, or the villain will win. Then, over the course of the episode you’ll need to prepare for the next showdown with the villain. This could be done a variety of ways:

  1. You could patrol a lot. Basically, beat up a bunch of generic criminals to get stronger, and interrogate the underworld about this villain (note that patrols will have some unique content for each day, just like other events. You won’t just be grinding against generic enemies).
  2. Do some research. Maybe the villain is reminiscient of an animal of some kind. So the animal’s weaknesses may be analagous to the villain’s. Or maybe you study news footage of your last battle to better determine what their strengths are, and then develop a new skill to counter them.
  3. Try to learn more about the villain’s personal life. See if maybe you could use a bit of psychological warfare to manipulate them, or lure them into a location where they won’t be as effective (i.e. lure a flying enemy into the sewers).
  4. Some combination of the above three.

Furthermore, you’ll have obligations you need to meet outside of superheroing as well, like homework, family get togethers, a job, etc.

Each episode will be broken into days, and I’ll release content a day at a time. Each day will be a fairly small update, so that we don’t have massive droughts like with Potion Wars. Each episode will have a list of tasks you’ll want to accomplish, perhaps broken into subtasks (i.e. you have a midterm at the end of the week, so each day will have a subtask to study three hours. If you study three hours every day of the episode, you’ll get an A+ on the test). However, you will not have enough time to do all of them. You could do all of them so-so, or a few of them well, but you can’t do all of them completely. Furthermore, you’ll absolutely have to spend a lot of your time preparing for the final fight with the supervillain, because at the climax of the episode you’ll have to defeat them. So if you spend too much time doing personal life stuff, you may find yourself in an unwinnable situation.

Of course, you need to do moderately well at the day-to-day tasks as well. Perhaps if your grades get too low, you’ll have to move back in with your parent (you’re in college, FYI), which will make it harder to patrol and research villains. If you do too poorly at your job, you’ll be forced to spend extra time at work, giving you less time to patrol and research villains.

The supervillain combats will probably be a bit more elaborate than the battles in Potion Wars. Not a whole lot more elaborate (I’ll be using the same game engine, just with a few minor tweaks). But many of the combats will probably be multi-phase. You’ll fight for a while, then there’ll be a cut-scene, and you’ll get options (which options will depend on the choices you made over the course of the episode). The outcome of the options will determine who gets a bonus in the next phase of battle, you or the villain. Obviously there will be a lot of save-games to minimize repetition. There will probably be an auto-save at the end of each phase of battle, and an autosave at the beginning of each day.

Finally, I’ll probably introduce more customizations. In particular, I’ll give players the ability to control the gender of other characters. You’ll have the options of:

  1. Specifying the genders you prefer to see for spankees. This will generally influence the genders of supervillains (since you are required to defeat them at the end of every episode), and perhaps a side-kick if you get one (no promises!). If you turn off the ability for enemies to spank you, then all generic enemies will be this gender.
  2. Specifying the gender you prefer to see for spankers. This will generally influence the gender of authority figures (your boss, your parent, etc). If enemies are allowed to spank you, and both the spankee and spanker gender are the same, then all generic enemies will be the selected gender. Otherwise, the gender of generic enemies will be chosen at random.
  3. Let the game choose at random (or let characters use their preferred genders if they have one).
  4. Pick and choose on a case-by-case basis. This has the downside of interrupting the flow of the story a bit, but gives you more fine-grained control.

Note that this isn’t guaranteed to affect all characters. For example, I plan on pulling Carrie into this game as your best friend, because I just love writing her. She’s going to be female either way, because she will forever be a woman in my head.

The downside to giving players control over the gender of other characters is that there probably won’t be as many sex scenes as I’d planned in Potion Wars (i.e. few to none), because there’d be so many damn combinations to write (male-female, female-male, female-female, male-male).

Furthermore, dialog choices probably won’t have as much of an effect as it did in Potion Wars. This is because I want the various tasks you can choose each day to have significantly different content each day, and I do want to release content at a reasonable pace. I do still want to give you opportunities to influence conversations, and I want characters to remember them, but you probably won’t get as many dialogue choices, and your choices probably won’t have as many and as long-lasting effects as I’d planned for Potion Wars. For example, in most conversations, you’ll probably get one choice at the beginning, in which you’ll have two to three options of various personalities (cooperative, aggressive, bratty perhaps). Then, the rest of the conversation, I’ll put words in your character’s mouth, based on the personality you chose. So if you chose the bratty option, then I’ll give your character bratty dialogue in that scene.

That being said, I do want some activities in earlier episodes to influence later episodes, so I’ll try not to railroad you too hard. As always, it’s a careful balancing act.

Thoughts? In particular, feel free to make costume or supervillain/hero suggestions. Also, if there’s a particular personality you’d like the opportunity to roleplay (an angsty loner hero? A pompous bastard? A cowardly lion?) let me know in the comments. I’m always looking for personality suggestions, and if I’m going to spend time writing dialogue for a particular personality, I want to make sure there’s at least one person that wants to play it!

23 thoughts on “The King is Dead, Long Live the King

  1. Sad to see Potion Wars isn’t going to be coming out anymore, but I’m even more excited to see a superhero-based game. I’d love to see a protagonist that is good-hearted and bright like most Silver Age heroes but is perhaps too proud and reckless, earning them lots of reasons to be spanked by their superhero mentors when they inevitably screw up or get themselves into danger.

    Love what you’re doing, keep up the good work!

  2. Well I totally get the change of direction and I like the new idea. I do think that spanking can be made to work with a premise such at this… but it’s definitely difficult to maintain a light hearted tone. Plus it’s sometimes nice to just work on something new and different, right?

    So this will be made in Python, not Groovy, correct? One release a day sounds a bit optimistic. You’ll basically have to have the game finished before day 1 and in that case you could just release it all at once. If you like the idea of the player having to wait as long as the character you could just implement an internal time-gate that only lets you play the next day after a certain amount of system time has passed. That has the added effect that even players starting out later or missing a day in between have the same effect.

    In any case, good luck! I’m looking forward to playing it.

    1. Sorry, I meant that an _in-game_ day of content will be released at a time. I absolutely won’t be releasing content every day, and I won’t be putting in any restrictions on playing.

      In other words, rather than releasing content in chunks of 1/3 of an episode, I’d be releasing episodes in day-chunks. So the first release will be the first day of episode one, the second will be the second day of episode one, and so on. The minimum I could probably pull off is a release a month, and even that is almost certainly too optimistic.

      Yes, this will be done in Python. It’d probably take me a year to get GroovyBooty up to the point where it’s ready to be used, and I want to write dammit, especially now that my job requires so much more coding than graduate school did.

      1. I agree that spanking can be made to work, but I’m not convinced it can work well. Not without drastically changing the tone of the story. Granted, you guys only saw one episode, so the tone may not be as solid in your heads as it was in mine, but it had solidified itself as a fairly dark game. Not Game of Thrones dark, but more like Wheel of Time dark, and I _hated_ most of the spanking scenes in Wheel of Time because many just didn’t make sense.

        For anyone who may be curious, Wheel of Time is this massive series, 13 books each with 600+ pages. Lots of spanking references scattered throughout, but you can count on one hand the number of actual scenes. Furthermore, many of the cultures seem to revolve around spankings (there’s a group of ninja-like desert dwellers with a complicated sense of honor that boils down to “You were a jerk so I get to spank you”). There are enough scenes and references to make you feel like maybe it should be spanking porn, but not enough to actually be spanking porn.

  3. While I am sad not to see Potion Wars continuing I get where you’re coming from. Silver Age sounds just fine to me, and if you write it half as well as you do PW I’m sure I’ll love it 🙂

  4. While I loved Potion Wars and couldn’t wait for the new episode, if you don’t like what your making, then there’s no point in doing it. I hope that after a while you can go back to it and make it like you want it. As for the new project, it sounds great! A spanking superhero game sounds really fun! If you want some inspiration, I would recommend checking out the “Heroes Rise” series. It’s a text based choose your own adventure game that also seems to be inspired by the Silver Age of superheroes. While I’m not really sure about Superhero/Supervillian suggestions, I’ll be sure to think about it. The only thing I ask is that (perhaps in the later parts) you add some role reversal scenes. Those are my favorite types of scenes, and I would love to see a few in your game. Other than that, have fun creating it!

    1. I, too, am a big fan of role reversal, and I think what AKA is proposing is a perfect setup for it in various forms.

  5. Sounds good, like the gender flexability. And yeah, might be easier without the sex. I know other games (CoC, TiTs etc.) have no end of work put in just to keep things straight heh.

    Still having some mini games would be good. Like the rent setup in potions, that sounds like the patrol and living/hero training you have setup. Always good to have reasons for your missions, and maybe scene potential when combat and RNG doesn’t go your way.

    Really liked the non game over ‘boss’ combats that were not only not a game over, but the winning/losing changed the path a bit and not just a different scene. Paths due to combat (anything with some RNG) I find more interesting as it’s more life taking you along for the ride feeling, as oppsosed to choose your own adv. Like the combat, I liked that ribbon thing in potions, totally different depending on the order you did the rooms. Captured Dreams mod in Skyrim (more bondage than spanko unfortunately) has it similar. Mistress sends you out on courier missions and then tells bandits where you are. And of course demands compensation when you come back robbed heh.

    And of course the appearance and stat page. Always wanted a game to show just how badly, good I mean, you’re doing :).

    BTW, I’d say if you want some humour, a side kick would be a way. Also good if you like writing snide comments, he/she could be the snarky one reminding you (like that stat report on the behind) how you’re doing (well, they are always standing behind you anyway right heh). I think Mia was going to be like that in Potions? She reminded be of the Betty sidekick/comic relief from ‘Rat Queens’ (fem D&D style warriors comic). That’s the comic Potions made me think about when playing.

    Good luck with the project, looking forward to it. 🙂
    Cheers.

    1. I have’t committed to making the final battle of every episode mandatory to win. I just need to make sure the supervillains don’t win if they’re trying something game changing, like conquer the city. However, there are a few possibilities that could work in my constraints:

      1. You foil your enemy’s plan, but they still beat you in combat, before having to run off when the police show up.

      2. You win, but they manage to escape before being arrested, so the next time they show up, you don’t have to worry about them being in prison and escaping.

      3. If you win and they get arrested, there’s a line at the beginning of the next episode they appear in indicating that they escaped prison. This line doesn’t show up if they beat you and escaped.

      4. If it’s something innocuous, like robbing a bank, they get away with the loots.

      However, I don’t want to make every supervillain battle optional, because otherwise there’s no real incentive to train your hero! Just keep your personal life in order, lose the supervillain fight, and continue the game. One of the primary sources of challenge in this game is supposed to be time management, and one of the major reasons it’s a challenge is because you need to spend a lot of time superheroing in order to continue the game.

      1. I really like the idea of the time management system, but I may be a bad player bc I’m going to want all the punishments… In light of that, I fully support a “brat” personality choice if possible. It seems like having a small choice of personalities may make writing easier than having the myriad choices we are implementing in PW. Is that accurate?

        1. Well, I’m going to try to balance things, so that you can’t accomplish every task given to you in each episode. So spankings are inevitable!

          I’ll see what I can do about adding a brat personality. I am, alas, not particularly bratty myself, but I’ll do my best!

          I may also add in a configuration option that allows you to skip scenes where you get spanked. As far as the story is concerned, you’ll still get spanked, but you’ll get to skip the scene, for those of you who are pure top and don’t want to read about your character being spanked.

          I’ll probably fold it into the option that already exists for turning off the ability of enemies to spank you.

          I think that having a small choice of personality options in each scene will make it easier to control the dialog trees. Each scene will probably have about as much content as a similar scene in Potion Wars, but rather than being a massively unbalanced tree (one path has four options, the other has one or two), the tree should hopefully be a bit more balanced, and provide some variety.

          1. What?!, you can do brat. Think Mia from Potions. That’s an imo a pretty good balance for being a trouble maker vs being out of place being too disrupting (ie, being a brat for brats sake).

          2. Yes, I think it will at least be easier to navigate the content (which I’m really looking forward to writing! Just let me know!). I really liked the bratting options in PW, too, so I have great confidence that you can write it well.

  6. This is really disappointing. I’ve been following you, commenting, and playing since the beginning; you’re over thinking this massively. The story, setting, and narrative, whilst interesting, do not define Potion Wars; the spanking does. Everything that I’ve just mentioned brings the spanking to life and makes it more worthwhile and gives the spanking more impact. There’s no other game like it because of that. The ‘tone’ doesn’t clash with spanking. Spanking isn’t inherently silly or whimsical at all. It came about because of a need in our society, and it clearly fits within that of Potion Wars. If you can’t make it fit there, I can’t see you making it fit anywhere. Please try and continue with the project, and if you can’t, I think there’d be a lot of people grateful if you released the content you’d already worked on for it, even if that’s just the scenes,

    Thanks for listening.

    1. Over thinking is how I came up with the game in the first place! However, I think I can see the crux of our disagreement:

      “The story, setting, and narrative, whilst interesting, do not define Potion Wars; the spanking does.”

      That’s not actually the case for Potion Wars for me. For me, Potion Wars is all about the story, setting, and narrative. The spankings are a side-thing. And more than that, for me the spankings in Potion Wars are a distraction. If I continued with Potion Wars, I can guarantee that over time spankings would become fewer and farther between as the story got darker, and the spankings just didn’t work with what was going on around them. Either that, or I would have had to neuter the story to keep things working together.

      And yes, spankings aren’t necessarily whimsical. However, they’re generally pretty absurd by the standards of fiction i mean, can you imagine a drug lord being spanked? I can’t. I can, however, imagine an over-the-top supervillain with an absurd and convoluted plan for stealing lots of cash instead of using their brilliant inventions/superpowers/whatever to build fancy gadgets or sell their services for lots of money getting spanked.

      I’m glad to hear that you enjoyed Potion Wars so much, and I’m sorry that you’re disappointed. But Potion Wars was pulling me too hard in a direction that was just clashing too much with how I perceive spankings in fiction.

  7. well, I’m hoping potion wars isn’t permanently shelved, but it’s awesome that you’ll be making a new game. I really like the premise. If you do end up implementing a sidekick, I think you could have a lot of options available for potential stories. Like if you treated them poorly, spanked them for really stupid reasons, they end up becoming a major super villain

    1. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point, I decide to resurrect it as a vanilla game. However, I don’t really want to do anything with that until Crimson Moon is reasonably complete. Pretty sure most people come here for spanking video games!

      1. While I like the idea of having a sidekick become a villain if you don’t treat them well, I’m not sure it would be feasible to implement, because it would be such a _drastic_ choice. In just about every situation after the point at which the sidekick turns, I’d have to ask “Is the sidekick still around, or did they go evil?” If they’re still around, write dialog for them, otherwise don’t write anything.

        So my concern is that if I tried that, the sidekick would basically vanish simply because having almost _every_ scene have at least two branches may be too much.

        But I’ll think about it. There may be something I can do that has a similar effect, but doesn’t basically double the work for every subsequent episode.

        1. that’s a good point, I didn’t consider how much more writing it would really end up being. Even still, I’m really looking forward to this. Any idea when you’ll have the first part out? I don’t think you gave us a date or an estimation for it

          1. Mostly because I’ve learned not to give estimates. 😛

            Anyway, I have most of the first dungeon of episode 1 done (basically it’s a few small tweaks on the map from the first episode of Potion Wars, with its own events and a few things rearranged). It’s nowhere near as detailed as the dungeon of Potion Wars, but the first episode will actually have two dungeons, a modification of the first dungeon from Potion Wars, and the map that I created for the second episode of Potion Wars.

            Once the first dungeon is done, I will then have a scene to write, and that will round out the first day. However, I’m also tweaking some things from Potion Wars, and that will have to be finished and tested. Best case I’m thinking is end of the month.

            The first day will basically be:

            1. You get your powers.
            2. Hoodlums attack!
            3. You have to explain to your resident assistant why you were out so damned late.

            It will mostly serve as a (hopefully interesting) tutorial, and give a small taste of what I have in mind.

  8. This actually sounds like a spectacular idea and I cannot wait until the first implementation to see how it all goes.

    Sad to see potion wars go, but this idea sounds great. good luck and I look forward to reading/interacting.

  9. Hey, hope things are going well, the writing turning out to be more natural as you hoped etc. Wondering if you’d given any more thought into putting the transcript out of the unupdated part of Potions while you’re working on Moon. As always curious about the favor you owed Mia etc. 🙂

    Cheers.

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