How about traits for yourself?

[laverinthe]

You created an excellent backstory, don't slouch now!  At the moment, you can't even name yourself.  How about a character creation screen where you can pick out traits for yourself, kinda like Age of Wonders.  You pick one or two positive traits and can pick an additional one if you pick a negative as well.  Here's a couple of suggestions.

Animal tamer- easier to subdue monster girls
Super potency- guaranteed to knock up any girl you shtup (might even cancel out sterile?)
Director- bonus income from movies
Romantic- makes women swoon over you, maybe obsessively so
Merchant- discount from haggling
Politician- bribery is more effective
Healer- cures and restoratives are more effective
Explorer- Less casualties and more loot from exploring
Ruthless- gangs are less likely to cross you (if gang loyalty is implemented)


And maybe some negative ones too:

Impotent- guess. . .
Religious- demon girls hate your freaking guts
Sex offender- harder to pick up girls when walking around town
Unlucky- gambling house becomes a black hole for money
Half breed- you have to deal with prejudice and stores might not even sell to you
Greedy- house percentage can't be below 90%


Not sure if someone else suggested this already (I'd like to think I'm the first) I'm just putting it out there.

[fixet]

while I would like some character customization, those traits are pretty... meh
honestly, I doubt I'd even bother with those

what I'd like to see is something like the girls' stats for your character that would (sloooooooooooooooooooooowly) improve with your actions
and the ability to equip/use items

[Lorde]

Those sound a lot like the stuff you get at the beginning of slave maker.

Or maybe I just saw "merchant" and went hmmm. 

[DocClox]

Character progression would be nice to have, but a nightmare for balancing the game. There's no increase in difficulty as the game progresses, which means that it would end up either too easy at the end, or too hard at the start.

Not that we don't already have balance issues, but this would make it a lot harder to resolve them.

That said, I do want to play with a few of these ideas in clonemaster - assuming I ever get back to it from the WM scripting

[Lorde]

Is clone master being used as a test bed for whore master or is it a stand alone game?

[DocClox]

A bit of both, really.

I want to create a stand alone game, but while I'm doing it, there's no reason I can't try out some ideas. The ones that work well should find their way into Whoremaster.

[Lorde]

I was thinking about what you said with scaling difficulties in a game where there is no scaling difficulty. So why not test out something like this in clone master.....

Give the girls 3 levels of Temperament. Low Medium and High

Give players 3 stats they can improve over the course of the game. Say: Charm, Intimidation, Deception.

Run a check against the girls temperament vs the players stats.

+ or Minus the girls Rebellion based off the check.

Figure Medium temperament and all 3 stats at 50 would equls how rebellion works now.  So that could be the baseline.

low temperament vs 100 in all 3 stats = qirl ridiculously easy to control.

High temperament vs 0 in all  stats = Girl who is impossible to control.

[DocClox]

I was thinking about what you said with scaling difficulties in a game where there is no scaling difficulty. So why not test out something like this in clone master.....

Certainly, it would be nice to have some way for the PC to improve is control over time.

In CM, I've been thinking along the lines of letting the player create better clones as his skill increases, and also having better genetic material become available as the game progresses, but not necessarily so initially obedient. I've got a lot of stuff still to figure out, though.

[Lorde]

Random ideas from the peanut gallery:

Thinking about what you described for cloning made me come up with......

Geneticist: Does what you described for giving better genetic material. (Better stats and traits?)

Cloner: Better Clones (Better obedience?)

BMGT: (Black Market Genetics Trade) Kinda like geneticist skill but not as high quality, easier to level up and brings lots of heat down on you. Also cheaper. The skill would involve being able to find contacts and work out prices all while not getting arrested|shot.

Mind Wiping : The dark side of cloning, sorta. Why bother growing them when you can just grab people off the street, wipe there memory and reprogram them. Same points of interest as BMGT. Easy to skill up, cheaper to implement. (less time consuming) But run the risk of Arrest or being shot and the end product isn't as good. (Randomly remembers their past life)

Not sure why I pegged these skills as Alignment specific. Just seemed like a neat twist.

Then there are the Obedience skills I was talking about.


That should give a player a lot to do. 

[DocClox]

Random ideas from the peanut gallery:

Always welcome

Geneticist: Does what you described for giving better genetic material. (Better stats and traits?)

Mind Wiping : The dark side of cloning, sorta.

I was thinking to do these as skills: genetics and neurology. Could have traits with a points bonus, I suppose, but I was planning on giving the player some points to spread around when his or her profile was created, so there wouldn't be much point.

Basically, you're going to start off with some genetic templates -  digitised dna sequences stored on computer, and some neural engrams, which provide basic motor skills, language and a few customisable options. The initial templates are going to be pretty low grade. Sex drive hard coded to the max, obedience will be medium-high, but other stats will be pretty low.

When the PC makes a clone, he gets some points to customise the girl's stats, and the better his genetics skills, the more points he gets to add. He can also push over that limit although there's a cost both in the time it takes the clone to "cook", and in the chance of something going wrong, with consequences ranging from unexpected negative traits to a "stillborn" clone, through to damage to the equipment.

You could have good traits to speed up the cloning process, or reduce the consequences of failure. (or maybe speed it up a lot, but aggravate the consequences of failure)

As the game goes on the player is going to get chances to make his own templates (the better his skills, they better the template) and get new ones from various sources. In general, the better the stats, the harder it's going to be to control the clone.

Why bother growing them   when you can just grab people off the street, wipe there memory and   reprogram them. Same points of interest as BMGT. Easy to skill up,   cheaper to implement. (less time consuming) But run the risk of Arrest   or being shot and the end product isn't as good. (Randomly remembers   their past life)

Well, there aren't going to be a lot of women around. The setting is the asteroid belt and outer solar system. Most of it is pretty rough and ready, and historically, that's tended to mean a high male to female ratio. So there aren't many women around, and the ones that have braved the hazards of the outer system tend to have a lot of very protective men watching out for them. So it's not quite as simple to grab a woman off the streets as it is in WM. (That's not to say it isn't possible, but its going to need a bit more work to make it happen

But yeah, artificial personality constructs are never a patch on the real things.

  BMGT: (Black Market Genetics Trade) Kinda like geneticist skill but not as high quality, easier to level up and brings lots of heat down on you. Also cheaper. The skill would involve being able to find contacts and work out prices all while not getting arrested|shot.

I like it, but I'm not sure it would fit very well. It's a big city perk in a low population density setting. There are a couple of "cities", but I don't think the PC is going to spend enough time there to make it worth his while. Still it's a thought.

[laverinthe]

Those sound a lot like the stuff you get at the beginning of slave maker.

Or maybe I just saw "merchant" and went hmmm. 

What is this slave maker you speak of?  I don't know anything about that slave training sim.  How could I steal a concept from a game I've never played?   

Seriously though.  I was inspired by slave maker but the way you select skills I got from age of wonders 2.  You can pick just one positive trait, or you could two positive traits and one negative.  And they wouldn't necessarily have to be upgradable.

[TF]

I was very fond of the way Oblivion handled stat based skills, specifically that in addition to the higher the stat the better the outcomes of actions associated with that stat there was *also* a sort of tier-based award system for leveling up each stat to certain milestones (e.g. leveling up any specific magic stat to any increment of 25 opens up new levels of spells, sneak opens up bonuses to sneak attacks, better athletics and acrobatics consumes less fatigue, etc...) and I'd love to see something like that incorporated.

Assuming that player stats will range 0-100, leveling to 25, 50, or 75 in the stat most closely associated with the physical aspect of cloning could reduce or eliminate the chances of machine failure or 'stillborn' clones. Likewise, in genetics, reaching new tiers could unlock the ability to clone more 'complicated' genetic material (i.e. more valuable and skilled clones.)

Hopefully, that kind of thing wouldn't be too complicated to implement, because I think it could add a lot more depth.

[Lorde]

Ok, this is officially fun now.

You could have good traits to speed up the cloning process, or reduce the consequences of failure. (or maybe speed it up a lot, but aggravate the consequences of failure)

Failures could be set up as "beasts" like in whoremaster. I might not be into Guro, amputee, or Even Tentacle porn. But I've seen enough requests for that sorta stuff to realize that if I somehow had the ability to make 5 breasted, 4 legged 0 armed women with empty eye sockets, I'd make a fortune selling them on the black market. 

Well, there aren't going to be a lot of women around. The setting is the asteroid belt and outer solar system. Most of it is pretty rough and ready, and historically, that's tended to mean a high male to female ratio. So there aren't many women around, and the ones that have braved the hazards of the outer system tend to have a lot of very protective men watching out for them. So it's not quite as simple to grab a woman off the streets as it is in WM. (That's not to say it isn't possible, but its going to need a bit more work to make it happen

Ah Kinda like the American west during the 19 hundreds.

Here is an Idea though. Why bother kidnapping women. If you have the world set up with tech for cloning, Sex change ops should be relatively easy. Plus you are overwriting their initial memories with new ones so you could Conceivably turn someone into a women and have someone believe it was always that way.

Question is, is it more efficient|cheaper to do it that way or just starting from scratch with a clone? If the former than ya, it's definitely a dark side option. If the latter, well why would an evil character bother?

Also this has a chance for catastrophic failure. (the best kind) So that could balance things out if you go the "clone is way more expensive" approach.


Also

  Seriously though.  I was inspired by slave maker but the way you select   skills I got from age of wonders 2.  You can pick just one positive   trait, or you could two positive traits and one negative.  And they   wouldn't necessarily have to be upgradable.
 

Like I said before, Merchant just jumped out at me. That was my entire basis of saying it was like slave maker.  Not sure why merchant stuck out from slave maker. (I couldn't tell you your other origin options if I tried really hard.) but it did.

I was very fond of the way Oblivion handled stat based skills, specifically that in addition to the higher the stat the better the outcomes of actions associated with that stat there was *also* a sort of tier-based award system for leveling up each stat to certain milestones (e.g. leveling up any specific magic stat to any increment of 25 opens up new levels of spells, sneak opens up bonuses to sneak attacks, better athletics and acrobatics consumes less fatigue, etc...) and I'd love to see something like that incorporated.

Assuming that player stats will range 0-100, leveling to 25, 50, or 75 in the stat most closely associated with the physical aspect of cloning could reduce or eliminate the chances of machine failure or 'stillborn' clones. Likewise, in genetics, reaching new tiers could unlock the ability to clone more 'complicated' genetic material (i.e. more valuable and skilled clones.)

Hopefully, that kind of thing wouldn't be too complicated to implement, because I think it could add a lot more depth.

Better yet, you could give girls traits for getting certain stats to certain levels. But now that I think of it that would require a major overhaul of the trait system. Since Most traits give stat bonus's to begin with. So it' would be at best redundant (Rebellion to -100 = broken will given... which gives Rebellion -100.....) at worst "easy mode" ("Give Blowjob expert" at service skill 50 which bops it up to 100 lets say.)

But the trait system is actually being overhauled by way of the new scripting system I believe.  (Doc Knows for sure.) so It might be yet another option.