Some detailed thoughts/plans on Charms (and acknowledging mistakes) (Patreon)

One of the recent additions to the House of Hellish Harlots was charms.  These are either permanent bonus effects or protective abilities for the whole of a run.

I've been getting a few comments on them.  There is a simple maxim for writers and creators (which sadly gets ignored a lot nowadays).  If one person raises an issue, they might be wrong.  If multiple people raise the same issue, it's probably the creator that's wrong.

So, onto charms.

One of the inspirations for House of Hellish Harlots is a game called Lobotomy Corporation.  It features hapless workers in a secret facility trying to harvest energy from SCP-type anomalies.  Sometimes they get energy from the anomaly.  Sometimes they die in horrific ways.  This is tied to factors that are consistent, but unknown to the player until they figure them out.  This solved one of the problems I was having while brainstorming an idea for a hellish (but sexy and pleasurable) brothel.  Moving the variables to a common framework outside of the scenarios allows for more scenarios while still having them be mysterious (and I also prefer femdom-y H-games where the femdom-y succubus or monster girl legitimately 'gets' and dominates the player, rather than the player having to trigger it with a surrender option in an RPG fight they're going to win easily).

As with Lob Corp, I knew I also needed to ramp up the 'threat rating' of the different harlots - some having trivial requirements, others having multiple difficult requirements - with the more difficult ones showing up in later rounds.  This doesn't happen at the moment, but there is code in place for when I add enough harlots to start being able to set a round range for them to show up (Sorpresa and Hiru should not be appearing in the 1st round!).

Near the top of the 'threat' curve are harlots requiring a protective charm to survive.  This should raise the tension in the later rounds as unlike other requirements, the charm seller NPC only sells a limited number of random charms every round.  Unless they're really lucky, the player can't just buy protection from a harlot in the same round they show up.  The idea here is that the player buys one or more protective charms in the early rounds when the harlots are fairly easy to survive and then uses that to determine which harlots are 'safe' picks as the ones the Madam presents to the player get more and more dangerous.

Now, you might be thinking there's an obvious flaw with this design in that it's heavily reliant on RNG.  The player might pick up one or two protective charms, but only get presented with harlots they're useless against.  I will be mitigating this with the faction/clan system I've hinted about.  While a lot has changed on what the different groups are, the idea is still the same.  The harlots are grouped based on similarities and fetishes.  The algorithm that determines which harlots are presented to the player is biased depending on choices they've made in the past.  If you pick harlots from a particular group, you will get more harlots from that group presented in future rounds.  As the groupings will be done in relation to fetishes and themes, the same charms will provide protection from multiple harlots within that group.  With perfect information, the player will figure out which path they should take based on what stats they start with and which protective charms they can pick up early on, and from that point RNG shouldn't be too much of an issue.  Of course, the player won't have that perfect information and the fun will be all the sexy Bad Ends on the way to learning it.

So, what's the problem.

I got a little too 'inspired' when making the charms.  I knew I needed to have them in place before I started implementing harlot ideas that required them, and I didn't want to add them at the same time as the relevant harlot as that would be a huge 'you need to pick this' tell.  I was on a roll at the time and figured I might as well get all or most of them done while I was running hot.  The mistake was adding them all in one release, as I think that's ended up being overwhelming.

I've heard multiple comments to the effect of "most of the charms don't do anything".  This is true.  I've added about 90% of the charms, but we only have around 25-30% of the harlots in the House.  A lot of the protective charms currently don't have any harlots to protect against.  They will come late.

On reflection, writing them while the inspiration was there, was probably correct, but revealing them all at the same time probably wasn't.  I think I'd have been better starting with the utility charms and a few protective charms that had uses with the current harlots, and hiding the others until needed.

I might do this before the proper demo release, but only if it can be done quickly and with no risk of some scenarios embarrassingly crashing because I forgot a charm was in use there.

The other comment I've seen come up is "Why doesn't charm X work against harlot Y?"

This one is a little trickier.  The harlots are loosely tiered on how stringent their requirements are.  That looks something like this:

Weak - Player needs STAT > 1.
Medium - Player needs STAT > 3.
Strong - Player needs the relevant protective charm.

However, that will throw up weird scenarios where a 'weak' harlot will kill a player with STAT=1 and relevant protective charm, and a 'strong' harlot won't.  To fix that I updated the stat checks to have overrides if the player has the right protective charm.  That's a nice reusable fix and I'm happy with the implementation.

Another weird interaction concerns harlots that offer choices, with the wrong choice resulting in a Bad End.  If the Bad End is administered through a certain technique (eg smothering the player), should that be blocked by the relevant protective charm?  I think the answer to that is "it depends".

This is where game mechanics start to fight with game lore.  If I check everywhere against various charms because they might apply, I get buried in complexity and have no hope of ever finishing the project.  If the scenario is pick A, B or C, and C is a Bad End, it's probably best to keep it that way.

There is a risk of this being an immersion breaker, but thankfully there is a very good lore explanation.

House of Hellish Harlots isn't a XP and Levels RPG.  The player is a level 1 character stuck in a dungeon filled with level 20+ monsters.  The only reason you have a chance at all is because the Madam wants to make a 'fair' game of it.  Even then, her harlots are daemons.  She knows some of them are going to bullshit her, so the Buxom Lolibaba's charms are a way of keeping them honest.  If the harlot is picky on who she kills, or gives her victims choices that lead to enough of them being able to leave the room afterwards, the Madam isn't going to mind if the harlot takes 20 minutes 'cracking' a charm to get the player.  If the harlot is greedy and using "they were weak", "they weren't strong-willed enough", "they couldn't hold their breath long enough" as justification and then takes 20 minutes to try and break through the protective charm, it's obvious they're not upholding the Madam's insistence on 'fair play'.  Rather than risk the Madam's ire, they'll let the player go.

This is why the Iron Lungs charm will not protect the player from the smother succufairy, Broinn.  She likes serious people and hates jokers.  She's also very determined.  It won't matter if a player with the wrong disposition has the right protective charm, Broinn is going to sit on their face and stay there until the player has suffocated no matter how long it takes.  This is acceptable to the Madam because the Muchadh sisters are still letting all the people with serious personalities go.

This also fits nicely with a certain gift. If you haven't spotted it yet, there is a gift that has the same function as the 'surrender' button in battlefuck RPGs.  How would that work with protective charms?  It's a surrender option, so it wouldn't make sense for a charm to override that as the purpose of a player bringing it is to automatically trigger the sexy Bad End (and avoid Horror Ends).  I was thinking that maybe the gift had an aura that 'switched off' charms, but I think the 'honesty measure' explanation fits better.  The harlot is free to take as long as she likes to overpower the protective charm because the player has already 'given' themselves to her as an offering (whether they realise it or not).

This also fits with the slight femdom theme to the House.  The succubi are always in control.  If they want to, they can power through the wards, but are kept in check because the Madam wants to make a fair game of it.

A more succinct way of putting it is this:

If the main mechanic of the harlot scenario is "has charm or no?", the right protective charm will protect the player unless they bring the surrender gift.

If the main mechanic is something else, the right protective charm will allow the player to auto-pass some stat checks, but might not save them if they make the wrong choice or have the wrong prerequisites.

At some point I will likely boil this down and have the Barman explain it to the player in-game (that's his function).

Also, if I do see examples where it looks like a charm should work, but doesn't because I need it not to for game mechanics, I'll try to either have the harlot acknowledge it or (better) have the Elegant Lady mention it as part of her gossip.  (And if I miss some where you thought there should be an interaction and there wasn't, let me know.  If multiple people mention it, I'll know I need to sneak in an in-game explanation.)

Whew.  That was a lot more than I thought I'd be writing.  I hope that's cleared up a few things.  Feel free to throw comments below if you want further clarification, or think I'm taking the wrong approach.