Yeah escape is somewhat complex and very veiled at the moment. If you press the mouse button and you see a small amount of stamina disappear, then the escape chance is high. Think of it like you struggle, the opponent reacts to your struggle. There is a moment when they may be caught off guard. It emulates that. If you constantly struggle, they will be prepared. If you wait, they will let their guard down. Struggle intensely for a short burst then wait before you try again. An easy guesstimate is just wait a couple seconds after your stamina is full and then mash like hell. This should get you an escape nearly 100% of the time. I'd started on adding UI elements about a month ago which are pretty hard to do but necessary for a good struggle system to replace RNG.
Ah but that's wrong. There haven't been good ideas, only complaints and thumbs ups. There's a fine line where identity of a creative work is lost to a homogeneous taint of a larger group. Generic, non-constructive commentary like "I don't like the struggle system" is worthless in the eyes of indie and if that's all it sees then it is best not seen at all. Indie is out here to throw status quo into the fucking meat grinder. If you listen to enough music or watch enough movies you'll either get it or you'll slurp up the slurry of capeshit and love it. D-Lis' work is already indie and yet you can dash past every non-boss monster to speed run the game. Why the hell did he even make animations for the common mobs with that choice? H-games are notorious about bolting porn onto a standard game genre and doing nothing to integrate it as actual gameplay.
If you want to not end up on the immediate block list like that biggie chucklefuck then saying something like "The struggle system is too enigmatic, I'd like to have something like calisto protocol's dodging system" or "I want DDR for escaping" then I know you're not a complete tool. Even if the idea is dumb as fuck. Reality is this is a hobby like I've mentioned ad-nauseam at this point so I'm not going to read most posts. I don't have the time. Maybe if there was something interesting to read then we might hit some pavlovian epiphany.
If anybody thinks there's exceptional ideas that I've missed, by all means a summary recap could be cool.
Honestly just glad to see you interacting with the community, complaints or not on the mod! The addition of some UI elements for the struggle system is really the only particular suggestion I'd want added, at least to better display what's actually happening. Still, pretty clever way to make use of something as simple as the stamina bar to display how effective your struggling is via how much stamina it costs the player to do so.
Haven't gone through since my last posts discussing the mod itself, but the only REAL place I have had issues with it is on bosses that have fatalities, and with some it can be a pretty easy instant game over should these bosses ever grab you when you attempt to dodge through them, or more often, just get clipped and have a hard knockdown situation. Both of these on their own are fine alongside the struggle system itself, but given some fatalities play out fairly quickly, especially in comparison to the non fatal/game ending sexual animations, it can lead to a lot of frustration. The third boss in the church, or High Inqusitor/whatever her name is, nearly made me just straight up uninstall the mod. She's definitely beatable WITH it, but you can get a lot of cheap instant game overs just from being grabbed by her ultimately, and having played through the game a long while ago, I can only imagine that some of the other guro/fatality bosses and enemies will likely cause some similar issues given their animations tend to be much shorter. Doesn't really help that said brutality isn't to my flavor, but I can really overlook that happening occasionally.
All in all, definitely respect if you prefer to keep it as it is with fatality enemies, but ultimately from a gameplay stance they do become a much bigger threat, and huge irritation when you find yourself at the hands of relative RNG to escape a quick game over. Still love the mod, and a lot of the ideas behind it, as anything which actually FORCES sexual animations on the player in a game where they largely have no consequence, and can almost entirely be skipped by dashing through enemies, as well as simply mashing the recovery button on knockdowns, is super welcome, and definitely look forward to seeing even more how your work progresses in time!
Edit: As far as actual suggestions to the problem, since I don't think I really gave any aside from just outright removing them from the grapple system, I think either excluding theses bosses/enemies from the grapple system, or simply making the more easy to escape might be a decent solution. I don't know a ton about coding, much less how well coded NoR is itself, but perhaps there could be some way to tie the difficulty of the struggle system to the guro/fatality option in the settings could allow for an easy way to blanket cover all of said fatality related enemies, without doing much work? Again, not even sure if that's really possible, but ultimately, just making them more escapable would make for a huge improvement to the mod overall I'd say, while leaving much of the rest the same for enemies that initiate strictly sexual animations, bad end tied to it or not.