But going back to the skill system. There has been lots of good feedback here. Reading your comments I identified the biggest problems as:
1) Seemingly little content for players that want to be a good and caring guy, but not submissive. Basically a caring dom. They might identify with many sensitive answers, but see no benefit whatsoever in picking those. This is, to some extent, also present in the reverse for sub players.
2) The Cunning personality is too much associated with a negative stigma. While it has some traits associated with “assholes”, like being egoist, “mean”, cheater, or just not caring, it wasn’t meant to be just that. It was meant to also include charming, witty, smart, or dark humor answers, and the skills should better reflect that.
3) some people don’t enjoy the system for several reasons. Or might become too focused on the strategy side of gathering the points for their preferred kinks, and that becomes detrimental for the roleplay experience. This game is packed with flavor choices so that you can mold your MC as you like. All that work gets wasted if some pre-determine choices are automatically picked based on what points they give. It’s important to incentivize players to collect at least some points from all branches, no matter what playstyle they are going for.
I’ve taken some of your ideas and decided to make a few changes:
-Make it so all playstyles require some skills from the 4 personality trees. This is meant to give more incentives to pick answers from all categories, regardless of what kinks you’re going for. These are generally the vanilla skills that will be used in plenty of situations, regardless if you’re playing a sub, dom, asshole or good guy.
-Introduce more skills in the Sensitive path that are appealing to “caring doms”, so they don’t find it useless to pick Sensitive choices, even though they normally would. That way, sensitive choices aren’t only appealing for sub players.
-Introduce some skills in the Manly path that are useful to sub players, so they can also feel more compelled to pick those choices when appropriated. These are “Teasing”, for situations that required you to be a bratty sub, or to challenge a girl before she gets in the mood of wanting to just crush you; or the “Power/Strength” skill that is attractive for Dommes that are into subs that are Powerful/Strong/Muscular/Have high pain tolerance, etc. Of course both of these will be also used in contexts where you're a dom. Like all vanilla skills, they will be useful in any playstyle.
-Change the name of a lot of skills to be less associated with abusive stuff. That was an original mistake, it’s not what the game is going for. It's meant to provide a healty, realistic, consensual representation of a bunch of kinks, from vanilla to hardcore.
-Clarify some skills that were very limiting and have too much “baggage” associated with them, and might even be misleading. Blackmail, for example. People associate this with the use of coercion to get sexual acts from someone against their will, while I meant a Blackmail Kink, as in, someone that gets turned on by the risk of being exposed, but all played in a consensual manner. There were a bunch of others like these. This doesn't change the plots I have in mind, just how the skills are presented.
-At the same time, also provide some skills for people that actually want to have fun playing the asshole.
-Eliminate some redundancy. We don’t need both “Humiliate me” and “Humiliate her” skills; “Humiliation” is enough to be used in both cases, dependently on the situation. Also, scenes that would require the “degrade a cuck” skill, for example, can instead require both the “Bull” and “Degradation” skills, making that skill unnecessary.
-Add a help screen to give a bit more information/tips and context to the players about the whole skill system.
-Introduce alternative modes of playing the game (new game +) that bypass some/all aspects of the skill system for those that
really don’t want it (I’ll talk about this later).
So, this is how the skills screen looks like now, after those changes:
What do you guys think about this? Is this better/clearer?
This doesn’t affect your saves. Except for metagaming reasons, in case you want to go for a different strategy and start anew with more points in some category. That’s the downside of changing this much, but I feel that this is necessary. And it’s still relatively early in the game. In case you
really want to start a new save, it’s not that big of an issue, I think. The “Bull” skill is now more expensive, but people that already bought it in older saves get to keep it for the original price.