What's the best way to unlock taboo content?

[215303j]

As we all know, certain websites dislike certain content.

The most obvious example is incest, which is banned on Patreon, but I guess there are some other examples as well.

The most common way to work around this issue is that relationships in the standard game are described as "landlady, roommate, tenant" and other eufemisms, but that a patch is kindly released by a friendly modder. I suppose it would not be that complicated to use a relationship variable which is set to "landlady" as standard, but which can be altered to something else via a patch, but some devs, for some reason, seem to prefer to hardcode relationships, thus requiring a new patch for every release.

Another way that has become more popular recently is that the game asks you to enter relationships manually. At the start of the game, the game asks you a question like: "This is Dee, she's your [type in your relationship to this girl, press enter for the default: tenant]". Personally I find this solution both easy and elegant, and also allows people to define custom relationships like "step-daughter" if they don't like incest but do want something else than the bland "tenant".

Finally another way that some games use, and which is similar to the patch, is that players have to enter the Ren'py console, and type something like "taboo = true" to define certain relationships in a certain way.

So, what do think is the best? What are advantages and disadvantages of each? Why would a dev want to make patching difficult?

 

[baneini]

Overthrow the government

 

[redknight00]

My preferred way is not sexing family members.

 

[anne O'nymous]

So, what do think is the best?

Without a single doubt the fan made patch.

What are advantages and disadvantages of each?

Letting the player define the relationship is the worse of all, and it only have disadvantages.

If the relationship is defined as expected, everything is correct ; relatively speaking since it still depend of the author's writing skills. But with the default relationship it's just a stupid unbelievable story.
Who can believe that a 18yo MC live with his landlady and roommates since so many years that they feel like a family ? What anyway fall under Patreon's ban conditions.
Who can believe that the said landlady want the MC to focus in his studies in place of finding a job, or at the opposite pressure him to find a job in order to help her financially ? She's his landlady, from the first day they encounter each other she expect to be payed regularly for the hosting, foods and all !
Who are those orphans who live with a landlady and not in a foster family ? Because in those games, not a single times the MC and roommates talk about their parents.
And I don't talk about the shocked reaction when the said landlady, or one of the roommate, discover that the MC sexually desire her. They aren't related, even if it's the nature of their relationship that motive their refusal, it is expressed in a totally different way, and the discovery shouldn't be a shock. It is expected for a 19yo boy to have some sexual desire for the women he live with every single day of the years since years. And since they aren't related, there's no reason for the reaction to be so overkill.

And obviously it become a full caricature when the player decide to take it so few seriously that it answer whatever stupidities as relationship. Personally in those games my MC have the bad habit to live with his whore and dirty sluts. It's not less incoherent and a little more funny.


Using a variable, like your taboo = True, is better.

It permit to modify the story according to the effective relationship, not just changing a word, by changing a whole dialog line for it to make sense whatever the relationship.
Which would lead to things like :

if taboo:
    landlady "What the fuck ? I'm your fucking mother !"
else:
    landlady "I'm flattered that you've these feelings for me, but I don't think that it's appropriate. I'm your landlady. As friendly as our relation is, there's a line that shouldn't be crossed."

But the disadvantage is that if Patreon decide to look closer at your game, you'll not be able to deny that it's a incest game. Everything is wrote by yourself right from the start.


And finally, there's the said best solution, a fan made patch.

You can define the relationship as expected and write the story in order for it to make sense whatever if the player use or not the said patch.
A landlady will be a landlady, she'll expect the MC to have the behavior of a tenant and will have the rejection motive of a landlady. This while a mother will expect the MC to have the behavior of a son, and will reject him because incest is a taboo.

Why would a dev want to make patching difficult?

If you can mod it, you can patch it, therefore he would want to use a game engine that make difficult to mod the game.

 

[woody554]

But the disadvantage is that if Patreon decide to look closer at your game...

I'm no lawyer, but I don't think that's even legal? they'd be hacking into someone else's property to cause financial loss. their justification not being valid under law (meaning most of these fictional stories are perfectly legal in most countries). and I HIGHLY doubt they have any interest in doing it anyway, for them it's enough if it looks plausible. you could certainly sue them for hacking it, and would probably win. (but it wouldn't require them to accept your game back as they have every right to kick you without explanation). a huge unecessary legal problem for them, which could even blow up into a huge amount of similar lawsuits.

the default though is that there's NO 100% way to avoid banning if they so happen to choose. it's not a democracy and they can kick you if they even think something smells funny. nothing is 100%.

that said, I think the best way is to use a selector variable with prewritten alternate lines. that way you have total control of the tone of the taboo dialogue. (I don't think the landlady version reading badly matters much, absolutely everyone interested in the 'landlady' story knows the real version is the patched one. including the patreon reviewer. noncest version exists just for patreon's plausible denial. they know what's going on, they're not idiots. they've seen loads of these, they can spot instantly when the milf you're living with is really your mom. they just choose to 'not get it'. they don't need any of this shit, it's a waste of everyone's time and only hurts their revenue.

not a huge fan of fanmade patches. often it's the only way of course because dev didn't make a fix, and that's fine. but the text never fits the tone of the writen, often not even the idea. even more so when we're talking about 100% added mod events. I wish devs took more interest in at least reading through any added content and fixing the small things that don't fit. not a huge job. doesn't have to be perfect, just fix the most glaring problems in dialogue.

maybe even give a couple of notes for the future, like "please avoid making the mom a cum dumpster, I've used three years of hard work to build her up as a reserved conservative. the whole game revolves around her NEVER becoming fully corrupted."

of course the fan will still do what he likes, but I'm sure most would more than welcome any such feedback to make their addition work better.

 

[anne O'nymous]

I'm no lawyer, but I don't think that's even legal? they'd be hacking into someone else's property to cause financial loss.

If the game is made with Ren'py, by example, it's perfectly legal since the code is in plain sight. It would be more a problem if the game is made with Unity, by example, since it would be reverse engineering, which is mostly illegal in the USA.
But in fact they don't need to go this far. The person that will report the game as breaking their Terms of Use will obviously tell them that "you just need to do this, type that, and you'll have an incest game". They'll do it and see that it's true, it's directly handle in the game.

As for the rest, the author was breaking the contract he had with Patreon by not following their rules. Patreon is in no case responsible for the financial loss ; they just took act that the contract is no longer valid and so stopped to provide the service related to this contract.

their justification not being valid under law (meaning most of these fictional stories are perfectly legal in most countries).

Their justifications are 100% legal and valid.
They provide a service and the author signed a contract where he, among other things, checked a case saying that he read the Terms of Use and agree to comply to them. And they have the right to limits the content they accept to host, in the exact same way that an insurance company have the right to have in their contract a part saying that, "if the damage result of a voluntary action you made, a negligence, or your careless attitude, they'll pay nothing".
They can't limit their responsibility, but can perfectly impose the rules they want.

Oh, by the way, at no time they claim that the content is banned because they are illegal.

I don't think the landlady version reading badly matters much, absolutely everyone interested in the 'landlady' story knows the real version is the patched one.

You shouldn't be so sure. I'm sure that I'm far to be the only one tired of all the authors following the incest route, and therefore don't even bother to download the incest patch.

 

[215303j]

But with the default relationship it's just a stupid unbelievable story.

I agree with woody554 in this case.

I think that in 99% of the cases, people use the patch, because otherwise, most games tagged incest here don't make much sense.
The relationship between a landlady and a tenant is so far from a family relationship that just changing words, or even entire sentences, don't make a good story.
To me, landlady, roommate, tenant etc. is just code or slang and everybody knows what it means.
The plausible deniability is enough for both the dev as for Patreon.

Proof of that is that there are plenty of games on Patreon with incest behind a patch, and I think they rarely get banned nowadays (unlike a couple of years ago).

But it seems that the concept "fan made patch" is not as well defined as I thought. I was thinking of a rather simple patch, like "taboo = true" or at most manually replacing "landlady" with "mother" but not a mod which actively alters or adds content that was not intended as such by the dev. But again, I think that the vast majority of devs making a landlady / roommate game do actually intend to make an incest game.

 

[Hadley]

The best way is if the taboo-patch is already in the Game and the actual "patch" you download is just something like "TabooUnlocked=true" or something. Its annoying when people manually have to edit the dialogue every fucking update.

 

[anne O'nymous]

But it seems that the concept "fan made patch" is not as well defined as I thought. I was thinking of a rather simple patch, like "taboo = true" or at most manually replacing "landlady" with "mother" but not a mod which actively alters or adds content that was not intended as such by the dev.

Look at the mod section here, it's what incest fan made patch are. By the way, those patch do nothing manually.