Spankers, Spankees, and Switches of All Ages (18 and above),

So I have some bad news. I’ve decided to put Potion Wars in a coma. I’ve been having a lot of trouble writing the second episode, mostly because of massive tone clash. The premise just demands a very dramatic, down to earth tone. Dramatic, down to earth tones really do not mix well with spanking porn. Rape, torture, and incest porn? Sure. Just look at the success of Game of Thrones. But spanking has just too much whimsy to really work well with a story about a drug war being fought along racial lines.

Some of you are probably slapping your forehead and saying “No duh, dumbass!” In my defense, the story kind of got a little bit out of my control. Stories do that sometimes. Note that I’m not doing this lightly, and it’s absolutely not because I got bored and found a new, shiny idea. I love Potion Wars, I love the story that’s taking shape, and I very much want to tell it. This just isn’t the right place.

So the next question is, what now? One option would be to take Potion Wars, rip out all the porn, and release it somewhere as a vanilla game. However, this website is called “spankingrpgs.” Not “baitandswitchrpgs.”  I’m going to write a full-fledged spanking RPG if it kills me. I just need to be careful to select a premise and tone that are conducive to spankings. So here are my constraints:

1. The game needs to be an adventure tale that is ostensibly dramatic. It does not have to be serious and angsty, but I’m not a comedic writer. The content should be dramatic, even if the tone is not.
2. The game should have an element of whimsy, silliness and absurdity. Spankings are absurd, and they will fit much better if there are other elements of absurdity already.
3. There needs to be plenty of natural opportunities for spankings, both top and bottom. Ideally without making the spanker look like a total douchebag (unless the spanker is villainous and they’re supposed to be total douchebags).

After considering these constraints for a while, I decided that one of the genres that best fits is the superhero genre. Particularly, Silver Age superheroes. Silver Age superhero comics were more than a little absurd, but the characters took them more or less seriously (so we get a rather absurd tone, but also some drama). Furthermore, a Spider-Man style superhero (i.e. a part-time superhero whose trying to balance work, life, and superheroing) provides a ton of natural spanking opportunities. First, we get the obvious superhero-supervillain showdowns. You can spank supervillains for trying to take over the world for the umpteenth time, and supervillains can spank you for trying to foil their plans for the umpteenth time. Plus, Silver Age supervillains tended to be ridiculously over the top, and I could totally see a Silver Age style supervillain giving a Silver Age style superhero a sound spanking, and vice versa. Furthermore, there are plenty of opportunities for spankings as the player tries to live a normal life. You stood your boyfriend up, because you were fighting across a bunch of rooftops? That’s a paddling. You slept through class because you were up all night trying to find the villain’s hideout? That’s a paddling. Forgot your mother’s birthday? Paddling.

My basic thoughts are the following, at least for the first season:

Each episode of the first season will have a new villain. You’ll have an initial encounter with the villain, that will be fought either to a draw, or the villain will win. Then, over the course of the episode you’ll need to prepare for the next showdown with the villain. This could be done a variety of ways:

1. You could patrol a lot. Basically, beat up a bunch of generic criminals to get stronger, and interrogate the underworld about this villain (note that patrols will have some unique content for each day, just like other events. You won’t just be grinding against generic enemies).
2. Do some research. Maybe the villain is reminiscient of an animal of some kind. So the animal’s weaknesses may be analagous to the villain’s. Or maybe you study news footage of your last battle to better determine what their strengths are, and then develop a new skill to counter them.
3. Try to learn more about the villain’s personal life. See if maybe you could use a bit of psychological warfare to manipulate them, or lure them into a location where they won’t be as effective (i.e. lure a flying enemy into the sewers).
4. Some combination of the above three.

Furthermore, you’ll have obligations you need to meet outside of superheroing as well, like homework, family get togethers, a job, etc.

Each episode will be broken into days, and I’ll release content a day at a time. Each day will be a fairly small update, so that we don’t have massive droughts like with Potion Wars. Each episode will have a list of tasks you’ll want to accomplish, perhaps broken into subtasks (i.e. you have a midterm at the end of the week, so each day will have a subtask to study three hours. If you study three hours every day of the episode, you’ll get an A+ on the test). However, you will not have enough time to do all of them. You could do all of them so-so, or a few of them well, but you can’t do all of them completely. Furthermore, you’ll absolutely have to spend a lot of your time preparing for the final fight with the supervillain, because at the climax of the episode you’ll have to defeat them. So if you spend too much time doing personal life stuff, you may find yourself in an unwinnable situation.

Of course, you need to do moderately well at the day-to-day tasks as well. Perhaps if your grades get too low, you’ll have to move back in with your parent (you’re in college, FYI), which will make it harder to patrol and research villains. If you do too poorly at your job, you’ll be forced to spend extra time at work, giving you less time to patrol and research villains.

The supervillain combats will probably be a bit more elaborate than the battles in Potion Wars. Not a whole lot more elaborate (I’ll be using the same game engine, just with a few minor tweaks). But many of the combats will probably be multi-phase. You’ll fight for a while, then there’ll be a cut-scene, and you’ll get options (which options will depend on the choices you made over the course of the episode). The outcome of the options will determine who gets a bonus in the next phase of battle, you or the villain. Obviously there will be a lot of save-games to minimize repetition. There will probably be an auto-save at the end of each phase of battle, and an autosave at the beginning of each day.

Finally, I’ll probably introduce more customizations. In particular, I’ll give players the ability to control the gender of other characters. You’ll have the options of:

1. Specifying the genders you prefer to see for spankees. This will generally influence the genders of supervillains (since you are required to defeat them at the end of every episode), and perhaps a side-kick if you get one (no promises!). If you turn off the ability for enemies to spank you, then all generic enemies will be this gender.
2. Specifying the gender you prefer to see for spankers. This will generally influence the gender of authority figures (your boss, your parent, etc). If enemies are allowed to spank you, and both the spankee and spanker gender are the same, then all generic enemies will be the selected gender. Otherwise, the gender of generic enemies will be chosen at random.
3. Let the game choose at random (or let characters use their preferred genders if they have one).
4. Pick and choose on a case-by-case basis. This has the downside of interrupting the flow of the story a bit, but gives you more fine-grained control.

Note that this isn’t guaranteed to affect all characters. For example, I plan on pulling Carrie into this game as your best friend, because I just love writing her. She’s going to be female either way, because she will forever be a woman in my head.

The downside to giving players control over the gender of other characters is that there probably won’t be as many sex scenes as I’d planned in Potion Wars (i.e. few to none), because there’d be so many damn combinations to write (male-female, female-male, female-female, male-male).

Furthermore, dialog choices probably won’t have as much of an effect as it did in Potion Wars. This is because I want the various tasks you can choose each day to have significantly different content each day, and I do want to release content at a reasonable pace. I do still want to give you opportunities to influence conversations, and I want characters to remember them, but you probably won’t get as many dialogue choices, and your choices probably won’t have as many and as long-lasting effects as I’d planned for Potion Wars. For example, in most conversations, you’ll probably get one choice at the beginning, in which you’ll have two to three options of various personalities (cooperative, aggressive, bratty perhaps). Then, the rest of the conversation, I’ll put words in your character’s mouth, based on the personality you chose. So if you chose the bratty option, then I’ll give your character bratty dialogue in that scene.

That being said, I do want some activities in earlier episodes to influence later episodes, so I’ll try not to railroad you too hard. As always, it’s a careful balancing act.

Thoughts? In particular, feel free to make costume or supervillain/hero suggestions. Also, if there’s a particular personality you’d like the opportunity to roleplay (an angsty loner hero? A pompous bastard? A cowardly lion?) let me know in the comments. I’m always looking for personality suggestions, and if I’m going to spend time writing dialogue for a particular personality, I want to make sure there’s at least one person that wants to play it!