Retconning some naga tails into existing sex scenes?

[chubbyrobo]

This is what happens when you're at home for three weeks straight and end up spending a lot more time on computer games: you get so tired of getting jarred out of the game when your naga PC suddenly has legs that you go and sign up on the forums just to offer to do something about it.

So here's what I'd like to do: I want to submit a bunch of minor tweaks to existing sex scenes to make them more compatible with naga tails. Not huge edits or writing entire scenes – just things like, hypothetical example, taking this:

You wrap your legs around his waist and cross your ankles behind his back to hold him tighter.

And editing it into:

{(if not naga)You wrap your legs around his waist and cross your ankles behind his butt to hold him tighter. / (if naga) You coil your tail a couple of times around his waist and press the tip against his butt to hold him tighter.}

Things like that. Other ideas, as appropriate:
- editing places where it's obvious a simple leg parser was used that results in phrases like "Your tails are..." to allow it to switch between "(not naga) Your legs are... / (naga) Your tail is..."
- making adjustments to the positioning in sex scenes that assume the PC is "straddling" their sex partner
- changing references to "kneeling down" to "settling down in your coils" or some such
- editing any other minor non-snake-friendly terms I happen to run into: "your toes curl" to "you curl the tip of your tail," "muddy footprints" to "muddy serpentine trail," "you stomp your foot" to "you smack the tip of your tail on the ground"....
etc.

These kinds of edits would take me basically no time to do because it's essentially what I already stop and do in my head every few minutes when playing the game with a naga PC. The only difference is I'd just be typing it up to submit to someone rather than mentally grumbling about it.

(Long term, it'd be nice to more heavily rework some sex scenes that could benefit from acknowledging naga tails – like, Naleens could majorly benefit from acknowledging when the PC's anatomy matches their own. Longer-long term, I'd like to try my hand at writing scenes that would allow for naga compatibility in places where it's currently not allowed – like Breedwell, specifically because I like nagas and like Breedwell and would love to have both at once. But I ain't gonna get ambitious or make any promises until after I see how I like doing more conservative edits.)

(Extremely long longer-long term and if I feel super nice, I might do the same thing for taurs, who I know are in the same boat as nagas; but that's way down on my list because I don't play any taurs. The main reason I feel confident I can do this so easily for nagas is because, due to playing one, it jumps out at me easily when that content's missing.)

Pretty much the only thing holding me back from immediately tossing edits at the game is, after looking around the forum, I don't know how/where to offer edits for existing scenes, or even if edits to existing scenes are allowed. I've read the writing style guide, I've read how to write/submit content, neither of them mentions editing somebody else's old scenes – neither "how to do it" nor "we don't allow it." I've seen the area for reporting bugs, which seems to be more for pointing out typos and the like to let the game team know they need to go fix it – and the whole point of offering to do edits like these myself is so that the game team doesn't need to spend time sitting around coming up with alternate phraseology to account for the minority of players that want naga tails. (I only just signed up on the forum, but I've been lurking long enough to know what a damn chore most writers consider adding naga/taur compatibility to be.) And I've seen the subforum for submitting new events, which is obviously for submitting new events, not editing somebody else's old ones.

So, where would one toss a pile of modest snake tail edits – if that's even allowed at all?

 

[Paradox01]

Above and beyond the monumental task you've set for yourself, I think your biggest hurdle is getting the devs/writers to okay this because that would mean they'd have to account for PC naga tails in everything they write from now on. That's something I'm guessing not a lot of them want to do.

Having said that, I applaud your enthusiasm. You got balls, kid.

 

[chubbyrobo]

The way I see it, it's only monumental if I commit myself to doing ALL of them. If (and I'm completely making up the statistics here) 30% of sex scenes have some mention of leg positions that prevent the player from imagining that it's a naga in the scene, and if when I decide I'm sick of adding alternative phrases for nagas 27% of the scenes are still not-naga-compatible, then there are still 3% more naga-friendly sex scenes in the game than before, and so I've still made a net improvement on the game experience for naga players even if I don't fix every single scene.

Which is why the more ambitious projects (the larger rewrites to naga compatibility + possible taur compatibility) I've only got listed as "maybe" for farther down the line – I'm not committing to the big things until after I've done the smaller things and can see how well I like that.

And I'm actually approaching this with the assumption that the devs/writers don't and aren't going to account for PC naga tails. First and foremost, long-term ideas set aside, I'm talking only about scenes that 1) are already in the game, and that 2) I am currently able to access and play through with my naga – but due to some little bits of wording that were missed and/or not worried about, the scene as written doesn't "work" with a naga. I'm offering to throw in short edits of a couple of words/sentences that do the work of accounting for PC naga tails so that the devs/writers don't have to. All the devs would have to do is search/replace the sentences I highlight with the sentences I offer instead, which I imagine has to be a much faster task than doing the actual writing.

So if the devs/writers continue to not concern themselves with naga compatibility for every future scene that's written for the rest of the game... no big deal, because I'll still have improved a few. It's not like my changing a couple of alternative sentences in a Zil sex scene here or a Raskvel sex scene there means that other writers are now required to worry about snake tails while, say, writing encounters on Dhaal. And maybe eventually I'll get around to tossing in edits for those future scenes too.

I can understand if the devs say "nah, we're done with those scenes and don't want to worry about them ever again, even to search/replace some sentences" – but I'm trying to offer this in a way that keeps the labor on their end as close to zero as possible.

 

[TheShepard256]

A while ago, someone offered to do something similar with SnakeByte. IIRC, the response was positive, and the recommendation was to put it all into a doc: each time, noting which scene is being edited, copying the original text, then putting the edited text immediately afterwards.

 

[chubbyrobo]

Oh thanks! I did a search for SnakeByte, I'm guessing it's this thread? I'll follow the recommendations in that thread.