Tuesday, October 13, 2009

RR Tutorial : Wriggle plugin

Hello there, we are going to talk about maybe the most misunderstood and underused plugin of all the RR suite, yet it can prove itself useful in certain situations.

Sometimes a captive may want to change position, if her restraints allow. Or rather, when she thinks that if she was bound that way in RL, she would have a chance to wriggle to a different position. For example her hands could be cuffed behind her back, and if she was fit and nimble enough she would be able to move them to the front after some squirming. That's the purpose of the Wriggle plugin, to give the captive a chance to wriggle to a different position, when possible.


First of all, you cannot wriggle from just any position to just any other position, it has to make sense. You can move your cuffed hands from front to back, back to front, but not from the sides to the back or whatnot, because it would imply a change in how the cuffs are locked, and that wouldn't make much sense without the key.

But enough chit-chatting, let's try a practical example. There, my hands are cuffed behind my back, and I'm blocked. Remember the tutorial about arms restraints ? When my hands are cuffed behind me, I can't touch anything anymore. But right now it may be a problem, I might need to touch something, operate something, or open a box, or do whatever I need to do that my cuffs prevent. In other words, I need to move those hands to in front of me ! And if I don't have a key, there is only one solution : the Wriggle plugin.




Let's just look at the menu of this plugin, I go to Plugins > Wriggle and here is what I get :


It asks me to choose which pose I am aiming at, i.e. where my wriggling would take me in case I succeeded. There is only one choice, "1 Hnd front", because realistically I could only move my hands to the front from where they are. So I press that button.



Whoa. What's this ? "Progression", "Chances", "Pot"... are we in Vegas now ? Where do I insert my tokens ? Well ok, hold fire and let me explain. "Tokens" in this plugins are the tries that you spend when you try to struggle out from your restraints. Remember that tutorial ? Struggling consumes tries, and you recover them more or less quickly depending on how well you are doing. Well Wriggling also consumes tries, that's the same energy source (your sweat). Basically this means that you can either struggle or wriggle, but not both. Wriggling is meant to be easier, though.

So what you have to "pay" for wriggling is tries. When you attempt to wriggle, you have 3 choices :

* Soft, consuming one try
* Medium, consuming two tries
* Hard, consuming three tries

And for every attempt, you have a chance to progress or not. Of course the harder you wriggle, the higher the chance, and it is stated on the menu itself.

When you wriggle, you do not actually lose tries right away. They go into the "pot" instead, with a 1:1 ratio (i.e. every try you bet goes into the pot). But if you fail an attempt, the pot loses double the amount of tries you have just bet ! But before talking about the pot, let's try to wriggle a little.


I press "Soft", and immediately the restraints says "You progress a little in your wriggling..." and I notice the progress bar on the menu has gained a little step (marked with a ">") to indicate that I am making progress. The goal is actually to fill up the progress bar. At the same time, the Pot is equal to 1, because I have "spent" one try in order to attempt this move. And succeeded so far. Okay then, 9 more steps to go.



I press "Medium" because I feel lucky (even if there is no stupidest thing to say than "I feel lucky", it could even qualify for "famous last words"). Notice that "Medium" has exactly one more chance than "Soft", but it costs 2 tries. This time the restraint says "You progress a little in your wriggling, and your chances of success are now higher...". Woohoo ! All the probabilities have been increased by one ! It's going to be easier to wriggle now, and cheaper ! Oh, and I've made one more step on the progress bar, and the Pot is now equal to 3 (1 for the Soft move, then 2 for the Medium one).


Ok so now that I have made 2 steps and both were successes, my 3 tries spent are all in the pot. If I pressed "Cancel" now they would be given back to me, and my progress would have been cancelled, and I would be back to square one, not losing anything and not winning anything either. But I won't press Cancel. I would if I desperately needed the tries in the pot to, say, struggle.


Let's fast-forward a little instead, let's say I have made 6 steps and the pot is now 8. I choose "Hard" this time, spending 3 tries to maximize my chances. However this results in a failure, and the pot is now reduced by twice the number of tries I bet ! That's 6 tries lost ! It's back down to 2 (even if I only spent 3 tries, but they obviously didn't make it to the pot).

This leaves me no choice than to go ahead, because the pot has suddenly become far less interesting. If I pressed "Cancel" now, I would only get 2 tries back and lose all my 5 steps, after having spent 8 tries. That would be 6 tries wasted ! Note that if I wriggled Hard at the beginning of the progress, and missed without losing all my steps, the pot would go down to 0 but not lower. This is interesting because it saves me from wasting too many tries.


Ok, this is pretty straightforward from now on, I think you got the point. The strength of the wriggling can be Soft, Medium or Hard, the stronger the more chances but also the more expensive. Internally, the plugin "throws a 10-sided die" at each wriggle attempt, the lower the result the more likely to progress one step forward. If the result is low enough, then the chances are even increased for later, but if the result is too high they are lowered instead !


And what happens if I actually manage to make all 10 steps ? Well the cuffs are automatically relocked into the pose I have selected in the first place (in this case "1 Hnd front"), and I get back all my tries because this is actually a new pose !



Oh, here is a little hint for you since you've read this far : the more you struggle (and make progress in struggling), the looser the restraint, hence the higher the chances at wriggling ! It is something like... hmm... *cough*onemorechanceperfivesuccesses*cough*. Hey, I've said it !


Have fun !
Marine