Slime Story is a game I've been working on for entirely too long. The short short tagline is "teenagers hunt cute monsters for spending money." It takes place in a world much like ours, but ten years ago magical portals opened up all over the world and started dumping out cute monsters like something out of a Korean MMO. In some parts of the world people are fighting wars over control of portals, but in small towns in America teenagers have taken up monster hunting as a hobby. This game is about those teenagers, a mixture of hunting and everyday life stuff. Yesterday I finally ran a playtest session with my regular gaming group.

Here's the current playtest draft (including most of the paper fiddly bits necessary to play), and here's my more detailed playtest report.

The first playtest was very encouraging. I think the basic rules, especially for Encounters (fights with monsters) are basically sound, if in need of lots of refinement. The major issue I'm grappling with right now is how to better encourage role-playing, because for all the elements of the game relating to character interaction, the first playtest session was kind of flat. Some of that was basically mistakes made in preparing characters and explaining the game, though.

A session (episode) of Slime Story is divided into Encounters and Interludes. Encounters are simple tactical monster fights, while Interludes are meant to basically give the characters free reign to recover, pursue social stuff, etc. Although players can have social elements be flashbacks or take place over cell phones (call up the girl you want to ask out, or flash back to when you saw her in person the other day), Interludes basically take place where the characters are out in a semi-wilderness area outside down hunting monsters. One of the key problems with the playtest was that a lot of the secondary characters (more or less NPCs, though players can also play them) didn't have any particular reason to be out there. Also, I should've made it clearer to the players that you can role-play and then select mechanical elements to engage accordingly. (So for example asking a girl out could turn into a Bonding action, a social conflict, or a Recovery depending on how things work out.)

I'm not sure I've explained it adequately, but I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to make it so the rules better encourage players to engage the social side of the situation and role-play more.

"Role-play" encompasses a vast range of behaviours. I'm guessing you mean "describe what your character does, and say what they say" or something like that.

A trick that I've found useful is to reverse the order of some rules. Istead of saying "choose a type of scene to have, and then play out the scene" you say "play out a scene, and then the other players tell you what kind of scene that was" or whatever.

Something else that might be a problem is that tactical fighting games are like the death of "role-playing" in the sense you're using it. In tactical games you often don't need to interact with the shared fiction of the game at all, and you're simply interacting with a set of rules. In my experience people find it difficult to switch between modes, and will start to see everything else as padding between monster fights.

Ewen, you know about Bliss Stage / Mouse Guard style interludes, yeah? Where you get resource refreshes for having specific things happen? That might be a way to make sure the interludes have teeth and are not completely disconnected from the rest of the game.

So, I had a new idea for making Slime Story work more the way I want it to, but I wanted to get some outside opinions on it before I really tackle the task of basically ripping out major chunks of the rules to put new stuff in (yet again).

The idea is that the game in large part revolves around two currencies, called Awesome Points and Suck Points, which are sort of an abstract representation of of the potential for awesomeness and suckiness in a character's life. You start out with a small number of AP, and get another one any time you roll doubles on a check (it's 2d6 roll-over) other than snake eyes (which is a fumble). Characters can spend AP or take SP to use special abilities, recover from damage, etc. during battles, but other characters can use them to make their lives difficult during interludes.

The procedures for this part are where I seem to be floundering. My tentative idea is to basically have characters spend another characters' AP to deliver an "ultimatum," kind of like when you've won a conflict in In a Wicked Age (you can impose a Status Effect like Angry, Exhausted, Depressed, etc.). I like the idea of having role-playing scenes be RP with some teeth at the end rather than a blow-by-blow conflict mechanic (personal preference). I'm thinking they should be tied to the target character's Issues/Goal/Connections (your girlfriend can mess with you better than other people), though I don't know that I would want to *limit* interlude vignettes to that. I'm thinking characters would also be able to spend AP during interludes for beneficial effects.

And there's the question of how the point economy would really work out, and whether the four attributes (Guild, Wiki, Hunter, Warrior) would all be useful enough if the social side of things doesn't have much in the way of checks to make.

Over in one of the Accountability threads, Ewen wrote:

I'm definitely making them (interludes) untethered in time from the monster hunting run the PCs are on (so they can be flashbacks or even flash-forwards as a matter of course), but I need to figure out what to do with the Awesome Points/Suck Points mechanic as it relates to interlude scenes. The idea is that you accumulate Suck Points basically by doing special stuff to save your bacon and keep fighting, but then other players can use them against you. I was thinking spending someone else's Suck Point would be like jumping to the part of an In a Wicked Age conflict where you negotiate consequences, but I'm not at all sure that's the right way to go.

Question #1: Why would you want to inflict Suck on your fellow players? (honest question, not criticism)

Question #2: Does gaining a Suck point give the same mechanical benefits as spending an Awesome point?

Question #3: Is there any limitation on how many Suck points you can have?

Question #3a: Is there any limitation on how many Suck points can be used against you in any given scene?

Question #3b: Is there any limitation on who may inflict Suck on whom?

You misunderstood my #1. Let me ask again. Why would I want to use your Suck points to make your character's life suck?

This is both ambiguous and intriguing:

But the idea is that you can get what you want from other characters, as well as avoid the GM inflicting something worse.

Least interesting question first: Why is the GM's assumed to be worse?

More important question: What do you mean "you can get what you want from other characters"?

Ah. Hmm. Is Slime Story play meant to be competitive, or antagonistic between players? I get the strong impression that IaWA is meant to be competitive/antagonistic, so these "do this, or you'll get this" rules work for it. Fastlane also had a rule that did something similar that could be used on NPCs or PCs. I once beat the hell out of another PC with the rule, because he wouldn't accept owing me a 'favor'. I hadn't really gotten the impression that Slime Story was about those sorts of PvP conflicts, so if it is, that definitely puts a new spin on things.

What is the GMs motivation for hammering players with their SP? Is there supposed to be direct competition between the GM and the players?

I'm going to rephrase your reply, to make sure I properly understand it.

The fiction can be fluffy bunnies (that you kill!) or sniping backstabbing soap opera, with either way being equally valid ways to play. The mechanics shouldn't advocate one end of the spectrum over the other, leaving that choice purely up to the players. Bad things should happen to the characters, either as a causal result of what happens in encounters, or only a thematic result. These bad things should be mechanically regulated and modeled. This happening should never, ever be the cause of irritation between players, even if it sucks for the characters. Put another way, you should be invested in the bad shit that happens to your character, rather than merely accepting, grudging or otherwise.

The GM inflicts the Suck because it is part of his job to do so, as this allows the Suck to be siphoned off, and because it can makes for a more interesting story.

Additionally, all of the Suck meets anime genre conventions.

Assuming my paraphrase is basically what you meant, I'm going to go forward with some specific advice/observations.

There needs to be incentive for the player whose character has accumulated Suck points to get rid of them. Mechanical incentive isn't necessary, but it does allow you as the designer to give incentive, rather than relying on the group simply being invested in the fictional merits of Suck. This can either be carrot (you get something by your character getting hit with the Suck) or stick (those Suck points are bad for you in some tangible way. Get rid of them before it gets to be too much!) or some mix of the two. Ideally, this means that the player will welcome either another player or the GM using their Suck points, completely aside from the fictional concerns.

In addition to or instead of the above, there should be a choice to be made in the use of Suck points. One should lead toward the fluffy bunny end of the spectrum, and the other should lead toward the backstabby end. The incentives for each should either be identical, or balanced in such a way as to allow the choice to be based entirely on personal preference or thematic concerns. The ideal result here is that the spectrum is highlighted, with people realizing they CAN make the choice to go either way, or thread a middle path between the two. This is of course based on the assumption that the spectrum is important to you.

I have more, but it took longer than you might expect to write those last two paragraphs, and I've lost the coherent concepts I had when I began. I'll wait for your response, and play it by ear from there.