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.