Ever think of running a slice of life game? If so, what system and/or setting?
Ever consider doing it in a setting that would normally not be conducive to it, like Sci-Fi or Cyberpunk? I've seen pictures of that one bartending game and wonder how far that concept could get at the table. What about a game where your goal is to secure a livelihood, more than the adventure itself? Would you actually play in that kind of sandbox?
Difficult. Good slice-of-life shows or books have more control over the story and atmosphere than a DM does at the table. "Securing your livelihood" can be a good motivation, but a game about paying the lease on your storefront isn't going to hold the group's attention without some magic or mayhem.
Sci-Fi and Cyberpunk are probably the best genres to do so, since solo employment stuff is a lot more viable.
An important thing to note is that this places an emphasis on NPCs and their interactions. You have to make people want to stick around or you'll mess up like me, where I GM'd a solo campaign where the PC was a cloned Assassin now working as a Barrista since her employer went under, then proceeded to kill her mother and expose to the world that the wealthy were creating engineered waifus for their children after bashing a security guard's head open on the concrete
I'd love to be able to play a space trucker or even a standard fantasy trader. Set up a trading company, work out deals with shops, secure protection for the transports and such. Its one of the main reasons I enjoy Elite Dangerous, I get to be a space trucker there.
What kind of story tropes do you think are exclusive to single-author deals? What kind do you think would still work in games other than "secure livelihood"
You know any systems for this kind of thing? Something like Harvest Moon or the like. Does that exist?
You just named the system. Videogames are all based on numbers. Look at the numbers and transfer it to paper.
While I don't think my group would particularly enjoy a pure slice of life game, basically all my games include heavy slice of life elements. Between adventures, missions or action sequences, giving characters downtime to RP with one another or NPC's and explore a bit more of their characters is something we really enjoy.
Weirdly, the basic structure of it was something I got from AdEva, way back in the day. It was a bad game otherwise, but the combination of tense, frenetic fight scenes and then slower, character focused sessions or minisessions with one player or a smaller group proved to be a very effective structure for a game.
God, I hate shitty inside acronyms.
What is AdEva?
The most I ever get into this is paying a mortgage in Traveller.
I need to secure my livelihood in the real world, I don't need to do it in a game.
Adeptus Evangelion, a Veeky Forums adjacent homebrew trying to run Neon Genesis Evangelion games in a hack of Dark Heresy. Most versions of it were bad and worked better as a weird, janky super robot game than the actual dark, psychological storytelling they were aiming for. For all its faults it had some good ideas, even if the community was fucking weird.
The reason this user got into the habit of slice of slice after playing it is that AdEva has downtime mechanics. You lay out what you'll be doing for the next week, then have scenes within that period, IIRC.
Can I ask what other games you've used this kind of pacing in, and how it works out? I'm in an AdEva game right now, and I also really love the pacing, but I'm not sure how it'd work with, say, a D&D party, or a group of Shadowrunners.
There's a systrem called Ryuutama that purports to do just what you wanted.
To me Ryuutama just looks like a perfectly ordinary GAMIST rpg, with a focus on low fantasy enviromental challenges, but perhaps the author hasn't played widely and thinks he has made something unique.
Or perhaps it is something magical, I haven't played it.
Shadowrun is one of the games I found it worked best in. Between runs, doing downtime stuff with the characters in a non-professional context was a really enjoyable part of the game.
I've done it in D&D games too, the adventurers chilling out in the local town between adventurers, bonding or boozing or going on goofier side adventures that mostly entail slice of life antics.
It's also used in a few Legends of the Wulin games, some I run and some I play. None are in the base setting, though, so it's not exactly a trait of the system in that case.
I think you've bought into the hype and misinterpreted the game. Yeah, the thing is comfy, but it's not slice-of-life It's an exploration game at its core, so you're always traveling.
What areas of rules are missing to make it, (or indeed any game), a "slice-of-life" game?
How is always travelling not slice-of-life?
It doesn't have rules for "living", it has rules that make it hard to stay in one place and are geared towards traveling through mappable landscape.
You're not getting a look into someone's daily life, you're getting to look at their probably once in a lifetime adventure. The PCs are (usually unknowingly) creating a story to be fed to a dragon that hasn't been born yet.
I mean, okay, that's a clever response to an extent, but I'd really appreciate a suggestion that doesn't require keeping a spreadsheet to work.
Though now that I think about it, using a google sheet as a map for a farm with little images for the crops would be pretty genius.
Then simplify it.
That's essentially, you know, making a system. I could do it no problem, but I was asking if you knew any that already exist.
Agreed. Just move the ship around from port to port and try and make a buck.
I sort of like all the tedious bean counting though.
If the problem was that you didn't want to make a system, then why not just say that as the first response?
Slice of Life.
In Rogue Trader.
As Necrons.
FUND IT
MAID has tables for sci-fi.
For real, though, I'd love to do a game balancing combat and slice-of-life stuff. Maybe it's a group of normal people who owe the wrong people a helluva lot of favors? Maybe they're Manchurian candidates?
Half the reason I love cyberpunk is the view into the life of the shitty side of the future, and not having PC-tier mobility and power half the time is a great way to explore that high tech, low life ethos even more.
My very first campaign was a cyberpunk one with heavy slice of life. It was fun having them scramble to get MegaXmas! (TM) gifts for their folks, go on a double date to save their friend from with a killer robot, and assassinate crime bosses at cannibal restauraunts.
You guys are making me want a tabletop Animal Crossing.
Players are Humans who try and run a town that they’ve inherited, keep everyone fed and happy, and alternate between working together and trying to show each other up so that they can be elected Mayor once the game is over.
If the town survives, that is...
(Don’t think too dark, villagers would just get on the train and move out.)
You know this shit exists and is named Golden Sky Stories, right?
It even has decent refluffs, one for DND (in which you can play a freindly beholder).
The biggest challenge I think would be the monotony. Doing the same thing over and over to achieve some sort of goal. This can work in a single player game as the player sets the pace. But in a group with different preferences for grinding speed, that becomes much harder.
Golden Sky Stories is not actually structured in a Slice-of-Life way. There's usually someone you need to help, and you go and help them.
People seem to confuse a comfy aesthetic with Slice of Life a lot. They're not the same
If by "living" rule-systems you mean jobs and neighbours and such it feels like relative mall effort to mod them on top of existing systems mentioned in this thread.. I mean you can always reskin cooking the fantasy pies or whatever as synth-food and narcotics.
been running a persona game for a while now, and the players have spent so little time fighting shadows and instead uping their S-links, its become almost a pure slice of life at this point.
I fucking love it, they now have waifus from the cast of npcs I made