How do you add slice of life stuff to standard murderhobo games...

How do you add slice of life stuff to standard murderhobo games? Like mechanically--not just by roleplaying doing the laundry.

Fetch quests

Can you elaborate?

rope them into having to interact with normal folks or settle down for a bit. frame it as a grand quest of protecting a young noble in a diplomatic stay out of the borders and turn it into them babysitting a brat and their maid/butler/friends/whatever with no fucking actual threat or danger maybe. Pay is, of course, reliant on the kid's satisfaction with the service.

Take mechanics from other systems to facilitate it.

Downtime mechanics.

"Oh dear adventurers the mining caves have become infested with golems and now we can't mine please help us clear them out"

We just got railroaded/hooked into saving a girl from some goblins who were new to town.

You could even be shameless and say you want them to hunt X boars for meat/hide and say there's a job call at the tavern. Or beat up X cute mushrooms/slimes for the town's culinary festival. Or it's the town's annual squirrel extermination/flying cabbage Monster harvesting season.

You know. THOSE fetch quests.

Let people make up food descriptions and bonuses. Better sounding descriptions on how & what they cook get better bonuses.

i gave the players a pet or three, and they had followers (ship's crew) for a bit they'd gamble with. let a rogue slight of hand to ball-in-a-cup trick pocket change off of folks. have a young couple insist the holyman of the party stay in town to oversee their wedding.

but if you meant like a non combat encounter, the "Book of Challenges, Dungeon Rooms, Puzzles, and Traps" has a couple of good ones. One I ran is the gang happened upon a shack in the woods near a road with a bunch of broken cages in an open doorway and a fat little man shrieking pathetically. he was delivering potential familiars to a gnome who loved there but oh no, he dropped the cages. party has to try to wrangle: a cat, a bat, a snake, a rat, and a hawk. without letting any eat eachother/escape/get harmed.

I honestly wouldn't. Not everything needs dedicated mechanics and I feel it often hurts the immersion when you get +20% HP, just for eating some food you made.
Roleplay is love, roleplay is life. A murderhobo won't suddenly see the light if he is just bribed by a bonus to go through the bare minimum motions. Players have to find joy in the roleplaying itself for it to be good.

If you want slice of life just play Ryuutama.

Your classes are tied to trades so murderhoboing takes a seat to haberdashery and general comfyness.

> mechanically--not just by roleplaying doing the laundry.

Uh so roll for it? Like
>OK so I am doing my laundry
>sure. Roll for laundry skill
>it's a 3
>shit bro you mixed a red sock in with your whites. Now your white paladin tunic is pink
...some time later
>I swing at the orc
>roll to hit
>its a 13. I miss right?
>normally you would, but in the orc is confused by the 6 foot knight wearing pink in front of him that he forgets to dodge. You hit him
>yay for laundry rules

>Like mechanically
Doesn't that kind of defeat the point of low stakes slice of life stuff? That said, the only way I can truly imagine this is by having a coherent system and costs associated with running a business and/or building a house. A murder hobo half elf rogue slut is a lot different if she has her papa's bakery to return to, for example. It's also a nice way to add a new angle to her personality. The question of how a baker's daughter became a rogue in the first place is curious, and what she'll do when she gets done being a rogue is also interesting to ask.

Is it a good system?

Seems like the way to go forward is to have two systems. One for combat, one for home/work. Sure, you go murderhoboing at the Lord's request to clear the nearby forests of a worrying amount of Kobolds, but you still have a farm to tend at the end of the day. Nights which you try to stay awake to catch that fox that's been stealing your chickens. Festivals to attend and (wo)men to woo with the tale of how you caught a walking mouse THIS big.

Though you might want to run this by the players because some are only into the murder/loot/spend cycle.

Sounds like something from the Necropolis webcomic.
>Child acquires skills/equipment that elevates them (martially) above her fellows
>Said fellows come to the child for help that they can not achieve otherwise

Doesn't even have to be a magical gift/calling, just roll some crits in a row and there the myth will be sown.

Penalties to social interactions for poor personal hygine.
Increased chance of infected wounds from scraps of dirty, germ-ridden clothing being forced into them.
Slower healing rates from poor nutrition if they just rely on basic dried rations instead of adding fresh fruit and vegetables to their diet (scurvy is a bitch!)
Creatures with a sense of smell get a bonus for detecting their unwashed bodies and equipment.
Poorly maintained equipment becomes more prone to breakage, possibly losing or damaging valuable items when pouches ,etc., fall apart from rotting seams.

>Is it a good system?
It's pretty cute

Have people acquire Stress or Trauma during adventures they need to reduce with wacky low-stakes filler. Voila, suddenly your players will regularly play out Beach/Hotsprings episodes.

I like how CLASEW handles it. Basically there's a stress mechanic similar to Maid, but it's a general-use system.

That dragon.

CLASEW?

>How do you add slice of life stuff to...
I don't because slice of life media is for losers

>party has to try to wrangle: a cat, a bat, a snake, a rat, and a hawk. without letting any eat each other/escape/get harmed.
Easy, you take one of them back with you across the river so that none of the two who will eat each other are ever left alone.

Have apprentices and followers show up.

Have a villager take a pc on a date

Couldn't you force min-maxer and murderhobos into role playing by adding mechanics that require them to do so. Like making them actually have to eat and order food, cook, make camp, maintain their weapons, or manage inventory capacity and weight limits?

Or would they just get pissed because those "rules" aren't in the book and throw a fit?

>How do you add slice of life stuff to standard murderhobo games? Like mechanically

I built a cooking system. The players can cook food once a session to earn Inspiration points for the whole party (D&D 5E). The amount of Inspiration points they earn is dependent on:

1. Number of ingredients used
2. Quality of ingredients used
3. Nutritional balance of the cooked meal

Each ingredient adds a dice to the cooking dice pool. The quality of the ingredient effects the size of each dice. The cooking dice pool earns bonus for each different nutrient it contains (meat, fish, grain, vegetable & fruits, etc...). The higher they roll the cooking dice pool, the more Inspiration points they earn for the session. Sometimes special ingredients will grant special mechanical bonus besides Inspiration points.

This directly incentivizes the players to think about cooking and gather ingredients. They will do shit like collect Kobold eggs and cave shrimp.

... Do you read Dungeon Meshi?

Is the DM.

Thinking about your question and I realised that my party has the opposite "problem"
We all like to roleplay downtime stuff/little things whenever have time, like buying personal stuff with no use gameplay wise, befriending npcs, playing, gambling, enjoying food and drinks or just relaxing after a hard day

Am I weird for not seeing the appeal of most slice-of-life stuff? What entertainment is to be had from watching people do mundane stuff like brush their teeth and wait impatiently for their microwave meal to finish cooking?

I can kinda relate which is why I hate most slice of life shows. But, I think the concept for RPing is to develop not only the characters in more ways than simple adventuring might, but also to build on their surroundings more.

You might for instance become more inclined to feel a personal attatchment to a place if you're spending down time in between quests always in the same town. Which in turn can make things more meaningful when it happens there.

It's like living your own life vicariously, with the bad parts plucked away or made easy.

But user, the pain makes me feel alive

Real life is full of pain. Entertainment is what we use to escape the pain, or deal with it through catharsis.

Which is why I will never understand slice-of-life. Without pain real life is boring as shit.

Add a daynight cycle and work the downtime into part of the day.

Sounds like you don't need an escape. Good on you.

I mean, to be fair, most SOL stuff isn't THAT much SOL. A lot of them still have some kind of story, even if they're more mundane and small-scale things than one is used to in fiction - like, instead of saving the world, the main characters are winning a student council election, or whatever. Usually, the emphasis is on the characters and how they develop and interaction with one another. SOL makes a lot more sense if you think about it like a character piece. Of course, most of the genre is crap, but 90% of everything is crap.

Though, there is a kind of performance art that boils down to watching some actor do mundane things like cook, read, sleep, etc.

To add to that, nearly all SOL anime is set in high school. High school in Japan is a super formative time, a lot moreso than it is in the US (and it's pretty central to the teenage identity in the Us, too) - it's pretty much the last time Japanese people have a life that isn't defined by their career and work, and OOC, it's a good excuse to have a relatively diverse cast of characters who have a reason to be around one another.

A lot of Japanese people find a lot more nostalgia in high school than they do in the west, so anime and manga's obsession with high school SOL doesn't always translate culturally. A mundane high school setting is kind of comfy for a twenty-something Japanese adult who remembers it as the last time they had actual free time.