GMing Slice of Life games

[CeeDub]

Salutations!

Has anyone ever run Slice of Life games, i.e. games about the daily lives of extraordinary characters rather than their thrilling adventures?

Do you need to find players who are into that sort of thing, or do you sell it to the players you have, and if so, how? You probably won't get a min-maxing murderhobo player interested in such a game, but even for players who like actual roleplaying, slice of life might sound a little too low-stakes. Or maybe I imagine it more mellow than it actually is.

Does anyone have some pointers on how you've run such games? Which power level, was it a one shot, an episode, or a whole campaign, what kind of adversity do the characters have to overcome, how do you get the players invested... maybe even whole plots? Any campaign notes you could share?

[Ejidoth]

It's doable, though GURPS is definitely more mechanically oriented toward danger, combat, and overcoming challenges.

My attempts at this usually only last a few sessions before we end up doing something different.

I find it's harder to keep up, as the GM: In a normal game, faceless mooks with guns, fantasy monsters, and various obstacles and traps are easy to run without putting a ton of thought into them beforehand. In a more relaxed low-stakes setting like this you're mostly going to be running NPCs with relatively detailed personalities and motivations, and that's much trickier.

[johndallman]

The Elizabethan G:MtA game I played in years ago would quite often have slice-of-life periods of half or a whole session. The players all liked interacting with Elizabethan London and there was lots of it. This just happened naturally rather than being something the GM was trying to do, as far as I could tell.

[whswhs]

I don't run pure slice of life games that I can recall. But a lot of my campaigns have had large amounts of slice of life. This was true, for example, for my fantasy campaign Manse, which had a lot of scenes of the apprentice mages/lords in the classroom, and some of the servants going about their duties, plus occasional scenes of dances, sports, and other social events.

[MrFix]

The main hurdle, as others have noted, is that your main work is acting out multiple unconnected personalities, since they're the source of the drama and plot. For me personally the skill of writing people is much more difficult than the skill of writing scenes or events.

I'd say it's also hard to find players who'll be on the same wave with you, since GURPS is classically an adventure game.

[AlexanderHowl]

The college roommate angle is probably the easiest route to take with Slice of Life game.

[CeeDub]

Good points, everyone, thank you!

You are right, roleplaying a lot of NPCs could be tricky. Although... I might be able to offload some of the effort of coming up with all those NPCs onto the players - if I'm sneaky. During character creation, I could ask them to spend X amount of (bonus) points on Allies, Contacts, Dependents, and Enemies, and ask them to describe each of them with two or three sentences. Something I like to do anyway in games that focus more on roleplaying and investigation rather than shooting and stabbing.

<kidding>However, I strongly disagree with Ejidoth and MrFix about the suitability of GURPS. GURPS can do anything. Don't you know what the "U" stands for!?</kidding>

Seriously, though, why would GURPS not do well for this? Sure, GURPS has a lot of action rules, but there's no obligation to use them; and sure, there are some games (e.g. Monsterhearts), with mechanics specifically geared towards social interaction, but I doubt they do it better, if only because they tend to force (melo)drama.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The college roommate angle is probably the easiest route to take with Slice of Life game.

Erm... college roommate angle? Should I know what that means? Perhaps I should brush up on SoL tropes before I consider this any further.

[Ejidoth]

Originally Posted by CeeDub

Seriously, though, why would GURPS not do well for this? Sure, GURPS has a lot of action rules, but there's no obligation to use them; and sure, there are some games (e.g. Monsterhearts), with mechanics specifically geared towards social interaction, but I doubt they do it better, if only because they tend to force (melo)drama.

Oh, it'll still work with GURPS. I recommend getting GURPS: Social Engineering if you don't have it already, as it has a number of suggestions and mechanics and such for more social oriented games.

Trait pricing is going to be pretty off-balance for a primarily non-combat game, though, so keep an eye out for that. A lot of stuff is priced for combat utility.

Although it might balance out if you ensure there's still some kinds of physical challenges in the game, even if they're low-stakes. A game with younger characters in school might have some or all of them on a sports team. Or people living in a lower-tech setting might need to occasionally deal with difficult chores or wilderness survival stuff. Basically, give the people that bought ST, DX, and HT stuff to do, too, so it doesn't all skew wildly in favor of the high-IQ builds.

If you're doing something like a superhero sitcom where all the actual superheroics are offscreen and it's just about the day-to-day mundane stuff, or something similar, I'd actually reduce the combat abilities like innate attack, DR, etc. to 1/5 cost or so, sort of like alternate abilities: charging something, because they'll still probably find a way to occasionally make them useful now and then, but way less than full value since they're primarily there for background purposes.

[MrFix]

On topic of why GURPS might be lacking for slice of life games. It has very robust combat system, but majority of other systems lack serious choice or depth, limiting mostly to skill rolls, contests and resists and then stacking bonuses. I am certain there might be an expansion for social things in Social Engineering book, but I've never had a chance to see them in action.

It's sort of like running a game about medical staff, with GURPS mostly assuming that majority of the medicine is 4-5 types of rolls that cover the entire activity of curing somebody. There's an expansion for that, a bit, in Low Tech and it's Companion 1, but it's somewhat limited in scope due to focus on TL0-4.

Because of that, some serious homebrewing is ought to take place if you want people to enjoy the game for it's mechanical aspects too, and not only storywriting and characters.

[ravenfish]

Originally Posted by MrFix

On topic of why GURPS might be lacking for slice of life games. It has very robust combat system, but majority of other systems lack serious choice or depth, limiting mostly to skill rolls, contests and resists and then stacking bonuses. I am certain there might be an expansion for social things in Social Engineering book, but I've never had a chance to see them in action.

It's sort of like running a game about medical staff, with GURPS mostly assuming that majority of the medicine is 4-5 types of rolls that cover the entire activity of curing somebody. There's an expansion for that, a bit, in Low Tech and it's Companion 1, but it's somewhat limited in scope due to focus on TL0-4.

Because of that, some serious homebrewing is ought to take place if you want people to enjoy the game for it's mechanical aspects too, and not only storywriting and characters.

If you're running a slice-of-life game, there's an argument to be made that being able to make one or two rolls and know whether you've succeeded and then get straight back to the roleplaying is an advantage rather than a disadvantage.