If you’ve been following this blog, then by now you know that Slime Story is my RPG of “teenagers hunting cute monsters for spending money.” Basically, imagine monsters from Ragnarok Online and Maple Story invading American suburbia. I finally have the new playtest document for Slime Story ready to go. It’s very different from–and hopefully altogether better–than the last one.
This game is a weird hybrid of traditional, indie, and Japanese RPG design sensibilities, or to put it another way, Meikyuu Kingdom, D&D4e, and Mouse Guard were all key inspirations (though there’s a long list of others). It has a rigid scene structure (you alternate between encounters and interludes), powers usable depending on the game’s time units, an abstract range map, characters defined by a “class” and “clique,” achievements (kind of like in video games, but a bit free-form), relationship mechanics, and other wacky stuff. It’s also meant to be largely player-led, and protagonists need to define and pursue their own goals.
Playtest Notes
I’m making this playtest draft publicly available so that people can read it and perhaps even try it out. If you do, I want to hear all about it! Tell me what you think, tell me how it plays, and share your war stories! However, it hasn’t been playtested yet AT ALL–I’ll hopefully be rectifying that fairly soon–so some of the stuff that I thought looked good on paper might not work at all.
The playtest version is deliberately incomplete, on account of me not wanting to try to come up with over 100 Talents and 40 or 50 monsters just to wind up having to rewrite them to make up for rules changes. I also left out the supplemental rules chapter (which is meant to have rules for experimental alchemy and quests, amongst other things) because it’s nowhere near ready. There’s enough to sit down and play the game though, and the overall goal at this stage is simply to make sure the basic design is sound.
Tasty, Tasty Files
I’ve put together the necessary materials in PDF form to the best of my ability, though especially for the character sheet I don’t really have the necessary skills to make something great-looking. For action cards, I recommend just using index cards, but most anything will do. Likewise, you can easily substitute miniatures for the battlefield tokens (which at this stage are just a placeholder using dingbat fonts).
Slime Story RPG Rules (Playtest v2) PDF
Protagonist Sheet
Secondary Character Sheets
Battlefield Map
Battlefield Tokens
Rules Quick Reference Sheet
Yaruki Zero Games 
Thank you! Now I’ll have to gather together a group for some online playtesting.
Just a note: the descriptions of Blaster and Cartridge upgrades are a bit vague as to whether they’re melee-only, but the text talking about taking effect on a melee hit and the existence of specialized ammo with item loadouts strongly suggests that those two upgrades’re only really meant to apply to melee weapons. You might want to specifically note that like you did with the extra range upgrade being missile weapon only.
Hmm. From comparing the costs to make things versus the cost to buy them:
Some items have trade-in costs equal to the cost to buy them (elemental bits). This is a situation you would virtually never see in retail but more likely to happen in informal barter/trade which’s also a part of the game. Not sure whether this should be changed.
There doesn’t seem to be much detailed in what parts can be used to craft what potions, but that can be forgiven in a playtest document. With the exception of stumpy leaves being used for healing potions, it’s mostly up to GM rulings. Though that alone is a significant cost advantage–assume an alchemist with a Wiki of 9 (this is the baseline for Weird Alchemists, and most cliques can get this just by putting their freebie point here). They would, on a roll of 3 (not using 2 because I assume the fumble rule applies), make 3 healing potions at a net cost of 3 influence per (3 for materials, 6 for the trade-in cost). And that’s minimum. An average roll of 7 gets you 4 potions for a cost of 2.25 each–at least half the cost.
That’s a cost reduction of over half on average for potions. Which sounds reasonable for a talent. But Renown can allow you to slash the costs of items up to half anyway. Assuming you have decent Guild, which Weirdos and Geeks in especial won’t have. Hmm. I suppose it doesn’t look too off just from a reading, though I’d have to playtest.
Uh. Sorry for all that rambling pondering. In Slime Story terms, I would definitely be a Weirdo/Geek supporting character. ^.^;;