Nothing particularly Easter-y going on with me, yet I have time to put up two blog posts in one day. Go figure.

I’ve been pretty badly stuck on what to do with Slime Story for a while, but I think I’ve finally figured out where to go next. The game has involved ripping big chunks out and putting new stuff in every step of the way, and this is no exception. The major issue is how to set up interludes to do what I want them to, and the solution has wound up involving stuff that resembles bits of Bliss Stage, Meikyuu Kingdom, and Nechronica. (And it will no doubt require plenty of playtesting to get right.)

So, the game has two currencies, called Awesome Points and Suck Points. They represent general positive and negative trends in a character’s life, which can be psychological or karma or whatever. You gain AP when you roll doubles (other than snake eyes), raise a connection by a rank, and certain other things, and you take SP when you roll snake eyes (a Fumble), get taken out in an encounter, or voluntarily take them to use things you’d otherwise have to spend AP on. Characters can end up taking SP to get through an encounter and to heal themselves afterward. All of that makes AP kind of like the Hope points in Meikyuu Kingdom, but with some weird twists. That includes making many Talents have a Cost rather than ripping off the Encounter/Daily thing from D&D4e. Another point economy to (heavily) playtest. Le sigh.

Anyway. Each character has two “Limit Breaks,” which are disadvantages that activate if they take too many SP. If you have 3 SP you have to pick one Limit Break to activates, and if you get 6+ the other one kicks in too. That’s your major incentive for getting rid of SP. I’m still working on specific Limit Breaks, but these are kind of like the fetters in Nechronica. I’m thinking there’ll be one called Clingy (for example), which requires you to stay uncomfortably close to whatever characters you have a high connection rank with, another called Unsocial that limits your ability to use teamwork or be close to others.

During interludes, each PC has the opportunity to do a quick vignette, which have wound up being a lot like Interlude Actions in Bliss Stage, which is to say you role-play, and an unrelated participant decides what mechanical effect you get. That will include a lot of the stuff I already had in the interlude rules (though significantly simplified in some cases), but removing a Suck Point will also be one of the major things you do (which also resembles the Conversation Checks in Nechronica).

I have high hopes for this whole thing working out (eventually), though it’ll take a lot of work to fully implement, especially since it’ll drastically affect the selection of Talents I need to write up. Aside from that and all the stuff I blathered about in my last blog post on Slime Story, I decided to add higher-level items crafted from monster parts, basically to give characters more crap to play with. I still need to work out more details and figure out what the heck to call them though. (And whenever I get around to working on the novel again I’m going to have a ton of setting elements to integrate.)