Tag Archives: Monsterhearts

Slime Story (Now Powered by the Apocalypse)

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RitaI had the idea for Slime Story around 2006, while I was playing Maple Story (which, somehow, is still running, so it’s had a lifespan that’s virtually unheard of in free-to-play games). It’s a Korean-made MMO/sidescroller hybrid, and thanks to spending a couple dollars on cosmetic equipment I had a girl walking around in a pleated skirt and raglan shirt, whacking monsters with a spiked club thing while listening to music on her headphones. That image became Rita (pictured to the right), who in turn became kind of a signature character for the setting. She’s an archetypal Slime Story monster hunter, and she has a popular video blog about monster hunting.

The setting is a world like ours, except that 10 years ago one-way portals opened up all over the world, dropping these MMO-like monsters into the world. It turned out that certain pieces of these monsters were useful for various purposes, from weapons to obscure industrial uses to healing potions. In many places the portals became the property of corporations or warlords, but in other places subcultures of monster hunters have popped up. In small-town America, monster hunters are mostly teenagers looking for spending money or just something to do. A company called Monster Mart has dominated the business side of monster hunting, and is the easiest place to do trade-ins and buy monster hunting gear.

It took a while for it to come together, but the first full Slime Story RPG I wrote had a manuscript of some 47,000 words. It more or less worked, but it wasn’t ever quite right, and I didn’t know how to fix it. As soon as I entertained the idea of making it as a Powered by the Apocalypse game, it started to fall into place. The first thing that really made it for me was the idea of dividing fights into mobs and raids, and handling mobs with a few quick die rolls–the “fight mobs” move. The previous game had fairly detailed combat for every single fight, whether against a dangerous dragon or mopping up slimes, and the whole concept of “summarizing” some fights is I think something I’m going to be playing with a lot in the future. It’s winding up owing a lot to Monsterhearts, but then my game is about teen drama too, albeit with a bit more of a Kevin Smith vibe, or maybe Rainbow Rowell if you prefer. Where Dragon World has a lot of my usual verbosity, so far Slime Story has a lot more of the economical writing style of Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts, which I think fits.

Monster Geeks

The big thing I realized is that deep down Slime Story is going to be a commentary on how geeks socialize. Recent events in gaming have certainly been food for thought in that respect, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the contrast between what people are saying on the surface and what lies beneath. A lot of the harassment and such we’re seeing happening seems to be rooted in a fear of marginalization, for example. Which isn’t to say that geeky relationships are always bad–far from it. It’s also about friendships formed through common interests, I think. It fits into the “being human together” thing I’ve been talking about to the point where I added “Be human together” to the list of Agendas.

The setting presents monster hunting as a hobby scene and a fandom. That creates kind of a terrarium where we can look at an artificial model of a fandom, and play around with it at the distance that creating fiction allows. How that’s going to play into the actual game is something I need to think about more, but in the setting I’ve built up monster hunting has its own weird little subculture. There’s stuff like a nerdcore rap artist called who does monster hunting songs, a documentary about hunting a dragon in New England, a middling MMO based on monster hunting that’s influenced the terminology of the hobby scene, and MonsterCon, a yearly con held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. It has its perennial issues (especially when it comes to their weird relationship with regular game hunting and firearms) and identity politics and so on. But being a physical activity mostly available in small towns (in cities portals tend to fall under the purview of companies or the authorities), it can develop more distinctly on a local level, like some kind of larp community stretching across the daily lives of a town.

Characters

Putting together character options is proving to be a really interesting exercise, since it’s a setting that cleaves a lot closer to reality that what I’m used to dealing with, and involves thinking about how people are in real life, trying to distill things down without resorting to caricature. That’s how I’ve ended up with things like the Geek’s “Looks” section turning out like this:

  • Nerdy T-shirt, worn T-shirt, or swag T-shirt
  • Overweight, scrawny, or average
  • Thick glasses, no glasses, or stylish glasses

One thing I’ve had to do is rethink the selection of cliques. I decided to keep the concept of characters having a clique and a class from the old version of the game (though it’s required some tweaks to make it work in the PbtA framework). Your class is how you fight monsters, whether with a sword (fighter), a bow and arrows (ranger), with cunning ambushes (ninja), etc., while your clique is how you function socially. Cliques were originally a set of stereotypes (Average, Geek, Jock, Popular, Punk, Weirdo), but I felt the game needed the cliques to reflect who a character is rather than the label being attached to them. A person who identifies as a “punk” could act like the queen bee, a “jock” could be a stereotypical bully, but could equally be really nice, or just really focused on self-perfection. (This also helps avoid having clique stuff overlap too much with class stuff.) The compactness of the playbook type format also makes it easier to make more of them, and it’s easier to keep from setting myself the task of squeezing out an inordinately long list of Talents for each splat.

For the time being I’ve settled on 8 classes and 8 cliques, just enough to cover some basics and fit in a couple oddballs in each category. While the cliques include the Geek and the Rebel, they also include the Touched, which is someone who’s started to commune with the slimes. This came straight from a Slime Story novel I want to write some day (“Slime Story: The Song of Michael”), and it generally plays into how the word “slime” being in the title is in fact really significant. The selection of classes meanwhile kept the ones in the old version of the game, but add the Mastermind (basically a leader/warlord type class) and the Tank (which is indeed a tank/defender).

Anyway, that’s about where I am with it right now. I’ve got my copies of Apocalypse World and the pocket Pokedex book on my desk to look to for ideas.

Dragon World: Monsterhearts Lessons

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Monsterhearts is one of those things that doesn’t necessarily interest me personally, but where I think it’s awesome that such a thing can exist. It’s an Apocalypse World hack that turns it into a teen paranormal romance game, and does a damn good job of it. It’s a genre that’s easy to make fun of–it’s aimed at women, Twilight is a seminal entry, it’s overdone to the point of getting its own shelf at bookstores–but Joe Macdalno unironically embraces it. I don’t know that it’s a game I’d want to play, but the Skins and Moves point to amazing things happening in it. The Mortal character is basically Bella Swan, and it gives you the tools to explore everything that’s messed up about that, including the things Stephenie Meyer isn’t talented enough to get into. Practically every character type makes me want to see/read something with them. “Twilight, but well-done and the boyfriend is a demon” could be amazing. (I also want a Twilight parody where the Bella type girl has a whole reverse harem of supernatural boys, but that’s neither here nor there.)

The other thing about Monsterhearts is that it really makes the framework of Apocalypse World its own. Dragon World has suffered in some places because I stuck too close to AW, whereas Monsterhearts embraces basic AW exactly as much as it needs to and no more. For example, aside from their sheer flavor, one of the things I like about the Skins in Monsterhearts is how they’re simpler in certain places. Each has only one set of stats (you get to add +1 to any one stat, which reminds me a lot of how certain Japanese TRPGs work), and the range of advancement options always include 2 slots for skin moves, 2 slots for moves from other skins, 1 gang, and a +1 to each of the four stats. Calling them something as simple and evocative as “Skins” is a nice little touch too. Even though I have a million other things to work on, reading Monsterhearts set wheels turning on Dragon World, hence this post.

I’ve done a fair amount of playtesting of Dragon World, and it’s right at that point where I know I’m onto something, but it needs work. I’ve also found that for me at least 3 players is the sweet spot, and 5-6 players is too many. I don’t know how it stacks up with other AW-derived games, but I’ve found that Dragon World requires a certain amount of GM attention per player, especially in terms of making their Temptations and Heart’s Desire relevant.

One of the biggest things I want to change is how character advancement works. Apocalypse World’s experience rules just plain don’t work well for my group. Highlighting stats is easy to forget, and it creates perverse incentives that lead to players trying to spam relevant moves. Monsterhearts includes the “Singleton Rule,” which says that you can’t mark experience from a given move or stat more than once per scene. While I like that idea–and will likely use it as a house rule any time I run AW or its progeny–for Dragon World I’m still planning to just drop the experience marking concept entirely and have players get one advancement per session. There are some other moving parts that tie into marking experience (like History), but after looking at Monsterhearts I’m feeling a lot more confident about slicing things out.

Relationship mechanics are one of those things that are very appealing for certain kinds of games, but a bit difficult to get right. Monsterhearts’ “Strings” system is note-perfect for the particular game. Strings are a currency you gain per character, and you can spend them to get an advantage over someone. Relationship mechanics have the issue that it can be hard to make them able to keep up with what’s going on in role-play, and Strings are ephemeral in just the right way, so that they don’t seem like they’d be trying to dictate or play catch-up with how characters relate to each other except insofar as they convey a very visceral advantage. This is definitely going to influence Slime Story whenever I get back into working on it. As for Dragon World, I’m thinking that while connections are awesome for developing the characters’ stories, the game doesn’t have any great need to assign a number to them. For DW’s source material I think helping or hindering others should work a little differently, and doesn’t really tie into relationships per se.

One of the big things in Dragon World that needs work is Falling Down. Not unlike Toon (or Teenagers From Outer Space), damaged characters are temporarily, comically incapacitated. The difference is that in Dragon World I made it binary–either you stay up or you Fall Down–with the caveat that for powerful enemies you need some kind of MacGuffin to make them Fall Down. As currently written, there’s the issue that PCs can be very resistant to falling down, but when they do fall down it kind of sucks because the player can’t participate in the game until the next scene, and they had no control over it. For a while I’ve been thinking about adding some kind of currency that players can spend to avoid Falling Down, and in turn I’ve been thinking that it would be very genre-appropriate for it to be easier or cheaper to avoid Falling Down by having some kind of freakout (not unlike a Maid RPG Stress Explosion) instead. I’m not sure what to call said currency, but it could well have other uses, and of course interact with certain moves. I definitely want to put a cap on how many a character can accumulate in order to prevent hoarding.

This is in addition to the stuff I was already looking into, notably story moves (a kind of temporary and sometimes detrimental move representing a story element like a curse or a certain situation) and an abstract wealth system aimed at getting PCs into trouble. I’ve also been working on an assortment of NPCs and setting elements, and trying to generally make the text better. I definitely needed a little extra distance from the text to come back to it fresh, and I can see the cracks a lot more clearly now. On the other hand this is a game I really want to play, because if I can pull it off it’ll be bursting with bright, silly fun.