Creating and GMing a Slice of Life RP

[Mollisol]

Hi all! I'm looking for pointers on creating and GMing a slice of life RP. For this post, I'm defining slice of life RP as RP that focuses on characters' day-to-day lives and interactions. There would not be an overarching conflict like "save the world" or "complete an epic journey to the treasure".

The definition I'm using doesn't mean any specific setting, but if it helps, I'm most interested in fantasy settings. My basic shreds of setting ideas are 1) a low-tech world where all the people have wings/tails/etc based on cryptids and mythological animals, and 2) an edgy magical fighting school in the afterlife.

Specifically, the questions I have on how to GM these RPs is...

• How does GMing for this kind of RP differ from GMing your average RP?
• How do you keep such an RP running for a long time?
• Are certain structures, like event calendars, more useful than others?

 

[Nemopedia]

I think I will just imagine a Hogwarts-slice-of-life to explain my thoughts on the matter. Since that also has magic and fantasy, and roleplays generally tend to focus on the students' lives.

- How it differs GMing wise:
Well, you have a magical system to think about and work on. What types are there, how is it invoked, how does it affect their daily lives (e.g: can it replace all of our household chores)?

- How do you keep it running:
In a school setting I would say you can introduce events to spice up the story. School competitions, athletics day, the dreaded physical examination day... or plain (special) holidays.

For a non-school setting: holidays, random encounters, missing the train (tail getting stuck between the door), blind-date events? Possibilities are endless if you just allow yourself.

- Special structures:
Experiment! A schedule with upcoming events could help, but maybe also a system on how the time lapses within the roleplay (e.g: everyone gets two rounds to respond before we move on to the next class...) A slice-of-life tends to demand a certain pacing in (IC)time to keep things interesting and fresh for the players.

 

[Diana]

I've always given people free reign to do whatever they want in a scene, and then if it feels like things have slowed down or stagnated, give a deadline for peeps to wrap up their scene before I start a new one/chapter. O: For slice of life, I like a lot of player freedom and then just enough GMing to make sure they're going moving forward and getting new scenes. (In slice of life, players by themselves often get stuck in a scene and don't know how to move on or where to go next, since there's no arcing plot to follow.)