I really enjoyed what @thefutilist did with it - literal, but powerful.
I was explaining this game to a friend this afternoon, and observed that I chose a reasonably "grounded" hero archetype - the lordly knight - and a reasonably "grounded" location - the evil village: which led to mediaeval fantasy and made it easy for me to stay with the Lover.
Whereas Alstrom is much more Elric-like; and both the Lunar Citadel and the cemetery that is also a city feel like places that Elric might visit. So I feel that inducing @thefutilist to have Alstrom stay with a Lover may be quite a tricky thing.
Edwards, following Jonathan Tweet, calls this drama resolution (and it contrasts with fortune and with karma, all three of them being "mechanical and social means, among the real people, by which an imaginary action or event is determined to occur").
Edwards tends to be quite focused on who has authority over what bits of the fiction, as an important feature in how a game provides for successful and fun RPGing. S/Lay w/Me is interesting here: in terms of backstory the "GM" has the preponderant degree of authority, as they set up the location and introduce both the Lover and the Monster. But the "player" establishes some backstory in virtue of establishing their hero's Goal.
And in play, authority can be quite flexible if playing fairly loosely. But the dice system, and associated rules (eg until all the rolling is finished, neither Monster nor Lover nor hero may be killed) puts constraints on how it is exercised.
Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands also mostly uses drama resolution (there's a bit of fortune when resolving a chase), with the constraints being more specific to the moves/scene-types.
On balance I would say that I've enjoyed S/Lay w/Me more than I did Firebrands; I think it's a bit more "fluid" (for lack of a better word) and probably a little more conventional also.
Another game a bit like these, that I played a session of this afternoon (with the above-mentioned friend, is Showdown. It has an endgame a little bit like S/Lay w/Me, but more structure on the way through. I think it would be a good game for someone wanting to try drama resolution, but not sure about how they would go with it. Because of that structure.
