Raymond Vermeulen

My goal for With Feeling! was to make a game where players could role-play out ridiculous musical scenarios and have fun singing and dancing, even if they're not particularly musically gifted. To that end, I came up with the following core design values:

• Have mechanics lower the entry barrier to playing with music.
• Encourage role-play. Players should sing and dance about who they are, not just current problems.
• The mechanics are there to serve the game's story, not the other way around.
• Keep the scope small to allow for rapid iteration.

Version 1

The first version of With Feeling! was based on Avery Alder's Simple World, a simplified version of Vincent Baker's Powered by the Apocalypse ruleset. With some modifications, of course. I chose this ruleset because the PbtA design values aligned well with my own, and it allowed me to get a game on the table ASAP so I could test my ideas.

Fig. 5 An overview of the core mechanics in version 1 of With Feeling!, and what player dynamics I am trying to generate with them.

Two major categories of mechanics deserve special mention: the character creation and the combat mechanics.

Magic circle character creation: Character creation is done together, in the play session. Players are asked to come up with characters together, assign some numerical modifiers, and to sing a quick line or two about their backgrounds. This gives players some prompts to riff off later, making it easier to roleplay. By making character creation a shared activity it also functions as a magic circle. Once players have gone through the process of making characters they know that the game has begun, and that the normal rules of life no longer apply. From now on they are expected to sing, and it is okay to suck at it!

Musical combat—escalating dice: Whenever the players run into an obstacle or experience conflict of some sort, “combat” breaks out—players are asked to roleplay a musical routine. While PbtA uses two six-sided dice for combat, in With Feeling! Players roll two four-sided dice by default. They can upgrade to six-sided or eight-sided depending on how much they sing, engage with character backgrounds, etc. With high numbers, players gain control over the scene and can freely roleplay what is happening to the non-player-characters, special effects, etc. This way people who were a bit shy could still play the game, but they'd get awarded with numerical advantages if they'd put some effort into it.

After repeated playtesting it became apparent that the ruleset was a bit unclear. The game also didn't offer a lot of gameplay challenge, owing in part to everyone actively engaging with the mechanics, and so always being awarded with the best dice to roll. But at least players were singing and dancing and making musical stories together, so the basic concept worked!

Version 2

For the next version, I wanted to make the game a bit less freeform to add more challenge, motivate players to work together, add more player prompts, and clarify the rules. I decided to move away from PbtA as a mechanical base and come up with a different randomization mechanic than just messing with different dice—I ended up using Tarot cards both for prompts and drawing random numbers.

Fig. 6 New mechanics for version 2 of With Feeling! The character creation and the overhauled combat now tie into the new Harmony system, which requires players to work together when making music.

Various minor changes were made, but most important were the introduction of the new harmony system and a complete overhaul of the musical combat.

Harmony—quantified relationship values: A relatively simple change with major repercussions, character relationships now get a value assigned to them. This means that they can now be used as a mechanic. In this version it mainly functioned as resource management for the musical combat, adding another layer of complexity.

Musical combat—Tarot cards: Songs are now broken up into verses, each verse having a numerical difficulty rating to be met. During any given verse individual players roleplay one of three components: lyrics, dance, and special effects. Whoever roleplays a component needs to draw a card. The values of all three components are added together, and if it's greater than the verse's difficulty rating, players score a success. By spending Harmony on each other, players are able to work together on a component, i.e. sing a duet. This gives more card draws and uses the highest modifier between players. The Tarot cards that are drawn are also used as yet another prompt to give players something to sing about. All this means that players now have to coordinate their actions within the party to successfully beat a song.

Playtesting went well. Gameplay went notably more smoothly, players were working together and singing their hearts out, etc. But one recurring piece of feedback was that drawing the Tarot cards felt too random!

This was weird, because drawing cards is not notably more random than throwing dice. But after going over my design diagrams, I saw that I'd made an error. While the Tarot cards and the dice are both ways to generate a random number, the cards weren't held in the players' hands, unlike the dice. This broke the illusion that players were able to influence the random number.

Version 3

Currently in development. I'm focusing on adding more options for character creation and further refining the Tarot system. I am convinced that by putting the cards back into players' hands and making the card suits more important the combat should feel a lot less random and be more fun!