In Syncing Feeling, players collaborate by taking their turns together in fights and managing their emotions and relationships in battle.
Worked on from January 2025 to April 2025.
Developed by me.
Made with Microsoft Office Tools
Syncing Feeling stemmed from my desire to add more narrative impact to how players engage with TTRPGs. Initially, I envisioned it as a homebrew concept for the D&D campaign I run.
Pair Characters Together
Player characters take their turns in pairs, planning out the actions they will take and using their combined capabilities to maximize each turn.
Manage Your Emotions
As players are damaged, their emotional levels will increase. These influence various stats depending on the type of emotional response.
Once the emotional response surpasses level five, the two players will be desynced. They won't be able to act together.
The original mandate of Syncing Feeling.
The original battle mechanics of Syncing Feeling.
Combat
Syncing Feeling's combat is complemented by a spreadsheet that tracks their stats, health, and other character details while fighting. It will do this dynamically, factoring in changing variables to roll totals.
Put in what you roll, and the sheet does the math for you!
Real Time Spreadsheet Communication!
The sheet can also communicate with other players' sheets, and will update in real time as things like health change. You can view all sorts of stats from the other player with ease.
Adding another player is easy, just get the link to their document and your sheet will be able to pull their information!
Six Unique Classes!
There is also an extensive class system, with six classes known as Focuses. Each Focus has a distinct playstyle and differentiates the player characters. Giving them exciting opportunities when planning their turns. The sheet features a Focus Skill Lookup section that will provide all the details on any skill.
Quickly look up all the abilities in the game just by typing in the name!
One character takes damage, and their health updates on their partner's sheet automatically!
Overall Combat Sheet
The overview of the Harmonics documentation
The Vows section of the documentation.
Other Deliverables
The gameplay out of combat is heavily based on roleplay. The Harmonics document details the system that I conceived to track the bonds players have with one another. They create a "vow" to describe their dynamic, and level that vow up when they take actions and have conversations that work toward it.
The level can also decrease if they go against the vow, and it can even be broken. The vow's level is converted into Harmony Points, which is a resource the players get that helps them while battling. This way, as the characters grow closer, they are numerically stronger when fighting together.
Iteration
When trying to balance Syncing Feeling, I tested the game with players familiar with TTRPGs. I had them make characters and gave them an environment to play around in. In these tests, I sought to find if sharing your turn with another player was fun. I was also looking to see if the mechanics were balanced and encouraged roleplay.
The system was well-received in these tests, but there was one issue that continued to pop up. Characters would rarely have their Emotional Response levels increased to dangerous levels. In an effort to correct for this, I made it easier for the increase to occur and lowered the maximum threshold. It ended up being an overcorrection, and players found it to be too stressful to manage.
I came up with the solution to have the levels increase at defined thresholds, and include multiple different mechanics for how the player characters can reduce those levels. That way, they had more control over the increase.
The changes made to increase the frequency.
Added in a defined way to lower the Emotional Response Level during a fight.
Syncing Feeling was an exploration of my ability to make intertwining systems and solve problems I've had with TTRPG systems feeling too segmented in their roleplaying and combat. The project successfully provides a convenient way to play, a breadth of options, detailed documentation on all aspects of the game, and has been tested and refined. The Combat Sheet works extremely well as an aid to smoothening the gameplay.
I have continued to play Syncing Feeling with some of my friends, and we have found it to be an excellent system for what we want from a TTRPG. I was able to push my documentation skills to the next level and find creative applications of spreadsheets to make an exciting system that anyone can learn and play.