Velouria, Bardic Duelling

Velouria: Bardic Duelling is a game with simple, but very flexible mechanics for resolving non-violent disputes of performance. In this game, you play along a second player: one of you creates a bard, the other plays the Audience.

Bard creation establishes your musical background, your strenghts as a performer, and prompts you to create your works (songs, numbers). This last item scratches an itch (haha!) that I only had scratched with The Sims: the joy of assigning titles to fictional artworks based on their presumed style and genre — which are, in this game, represented by a noun + a descriptor (usually an adjective).

The duels themselves are where the Audience has more decisions: they decide what the public wants to hear, who the bard's aversaries will be, and what numbers they'll play. This is also where the game's dice rolls happen: the Bard player decides a difficulty for their own performance (their ambition to play well), then roll according to their stats to try and reach that difficulty. The duel goes in rounds with both the bard and their adversary making these rolls to get points, and the points are compared at the end of the show to decide who won.

There are also some downtime mechanics: the bard character has to take time and put effort in to transform their worldliness points (acquired both by winning AND losing duels) into better stats and new works.

Finally, the game suggests other performance-like conflicts that could be played with very similar rules: rap battles, circus numbers, court cases, etc. Overall, it creates an interesting imaginative experience for two players that I can easily see being opened up for more participants.