Hello friends,
Looking for recommendation for a system that would be good to do a Dark Souls inspired campaign with. I'd prefer it to be narrative focused with less emphasis on stats and more on common sense mechanics and flexibility. I've heard Dungeon World is a good fit but I need more suggestions.
>narrative focused
What narrative? Dark Souls is all about exploration, finding things out, and interacting with the variety of memorable characters, not following a plot.
Anyway, to answer your question, look up Torchbearer. It's a dark fantasy game with a very strong focus on characterization (which I think may be what you meant by "narrative focused") and exploration. Its focus on lighting (hence the name) and morale may also mesh well with a Dark Souls-esque campaign. There's a healthy amount of combat maneuvers available, and planning/playing smart is a major thing. It's not the world's most intuitive system, but its worth a shot. The system also gets thrown around a lot for Dark Dungeons.
If that doesn't work out, there's always GURPS; you'll have plenty of options at your disposal allowing for *tons* of flexibility, and a brutal realism of the system supports common-sense choices over "he's threatening me with a crossbow? lol I've got 60 HP and that does, what, like 1d8?" There's no built-in mechanics for character-driven stories by default though, so that'll be on you to include.
By Dark Souls inspired I meant via atmosphere, eg decaying world, few npcs, themes of cycles and rebirth, not lack of a strong narrative. Lordran is just one part of the world as well so I was thinking of incorporating other provinces from the Lore as well or making up similar scenarios.
And thanks for your suggestions! I'm looking for things that won't be too clunky to newer players, so GURPS might be a good fit albeit more work for me to fill in the blanks. I'll look into Torchbearer as well though. I really appreciate your response
Fee fi fo fum
I smell the blood of a casul
>What narrative? Dark Souls is all about exploration, finding things out, and interacting with the variety of memorable characters, not following a plot.
You're confusing narrative with story.
Yeah, OP, it sounds to me like Dungeon World should be a good fit for what you want. It's fast and light, easy to customize and homebrew for, and is more about player skill than optimization and number-crunching.
Thank you! It was suggested to me at PAX by a store owner as a quick RPG for friends who thought D&D4e was too hard to start up. Glad to get a second opinion on this.
Don't run flavour of the month games. It never ends well.
Horseshit, on multiple levels.
For one, Dungeon World was released in 2012, and has been popular ever since. That's not a flavor-of-the-month.
For another thing, I've run Everyone is John for my group, which actually WAS a flavor-of-the-month craze a while back, and it was great and everybody had a good time. So it's also not true that running a popular fad game "never ends well."
>Looking for recommendation for a system that would be good to do a Dark Souls inspired campaign with.
>By Dark Souls inspired I meant via atmosphere, eg decaying world, few npcs, themes of cycles and rebirth, not lack of a strong narrative.
I have no idea what "Dark Souls" is. However, it sounds like you are looking for Kult.
DW is mechanically simpler due to being a PbtA game, but I'm not sure it'll fit what you're looking for.
Dungeon World offloads some of the "world building" onto the players, through questions posed by you, the GM. If you're clever you can subtly steer the way the players answer these. The result may be pleasantly suprising, but I don't think you can get the "mysterious decay" aesthetic of Souls games with players filling in the blanks. Also, the rules and some of the class moves assume the presence of civilized safe havens.
You can hack/homebrew more appropriate moves, but you might look for something different, (or create a PbtA hack out of whole cloth)
I think user meant trying to run a Dark Souls-inspired game.
Come on man. The strength of dark souls rest firmly on things that aren't translateable to pen and paper.
Without the constant swearing at dying, and the smug satisfaction of finally overcoming an obstacle after dying 3 times, all you're left with is "kill monsters in gloomy as fuck fantasy world"
Running videogame: The pen and paper rpg usually ends up dull as fuck because you're not actually translating the stuff that made the videogame good into pen and paper, you're just dressing a pen and paper game up in the same hat as the videogame.
There ARE videogames where this work, because they are more about the fiction and mood than the mechanical challenges, but Dark Souls is definitely not one of those.
Who even cares about the "lore" and characterization in Dark Souls? 14 year olds who never actually read a book, and people who never finished it and only watched a lot of lets plays so they could still talk about what's popular this month with other nerds. That's who.
>I don't think you can get the "mysterious decay" aesthetic of Souls games with players filling in the blanks
This depends a lot on your players. And while that's a preferred playstyle, it's not necessary by RAW. The only place it's stated in the rules is the principle "Ask questions, use the answers." How far you want that to go is up to you as a GM.
>Also, the rules and some of the class moves assume the presence of civilized safe havens.
This might be the biggest problem, but I can see working around it.
>I think user meant trying to run a Dark Souls-inspired game.
Ah, okay, that sounds way more reasonable. In that case, my bad. Veeky Forums has me assuming that somebody's going to come in and take a big steaming meme all over Dungeon World anytime it's mentioned. Must be PTSD from Virt, lol.
My idea was to introduce mechanics that players had to deal with when they died. No permadeath, but players would have to go through hell and back to get their characters alive again, whether it be sacrificing a limb or giving away sanity. Playing with the idea that everything comes with a price.
And I get that you might have a misconception about who enjoys the story of the Souls games, but not everyone falls into those stereotypes. I have been playing Souls games since DeS and have always been interested in their nonverbal storytelling elements. It might suck but is like to try this.
>It might suck but i'd like to try this.
Good for you, user. Nobody ever accomplished anything worthwhile by listening to cynics who said to not even try.
>Playing with the idea that everything comes with a price.
Again, I would look into Kult if I were you.
Will do friendo, the story can always be modified but if Kult has any sort of mechanics in place for some of the things I'm thinking of it would be a godsend
If that's what you want, then try Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (2nd or 3rd ed).
2nd ed is absurdly brutal, lethal, and grim/decay.
Use any *World game -- they're all variations on the same system and pretty good at dramatic action-- or build your own, but for the love of god don't use DW. Its attempts to combine AD&D tone with PbtA mechanics is clunky and straight up doesn't work. PbtA is fine, but DW actually is shit, dank memery aside.
>doesn't work.
My 20+ session campaign says otherwise. The players loved it, we had a great time, and the mechanics worked beautifully.
Storytiem?
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Thanks!
It needs a little love, but a lot of stuff is in the right place.
Did you make this?