Sure is dark in here

How would you run a dark and depressing game in the vein of darksouls and darkest dungeon?
What are the key points?

If you're gonna use D&D you have to run it human-only.

To start with, I would use something OSR or simmilarly down to earth and open to modification.
I would also say you need to be on point with your descriptions, particularly of combat. Don't use fantasy physics, try and make everything seem weighty and believable.

Low level, restrict spells and caster class selection. Healing should be rare and injuries need to have more impact than "Hey cleric can you use your infinitely replenishing level 1 spell slots to heal 6 damage?"

the most important thing is to get huger when you get more souls.

>What are the key points?

lets start with a setting were the ancient heroes lost the game.

The BBEG succeeded. or at least he managed to fuck over the world.

The Gods are gone or dead. Or worse, they became corrupted and twisted.

i think a huge part of it will be how you present the setting to the players, sure game machanics are also very inportent but they wont really mean shit if you dident get the feeling of the setting right

The players should always be on the *verge* of defeat without being defeated without bad luck/planning.

Mechanically? Just play DND (older edditions are hasher but any will do) and just don't pull your punches.

If the players rest in the open have them attacked. If the enemy rolls a 20 roll the critical. If they fire a bow make them track ammo. If they were heavy armour make them track weght. If there a Caster make sure they have spell components.

If you're actually strict with the rules, you won't have any problems.

I'd suggest looking up a game called Torchbearer

My GM used a very heavily modded Warhammer Fantasy RP 1st ed, I'd say it worked well.

Tomb of Horrors.

> If there a Caster make sure they have spell components.

Eschew Materials BITCHEEEESSSS

The main allure of the Souls games for me is learning how to master the game mechanically. Eventually I can play those games without armour, wield a fuckhueg sword, dance around or through (god bless i-frames) the enemy attacks, and beat the game without real effort.

I don't really know how you can simulate that in an RPG.

...

One thing that attracts some people to Souls games is the visual styles and themes that create the whole dark, oppressive atmosphere. I think thats more what OP wanted to ask about - how to replicate the feel of a Souls setting.

I suppose you could, however, cook up a basic hack that allows players to use various skills or stances, some of which are good against particular enemy 'movesets', in an attempt to simulate a modicum of the combat.

Thank you for paying your feat tax

well the key themes in dark souls are actually important to the world. its more about hopelessness and cycles rather than just copy pasting monsters from the game. i think the world building is the most important part, and having characters that exist in a world on its very very last legs before it collapses.
i would look at gustave dore and other influences on dark souls, and try to capture that incredibly dark and empty feel. then add undead.

You can (and should) make the combat really unforgiving. Players can only win through luck, the right builds, and with a good plan. However, players have virtually infinite tries because they can respawn - unless their bonfire is compromised.

as an incentive for PCs to not just give up and leave, the lose their xp/souls/money/whatever on death.

I wouldn't make it anything as 'gamey' as respawning for an RPG.
If you want to go full grim, have it so that the players are cursed that, no matter what injury befalls them, they will not die and will instead slowly come back together.
They still feel pain though. All the time.
Their attempts aren't limited by respawns or currency, but by how far their sanity or willpower will go before breaking.

this

I'd recommend checking out a game called Shadows of The Demon Lord. It's likely inspired by DS to some degree. Combat is very lethal but not unfair. Characters start at level 0 with only racial (ancestry) traits. Characters can also be completely randomly generated, if you like that sort of thing.

The system is fairly elegant, only using a d20 and some d6s. Everything is either a challenge roll (beat 10) or an attack roll (beat an enemy stat).

There aren't any real static bonuses or penalties, instead it uses Bane and Boon dice that cancel each other out. Let's say you have 5 boons on a certain roll and the GM determines that the difficulty of the task gives you three banes. Well, then you only roll 2 boon dice. You add the highest to your d20 roll and that's your result. Works the same way with banes except you subtract the highest from your d20 roll. So there's a very easy to see difficulty scale, a 26 being the hardest task to accomplish.

There's lots of charts for generating flavorful items on the fly and it has an amazing bestiary built in.

oh heres a good dore

Its leveling system is reminiscent of the Souls games openness, too. Once you get to level 1 you pick one of the 4 classic archetypes for your "novice path": warrior, rogue, priest, and mage. This forms the backbone of your character. The next step is the "expert path" with more specific stuff like ranger, assasin, sorcerer, and cleric. The thing is, though, there are no prerequisites for these. If you start as a Mage but like the stuff you get for being a paladin, go for it. The last step is the master path. Highly specialized but strong. However, to qualify you need to complete some sort of task or quest, determined by the GM.

Lots of good advice here, thanks folks.

Now I'm trying to figure out what religions would be prevalent in a 15th century fantasy country...

That has nothing to do with darkness, you're just talking about making it more difficult. Darkness is thematic.

Low wealth, emphasize cold, hunger, and discomfort.
Make it so that there's more enemies than cooperative NPC's, and those NPC's are fairly cold and indifferent to the players. Failure must be a recurring element. The enemies must be dark themselves - fearsome and grotesque. They're corrupted versions of once-better things or embodiments of our various individual fears or vices. I think the best thing about Dark Souls is the bleakness - there isn't much life or commotion, and the little there is is usually bad for you. This has a profound effect on the mood and is worth considering.

...

read berserk.

>Now I'm trying to figure out what religions would be prevalent in a 15th century fantasy country...
if its a fantasy country then you can do whatever you want.

He cant just DO anything!
That's how you get retard religions like the D&D pantheon or people worshipping "The elements" or "the light".

>being this Abrahamic faith-centric

Don't pretend like any religion in any recent game, vidya or /tg, has even held a candle to any historical religion

youve missed the point

TES > Scientology.

No, you.
>TES
>new
That's old shit. Good shit, but old.

How recent is recent then?

last ten years

well... thats one way to respond to my post i guess.
i will say i agree with you and am working really hard on the religions in my setting i'm making for my next campaign i run after this one is done.

what religions you making?

/vr/ rules then. Well, since my piece of shit computer can barely run Morrowind, I don't have much to say about games made the last ten years, because I haven't played any of them.

Not him, but I just checked it out. It looks pretty sick, so I think I'll see what my group thinks of it. Thanks.

It's a word on the character sheet, not something intended to be studied for a doctorate, bud. Having a variety of interesting flavors with no more than a paragraph of depth a piece is more fun for a game than choosing between various flavors of Abrahamic religions.

>It's a word on the character sheet
Wow. so your character might as well be atheist then. If medieval people wore their religion like a dog tag I'm sure it works for D&D too!

My GM has decided he wants to run our dnd game as Dark Souls.

It's shit. I've told him that the sense of unknowability of Dark Souls, that not being given any exposition about the world is unworkable in a tabletop game. In Dark Souls you can look around and make inferences from what you see and hear, in tabletop you only get what the GM tells you and that is necessarily biased in importance or relevance.

He wants to make resources scarce, but that's only making our casters in our party more valuable. Potions are expensive, but we've always got healing casts. It's also forcing us on boring resource management quests like it's fucking Skyrim
>collect three bloodleaf petals
fucking bullshit.

I've told him that if he throws a Wheel Skeleton at us I'm quitting the game.
Oh and we had this exchange

>GM: I've been experimenting with giving opponents abilities which are like spells but not
>Me: You mean... spell-like abilities? Because that shit's been in the game for the better part of thirty years
>GM: ???

this thread needs jesus

That's quite a size discrepancy.

That sounds more like you're DM messed up rather than a damning sentance upon Souls-style games.

In describing scenes, if he wants you to infer particular things he should mention them specifically in his description. On your part, you might want to make an effort to dig around and ask about particular features - don't be lazy and just say "I roll perception".

Of course the default advice is just to talk to him about it in a friendly manner and make sure your criticism is constructive. As a DM I know feedback is a hugely valuble tool, particularly negative feedback, so if you aren't confrontational about it it will be recieved well.

Fetch quests like that are pure BS though.

Read berserk as reference for the world building. It should give you a pretty good idea of the social mechanics of the kingdoms and how to mix monsters with a more traditional medieval setting. Having your players raped as children is optional

meh mostly fake magic abrahmic religions, with a few other cults who still worship one of the god interpretations (god in this setting is deist) as well as some extremely powerful god being that exists on the planet, of which there are so far 4. but as god grants literal divine power to people, everyone does worship him. they just fight (as you do) about who is right about him.
but i'm just trying to make the various sects believable as well as separate from existent religions because i'm not trying to make a commentary on religion. its all a fictional world like but unlike earth.

anybody have the pdfs?

(2+2)U(e)

literally a constant thread for the pilfering of PDFs, go there.

SotDL is a solid game mechanically, but it's setting is comparable to DS on only the loosest of levels.

you just have to nerf darkvision.

every other race has darkvision, so remove it except for races that live underground.

you just gotta make them fear the dark again.

I've always thought og-style D&D variants were attractive, but so often they either hold fast on to the byzantine/draconian rules of old D&D or simplify it way to far into some DW-level nonsense.
Does any one of them strike a good middle between enough rules to be groudned but not so much you get slowed by the weight?
Like, a sort of chewy-level of gameplay; between soft and crunchy?

or downgrade to low-light, and low-light to none; that's what I usually do

Can I get sauce on the image there? I'd like to check out there other stuff.

Sombody post that Fatnasy 1979, or whatever.
It's bare-bones but super malleable. No reason you couldn't just stick some primary abilities and some derivatives on there and call it a day.

Veeky Forums relevant highlights:
>Souls series
>Dragon's Dogma
>Dawn of War: Dark Crusade
>Space Marine

The only person who decideds how draconian the rules are is the GM, particularly in OSR. One of the things that keep me using it is how you can fine-tune it for games so easily - theres a great deal of encouragement to use fluff and RP instead of 'I roll perception/seduce/charisma', and the whole thing is so easily moddable you can steal or invent houserules for whatever you like.

LotFP is a nice base thanks to it being a very clean system with actually good simple rules for encumberance and early firearms. The rules are free on their website.

2e made dwarfs less tanky and either improved or threw the magic system in the garbage, depending on your world view. it definately works well for playing underdogs surrounded by insanity inducing killer machines.
I play darkest dungeon inspired campaigns with it and it's great, insanity effects just creep up slower but are more permanent, tell your players to actually roleplay sanity damage and everything works great.

Here we are; some bro was nice enough to post it in the other thread. I'd never run this as-is personally, but with a little elbow grease you could turn it into basically anything.

>Players can only win through luck
>luck
>souls game

Start paying attention to how the game works.

When I think of Dark Souls (at least when it was good), the primary emotion I feel is sadness, not fear.

Its like you didn't even finish the sentence before you responded.

> I think it's a misunderstanding to make enemies aggressive and malevolent
I agree that the Souls series is equal parts tragedy as it is drama and action, but there are plenty of non-pathetic, malevolent beings through out the lore of any given game; many of which are the sources of said tragedy. Not in the sense that they're the BBEG that needs to be killed to fix the world, but more that they're fully aware of the ramifications of their actions, and doing it on purpose; vs. doing it out of circumstance or ignorance.
All in all it's at least a 70/30 split between Circumstantial/Voluntary antagonist, if not 60/40.

I'd argue that creatures with darkvision would fear the dark more than the average creature, being that they've never really experienced it before.

I think the bonfire aspect, from a lore standpoint, is justified respawning. I interpet it as time getting turned back to the point where you last rested at the bonfire, allowing you to keep only knowledge.

Which works... until you remember that you also keep all items you pick up.

So no.

What the fuck is that on the left?

The first TES game came out in 2006, though.

>Dark Souls
>Don't use fantasy physics
u wot m8?

A bat of some kind, the picture is just flipped so it appears to be hanging "up".

I actually suspect I've seen those things in an art project and they're not natural.

I think in English you still call it a bat, even though it's not the same family.

Varied bosses, from gigantic knights to horrifying twisted monstrosities to the occasional dragonoid.

Around 10 or so NPC's, some of them are blatantly untrustworthy or mad, forcing the player to decide whether they will kill them early and avoid a betrayal, or let them live and see what happens.

World building that doesn't rely on tons of exposition. Set up something simple (Faction A fucking hates Faction C) and then use it in the world to subtly tell a story (You find an ancient cathedral filled with the corpses of Faction A members. The boss wears the shroud of Faction C)