How would you make a Dark Souls campaign Veeky Forums ?

How would you make a Dark Souls campaign Veeky Forums ?

Generic dungeon crawl/combat gauntlet one-shot with no story and no actual opportunities to roleplay or play a character beyond their stats.

Identify what are the important parts for a Souls-like game and focus on those, while considering how they translate to a multi-player tabletop experience.

There's an OSR game by the name of Torchbearer that I hear captures the "Souls feel". Beyond using a system that lends itself to the atmosphere of the game, set a nebulous goal (Ring the Bells, Seek the Kings, Find Paleblood, Return the Lords) then send the PC(s) to a fallen empire with interesting locals, brutal enemies and slightly insane NPCs.

we have this thread everyday. the answer is always the same: dark souls does not work as a TTRPG. the things that comprise the tone of dark souls, and the mechanics that make it fun, do not transfer well to other media.

I wouldn't. I might run something inspired by them and make a campaign that takes place in a dying world with similar aesthetics, but that's it.

I wouldn't, for the same reason I wouldn't read a Dark Souls novel; none of the unique/interesting things about the games would translate.

We have this thread everyday. the correct answer is always the same: the system doesn't really matter, but the themes and tone do. Don't try to use Souls lore or setting, but lean into the thematic strengths of the series.

high lethality (with respawn), but NOT dependent on RNG

maybe try something that works on player skill alone in a chess-like way.

alternatively, you can use mechanics that make the flow more independent from stats and RNG, like incooperating a Rock-Paper-Scissor match when it comes to taking defensive actions

Dungeon crawler with low survivability but no survivalist themes beyond, maybe, torches. Then go to town with worldbuilding but fit the same tones and themes as the game's, at least at first.

A ttg will have the opportunity for PC with axial identities and backgrounds, interesting and personal conversations, NPCs that are actually alive and not just prerecorded info bombs, and, with more than one player, RP, group deliberation, comradery and RP. Imo don't fight this.

Keep the world low tech, low culture and poorly educated. Don't let this grimy would become anything like a Tolkien Fantasy, even if that means slowing down the PC's skill advancement (especially magic) or at least playing down the superhumanity of it.

I recommend having stats that actually make sense and mirror the tones and various epic archetypes you're going for, MINUS ARBITRARY LEVEL CEILINGS AND CONVOLUTED SCALINGS.

...

>very

I don't know, coming back after death but losing any unspent experience points as a result, with experience only being able to be spent as specific "sanctuary" locations, that are few and far between, seems like it would be easy enough to do in a tabletop game. Everything else is pretty much just standard fantady rpg stuff that is already done in many existing ttrpgs

Why do you dumb shits keep suggesting combat heavy gauntlets for dark souls

Almost every single human who wants to play a dark souls TTRPG cares more about getting the tone of the setting.

It'd have to be a one on one campaign, yeah? In order to capture the ds feel at least.
I don't know how fun it would be for a person to go through a campaign where they die constantly.
It doesn't seem like it would be very entertaining.

On a side note, what about a Diablo style game?

Step 1) Buy pic related
Step 2) Either learn Japanese or get it translated by someone who knows it

>dark souls does not work as a TTRPG
Se pic related

How would DoomGuy fair in the Souls world?

The things that make Souls games Souls games feel contrived in TTRPG for anyone at all familiar with them.
>exploring the ruins of a fallen empire
>being a thrall/bound to said fallen empire even after it has been ruined
>nebulous lore and story beyond the obvious
>even more nebulous for NPCs
>very little strategy involved in the combat; much more reliant on reflexes
Take any character beyond the MiB/Firekeeper or Crestfallen guy from the spawn, and think about what you have to do to further their quests. Most of them would feel like special snowflake DMPC garbage. I don't even know how you'd go about indulging in the lore, because that relies on collecting and hoarding items in an extra-dimensional item reader. You certainly couldn't go about it the normal way and leave books, or have NPCs tell you most of these things.

OP here, What the fuck ?!! It exists ?! Well Thanks user. Good thing I know japanese, so long faggots this thread is now officially dead

It just came out on the 20th.
On Amazon.jp it's currently ranked the #1 best selling TPRG, it sold out on release and is currently on backorder, resellers are scalping copies for twice the price already.

This thing was huge from day 1 and got like no hype beforehand.

>TPRG
TRPG, I mean

That depends entirely on your group
I am guessing your the DM and your players asked you to make a Dark Souls game for them.

Find out what exactly they like about Dark Souls and try to capture that.

I made a very stat heavy RPG with lots of cards.

OD&D with tucker's kobolds, rooms with treasures that are mimics, ceilings that are mimics, floors that are mimics, doors that are mimics, walls that are mimics, the whole works

>for anyone at all familiar with them.
I have beaten DS 1, 2, and 3, but not Demon's Souls or Bloodborne. (I only own a computer.)

>exploring the ruins of a fallen empire
>being a thrall/bound to said fallen empire even after it has been ruined
>nebulous lore and story beyond the obvious
>even more nebulous for NPCs
This is tone, and can be done in almost any system, with the tight GM.

>very little strategy involved in the combat; much more reliant on reflexes
I don't feel that this is that important. I think that the feeling of danger, dread, and deadliness certainly is, but this can be achieved just as well with a deadly combat system. Tons of ttrpgs strive to imitate the heart-pounding fast pace of believable combat, and many are able to pull it off without the combat actually needing to be as fast-paced as it would realistically be in real time. But again, this is dependant on the GM.

And just to give my own ideas:

>The World:

The Souls worlds are always grand and magnificent, but dying or outright dead.
Even the most rotten, decayed parts of it, and its inhabitants, should have a sense of dignity in them.
Civilization, as we understand it, does not exist anymore, at least not where the game is set in.
Areas are characters unto themselves. Each should have a strength and a folly that lead to its downfall.
History of places should be hazy. Whenever the characters enter a new area they should be forced to think about what this place was and what happened here to make it like it is now.


>The characters

While the games themselves give you a "blank slate" protagonist, the characters that do exist act as a source of information about the world and its inhabitants, especially relating to their (often distant) home land, as well as having a strong personality quirk that keeps them sane. The Souls-verse (especially in DS1) hammers in the idea that purpose gives strength to push on, and that once you lose your purpose (either by achieving your goal or abandoning it), you'll lose your reason for existing, and the only natural outcome is the death of self (this fits with the meta-narrative of the re-lighting of the fire being against the natural order of things and just prolonging suffering; undead who stubbornly refuse death go hollow, and spread suffering to those around them, coveting their lost humanity).

Because of all of the above, I suggest that player characters should be based on the NPCs, rather than the PCs of Souls.

DS3 gives you a very interesting opportunity in the form of Ashen Ones. They are characters with actual history; they were actual heroes who had a good shot at saving the world, rekindling the flame, but failed for some reason, and had been dead for a very, very long time. What I'm thinking is, you could have the player describe this pseudo adventure the character had that lead to his death, but also the place of origin in broad strokes. The GM then would decide how the centuries changed that place and what lead to its downfall (again, in broad strokes) but when it's time for specific lore on the inhabitants, their gear, spells, etc. the player whose place it was would be encouraged to come up with something. DS3 also gives you the Big Bads right off the bat, which is again, a great setup for a tabletop game, although the more nebulous, and maybe a bit less gamey setup of "ring the bells" works as well.

>The gameplay

Although the Souls games have a tendency to be considered very hard/punishing, it's really only so in the context of video gaming, the games are downright benign with their infinite lives. The gameplay itself is centered around exploration and mastery on the macro level, with risk and resource management on the micro level. The best way to translate this to tabletop is to have a world that is a sort of "dungeon of dungeons" (with a "dungeon" being interpreted very liberally). Since the areas are very expansive, it'd make sense for them to be abstracted to some degree, with the players only deciding how "deep" they are exploring, how comfortable are they with using resources, etc. Exploration would be rewarded with "small" shortcuts (a shortcut within the area) and "big" shortcuts (a shortcut that bypasses the majority of the area or transitions to an other area altogether). Bonfires could be at each "depth", although you could do a thing where there are very few "real" bonfires and you only get campsites where the recovery is limited.

Detailed combat against "generic" enemies should only be a thing when the characters push in too deep, too greedily and run into an ambush, otherwise it should be limited to minibosses and bosses; easy encounters should be just considered a minor resource drain event. How deep or tactical combat should be is up to taste, although the games make me think it should be only limitedly random (if at all) and fairly tactical.

Character generation is tricky, cause while the games let you pointbuy, I feel they are heavily encouraging specialization, at which point it feels faster to just use classes; I also find that classes lend themselves to a better group dynamic, but again, it's up to taste. Equipment definitely should play an important role in advancement, maybe even to the point where it is rolled into it by default.

>can be achieved just as well with a deadly combat system
I can't think of any system where the combat is fun enough to offset the annoyance of dying, every enemy respawning, and having to kill them all over again. I also cannot think of any way to turn this into a multiplayer game without trivializing the challenge like it does in the actual games.

Well you could just wait for some nice user to acquire and hopefully translate the actual official Dark Souls RPG.

a planet that is a mimic

I'm totally waiting for that, but I'm sorta pessimistic.

Which is fair.

The one review on amazon.jp is pretty positive, and Japanese amazon reviews, especially for nerdy shit, are usually EXTREMELY nitpicky.

Haha fuck, that's awesome.

I've thought about this, and haven't got to work on it much (though I am currently working on a fantasy post-magical-war-apocalypse setting which I imagine will have some elements of Dark Souls' tone) but decided on a few things I'd likely include. I haven't played DaS3 yet mind, so I'm unsure how I might change things if I had, but from having played 1 and 2 I'm aware of the whole cyclical ages of dark and fire deal, so I'd set it in my own OC donut steel cycle between 1 and 2 so that I'm not bound by what places/characters appear in the games, only the underlying mechanics of the universe and the tone of the games. I always interpreted respawning with your gear to be purely mechanical convenience in the games, so I would have respawning naked after death (with a hollowing mechanic to discourage players from dying too often), with players either needing to recover their equipment or find new stuff. An experience as lonely as the vidya wouldn't be cool, so I'd have more NPCs dotted around (though mostly not wholly trustworthy) so the party can get some RPing done. Would try and avoid too much combat and have each encounter feel meaningful, with options available to avoid fighting. Make the NPCs all slightly creepy to interact with, even the "good" ones, and to some degree let the players pick their own goals on the understanding that all the little things they can do are part of a bigger picture that they won't achieve in the one campaign (perhaps in this cycle, to rekindle the first flame requires access to some place locked by various seals, and each over-arching goal the players might work towards is essentially unlocking one seal).

Do you have a link to it? I have a friend in JP who could be of assistance.

Puts forward some great ideas, I think. I like the idea of a lot of the challenge coming not just from combat, but from decision making and resource allocation like in those CYOA 2nd-person RPG books you get. Different routes can be taken through "dungeons", some are more risky than others, some take longer, some might require [door-unlocking MacGuffin] which could have been acquired earlier depending on prior decisions made or how they chose to interact with some NPC they met, etc.

>every enemy respawning
Could do away with this mechanic, possibly. DaS2 has (most) generic enemies stopping their respawn after some time. Alternatively, rely on the players to find ways to avoid the combat if they don't want to do it again, encouraging and rewarding the "Maybe we should try X method or Y route" mentality.

>Different routes can be taken
This is decidedly against Souls philosophy, though. There are usually paths leading to optional areas, but in general there is only one (maybe 2 on rare occasions) path leading through the area.

You can usually approach encounters in different ways though. Stuff like walking in a door vs dropping down from a balcony. Hell, the DS1 tutorial boss is literally there to teach you "find a different approach" (and dropdown attacks).

Also, tabletops let you have a lot more freedom. A bunch of "walls" that work in the games wouldn't work in tabletop with anyone who has some rope and a grappling hook, or just the ability to climb really (which would be an actually interesting way to diversify characters in the exploration phase versus the "you are dex so your weapon damage is based on that stat" things).

Incredibly dour setting, usually in the throes of ragnarok. NPCs are seldom seen and when they do they stand out from the constant enemies.

You'd have to make it very combat focused but make sure that combat isn't arcadey like in DnD. Being hurt carries a price and sometimes it's more about surviving to the next healing station than fighting to get xp. Combat has to be fast too. Fast and brutal. You can get through six encounters in an hour because all it really takes are a few rolls and your personal decisions on how you deal with battle.

MORE OR LESS Impossible.

>it shouldn't be like D&D
>goes on to describe pre-WotC D&D

Eh you're probably right. Haven't played OSR much but I grew up on 3.5 derivatives. Guess it'd be best played in an OSR system, I'd totally be up for that. You'd have to make sure that death has a consequence even though you respawn.

It's fucking amazon.jp you mong. Use their fucking search bar.

Even some of the WotC stuff have some surprisingly fitting mechanics, like healing surges/second wind functioning very similar to estus in 4e, and the slot system being a lot like D&D to begin with.

I think the hardest thing to capture in a TTRPG is the actual best part of the entire series.

The Fashion.

These are the kind of posts that I keep revisiting DS threads. The ones with nice, thoughtful analysis of the tonal and topical essence.

I'm running something inspired by it. Setting is a shithole, party and their organization + a village they found is the only non-hostile populace they've found so far. Just about every other survivor has changed into a wretched, mindless creature similar to undead but somehow still alive. Everything is ruins and deserts, deadly fogs traverse the land killing everything in their wake, just about every area has some large-scale curse put on it, dragons have gone absolutely insane and destroy everything that comes near to them, there is some pattern and somebody behind the recent actions of the not-hollows, the demons are zealously gathering precious gems, and the party knows fuck all about the reasons for anything of this because they've spent the last few thousand years being petrified together with their friends.

Do you have plot reveals inbuilt in your setting? How do grant your players background information?

Sometimes they can stumble upon notes or journals. They know of at least two "capitals" with grand libraries, but one of them is completely inaccessible to them right now (too deadly), and they are slowly preparing to head for the other one. They've found a few survivors (including that village) so they have very scarce information based on rumors and legends, and they have a vague map which has meaningful location names.

The not-hollows don't die until they are killed (heh), and they often adhere to their past life's routine, sometimes mumble a piece of old lore.

Identify spell, other than identifying how magic item works, sometimes imparts a piece of history or memory connected to the item.

And they've recently penetrated ancient temple and rescued a mage-priest who put half the room into temporal stasis a second before a demon struck him down. He's giving the players info about an era after they were petrified but before the current time.

>fifth
More like fifth hundred and that's probably not even exaggerating.
The thing about Dark Souls is that it relies heavily on loneliness and isolation to built its unique atmosphere. Everything went to hell, the world is pretty much a medieval post-apocalypse with completely messed up timespace on top of it and the characters are all sole survivors, slowly going mad but struggling to hold on to their humanity. This is really hard to properly translate to a game where you have a whole party of characters.

GURPS has amazing melee combat. Dungeon Fantasy is a good foundation to build from, since it has rules for all sorts of things in Dungeons and Wilderness Adventures, along with having a few monster manuals. The rest (atmosphere, tone, mood, etc.) is up to the GM.

>Could do away with this mechanic, possibly.
I think this is a good idea, and it even can be seen in some instances in the actual games, such as with bosses. It always struck me as a little odd that, when you reverse time at a bonfire, some enemies come back to life, while others don't, but I've always attributed this to "time is convoluted in Lordran," although that is pretty much a handwave to explain arbitrary game mechanics. I do, however, think it would be interesting to at least have SOME enemies have this revival property, as it seems to be a part of the world's lore, and I think the game would feel somewhat incomplete with it entirely removed.

You don't reset time when you go back, it's just assumed that all the undead/hollow enemies also have time to revive/reset their traps/etc. (I always thought the mists around you signified that you are actually spending a lot of time sitting at the bonfire, it's just that your perception of time is fucked and you think it's only been a moment).

"Time flows from the fire"

I'd simply adapt Song of Swords.

>Play for 4 hours
>Die
>All enemies and traps are back, and you lost all your XP
>4 hours wasted
This sounds infuriating. At least the relatively quick pace of a video game makes this bearable, but fuck having to redo every fight every time you die

fpbp

But don't forget to tell the players nothing about how to play.

Someone is really bad.

It is infuriating, which is why you tweak it to fit the game. PCs are a special class that respawn on death; everything else coalesces back into the aether and is reformed at a later point/strengthens pre-existing enemies, or something along those lines. You don't lose progress, really, besides time and money. You just make future progress more difficult.

I think that's just a limitation due to the nature of vidya, though; as you said, there are optional areas, even optional bosses. Some enemies basically must be fought, some can simply be run past, some can be hidden bodied past. I like the idea of some level of picking your fights according to your strengths in TRPG and I think it fits fine in a DaSalike setting. mentions some cool ideas in being able to tackle verticality more interestingly on tabletop than you typically can in vidya.

Lel, underrated.

Huh, I'd never considered the passage of time and the other undead just respawning too, but I guess that could make sense. I'd always just assumed it a game mechanic not to think about too deeply. The idea of some enemies coming back is cool, though; shitty hollow trash can stay dead, but a rival sane undead could re-appear to harass the party again.

Another thought I've had regarding bosses (not just regarding this game, but regarding big guys (4U) in general): Rather than simply giving them big health bars, I like the idea of killing them in steps, not necessarily with a set order. For example, some multi-limbed giant might lose an arm upon receiving a significant enough hit. A flying enemy might need to be grounded before you stand a chance of deadifying it. Something like the Bed of Chaos in DaS1 which involves destroying objects in the encounter space during the encounter could be cool - surely less frustrating than the actual Bed of Chaos encounter, at least. Obviously each encounter of this sort would need its own mechanics to be assessed on a boss-by-boss basis, but I think it makes big fights more interesting than simply taking more damage and having to do more damage.

>the games are downright benign with their infinite lives

This is one of the more important aspects of Dark Souls that I feel gets ignored a lot. If you think about it, the fact that you keep any collected items and accumulated knowledge of the area you were exploring and only lose unspent souls and soft Humanity when you die makes your character more or less invincible.

Nechronica was built with a similar design goal in mind. Your characters can't really die no matter how much damage they take, but they can go insane and fall into a kind of despair fugue from losing too much of themselves, which is pretty similar to going Hollow.

Make it as video-gamey as possible, in a good way.

Carefully prepare a detailed dungeon complete with traps, secrets, and a variety of enemies. If a party member dies, they respawn back at the bonfire and can either continue alone in their world or wait for the rest of the party to wipe or reach the next bonfire so they can be summoned again.

Players have estus for healing that refills whenever they rest, can be upgraded just like the games.

Invaders and other NPCs provide an opportunity for roleplaying, as DM you should let the players do whatever they want, the setting itself is enough constraint.

Upon death or resting at a bonfire all hostile enemies in the dungeon respawn besides invaders, bosses, and a few unique enemies.

This means that you can do lots of "unfair" things to the players that might result in TPK, that in other campaigns would be unforgivable bullshit, but here is just a minor inconvenience.

I've always wanted to run something like Tomb of Horrors but with the bonfire mechanic, watching people try and fail until they puzzle through a challenge is much more rewarding than fear of permadeath making them only ever use the most optimal and safe strategy.

The actual gameplay would probably be more similar to a boardgame than traditional RPG but that's not at all a bad thing. I've never understood the stigma of something seeming too "videogamey" considering the hobby''s origins as modified wargaming.

I might suggest something like this to my current group once our present campaign wraps up.

First don't try to translate the gameplay into tabletop, it's impossible (or it would be very shitty) you also can't work to much on the visuals aspect of the souls game, I can't see how you could reproduce the feeling player had when finding Ash Lake for example.
However you can use the setting, the characters and some of the theme (madness, decay,exploration, loneliness) to make some interesting session, you could also include an hollowing mechanism to replicate the multiple death