Dark Souls in TTRPG

Try incorporating Hollowing into the game. In the lore hollowing was always shown as the loss of humanity over time, when you start to give up on yourself and loose sense of who you are, or your purpose you start to go hollow, like the NPCs in the game. Good examples of these are Laurentius, Reah, and Siegmeyer

I am somewhat familiar with the lore.

This might be some faggy shit to say, but I'd suggest reading up on it. I personally think it has the best lore for a fantasy game in vidya.

Also, a lot of what makes Dark Souls feel the way it does is through visual storytelling. It's not a dialogue and cut-scene heavy game so a lot of the way it brings across the story is through the visuals and environments. The run down and mostly empty environments that feel like mere shadows of their former glory, the way the hollows just kind of loaf around lethargically only lashing out when they notice you. A lot of this is relayed to the player without dialogue so recreating that kind of atmosphere in a TTRPG is going to be very difficult in general.

Do you think it would be possible to do so in a game, maybe bake it into mechanics somehow? Or is such a thing above us lowly anons?

I did a Bloodborne homebrew for some of my players, and incorporated Beasthood as an ever-present ailment that needed to be staved off. I had it set before the events of the game, when the town of Yharnam was still functioning during the day. The contrast between day and night was what my campaign hinged on.

Hit submit too soon, I say all that because I assume you could do the same thing with Dark Souls. Especially with the repetitive aspect of the world and Hollowing.

If you're descriptions of things and places are fleshed out enough you may be able to convey the feel of a run down steadily collapsing world in the player's mind, but I don't know how you would go about doing that with the mechanics. Maybe have the enemies slow on the uptake but ramp up after a few rounds to show that they weren't deliberately waiting for the players and were pretty much part of the environment until someone came along and disturbed them.

How did you play out the contrast, user? Tell me some more about the game.

This would be a good way of going about it. Also maybe make it so that PCs die fast but they don't have to re-roll new ones, but adding in the hollowing element of having their stats receive a detriment until they can get some humanity back.

At least until you get to the lava level

I had the day consist of investigation and story gathering by the players in a slow and methodical fashion, since they are being told one thing by the church and another by the evidence. During the night, it is fast paced with combat and treacherous environmental threats, as the quiet town they walked during the day has turned into a hunting ground and anyone not employed by the church is considered hostile after dark. I have it running with multiple factions that the players can interact with in any way they please, based on the factions in-game. The best part is that only one of my players has actually played any of the Soulsborne games, and I love to throw him for a loop by adding in new Lovecraftian monsters.

You could probably leave that one out, nobody likes that level.

Did you have boss battles and the like? What system was this with? Your day/night division is a genius idea btw.

It was ALMOST good. But the lack of enemy variety, poor placement of stuff, and dragon butts killed it for me

yeah, that's when they started running out of time though and had to rush it.

Yup. the rushjob in tomb of the giants was less bad since they had some time to do some neat things, and more importantly, the oppressive darkness hides it well
I feel like the last "Completed" area in the base game was The duke's archives

Yeah, that whole second half of the game is a slog to get through, I usually end up stopping after Drake and Josh because I'm not motivated to complete the rest of the game.

Thanks for the complement, user. I have been running it using 5e and homebrewing in a feat that is granted after blood ministration called Rally which is in pdf attached:

"You have the strength to persevere and recover after sustaining the most grievous of wounds. You gain the ability to hold Rally Potential. Rally Potential is a pool of points equal to the total amount of damage you take outside of your turn. When you make a melee attack with more than one point in your Rally Potential pool, you regain Hit Points equal to the damage roll of your weapon plus your proficiency bonus. You cannot regain more Hit Points in a single turn than the current total of your Rally Potential. Your Rally Potential resets to zero at the end of your turn"

I did have boss battles. So far they have fought the Cleric Beast, which was the climax to an investigation into a cleric that had allegedly been "practicing out of his jurisdiction" (i.e. experimenting with a synthesized beastblood concoction). They also fought Gascoigne and Old Hunter Henryk much later, after encountering the former's daughter in the market and thinking the sewers would be a great way to travel around at night, as they were on a quest to retrieve workshop tools for the Church that were stolen by a group of heretics (Powder Kegs) hiding in the ruins below.

The artorias DLC is really good, and the carvings kinda break the invisible section of the duke's archives

How have you found the combat, tactically speaking, to be? Does it feel like bloodborne despite being 5E?

I am still working out the kinks, but my players seem to like it for the most part. Compared to Bloodborne, I need to figure out how to capture the quick dodges a bit better, but the risk-reward aspect is there in full force. As it stands I have a soft disengage that is a bonus action that makes Opportunity attacks against you be made at disadvantage. I also have a quickening spell that I am waiting to implement for some NPCs and make available through a Hunter's Bone mechanic (X uses per day equal to X modifier) that is as follows:

1 bonus action. 1 minute duration. "You move like the wind. For the duration, your movement does not provoke opportunity attacks. In addition, the first time you make a weapon attack on your turn before the spell ends, you make an attack roll with advantage, and your speed increases by 30 ft until the end of that turn."

I am definitely looking for more suggestions, if y'all have any.

>the carvings kinda break the invisible section of the duke's archives
you could do the same with pebbles before DLC was a thing

Learn Japanese and play the official one.

>I need to figure out how to capture the quick dodges a bit better
Well, that's easy enough. Give players active defense scores (Dodge, Parry, Block) that they have to roll against to successfully defend against an attack. Retreating gives a bonus, although that bonus depends on weapon type and skill. Shields give a bonus to all defenses. Remember to apply damage to shields to let you hack through a tough nut.

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Bored now, that's enough.

Can you actually read it? How is the game?

Jolly Cooperation

One way we did it was having a humanity stat capped at 5. Each death resulted in -1 humanity and if a pc hit zero they went hollow and perma-dead. Humanity worked by using one and burning it at a bonfire to restore back to 5. Though you can use more but the stat would only go up by 1 per humanity.

That's fucking genius, user! Thanks!

Challenging combat and traps. Dark Souls is a dungeon crawler at heart.

And a skeleton that kicks you off a cliff

>Can you actually read it?
Mostly yes. Kanji is my weak point so it's slow going.

>How is the game?
It's a dungeon crawler, but one would have to be retarded to expect anything more than that out of an officially licensed Dark Souls TTRPG.
It's entirely d6 based like large number of Japanese TTRPGs are, and it has a neat action economy with FP (stamina) and a dice pool you allocate towards different actions on your turn, but I'm still working through it so I can't say much more than that.

>a neat action economy with FP (stamina) and a dice pool you allocate towards different actions on your turn, but I'm still working through it so I can't say much more than that.

I would be interested to hear more the next time this thread rolls around.
I have yet to see action points executed such that "more action points" isn't the hands-down best way to build a character.
Which I am inclined to blame on them being carried over directly from single-player vidya with minimal consideration for balance.