Dark Souls Campaign Mechanics

>Where should I begin reading?
Games that are good at explaining themselves. The ones I can think of are Apocalypse World, Tenra Bansho Zero and Ryuutama. It helps that they're all very different in terms of system, structure, scope and intention.

Now that I think about it, Ryuutama may actually be excellent for a Dark Souls-esque game.
It's naturally more rooted in the game world, it's location and mysteries more than muh dee un dee.

Only played 2 or 3 sessions of it but if you build a dark and grim enough world, it may work excellently.

The closest game to dark souls you can find easily is Mythras/RuneQuest 6

I had made a Dark Souls based system that is admittedly very shitty and imbalanced due to not ever finishing it. I had playtested what was done with it because the DM never showed up. I offered to DM and one-shot a playtest of the system and they said yes. It became a full on campaign until being forced to dissolve. I got stuck into forever DM status ever since then.

I had a stamina system that needed to be ironed out, armor gave bonus HP instead of damage reduction, each and every stat had a level of importance, so being a jack-of-all-trades wasn't a bad idea, but they were locked out of the stronger weapons, armor, and spells.
I also worked in a Purity and Sanity mechanic that would either turn the player into something similar to a Pus of Man or become berserk respectively. There were three stages of "rotting" as they were undead. There were human, rotting, and skeleton. Upon each death, the character would lose maximum Purity and Sanity and upon dying as a skeleton, they would have to make a save to keep hold of themselves but take another hit to Purity and Sanity.

It was very imbalanced, but fun nevertheless. I might start working on it again whenever I'm not flooded with homework.

>realize that the quick, player skill-based, iterative trial-and-error gameplay of Dark Souls translates very poorly to the tabletop

Yes it does, it's just different where players have to think intelligently about their actions as opposed to having quick reflex-based memorization of hit-boxes and enemy abilities.

In fact, it would translate more-so to table top than to VG's, because the table-top adds that extra dimension of infinite possibility (if you have a good DM).

Dark Souls is practically Tomb of Horror turned into a video game anyway.

Nooooo no no no

Bad idea

D&D does heroic fantasy. When you try to make it do other things, like Dark Souls brand of atmospheric dark fantasy, it has a little cry and gets extremely depressed.

Choose a different system. You have your work cut out for you as-is what with trying to live up to the feel of the games, don't make your life harder by trying to force a round peg into a square hole.

>Dark Souls, a videogame, translates better to tabletop than it does to itself

You heard it here first, folks

Actually 4e's combat focus is pretty straight forward on for a vidya

I wonder, what does Veeky Forums think about the mechanic in the Dark Souls boardgame where they made stamina and health share a pool, so that you will die more easily the more agressive you play? I haven't actually played the board game, but it lokes pretty cool and fitting to me.

4th edition is overdone garbage.

Just making my character dissuaded me from playing it.

>Elite knight set with the uchigatana
Damn, I thought I was the only one who did that. Twelve year old fifteen year old me was so proud of my armoured samurai concept.

Incredibly silly.

I'm pretty sure everyone who plays Dark Souls has had a Elite Armor Samurai at some point.

Charlie Chaplin once came second in a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest.

It's okay user, we won't make fun of your terrible taste.
Much

Make your own homebrew, rip the basic combat from RuneQuest6 or just hack the action points, forget about feats and classes instead make it so they will find trinkets with special skills in their journey emulating the feeling of a DS blind playthrough, instead of classes give them some basic pregen characters to start with, they then can gain souls and customize their play style freely, no roleplay or knowledge skills instead make the PC talk stuffs IC / find the lore IC, run the game like a pathcrawl mega dungeon with some safe zones with NPCs, when a PC dies make it so that the enemies they have killed will resurrect, PCs can resurrect at any point at the cost of humanity or freely in a bonfire, at 0 humanity you become hollow and change sides
Or something like that, dunno

I'm actually slapping together a Soulsborne homebrew in my spare time as it is. The goal is to provide a framework for the RPG part, and then to provide rules for importing weapons from the games with key numbers intact. Easier than repeating and rebalancing such a long list of equipment.

Rounds start with everyone rolling a Stamina bar to spend on actions, and initiative is Popcorn style except that enemies can Interrupt a switch between players with their own turn. Bosses get multiple Interrupts a round. Attacking and the like requires spending dice with a total value equal to the action cost (big weapons are slower and thus cost more Stamina, quicker weapons cost less) and Dodging an attack just sacs a die regardless of its value.

Leveling up will be spending points on incremental stat increases like the games, with the option to spend your points instead on Licenses, which unlock specific abilities not directly based on stats, like Lockpicking or other useful RPG abilities in that vein that Souls games generally don't include because its just walking around and fighting.

If I can find a way to make it work, I think I'll write the rules in such a way that Souls options and Bloodborne options are both available, for mixing and matching as you see fit. They have more in common than they have differences.

What sort of stuff would you guys like to see in such a game?

Not him but I'd recommend Turbo Dice. it involves a lot of rolling and deciding what dice to roll, but is generally a good system to run a souls-like game in tabletop.

How much Berserk is there?

>realize that the quick, player skill-based, iterative trial-and-error gameplay of Dark Souls translates very poorly to the tabletop

The Veeky Forums interest in dark souls is not to emulate grinding and dodgerolls, it's for the vibe and the setting, both of which are perfectly translatable to tabletop.

Personally I'd stray from trying to emulate combat mechanics, just take the principles of monsters that have attacks or weaknesses you can plan against.

It is going to be hard to capture the haunting loneliness of dark souls with a party goofing around tho, and with them itching to banter with any NPC they run into, I'm interested in how you'd guys answer for that. Having active dialogue at all will make it feel less dark souls

The early SoS threads had a lot of talk about adapting it for Dark Souls. It's one of the premier 3 medieval combat autism simulators right now, and probably the one most explicitly to draw from the Souls series, so you could probably look there if those threads are still around.

Except in Dark Souls 3 where the game forces you to spazz out and punishes you for doing anything other than R1 spamming the longsword.

This is my first thought. Dark Souls focuses really heavily on its tight combat, famed for its lethality and being skill-driven. 5e this ain't. Maybe Hackmaster or something as a base?

Don't. Essentially. What Dark Souls does really well is tell a story and create an atmosphere in a way that can only be accomplished through a video game. There's barely any dialogue at all, and what dialogue is there is intentionally ambigious and short and tries more to convey tone than actual information, and almost all of the story is instead relayed to the player through visual cues in the environment and leave them to puzzle it out on their own with the help of snippets of lore found on items. And many of the mechanics of the game are directly vowen into the lore, and many of them (such as constant resurrection and mastering the environment and the enemies through persistence and trial & error) do not translate well into other mediums, and the feeling of you ultimately being on this journey by yourself is completely ruined in a tabletop rpg setting where communication with the other players is fundamental.

It's pretty much the same as the system used in the Conan board game. It's a nice mechanic. I like it.

I call bullshit on the basis of .

ironically Bloodborne would probably adapt easier to an RPG context than Dark Souls would

OP here, this is what I plan to do, after reviewing suggestions from you all:
-Keep the setting I'm using for regular D&D but in a broken, seemingly apocalyptic theme.
-Consistently hint at never giving hope, so as not to lose the players in despair.
-Stick to the D&D 5th style of combat. It's very simple and clean. Keep the current classes, even the gods.
-Humans only
-Adapt the list of 5th edition feats, by removing and adding relevant traits.
-Keep the monsters of the D&D universe, because it's eldritch horror enough.
-Add covenants, and offerings which can be made at any church.

I'm sticking to D&D 5th, while keeping the atmosphere and appearance of Dark Souls. Basically, it's D&D with Bonfires and Madness, get the picture?

How are you gonna pull of pyromancy? Can't have Dark Souls without that sweet, sweet pyromancy.
>t. Unapologetic pyromancer

No pyromancy, I'm sticking to the conventional spells, except the ones that involve other planes.

You know how everything's gone to shit in the Souls games and you wander around the remains? When I did a Souls based campaign, I decided to have the time set right before/as things are going to shit and it was fascinating to see what the party was doing in terms of researching and trying to find out what's happening to the damn world. They started digging deep into the story and it was delicious.
I better not fucking see you backpedaling so hard you we're fighting in different damn NG+ cycles while you're occasionally using Fire Surge.

What you've said for your plans are pretty solid, at least coming from my limited viewpoint of 5e. I'd like to hear your changes and additions in a bit more detail if possible.

Bump

You guys do know that 5e has two different pyromancy-related Sorceror subclasses, right? The UA Pheonix subclass, and the Pyromancy subclass from Planeshift Kaladesh.

I had no idea, actually. I have limited knowledge of 5e, especially since I'm not one who plays casters so I never look at their classes.

If you want the mechanics then you want a diceless system. The typical RPG combat resolution mechanics aren't even close to capturing the style of Dark Souls, you want something that gives the player complete control over their character's actions so that you can then use it to make them feel like it's their fault when they fuck up. "Aw shucks, I rolled a 1 to miss lethal and then got hit with a critical, GG" lends itself to a totally different vibe.

You know, you're totally right about this. Dark Souls is really about player control vs. luck, since you can kill great big dragons with a puny dagger if you're a master.

What is a good diceless system to look at?

Why not gut the conventional spells (that are a pain anyway) and just steal/rework Dark Souls spells? Also steal Dork Sols attunement stat.

Because I'm lazy and I don't want to create effects for 50+ spells on top of building everything else.