Dark Souls RPG survey

Because everything I didnt mention I already have more or less an answer for. I dont come asking about the easy shit, I come asking about the stuff thats hardest to adapt, to see if anyone else has a novel solution.

We're talking a game centered almost entirely on combat here, and relatively simple, unflashy but intense combat.
Since experience and skill should count for much more than luck in a DS context, it would also seem thematically inappropriate to give too much power to the dice.

Much as the atmosphere invites RPG comparison, the actual game feels more like chess with a plot.

Oh and PS: the moment you've started crowdsourcing opinions for a project like this and asking how people want YOUR game to accomplish some vague "feeling" is the moment your project has utterly and outright been doomed. If this project were going to have a chance at completion and cohesiveness you honestly never would have started this thread in the first place. Just as an aside on general creative development and think-tanking.

Says someone who has never made a game before, clearly. You can maintain a vision while seeking input and inspuration from others. NOT doing that is a surefire way to make sure what you make is insular dreck no one will enjoy but you.

I never said don't ask for input or advice at all. I have done development and playtesting on 4 different RPG's over my ~15 years in the hobby (on top of generally playing/running around 40 different games, and countless ones read through).

You can either believe me or not, try to actually absorb some of the advice in my post or not. It genuinely could not possibly matter less to me.

Your life, your project, your time.

The /tg equivalent of the NavySeal copypasta.

As I said; your life, your project, your time.

Oh, I'm not OP, but I am developing a system. You just came off like a pretentious fuck, even though you were probably genuinely trying to help.

In order to contribute to the thread though, I'll say stick with it OP. I believe that setting-specific systems are always preferable to playing poorly-converted generic shit, and Dark Souls deserves a fun, thematic PnP RPG.

No, I mean why are you trying to directly simulate the mechanical elements of the video game itself, when that is pretty much the worst thing you can do if you're trying to capture the game's feel?

A dramatic medium shift like this requires you to consider the game as a whole including the effect its original medium has and translate that feeling on a higher level of abstraction rather than just translating single elements on their own.

Dark Souls works because it's design fit the format. Most of the things that make it great don't translate into RPGs.

Not every cool IP is ripe for use as an RPG.

I wasn't assuming you were the OP; the message my posts convey can be considered applicable to any aspiring designer on this board, OP was simply the primary focus.

Best Dark Souls game I ever played on tabletop was an entirely solo play of D&D5e because it was all atmosphere and I had to be careful how to tackle situations as I had no party to back me up, which changed a lot about how I fought monsters and which I just tried to avoid.

>the FEEL of dark souls
Is largely built on something that can only be done in video games, which is also why it's a brilliant series; it understands and utilizes its medium fully. You can't recreate the feeling it evokes in anything other than a video game.

You claim a lot of experience in developing RPGs. What would your solution to the Poise question be?

False. Having played the Dark Souls board game, I can say that feels a lot like Dark Souls in the sort of playstyles it encourages. Not a perfect replica, mind you, but more than enough to be recognizably souls-esq even if its name wasn't on the box.

So you want to recreate the Dark Souls board game?

Not even OP, man. Just saying your claim was built on a faulty assumption.

Not at all, because the mechanics of Dark Souls is a very small part of the feeling that it does evoke. Just a few very obvious examples, the nature of you being expected to die constantly and retrying challenges until you understand them and can overcome them. That's a natural trait of video games which Dark Souls utilizes fully. Or the fact that the games has almost no dialogue at all and instead relies almost entirely on visual information and the players piecing the story together themselves based on what they find and where.

Poise is just a game mechanic. What purpose does it serves? What do you gain by including it in your system? What did even the original videogames gain from it (this is even a hot topic among fans of the games)?

Let's assume you've already thought about this and decided your game needs the ability to stagger people and interrupt their actions or perhaps subtract AP from the hit character. How would this function? An opposed stat roll between characters? A static value rolled as determined by some 'poise' stat attached to the character? Do you want heavy weapons to affect those chances, or are foes themselves simply organized into 'fodder,' 'competents' and 'bosses'? If so, should they be attached to those mechanical divisions instead of to a sprawling system of intricate weapon statistics and values/properties?

This is also completely avoiding the topic of how this would affect the game in play. What are your other combat rules designed like? How long in the game world does a turn, round or exchange represent (in other words, what combat resolution is your game working with?)?

Does poise affect parrying significantly enough to warrant it's own mechanic? Is this required to replicate the actions and reactions you have seen within the DS universe, or can it be trimmed or subsmed into another value? Should it? Why? What kinds of other modifiers will parrying be influenced by?

These are all questions which both need to be asked and have a solid foundation to work from/goal to work towards, with those design choices made as concisely and conservatively as possible. You need to evaluate these choices for yourself or ask advice sparingly in a targeted way that will serve your design parameters, or at the very least, consider these kinds of questions before you start asking about a nebulous mechanic that arguably didn't even work properly in most the games it has been featured in.

>Rules impact atmosphere.
I agree, but in my experience rules are strictly secondary. If you can nail down a gritty, isolating, hopeless atmosphere, your players (and you) will enjoy experiencing that much more than they will using weapon arts or rolling poise/dodge/parry/etc.

Okay, now that I have that out of the way, rules should be fairly straightforward by sticking to DS’s design PRINCIPALS (not gameplay). For example, souls games aren’t hard - they’re unforgiving. You are punished for making mistakes, and if you bite off more than you can chew or underprepare for a situation/boss/etc. you can expect to die.

So what are a few ways we can reflect this principal on tabletop? One example I can think of is to have rules reward methodical play and preparedness. Does the enemy have a weakness the players can exploit? Can this exploit be abused by intentionally bringing an item (such as charcoal pine resin, or witcher-style oils)? How can you telegraph enemy actions so players can act/react intelligently? These questions (especially the latter) can be hard to answer without some serious consideration and hours of playtesting in order for the result to “feel right”.

Additional consideration:
In Souls games, death is a learning mechanic. When you die, you typically learn something you didn’t know before (enemy hidden in a corner, the area of a boss’ attack, can’t parry that particular enemy/attack/weapon…. You get the idea). If death is a meaningful event in your game (as it is in most games), how do you compensate for this style of learning? Do you go full Souls/Shadow of Mordor and have death become somewhat inconsequential? Are players “taken out” and given long-term punishments like scars or lost limbs? Or do you give them extra health to compensate for the steep learning curve (and if you choose this avenue, are you REALLY sticking to the aforementioned design principal?). All things to consider...

>Hey guys, I'm making this cool system about this one IP with lots of cool fighting and weapons and stuff

>So, without giving you any ideas as to how the rest of the system works or even the bare minimum design goals, how about you tell me how you want weapons and fighting to work?

Gee I wonder why nobody has given advice.

I think the important question to ask are equipment, movesets and poise critical to the Dark Souls experience?

Was Dark Souls 3 a bad experience when poise did nothing? Was Dark Souls 1 no fun until you had multiple weapons to choose from? I don't think either of those is true.

Poise is just an interaction with other mechanics, I can see how you could implement it in GURPS where you have penalties for taking damage, but in D&D there are none, so it's a non-issue.

Part of what made equipment interesting in Dark Souls is the lore that came with them. The other side of it, and movesets, finding a combo that works with how you want to play or fits the situation, again is a matter of specific mechanics.

Again, the main question is "What parts of Dark Souls are important to it being Dark Souls, and which of those translate into RPG form?"

Those are questions I can answer.

Obviously, Souls from a video game standpoint is all about player skill and risk management. I think everyone can agree this pairs poorly with traditional RPG 'I roll to hit the thing, did I hit the thing?' resolution mechanics. Instead, I have a system in place by which players have a rolled amount of Stamina each round (excused as 'the ebb and flow of battle leaving you better or worse off to act this turn') but how you spend that stamina is 100% up to you, and your actions don't fail as long as you pay for them. In addition, some things (like attacks) have a cost measured in totals. Heavier weapons cost more stamina to swing, and so forth. Other, simpler actions (like dodge) simply cost dice, allowing you to get value out of stamina dice even if they were low rolls. You might not always get dealt the hand you wanted, but how you play your Stamina, and the consequences of those choices, are on you. Your Stamina bar doesn't refresh until next round, so you better make sure you don't fully exhaust your ability to dodge or you are setting yourself up to eat face after spending your whole turning swinging out.

Because this greatly reduces (but does not entirely remove) the impact of luck on success, preparation is important. I also plan on limiting your ability to change out equipment between bonfire rests, so if you want to equip gear specific to taking out a specific enemy you need to balance that against being able to survive everything else along the way. Switching weapons is easy, switching armor is hard.

Telegraphing enemy attacks is a problem, and the closest I have for that is to have the bosses have a limited number of signature moves, so while your ability to know what they are doing next is not as viable, your ability to know what they are capable of can be learned by simply paying attention.

The way I plan to handle death is like so. Obviously we want players to be able to die again and again, both as a learning experience and as a way to not have bosses being bullshit game overs the first time you run into something you don't know how to handle yet. At the same time, since this is a tabletop game we probably don't want infinite tries at a problem because that gets boring for everyone.

My solution is to simply cast the PCs as more traditional undead in the setting. Not everyone gets to be the chosen undead, able to die as many times as they want and never falter. Instead, if you die human you lose your humanity. Tough break, but you can get it back. But die without any humanity, and you start to get more Hollow. Regaining humanity gives you a buffer against further hollowing, but it doesn't undo the damage that hollowing has done to your mind. This is represented as certain slots on your character sheet being erased when you die a Hollow (basically your Name field and a bunch of key memories) and if you die and don't have anything left to burn, you go fully Hollow and become a hostile NPC on your next life. By my recollection, this would require dying something like 6 times, not including regaining humanity in the middle there or taking advantage of a couple of different ways to buy more time for yourself.

And if that idea upsets people, they can always just ignore that mechanic and not penalize death that way. But I'm of the opinion that for a game to be a game, there needs to be at least the threat of a failure state, even if that failure state is avoidable.

Huh. Thats not terrible.

Id say only give unique weapons special attacks, like Ornsteins Spear.

Dont include poise as a mechanic, just make 'attempt to stagger' a combat action of some kind. Maybe have it work/fail based on the amount of damage the enemy has taken that round? So damage still kind of impacts 'poise'.

That actually doesn't sound too bad. Rolling for stamina each round seems a bit meh, but I'd have to see it in action before making any real judgements.

It sounds like you roll a bunch of dice for it, so I'd imagine it mostly averages out like any dice pool system. Though depending on how it gets written, different rolls that total the same thing might get played differently? Like, 3 + 3 = 6, and 1 and 5 equals 6, but if dodge takes a die regardless of value I probably would rather have 1/5 that than 3/3, because now I might be more tempted to put those 3s to 'good use' on actions.

What i did was run pathfinder, have everyone run the wizard class templet with no proficiencies familiars, and the ability to only cast spells when they both had a casting item (chime, staff, or totem for hexes), and spellbook. Item wise i just let them do as they pleased, with the exception of magic items. Since their paying 1 out of 3 starting starting feats for their weapon proficiency (unless they wanted to go with casting) this wasnt too terribly gamebreaking. They where aloud to pick their save score as well. Rather then base casting off a single stat, i made some spell lists and based each spell list off of one stat (wis for miracles, int for sorcery, cha for hexes, and your hand for pyromancy. And before you ask, yes, pyromancy is still broken when doing this.) As for the enemies, i just made the enemies have a extremely high cr (bosses being a 10 levels above the highest player level minimum). I personally ran the estus like a refillable mid level healing potion made it so enemies for the most part dont respawn, but thats more or less up to you. Hope this helps user.

>Was Dark Souls 3 a bad experience when poise did nothing?
Poise gave you extra frames of hyper armor when using ultra great swords.

Play E6 3.5, done.

Has anyone made a spell chart for GURPS?

As long as we can play Sunbros, I'm happy

So, reading through the thread I got an idea about how one could do movesets with weapons and such. Maybe create a set of 4-5 "cards" for each weapon that make up its "move set". And a second set for two handing said weapon if it matters. For the "cards" I'm thinking something along the lines of the DS board game boss cards. If there's enough variation you could definitely give each weapon a very different feel. Also, if you wanted you could replace a "parry" action card with one of those sword art things they brought into the later titles.

I feel like this could relatively seamlessly be added to your stamina system where, instead of giving each weapon a set stamina cost to swing you could add that to their cards. This would allow for things like heavy attacks and light attacks, at the drawback of losing more stamina, or doing less damage.

Hope this can help in some regard.

When I was doing this I tried to add a stamina mechanic to make the combat feel more strategic. Basically you had a certain number of actions you could do before you ran out of stamina and every action after you ran out and didn’t recover some took a severe penalty to success. Because of this mechanic I also made it so you coukd attack mumtiple times per turn if you were willing to give up the stamina to do so.

Impossible. Dark Souls cannot be made into table top because it's inherently designed as a video game. You spot things out of the corner of your eye with no indicators to look there to start with. You find secrets through trial and error that can't be replicated by a GM. You fight things by repeatedly smashing your head into the wall until you find a strategy that works. It's an atmosphere where you alone are required to get through it, not a group, not a GM hand holding, not a game where you can't possibly know your surroundings without giving away the secrets.

I hate this shit.

I've been playing since demon souls first came out, and all faggots like you keep doing is reminding me that everything I've ever loved will one day die a horrible fetid death. Either it becomes popular enough to consume itself due to levels of excessive faggotry, or no one will like it, and it'll remain undersupported forever.

A thing isnt beautiful because it lasts, user.

1 I would have a definitive list of weapons with options on how to create variations. In dark souls games theres infusions and i would allow that and also add on top of it by giving a rapier a special version with increased damage and stats (kinda like richards rapier if i remember correctly)

2. I dont know how to translate movesets into pen and paper but there definitely should be a value for range and such. If you want to be more waregamey, you could give each weapon several attacks (3 or so - stab, lunge, swipe for example), which each cost different amount of action points and hit a different amount of squares infront

Speaking of action points, use action points. They're great and work well to differentiate weapons + builds

3 Poise should be a stat to handle getting staggered + scared

4 Keep it rules light with a big focus on how to handle enemies + equipment. Squarebased + action points are good if you want to be serious about it

>Or the fact that the games has almost no dialogue at all and instead relies almost entirely on visual information and the players piecing the story together themselves based on what they find and where.
A good GM could achieve this simply by being very descriptive about scenery and using environments to tell a story more than characters.

So, basically like making a concentration roll against damage taken in D&D, except instead of just preventing spellcasting, being "staggered" affects all actions?

This is entirely accurate. Mythras with a good atmosphere feels like dark souls, just use point buy for stats and ignore the culture stuff in favor of just choosing what you want. If you want it to feel even more like Dark Souls pool total HP into a single bar instead of by location and have all combat and magic use a single skill roll.

user why not use Song of Swords ?

I think it would be art to translate everything that make Dark Souls "Dark Souls" into tabletop, the setting would be the easiest thing to make if you are interested in the lore, but the gameplay would be a bit harder to translate without it being a chore as a turn based game

From what OP has said, and I may be wrong on this, the actual round to round stuff should be easy. You only get one fistfull of dice a turn, with almost no rolls other than that.

Since it sounds like he is sticking mechanically close to the games (aka, you can convert weapons from game stats) I suspect this means that levelling up will be a chore of math and scribbling, but between level ups you just use the values on your sheet.

Id imagine being Staggered sucks up Stamina dice, either screwing your ability to dodge or limiting what you can do on your turn depending on when it happens to you.

Im not sure I understand what you mean? Are you upset about casuals in your fandom, or the game itself? Or that Demon's Souls never blew up like Dark Souls did?

...

Just to let you all know, an official Dark Souls RPG already exists.

Sure. Untranslated, in Japanese, and if we are being honest Japanese TTRPGs are often really hit or miss, especially tie-in ones. Sometimes you get cool shit, like Ryuutama. Sometimes you get the NGE RPG, which is only 9 pages long and has sometime to do with cards which no one has ever been able to explain how it would work.

>Would people rather have a defined list of as-is weapons?
Yes, the game is in a sense about weapons and therefore it should be clearly laid out in the rules.

>How important is maintaining that moveset diversity between weapons?
Very important. Refer back to previous answer.

>How would you want to see Poise/Parrying handled in a tabletop game, or should it just be dropped?
Think about how you will be able to handle twitch reaction in a role-playing game, and use that.

>Anything else you specifically want to see in a dedicated Souls RPG system
Mostly I think the experience of Dark Souls is strongly connected to its medium and I don't think it's easy at all to convert it to RPG format. I don't see why one would want to anyway. As I wrote before, how would you handle twitch reaction? Rolling? Parrying? If you say by dice roll or stats, it doesn't mirror the way a player of the actual game experience it. How do you handle the fact that you never die, and keep returning to the place you've been in until you die? That sounds like it would be incredibly boring in an RPG. I know you don't want to hear this, seeing your last sentence, but I think that if you just like the feel/lore/atmosphere of Dark Souls you should consider figuring out how to transcend the video game format and move towards a more functional RPG system. Don't call it Dark Souls, don't call it a soulslike.

It would be a start, if you've got a pdf.

Parrying needs to be dropped, it doesnt really on skill, its really easy and just trivializes a lot of encounters. Also you can't really have timing be a thing in a turn-based rpg

Did my best to compile a list of all the spells in all three of the games. We could probably remove the redundant spells in favor of some sort of power-up system and remove the ones that wouldn't work well in an TTRPG. Organizing it further into Chaos Pyromancies, Crystal Sorceries, Golden Sorceries, and Miracles granted by specific gods/covenants is also an option.

>Miracles
Heal Aid, Heal, Med Heal, Great Heal, Soothing Sunlight, Replenishment, Bountiful Light, Bountiful Sunlight, Caressing Tears, Tears of Denial, Homeward, Seek Guidance, Sacred Oath, Force, Emit Force, Wrath of the Gods, Lightning Spear, Great Lightning Spear, Sunlight Spear, Lightning Stake, Lightning Storm, Divine Pillars of Light, Blessed Weapon, Lightning Blade, Darkmoon Blade, Magic Barrier, Great Magic Barrier, Way of White Corona, Projected Heal, Lightning Arrow, Gravelord Sword Dance, Gravelord Greatsword Dance, Great Heal Excerpt, Karmic Justice, Sunlight Blade. Tranquil Walk of Peace, Resplendent Life, Heavenly Thunder, Soul Appease, Blinding Bolt, Unveil, Perseverance, Splintering Lightning Spear

>Dark Miracles
Dark Blade, Vow of Silence, Dead Again, Atonement, Deep Protection, Gnaw, Dorhys’ Gnawing

>Sorceries
Soul Arrow, Great Soul Arrow, Heavy Soul Arrow, Great Heavy Soul Arrow, Farron Dart, Great Farron Dart, Farron Hail, Homing Soulmass, Homing Crystal Soulmass, Crystal Hail, Soul Spear, Crystal Soul Spear, White, Dragon Breath, Soul Stream, Soul Greatsword, Farron Flashsword, Magic Weapon, Great Magic Weapon, Crystal Magic Weapon, Magic Shield, Great Magic Shield, Spook, Aural Decoy, Pestilent Mist, Cast Light, Repair, Hidden Weapon, Hidden Body, Chameleon, Twisted Wall of Light, Frozen Weapon, Snap Freeze, Aural Decoy, Remedy, Resist Curse, Shockwave, Soul Shower, Soul Vortex, Soul Bolt, Soul Geyser, Yearn, Unleash Magic

>Dark Sorceries
Deep Soul, Great Deep Soul, Affinity/Pursuers, Dark Edge, Great Soul Dregs, Old Moonlight, Dark Bead, Dark Fog, Dark Orb

(1/2)

>Pyromancies
Fireball, Fire Orb, Bursting Fireball, Fire Surge, Fire Whip, Firestorm, Great Combustion, Sacred Flame, Profaned Flame, Poison Mist, Toxic Mist, Acid Surge, Flash Sweat, Profuse Sweat, Iron Flesh, Power Within, Carthus Beacon, Carthus Flame Arc, Warmth, Rapport, Boulder Heave, Flame Fan, Fire Tempest, Combustion, Lingering Flame, Flame Swathe, Forbidden Sun, Flame Weapon, Immolation, Chaos Fire Whip, Great Chaos Fire Orb, Chaos Bed Vestiges, Chaos Storm, Floating Chaos, Seething Chaos

>Dark Pyromancies
Black Flame, Black Fire Orb, Black Serpent

(2/2)

another good question is why do we have this thread every few months

Because the demand is there but no one has made a system for it yet that satisfies that desire.

Good work, man.

I find dark souls much more interesting as a setting than as a system.

>A good GM could achieve this
No. Even the best GM would only be able to provide a bad video game experience. Rather than trying to make your tabletop games play like video games you ought to look into what only tabletop games can do.

GURPS Martial Arts might be what you want. At least for inspiration for a homebrew. It's got many options for players. You could restrict the players to certain options based on the weapons they are using to try and emulate the concept of "move sets." Things like Combination Moves (a technique that allows players to buy off the penalties involved in executing multiple attacks, in exchange for having a single attack that MUST always executed the same way - like a stab to the gut followed by a cut to the neck with a sword) can be used to emulate complicated maneuvers.

Better question: Why has Veeky Forums not made it in GURPS, if we keep having these threads?

Literally all DS is, is an AD&D 1E setting or older with free ressurection built into the setting. There's 1:1 parallels to the vast majority of it.
Equipment lists - check.
Assumed (but not always spelled out) movesets based on the weapons - check.
Spells, both clerical and magical - double check.

The only notable difference is that D&D's combat is more abstract.

Dark Souls is more or less a D&D campaign with Berserk inspirations converted to PC with spiffy action combat thrown ontop.

Possibly WFRPG is a descent choice

GURPS actually has a bite-size setting with accompanying guidelines and rules for a Dark Souls-type game/setting already. It's called "Havens and Hells" in Pyramid 3/89. Complete with repeating deaths. Combined with other articles like the one on the value of souls, videogame pickups, etc. you really could get down to the nitty-gritty of DS's game conceits if you wanted to.

However, I think emulation of the setting is more important than necessarily emulating any of the mechanics save for once you feel you need. For those mechanics desired, GURPS fills the role fairly well; if you want an AP system, it also has an article "The Last Gasp" which adds complexity but a surprising amount of depth to combat strategy, very dark souls ish for a melee combat centered campaign. Powers/dodging/parries/damage to shields and armor/etc. are already easily done in GURPS by default, particularly with the recent Fantasy Tech 2 being entirely about giant swords and other ridiculous anime/fictional weapons, and Combat Writ Large for giant monsters/bosses.

If you want rules for madness or something like becoming Hollow, there are plugins for those. Also Corruption might work well as a side effect of certain powers, actions, faction allegiances, etc.

If you don't like GURPS that's cool too though. As mentioned earlier, Mythras is also a great choice for it among others. There are a few good systems that I feel can replicate the feel of dark souls in a satisfactory way, depending on your gaming tastes.

Oh, and speaking of Mythras: I just recently created a set of rules for using Passions from Mythras/RQ6/Pendragon/BRP in GURPS.

These could be useful if you used GURPS (or 'natively' in Mythras!) and wanted to encourage the big, dramatic character motivations and allegiances/relationships so commonly implied about significant characters in the Souls universe.

Homebrew GURPS Passions rules here for the curious:
forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=152474

Hi user, i know your pain, that's why i'm currently writing my own Souls game.

1: equipment
I'm just giving weapons numbers that feel right. the most important means of differentiation turn out to be movesets in my current design (there's also scaling and stability, and that's pretty much it. weapon weight is mostly defined by type).
I simply categorized armours into 7 tiers (cloth, light, medium, heavy, very heavy, ultra heavy, havel. technically 8 tiers if you count running around naked, although you don't really get any benefit from it)

2: Movesets
i use a d6 pool for stamina (ended up at 6 to 10 - at start and without rings and shit) which you use to do actions. weapons have 2 or more attacks that cost X stamina. you take X dice from your stamina pool and roll them for the attack (generally, it's Keep Highest). different attacks can also have different keywords (shit like windup, true combo, sweep, roll-catch...)

3: Poise/Parrying
as much as i would have liked to include poise as a general mechanic, it just didn't make sense in the context of my game (although i included hyper-poise as an attack keyword). Parrying is still high risk/reward, kinda tricky to gauge, but heavy attacks (which generally use more dice) are actually easier to parry with the mechanic i'm using.

4: HUMANITY. in my game, Humanity is the only way to raise your HP and you lose 1 humanity when you die (you go hollow when you die with 0 humanity left). you can also expend 1 humanity to either fully heal yourself (once per combat) or boost a roll (e.g. exploding dice).
Humanity is mostly gained through defeating bosses (but you can also find it on corpses from time to time).

Also, Sorceries cost souls on cast, pryomancy costs stamina (bad for combatants, but on the other hand you don't need to invest stats in it), and miracles come cost you nothing (but have longer casting time). Dark spells consume your humanity, but they're generally extremely powerful.

>If you think you need to build a system from the ground up for dark souls you either haven't been listening or you haven't done the proper research.
>Else, your idea of what constitutes "souls-like gameplay" is so narrow and specific that you are functionally designing an entire game for yourself, alone.
have you ever built your own system from ground up before? it's fun, you should try it some time.

not op but I'm not gonna let myself be stopped by that. Ultimately, the games are dungeon crawlers anyway, and that's something we've been doing for years anyway.
that or you can also have your undead characters on a pilgrimage to the north like everyone in lordran seeminlgy has undertaken, letting them visit all these places like Catharina, Astora, Vinheim, Carim etc... just not Zena (my headcanon is Zena can only be found by people who've already been there)

I personally wouldn't use a d100 system as they cap far too quickly even though stats scale from 1 to 100 in DS. I've been writing my own souls inspired system for a while now, and the things that have worked best are 3d6 based systems, and semi-simple dicepool systems (see Storyteller, some White Wolf, D6 system, etc)

Holy shit, just use GURPS you fucking autists

Behold! A post equally at home, and equally wanted, in every thread that ever has been or ever will be on Veeky Forums.

>I'm not gonna let myself be stopped by that
Then you will also create subpar products given your choosen format. What makes Dark Souls great is above all that it fully understands and utilizes the limitations of its medium. In particular the feeling of loneliness that pervades the games because of the very limited interactions with other players and NPCs and the feeling of your one ultimate enemy being your own hopelessness as the game doesn't punish you for failing in any other way than forcing you to retry over and over again.

If you want to do what Dark Souls does in a tabletop game, then rather than trying to copy the most superficial elements of Dark Souls, try to understand what's unique about tabletop games and work around that. The most obvious element would be the very unlimited interaction between the other players (something which is the polar opposite of the what Dark Souls has going on) which means that anyone theoretically could add information to the world at any time, and yet that's an aspect that's only ever explored in the most narrativist of systems.

Yes I have, and yes it can be, though its a process potentially riddled with traps and pitfalls.

You make a good point about the BRP skill caps. Have you looked at Reign for inspiration for a Souls system? It's pool-based, has interesting ideas for magic use, and uses the One Roll Engine which ends up working great for all kinds of stuff like hordes of faceless mook, easy/quick hit location decisions, speed of your parry being as significant as the attack to see which connects first, dodges being a limited resource to be spent carefully, etc. (including super powers as it so happens, see Wild Talents/earlier Godlike).

Preach

I like hope people pretend the only reason anyone played dark souls was the 'solitary experience', and that if there were more persistant NPCs in the game no one would have enjoyed the world or the gameplay and everyone would hate it.

I like how full of shit you are.

What is it from the game you want to capture?

A lot of the high points I enjoyed about the game just don't seem repeatable in an RPG medium. I suppose there are themes that could be interesting to port over, like losing Humanity/Hollowing, you could take and maybe parts of the setting, but I think you'd do better designing a good RPG (or using a existing one) and not try to emulate everything. This is almost always where RPGs based on other IP's go wrong.

i get your concern, but I'm having too much fun trying to find lightweight analogues. Andi get your concern, but I'm having too much fun trying to find lightweight analogues; i guess I'm seeing this as an opportunity to experiment with combat resolution mechanics, too.
that said, i always wanted to explore the world outside Lordran, maybe i could even try coming up with a "lore creation" mechanic of some kind... lots of things to think about.

really fucked that post up ... sorry

Yeah ya did.

I agree with wanting to explore the world more. Every bit I see I want more. I am really sad we won't be seeing more games from it.

Hmmm. Considering that 1 and 2 take place during very different time periods, and 3 is just a jumble of time and space, perhaps the way to handle that would be to construct less a 'setting' so much as flesh out the different regions and groups more or less individually, and let GMs pick and choose which ones are in their game world?

Time is convoluted in Lordran, after all. Its up to you whether Astora is a current nation, a long gone land of knights, or if it goes by Mirrah now.

Mythras doesn’t have a skill cap.

I know this has been answered to death, but I've had a few ideas about this

Considering your first three questions; I think the design of the weapons actually relies on you changing combat a bit, if you want to include poise and movesets.

So, I believe the best way to make sure weapons work the way they do in the Souls games you should look at how those weapons function in the games; some weapons swing faster than others because they're keyed to different stats, but generally those that swing faster deal less damage in a single swing. So players who have lighter weapons will get more attacks during the combat round, but will do less damage per strike.

So, for a really dumbed down example of this (Mainly because I'm shit at math), lets say that, striking with an Axe like the one the Northern Warrior starts with in DS3 would normally deal around 10 damage in a single strike. The dex-built short-sword and knife combo would get two attacks in the same round, but will do, on average, five damage per hit.

The only difference between the two is that, if you miss your opponent gets a chance to attack you with Advantage or whatever equivalent have you. In this situation the guy with the Axe will more than likely suffer a penalty to see if he can dodge, but the Dex build will have an easier time of it, and may be able to strike again.

Leastways that's how I look at it.

What would be the best way to handle Dark Soul's magic system in GURPS?
You forgot a lot of DaS2's hexes.

A big part of advancing in dark Souls is upgrading your weapon as much as it is leveling up your character. I wonder how in depth you can really get with those rules before it becomes too autistic. You cant have a huge table of all possible upgrade paths for that weapon for EVERY weapon.

>Asotra
>Mirrah
>The same thing
Cease

...

While lacking the depth of weaponry in the games, probably best to just have generic upgrades, rather than each weapon upgrading on a unique path.

So, +1 means +10 damage regardless of weapon. Infusing a weapon with magic means half its damage becomes Magic typed. Etc.