Tabletop games could learn a lot from Darkest Dungeon

did OP pic really happen in darkest dungeon?

Hardcore.

Yes.

Ancestor is the most chaotic-evil motherfucker to ever grace videogames. The list of his exploits are sol hilariously over the top selfishly evil that you can't not appreciate it.

>DoTs, debuffs, stuns, and abilities that get increased power from these factors are plenty abound /.../ it became less effective
So a lot of book keeping to keep track of what's on who and will expire when.

>Different attacks work at different ranges
So now we have to keep track of where exactly everyone is in relationship to everyone else.

>or they run out of uses of it per battle
Which can rather too gamist unless you can somehow come up with a good reason for it in each and every bloody case. (You won't.)

>there were ways to take reduced damage or intercept damage
Other standout features: it has a fantasy setting, there are monsters, it's available in English...

can you give me a few good ones?

I love this stuff

I have a love/hate relationship with D&D and it is super bad at doing anything other than D&D.
It's shaped like itself, if you will.
>So a lot of book keeping to keep track of what's on who and will expire when.
>So now we have to keep track of where exactly everyone is in relationship to everyone else.
Honestly it sounds like you're just not willing to keep track of these things, which is totally fine if that's the style of play you're going for.
>Which can rather too gamist unless you can somehow come up with a good reason for it in each and every bloody case. (You won't.)
Whenever anyone says this, ever, Vancian magic is always considered immune from this issue and I can never figure out why. It's literally X/Day resources explained with 'it's magic' handwaving.

>Stunning Strike
Okay, so I was wrong out of the starting gate to not choose Monk.
>Use a magic item when it's up to the DM entirely to decide what magic items you get, unless you're one of those >wishlist fags
Okay. I'll pull one out of my ass and I'll stop being asshurt in one fell swoop.
>The rest are spells
Of course spells do it. No one ever complained about a Bard not having options. Martials don't have these options, they're locked behind restrictive classes and spells they don't have slots for.

>book keeping
You mean a red pencil tally of turns until it expires right next to the initiative list
>So now we have to keep track of where exactly everyone is in relationship to everyone else.
You mean, what, on a grid?
>Which can rather too gamist unless you can somehow come up with a good reason for it in each and every bloody case. (You won't.)
Somewhat true, but it depends on the action. For example, a werewolf can't keep popping in and out of werewolf form every two seconds, but I bet there's already rules for that sort of thing in D&D.
>reduced damage or intercept damage
Tell me what class, or system even, has a feature to dive in front of an attack of an enemy during its turn as a reaction to soak the blow that would kill your squishy mage.

This. Just play 4e. You can move others out of range with a push of your shield, Daze other people with attacks, allowing that target to grant Combat Advantage so that your Ranger can hit them more reliably. Force others to stick to your Fighter and punish them if they attack someone else. Control the battlefield with a wizard. Attack an enemy and then command your teammate to follow it up, RWBY/Avengers team attack style, as a Warlord. Weaken (cause them to only do half damage) a major threat to your party so that you can recuperate and ready another assault as a Wizard. Cast the searing Flames of Phlegethos on an enemy and provide them with an ongoing 5 fire damage unless they succeed on a saving throw as a Warlock. Devastate an enemy and heal yourself at the same time as a Fighter. Pray to the Gods and give you and your allies an increased chance to hit their attacks, and then have your Rogue hit their fatal dagger thrust and then have them switch places with you to avoid more attacks, in one action.

And most of that shit's from the PHB.

Or play GURPS (needs some tweaking. It's GURPS, after all.) or WHFRP (gritty, dangerous combat.). Love them as well.

Not OP but I'd like to give that class mod a try

Ive been running into mod bugs where I can complete a dungeon but never return to hamlet before it crashes to desktop.

Ive been trial and purging mods I believe are incompatible in the workshop but now it's frustrating

Then depending on version of D&D, either play versatile martials (Tome of Battle [3.5], Battle Master Fighter [5e]) or yes, ask your DM for magic items to spice up gameplay and not be a little passive aggressive bitch.

>Attacking usually results in a hit,
Ask me how I know you never reached champion dungeons.

>the brigands all over the place were actually hired by him. They alternated between posing as local militia and brigands who the local militia needs to defend against while robbing the locals.

>he starts doing necromancy, because why not
>is pretty shit at it, but manages to make a dead rats leg twitch
>invites all the known necromancers to his place to learn from them
>once he feels he can't learn any more from them he poisons them and animates their corpses, making him the greatest living necromancer (and also infesting the castle with undead)

>is stalked by a girl
>girl sees that he makes deals with deep ones
>tells girl to meet her at the docks
>chains her to a statue/idol and throws her over as a sacrifice to the deep ones who transform her into an immortal siren

>starts growing special herbs and brewing potions from them
>is going badly
>a beautiful witch from the forest offers to help
>they hit it off
>implied to have had lots of kinky sex drugged out of their mind high on potions they made
>she turns fat, ugly, and halfway retarded from drug abuse, ancestor doesn't think twice before dumping him in the forest where she becomes a cannibal and the source of a cordiyeps/myconid infestation

>young ancestor is throwing a party at his summer home next to some swamp
>the nobles he invited are incredibly decadent; torture, orgies, scat, everything you can imagine
>a noble lady tries to seduce him
>he goes along with it
>turns out the lady is actually a vampire
>Ancestor's dick game is so strong it distracts the vampire and he stabs her in the neck
>serves her blood to the nobles partying there turning every single one of them into blood crazed monsters

>decides summoning demons is a good idea
>is shit at it and he runs out of human sacrifices
>fusing human souls to pigs should work just as well, right?
>no
>god no

>he actually summoned you in his will to bring people to the town whose suffering will feed the Heart of Darkness

>You have never played D&D.
I have a theory that the cancer killing Veeky Forums is /v/, not /pol/, and that the /pol/ shilling just came along for the ride because GG. Tabletop RPGs are popular right now so vidya players hear about them and come here to learn more. The problem is that old Veeky Forums was the fun, happy kind of autist who goes to the Renn fair and gets way too into it, while /v/ are bitter shut ins who hate everything. They have no friends and as a result no one to invite them to games. They also bring in their idiotic """hardcore gamer""" mentality. So you've got this flood of people trying to prove to each other they're the bestest, most seriousest imaginary elfgame player of all, but since they have little RPG knowledge and zero experience all they can do is make posts like this and fantasize about all the different kinds of boogeymen they'd ban from their game if they had one.

so basically he's an incredibly good learner that doesn't understand the concept of theoretical study before starting practice from a place of zero understanding?

>ve me a few good ones?
>I love this stuff

Not him but well:

- Tried to tamper into necromancy to finally murder each of his mentors and raise them as undead servants who will use their superior knowledge in necromancy to raise more undeads servants for him.

- Militarised a gang of brigands so they could tiranyse the commonfolk who were rebelious against his evil hobbies.

- Bored of necromancy, tried the patrician hobby of demonic summoning, trying to summon demons inside of pigs, since they need a human vessel and swine meat is almost human meat. Of course, his summonings failed each time and he discarted the everchanging demonic swine hunks of meat to the WC and forget about them.

- Thanks for the thing above, now the sewers are infected with a civilization of mutated demonic swine-folks.

- Toyed and lied to a young shy girl, who was in love with him, in order to close a deal with the pelagic demons undersea. He brought her on top of a cliff and make it look like a date, chained her to a rock and tossed her into the sea. The pelagic fish-folk rewarded him with gold and diamonds brought by the tides, while they transformed the cute and inocent girl in some sort of corrupted breeding monster.

- Feasted during his young years everyday in huge court parties at his house with the noble lords from nearby, wasting food from a hungry feud.

To name a few

>crimson court
Hosts lavish artisocrat parties that make 120 Days Of Sodom appear tame then uses a vampiric blood curse to poison the wine of his guests just go see what happens.

>bandits
Terrorized the Hamlit with hired brigands to seize tax. When the hamlet resisted he gave the brigands a cannon

>the wardens
Experimented on demonic human hybrid fusing. When his pig clones for trouble he just dumped them and his hybrid juice into the sewers to contaminate and manifest horrifying flesh monstrosities...just to see what would happen.

It literally goes on and on the Ancestor is certifiably the most batshit insane villain ever. You can honestly sum up his antics with "played God with eldritch sorcery...just to see what happens"

- Tried to assassinate a noble courtesan just because he was bored with all those feasts and parties every night, and because she was better than him at being the center of attention.

- After discovering that the courtesan was vampire, just before murdering her, he desecrated her corpse and bottled her blood, so he could serve it in the ongoing party as the most exquisite and exotic wine you could taste. Upon drinking the wine, the noble-folk became some sort of insectoid vampiric monsters and the party became a slaughter house, for the amusement of our bored ancestor.

- Relegated all the properties of the feud and the task of "saving the world against the Darkness", in order to raise the Old God using the deaths of the heroes who sacrifised themselves trying to complete the missions in the game. So, yeah, basically wanted you to be his sacrificial lamb.

>DoTs, debuffs, stuns, and abilities that get increased power from these factors are plenty abound, every character only has one normal attack, and you wouldn't use it frequently.

LITERALLY DESCRIBING 4E; SEE ALSO

You forgot
>summoning fuckups accumulate
>giant pile of possessed meat squirming around, growing heads and ribs and prolapsing assholes all over the place
>should probably do something about this
>dump it down a hole into a gigantic tunnel system and ignore it

>peasants are getting sick of my shit
>solution: cannon

>crazy prophet is going around saying I'll doom the world
>need to make him shut up
>prison, drowning, and liberal backstabbing don't work
>idea.jpg
>drag him down to the Thing and prove every single accusation right, if not horribly understated
>prophet rips out his own eyes and goes completely insane
>let him keep preaching anyway, because he's not following me around anymore

He's basically a wizard with no sense of right or wrong, who just does things for the lulz. He abandoned every single one of his pursuits EXCEPT uncovering the truth under the Estate.

He became the greatest necromancer... then just stopped doing it because it got boring.

He hired the brigands to get him money for artifacts... then when they turned to banditry and started asking for more gold, extorting the locals and robbing his artifact deliveries he just started paying the pirates instead. Then when THEY started asking for more gold, he just sacrificed THEM to the deep ones for more eldritch artifacts.

When a seer was trying to warn the townsfolk he tried to assassinate him multiple times, then finally decided to just show him his work, which made the seer go so mad he ripped out his own eyeballs and became a gibbering mess.

And all this shit. All this fucking shit, and his motivation basically resolves to
>"I dunno I was bored lol"
The best villains are basically just giving a normal player character virtually unlimited resources.

I honestly can't stop fucking laughing

It's so fucking over the top its become its own art form of exaggeration and hyperbole. I fucking love it

>The thing is, a lot of these factors made melee combat interesting. They did different things and were designed to synergies with each other.
They also work because in DD you are in control of the whole party's build, and can freely choose who goes on what mission based on your knowledge of what you'll find. Sure would suck to be the Plague Doctor's player when you're off to the warrens, because you're staying home every time. Character choices are also comparatively limited compared to tabletop games; no matter what happens, a Crusader can never pick up a bow or some throwing knives, because that's just not his niche.

It started with "because I am bored", but the rest was just a spiral to insanity.

He murdered the vampire and gave her blood to drink to the people in the party because he was bored. But upon having a sip from the cursed wine, he could see the Hearth of Darkness buried under his manor. And he wanted to know about it, what it is behind the veil.

First, tried necromancy, because Death is the barrier the human can't traverse. After being succesfull, realised that what he saw wasn't afterlife, it was something more. So he tried to learn about other planes of existence and demonic summoning.

Since all this shit needed a lot of relics, money and books, used the local brigands to get the money. When they became a problem, resorted to use some pirates. When the pirates were a problem, he made deals with the pelagic demons he meet during all these experiments.

Neither ancestral knowledge, potion or entity could tell him some of the truth of what he saw. He knew it wasn't Afterlife. He knew it wasn't a mere demon. But he didn't know the truth. And he needed to know it.

So, tired of trying to circuvent the issue, he digged under his manor to find what he saw that night in that party... And he saw it. And he laughed. And he cried. He knows the Truth.

Now he is summoning you to finish the job. Because posponing the inevitable is just naive.

The fact this judgement is coming from the ancestor is the only reason I have hope. Because if that fuck head thinks we should give up, we should probably fight tooth and nail

>So, tired of trying to circuvent the issue, he digged under his manor to find what he saw that night in that party... And he saw it. And he laughed. And he cried. He knows the Truth.
>Now he is summoning you to finish the job. Because posponing the inevitable is just naive.
spoil me daddy

This is the correct synopsis, although I prefer the lulz explanations more.

That sounds like a fuckton of book keeping and dice rolling for not a lot of payoff.

I thought this was a given. Every "confess your /tg sins" thread is 80% posters saying "I don't actually play traditional games, I just come here for the greentexts written by other people who obviously don't play traditional games"

> There's no stuns, there's no poison or bleeding damage.
All of those things exist even in 5e.
go back to /v/

Here are some highlights of the Ancestor's shenanigans:
>Exhausts most of his fortune trying to unearth an "unfathomable power" beneath his estate, it turns out to be an eldritch horror that'll destroy the world when it wakes up

>Pirates he hired to recover occult shit start demanding more money
>Fuck that, my money's about dried up
>Curse their anchor to drag them down to the depths
>They become undead cursed to drown for all eternity

>Peasant girl gets a crush on him and starts following him around
>She sees him making a deal with the fish monsters in the cove for gems and shit
>He later lures her to the docks and chains her to an idol he agreed to give the fish people and she gets turned into their queen and slave

>Some crazy dude shows up in town l, raving that the Ancestor will doom the world
>Every attempt to silence him fails
>Ancestor shows him the sleeping Heart of Darkness
>Crazy dude rips out his eyes and runs off laughing and shrieking "The end is nigh!"

>Ancestor decides to get into necromancy
>Invites a bunch of master necromancers to his estate, learns everything he can from them, then murders them and reanimates their corpses with most of their intelligence intact

>Decides to try his hand at summoning demons
>Mixed successes, mostly uses pig flesh for vessels
>Tosses failures in the old sewers his workers found
>Failures come together in a squirming mass of twisted, squealing flesh

Then you're going to need some paper or card. And a pen.

Have a track with numbers on it saying how many round left until the Bleeds/Poisons/whatever runs out.
Then use tokens to denote a single unit of whatever Status is inflicted.
At the start of every round count up how many tokens of Bleed/whatever there are, inflict them, then move them along until they fall off the track and are removed.

Again, that seems like a lot of unnecessary work for not a whole lot of gain. It doesn't really add anything to the game at large, and seems like it'd actively slow down play. Not to mention specific abilities for mundane things opens up another can of worms.

You fuckers forgot that when he showed the Prophet the Thing, he didn't even have the common decency to remove the stockade from the old fart. Or the five knives. Or the giant metal weights. Or the fuckhueg splinters embedded into his everything. All of which the Ancestor put there because he really had a lot of fun killing the old fuck.

That, and he told the fucking brigands to do their homework, bring a huge cannon, make it even more huge, then told them to fuck off when they started asking for a little incentive.

Or the fact that he bound you to the land via letter. Or that there were multiple letters, a la Nigerian Prince.

But yeah on to the topic I *kinda* agree with

I don't know about 5e but in 3.pf stun/bleed/DoT tend to be a complete waste of time. You can full round attack for 2d12+STR+power attack or... 1d12+STR and 1d3 bleed that is immediately cured by any and all sources of healing. Grapple only works on enemies your size and only if there aren't many of them.

>mfw people actually think they're good at video games because they can beat a turn based RPG
how impressive, you have a basic understanding of RNG and risk management

Who implied that? I just thought that such features would be useful and entertaining to bring over to tabletop.

For the love of God, OP. Just play Warhammer Fantasy RPG. There stuns, bleeding, poison and shit are a must.

>There is actually stuns, bleeding, rules for grappling and the like in DnD.
Sure, but they are either just flat-out worse than hitting someone, bonuses you just get or pretty unwieldy.

You're mostly describing 4E, and the key differences there are that while characters don't auto-hit without a leader's help or by being an Avenger, they do have a wider variety in what they can do to an enemy.

The problem is the human brain. When a computer is keeping track of all this stuff it's fine. But in a tabletop game everything has to be managed by actual people, and that means that things are going to be messed up if every ability functions in a unique way and have different forms of cooldowns and lasting affects that disappear or get removed entirely differently from one another.

They'd be boring as all fuck and snow down the game for no reason.

100% this.

DD is computer program, that will every single turn iterate trough hundreds of calculations and modify massive system of variables according to player actions, AI actions and additional feedback. Multiple times, I tried to recreate DD as table top. These are iteration i came through.

>Completely transfer game mechanics
Each player turn takes like five to ten minutes to finish calculations, keeping eye for bleeding/blight/horror tokens, randomly rolling stress and modifying stress according to trinkets. Thanks to unfirom randomness of throws, ending with huge volume of misses.

>Using application I coded to keep track of things
Action phases become much quicker, but huge loss of immersion, we ended up basically playing DD huddled around my computer screen. Also Hamlet phase took much longer, because I was feeding program data about all the character configurations

>Abandoning RP aspects and moving to more boardish game attempt
Strategy aspect, with lock in system became much more fluid, but roleplay suffer a lot, ending up with board game, where you primarily just roll dices and use tables to simplify outcome of your action. Token system with cards proofed itself to be good direction for keeping buffs, DoT, stun and debuffs. Yet it was just a board game, like trying to play Dark Heresy, but ending in classical Warhammer wargame with OP squad and lots of mooks.

>Simplification of mechanics to keep RP alive
I just ended with unbalanced rape children of GRUPS and DnD.

I agree with you for the rest but
>Tell me what class, or system even, has a feature to dive in front of an attack of an enemy during its turn as a reaction to soak the blow that would kill your squishy mage.
usually the job of the martials is to use their movement options to get to contact and the prevent movement by menacing AoO on different action. On top of that I think there's a feat called combat patrol that's after a line of feats going in that direction, allowing to use your movement actions out of your turn.

Also, Bodyguard feat and some other things that let you throw yourself in front of other people.

I was thinking the same thing and was like "This is something that one of my players would do".

>Tell me what class, or system even, has a feature to dive in front of an attack of an enemy during its turn as a reaction to soak the blow that would kill your squishy mage.
What seriously?
Final Fantasy D6, OVA, Ryuutama, Symbaroum

>The thing is, games like D&D
>D&D
Come the fuck on, OP. Tabletops are more than just DnD.
Also, Darkest Dungeon wouldn't work because alone, the characters are too weak to perform in a satisfying way and depend too much on exact actions of the player before you.
What you failed to see, is that DD's party is one character, customized and operated by one player. This player has fun taking risks, calculating and making sacrifices out of his party.
An actual band of several minds would either bicker at every single turn, longing not to get shafted by the repositioning skill of the other player or agree on a set rotation, most likely decided by one of the players.
Either way, the magic of individuality that tabletop games provide, dies with a sad whimper and a longing for something more.

PC is nothing more than a limb with one set function. It's like being a power ranger and always steering that one fucking arm, except being in that arm all day, all episode, all season.

I'm not saying teamwork is bad, but all that plus the calculations required makes this kind of combat boring as shit

Most of the more interesting decision making options mesh poorly with multiplayer.
You've only touched on mechanics, but DD lifted its aesthetic from the earliest RPGs and people still plays those old games.

>DnD is bad
What else is new?

Play a better system.
Or break out your thinking cap and start homebrewing.

>Tell me what class, or system even, has a feature to dive in front of an attack of an enemy during its turn as a reaction to soak the blow that would kill your squishy mage.

4e?

It's not even tied to class; literally everyone can pick up the background that grants this.

Two things:

One: Darkest Dungeons can play with stacking effects more because a computer is doing all the work for you instead of a half-drunk neckbeard with a weak meat brain.

Two: these things exist in the combat systems of D&D3 and 4e, but require optimization to add to a character effectively. They are an absolute pain in the ass to keep track of, and end of the day you want to pick whatever ends the turn fastest because you have at least three other people waiting to do shit on their turns.

This thing you think you want you do not actually want in a TTRPG. Trust me on this.

Strike! has this type of play in spades. The combat is basically built around it, and it's streamlined to the point where not having a computer do it isn't crippling.

DoTs and statuses are fine. But not in pen and paper.
Most GMs I know, me included, have a hard enough fucking time just keeping track of the HP of every individual enemy in a normal encounter. Do you really think anyone has the patience to keep track of multiple different ticking debuffs on multiple enemies that expire at different intervals on top of it?
Unless you have a perfect silicon brain this would add fucking days to combat which already takes way too god damn long as it is most of the time. And after going trough the trouble of gathering four other friends that probably live hours away from you all in one room for one night to play a role playing game which is something you can only manage to set up every four months maybe, the last thing you want to do is spend half the evening crushing numbers.