Dark Souls Roleplaying

They absolutely argue that, without relent

This is how I know you've never played DF.

do an investigative adventure? one enemy at a time? Lots of weapon variety? cut content but hints of something ?

thats what usually souls fags like.

Rocket tag combat
Character death is difficult, but death spirals are ubiquitous ( i.e. when a character hits 0 HP instead of death they are removed from combat and wake up without an eye or a hand )
Player skill driven, not character skill driven. Stats don't matter so much as being a smart player. So no "I search for traps; roll perception". You either avoid the trap or you don't.
DM is not allowed to describe anything in any way unless it sounds like something Lovecraft might write.
Spells like Identify and skills like History don't tell you what something does or what something is, it gives you a single line of vague flavor text( i.e. "I cast identify on the glowing broken sword";"The gray knight who wielded this sword shattered the blade in his desperate attempt to destroy the Grand Chalice". This is a heavy burden on the DM, so don't do it.

You might as well just play some OSR game and pretend you're playing Dark Souls instead
I just glanced through like a clunky attempt to do Dark Souls system and it completely missed the point.

Oh I forgot, take a note from 5e and the way it does "boss" monsters. Instead of just "boss" monsters, any dangerous creature should operate on some kind of "Legendary/Lair Action" system where the monster does things in between the players turns.

>Spells like Identify and skills like History don't tell you what something does or what something is, it gives you a single line of vague flavor text( i.e. "I cast identify on the glowing broken sword";"The gray knight who wielded this sword shattered the blade in his desperate attempt to destroy the Grand Chalice".
Okay but that sounds dope as fuck.

I like a lot of this, except for things being purely player skill over character skill. I agree that player skill should be a big part of it, but an important part of roleplaying to me is stepping into the shoes of someone who might have abilities different from your own. How exactly I'd go about combining those two is probably going to be the sticky wicket of it all.

I might take an OSR game and merge parts of into it. Some of the combat mechanics seemed stiff, but I liked other aspects of it a lot.

Yeah, that seems fucking tight and I will absolutely do it.

Now I suppose is the bigger question: what sort of story would you personally run within the Dark Souls universe, keeping in mind that it would by necessity focus on a group rather than an individual?

Maybe you'd play as members of some kind of covenant or other background group, like the Blue Sentinels or the Abyss Watchers.

>except for things being purely player skill over character skill.
The point is to keep the player tense and not rely on dice rolls. When a player gets crippled instead instead of it being because the whims of the dice god it's they player should feel like it was their fault and they should try better next time.
If a player rolls to search for traps then triggers the trap and rolls to avoid the trap, pass or fail the player won't be nearly as careful if they know for sure they can't rely on dice rolls to be safe.
If you let them roll dice they will just shrug and either build a character for detecting traps or pass the responsibility onto someone else. Then there is also the tension lost ("I rolled high and DM said there are no traps so there's probably no traps" or "I rolled low so now I'm going to pussyfoot around and get all the other players to search for traps too just to be sure" )

Why the fuck didn't I think of this right away, it's the most obvious route.

>Warriors of Sunlight
Travel the land helping people overcome great challenges, bring sunlight to the darkness.

>Blades of the Darkmoon
Dispatched to hunt down a host of particularly wicked entities.

I didn't mean rolled abilities, I feel like rolling isn't really in the spirit of Dark Souls. What I meant is that certain classes/character choices give said character an ability that they always have. Eg., the loremaster guy simply knows the history of an object, or knows where he can find out more about it. The acrobat character can scale walls, but that doesn't help the rest of the party much unless they can figure it out. The adventurer character can ask for a "hint" x times per session. The ttrpg format isn't perfectly conducive to "spot the trap OOC" because you either have to hope they can intuit it based on details that may seem obvious to you but aren't discernable to the player, or make the trap trigger glaringly obvious.

Rolling to spot the trap isn't what I had in mind.

>The ttrpg format isn't perfectly conducive to "spot the trap OOC" because you either have to hope they can intuit it based on details that may seem obvious to you but aren't discernible to the player, or make the trap trigger glaringly obvious
Neither are a problem if your players are playing smart enough to invalidate most traps anyways. Which is my point. Can't get hurt by a trapped chest if no one is near it when it's opened or broken open. Can't fall down a pit trip if you captured a monster and are forcing it to march ahead of the party.
Instead of playing "spot the trap" with your players, get your players to play "make the traps not matter". Sure they will get hit by the occasional "unavoidable" trap but that is when using warning flag descriptors come into play or as the DM just not include that bullshit.
>What I meant is that certain classes/character choices give said character an ability that they always have
The character abilities you describe are better than letting every player roll and every so often the barbarian knows some arcane shit the wizard doesn't.

Your kinds of trap avoidance are exactly the kind of shit I don't like in tabletop games though, and they also don't really fit in with the thematic appeal of Dark Souls. Not to say they're bad, they're just not anything I have fun dealing with.

On the other hand, I have yet to come up with a reasonable alternative.

I ran a Dark Souls campaign the last year. We used the rules of Symbaroum, with some house rules added.

It started with the characters as mortals in Astora, with what seemed to be a normal quest. Then odd things started showing up. It was very fun.

Bump

I'm not sure you 'get' Dark Souls, mate.

Rocket Tag combat implies that both enemies are equally capable of instagibbing the other. You might be squishy and only able to survive a couple hits, but a lot of the enemies you fight are a lot tougher than you are, breaking that comparison.

I also think that your death spiral thing misses the point of Dark Souls. Its "If at first you don't succeed, die and die again" not "if at first you don't succeed, get fucked and be worse off for having tried". If you could chop up undead and permanently maim them, they wouldn't need to lock the fuckers up in the ass end of nowhere to deal with them.

And Lovecraft is Bloodborne. Not Dark Souls. Most of what you fight in Dark Souls is dudes in armor.

No talking at the table. The GM can only communicate through brief notes, players can only gesticulate at each other.

This actually isn't all of it. The rest of the game can be found here:

1d4chan.org/wiki/Fires_Far_Away

There are rules for covenants and invasions but I think those are optional? They are in separate PDFs.

>everyone has giant weapons and magic
>combat is full anime with swordbeams
>heroes standing against the coming darkness as a theme
>last three sessions are alright but feel unfinished, because the GM got drunk

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I won't lie. I'd roll Moonlight Greatsword and save a laser so I could use it as the finishing blow against bosses.

Its dumb, but makes me happy.

Are you retarded?

t. Dark Souls and Dorf Fort lover who argues this

All people I've met who wanted to have a DS ttrpg were realism cucks, and insisted that it would make the setting too anime and unrealistic. Nevermind the fact that DS has nothing to do with any kind of realism.

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Doing up SotDL for bloodborne pre-yharnam collapse right now. Scourge has kicked in in old town and is beginning to spread. Players start out as bog standard yharnamites doing what they can for yharnam and her people. Here's hoping they live long enough to uncover the secrets beneath.

Also I completely ripped off all my bosses from Alex Roe's "Night of the Hunt" and "Rite of Blood" pieces. So far it's worked well, at least in concept.

Realism? Really? In the game with the dragons? And the fireballs? And the swords as big as your dude?

I think its because most playstyles available to the player are fairly grounded? Lots of people don't dabble in any magic at all. So they take that as some kind of indication about the world as a whole.

Ignoring that, just offscreen, dudes are throwing thunderbolts at motherfucking dragons and groups of Abyss watchers are performing spin-to-win anime moves to cut through legions of dark-spewing hexers and the howling spidermonser they pulled out of the abyss this time.

Some of the bosses you fight can get really, really anime. You probably don't want that to be the default game tone of the setting, but ignoring that the dudes with powerful souls out there get up to some crazy shit is just dishonest.

And who can forget our favorite group of edgelords

> Invades behind you
> Unsheathes Darkdrift
> "Nothing personal, hollow."

>I think its because most playstyles available to the player are fairly grounded?
You're still using xboxhuge weapons and giant armor made of rocks.
People are autistic

A fair point.

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>Rocket Tag combat implies that both enemies are equally capable of instagibbing the other. You might be squishy and only able to survive a couple hits, but a lot of the enemies you fight are a lot tougher than you are, breaking that comparison.
You haven't played DS games to a high enough skill level then where you can just shit on bosses as easily as they shit on newbs. Look up some speedruns of any Souls game.
>I also think that your death spiral thing misses the point of Dark Souls.
There has to be a consequence for death. Also lol if you think DS doesn't have deaths spirals. In 1 you have half hp on death, losing excess estus until you kindle newer bonfirs
DS2 literally has constantly losing max HP for every death on top of lost lifegems
DS3 is casul though

You are too focused on DS mechanically and trying to translate that to ttrpg and not what actually matters like the feeling and tone.

Yes, because everyone knows the TRUE dark souls experience that is the only way to present the universe is NG5+ as played by someone who has been practicing his parries 8 hours a day like its his job.

Don't be daft. That's like saying DnD is level 21+ only and everything below that isn't real DnD. The game clearly isn't functioning as intended at those levels, and they don't represent the usual experience of the game.

>1 you have half hp on death.

Everyone wrap up, this guy has learned about dark souls from memes.

This is actually really cool. Formattings a bit screwy, but I like how it explains why it made the decisions it did to translate stuff from the games. And it knows that you cant copy everything from the source material juts because its good in the original, which is a mistake a lot of homebrews usually make trying to chase a perfect replica of their favorite thing.

>>frustration as a selling point
I legitimately only found DS 1 hard for about 2 hours, after that I had no problem with Dark Souls or any of its successors. I do not fathom how people can be so shit at this game.

>Invade someone
>He has three phantoms summoned
>As I ventured towards him I see him lose one phantom, then another
>He goes all the way back to the start and summons more phantoms

I honestly doubt the average player I invade can solo the stronger non-boss enemies.

To be fair, invasions and PVE are two very different modes of play. Getting good at PVE is about learning attack patterns and learning the correct response to specific telegraphed attacks. What you can block, what you can dodge, that turns into a 4 hit combo that as long as you can get behind them you can ignore and attack with impunity until it ends, etc.

PVP is very different, because not only are attacks much quicker and usually less telegraphed, but the enemy can bait you and outthink you and honestly if you are the one being Invaded? The biggest difference is that the Invader has prepared for a PVP fight and the home team did not. You're carrying around all your anti-poison gear because its Blighttown or whatever and you have a nice halberd build going that does okay for dealing with enemies at a reasonable distance, and then this dodgemonkey in a dress and parrying dagger shows up and backstabs you for all your health because he has twice your Stamina and all he has to do is outlast you. GG no re.

I found DS1 frustrating at first mostly because I didn't yet know I was supposed to grind respawning enemies for levels, and because I didn't know about the path to the Undead Burg and I kept trying to fight those fucking skeletons (after all, it was so clearly the next area) and I couldn't figure out how this was supposed to be fair.

But yeah, its not difficult so much as it drops you in the ocean and you have to learn how to swim on your own. With a *few* exceptions. Anor Londo archers can still go eat a bag of dicks.

TTrpg combat will never feel like a videogame because it's a different thing, so stop trying. Also the big problem is that the soulslike's PCs are usuay very impersonal, and you can't force your players to role chosen undeads without personality or backstories. Dark souls is cool because of great dungeon design and a deep lore told by descriptions and good NPC, so the first step to recreate that feeling would actually be being a good master. I get you like DS but don't force it on the players, do your thing.

You people focus on the weirdest things

While DS might not aim to be anything near realistic, it's way more realistic in design than 99% of fantasy vidya. Only game more realistic out is Kingdom Come. Many of the armor sets are very precise period sets (ex: Knight armor is virtually a perfect German 16th century Tappelbrust set). The architecture too is very realistic, Lothric is very very 15th Century Franco-Germanic in design. Probably because they just researched medieval armor and settings and most games just use whatever Google images come up for knights, usually larp stuff. Im looking at you For Honor.

Explicitly silly armor and giant fuckhueg swords aside.

Honestly, I find that just a little dose of realism goes a long way in these things. Its not actually about being realistic, its about conveying a sense of practicality and reality to build up just enough credit that you can then include the fantastical and not lose people.

Its like salt. A little makes almost any dish better. Too much ruins a dish. None at all is usually a mistake.

That's not what rocket tag is.

The consequence to dying in dark souls is you lose a bit of humanity. It's only bad if you di a fuckton, which isn't really what a deathspiral is.

How can one man be so wrong.

Did you even read the OP?

>expecting a tabletop player to read
user, please

I was thnking about curses, anyways souls games do have death spirals though resourse attrition
The number off bosses designed to punish panick rolls (especially pressing roll after you already got hit) and punish attempts to estus combines with boss AI patterns and input reading means getting hit and trying to heal throws off the attacking pattern and players make more mistakes
If you ever got hit and started getting hit over and over by things you would normally easily sodge because the AI pattern changed the timing a bit you know what I'm talking about
Then there is shit like Nameless King who will rollpunish like fuck after you get hit

Yeah, but that's not the death spiral you originally referred to. And if you get gud you don't get locked into your own pattern while fighting. Get combo'd isn't really a death spiral.

Why should he read the OP and he can just see the vague idea of the topic and whip his dick out to masturbate the same anti-fun talking points he has rehearsed for years.

Its doubly funny nowadays, because basically disproves almost all of those points anyway. Its full of mechanics that provide a uniquely Dark Soulsian experience that you wont find in other off the shelf rpgs and and its playable. The homebrew works, and nothing he can meme will prove otherwise.

>anyways souls games do have death spirals though resourse attrition

Not really. There are almost no resources you can get that you can't farm more of if you need to. The true cost of death in DS is just time.

Aesthetic doesn't mean it's realistic. Nevermind the fact that it still looks like generic fantasy/berserk. Yeah, the armor designs are sometimes legit, but even then they are not historical in any way. Elite Knight set is no more real than Warden's armor from for honor.
And even then, people fight dragons and chuck fireballs in that armor, so how the fuck is it realistic in any shape or form?
>Only game more realistic out is Kingdom Come.
Fuck off, dude.

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I've yet to see a treatise that doesn't explicitly state the correct stance for when your opponent casually walks into the air.

This has been said multiple times, and it's just not possible. Soulsborne works because it allows you to piece together the world around you all by your self. You notice things that weren't immediately obvious. You have sudden moments of realisation. You learn as you explore.

None of that is possible in tabletop.

The only part of that not possible in a tabletop is the themes of isolation because you are in a group. Everything else is just a matter of degree.

And, hell. You are focusing on a tiny, tiny sliver of the DS experience and throwing up your hands in abandonment because it the one thing that pnp doesn't do. Maybe those things aren't even the reason why someone wants to run a DS game in the first place, dum dum.

That's only one part of Dark Souls, quit being a defeatist.