Dark Souls

I heard the official DS TTRPG was trash are there any other (actually good) official / unofficial souls-like ttrpgs?

Schizophrenic Conspiracy Theorist Shirt $21.68

Homeless People Are Sexy Shirt $21.68

Schizophrenic Conspiracy Theorist Shirt $21.68

  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I want to homebrew something into my system of choice for it some day but man if I already have too many things to do.
    I also don't know how I'd translate many of its core conceits in a way that'd be fun. Just resetting stuff and trying again doesn't work like it does in Vidya.

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Fires Far Away seemed like an interesting one, though I have never playtested it and it seems like it could be rough on the edges

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Seconding Fires Far Away. Its a game thats full of really solid ideas, it just never got the polish needed to really shine. The only things you really have to tweak while running it is filling in some items that it mentions but forgets to stat (ie, one of the classes starts with a handaxe that isn't actually in the game) and dodging needs to deliver some kind of diminishing returns in a round otherwise a player being cautious with their stamina dice is almost impossible to hit without overwhelming enemy action economy.

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    This one, every single time. Fantastic fan made system.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      this actually seems very in depth and very lovingly crafted
      seems really good

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Dedicated to sabaku no maiku
      I recoiled in disgust.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Care to explain?

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Italian eceleb

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    depends on which you are talking about there are 2 one is a disgrace of a 5e book that is somehow worse than what people did on reddit years ago and one is a complexly unique rpg... in japanese

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I've always thought of the Dark Souls games as being more about solitude, making them a poor match for sitting around the table playing a TTRPG. But maybe that's because I always played offline, ignoring both invasions and real co-op.

      I haven't played it, but the position mechanic seems like an interesting take on combining stamina and health into one stat. Most of the criticisms I've seen were about embarrassing little mistakes like the knight not having the stats to wear his starting armor and the quality of the book's binding.
      I'd like to see some more thorough testing of whether the position mechanic works.

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Video game mechanics will never ever translate well to table top rpgs.

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The writing was on the wall for the new one from the very start. The company only ever makes shitty board games based on popular vidya, the announcement trailer showed fricking nothing, the twitter account was run by a moron. And yet, conveniently, they never, ever even mentioned that it was just a 5e supplement and not an original save for a tiny little icon at the back of the book itself. It’s stunning that they can legally do this.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      It's not a 5e supplement. I copies extensively from the 5e SRD, but is playable stand-alone. They've rolled their own health replacement system and spells.
      >It’s stunning that they can legally do this.
      It might in fact have been one of the motivations behind WotC's now-abandoned OGL 1.1 "draft".

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Working on a bloodborne rpg, should have finished it some long time ago, but oh well.
    >stamina combat system, any action from attacking to defending to using items costs stamina points, also for the enemies
    >any trick-weapon from the main game present, with simplified scaling
    >using insight to level up
    >beasthood countering insight, characters can gain more beasthood but ultimately transform if they overdo it
    >pretty much any mechanic from the game put into it in a simplified form, any item, some occasional new stuff
    Personally, I'm pretty pleased with it, although can't find a group and need to fill out the bestiary, weapon-builder and crit table (for those that want it), and finally find a group for a shorter campaign. And frick, also proof read a bit more and give it some proper layout.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      what dice are you using?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        D10. Opposed tests for combat, roll over target number for skill tests and occasional roll under/over attribute.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      D10. Opposed tests for combat, roll over target number for skill tests and occasional roll under/over attribute.

      I seem to recall reading something like this years back and being interested, have you posted about this on /tg/ before?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Pretty sure I even dumped the whole pdf at some point here. It's called Hunting Nightmares, should be on itch.io.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Thank you very much, good hunter. I've found and downloaded it, very much looking forward to having a read.

  8. 1 year ago
    Smaugchad

    Have you tried playing AD&D?

    Take any classic module, add the core Dark Souls mechanic of auto-resurrection with XP dropped to the bottom of your current level and full respawn of enemies

    Use the random loot mechanics for monsters as-is, set yourself up a little home somewhere to put all the art items you'll loot and come up with some kind of a fair merchant mechanic to spend all the gold and gems. Off the cuff I would suggest him having a certain number of fully randomly generated magic items and at all times for sale at maybe 10x their listed value (you'll get a LOT of gold) and you have to buy one to clear its slot for a new one to be generated into.

    This would work just fine for a one-on-one game as a grim and gritty alternative to the more super-heroic easy mode Scarlet Heroes method. Your DM might get sick of running the same encounters over and over again but you could switch roles (and modules) or you could just do it all solo I suppose, if you didn't mind spoiling the traps and puzzles and story points for yourself.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Can immediately see Isle of Dread or Keep on the Borderlands (in which case the Keep is all-undead, and just as hostile as the Caves) working for this purpose.

  9. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    old school games emulate the play structure best (heavy exploration, high danger, trial and error, feelings of well-earned ascension toward greater levels of power)

    I'm currently putting together a campaign with a classless system (probably Knave) to further emulate the natural character development of Dark Souls in this style of tabletop play. I think a classless system with some 'archetypes' (like prerolled and partly filled out sheets) works best, considering that your souls character can evolve along any lines you please

    • 1 year ago
      Smaugchad

      I agree that a classless point buy system would better be able to emulate dark souls I'm just less familiar with, like GURPS Fantasy or whatever and I was mainly talking about the gameplay loop part of the mechanic

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        I might also recommend Savage Worlds as another classless 'universal' system and simpler alternative to GURPs, but as far as the loop goes, I like your idea as far as resurrection at the bottom of your current level. I think that oldish games' cycle of early characters dying and being replaced could be a decent stand in for the 'respawning' system of a video game, but genuinely trying to emulate it is also interesting. Clearly it should also cost something more - perhaps the player loses Con or some bonus core attribute each time they perish, and if they perish too many times without recovering it (whether through help from npcs, divine blessings, or killing whatever killed them before), they go 'hollow'

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          forgot to mention that this would be reminiscent of the max health loss mechanic in ds2, which I actually kind of enjoyed

        • 1 year ago
          Smaugchad

          >oldish games' cycle of early characters dying and being replaced
          Yes, I've said from the beginning that this is what Souls games are about, just using the "souls" unified XP/GP mechanic from Shadow Tower Abyss

  10. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    So we have...
    Dark Souls RPG (DnD5e-based one)
    Dark Souls TRPG (Japanese one. Also, Elden Ring TRPG expected to be released this spring)
    Dark Souls Unofficial RPG
    Fires Far Away
    The Cold Ruins of Lastlife (PbtA DW. I kinda like ideas in this one)
    Fragged Aeternum (People have a lot to say about it's mechanics https://www.reddit.com/r/RPGdesign/comments/fj27rz/comment/fkn5dry/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
    Embers of the Forgotten Kingdom (For DnD5e and with booklet of stats for Shadow of the Demon Lord)

  11. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I spent 6 years developing a souls style RPG, had a psychotic breakdown towards the end, and while I think it's fun in the low level monsters aren't scaled well at all and quickly outpace PCs, however I'm slowly going back to it to rebalance monsters and a couple of other systems.

    There's still a lot of typos and uh, missing content in the base game but it's freeeeee

    https://anythingarax.itch.io/ruins-curse (includes map terrain in DL)

  12. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    What I don't get about dark souls systems is why wouldn't they just rip the system straight from the games instead of forcing it into d20 and such? Everything is statted right there, we know how damage scaling works and the build calculators online seem like a perfect match for an easy, no hassle character sheet. The only thing you'd really have to worry about is figuring out how combat is resolved, and connecting attributes to certain non combat abilities if you felt like it.

    • 1 year ago
      Smaugchad

      Well for starters it's more complicated than anybody is going to want to keep track of on paper. As a two hand player I'm 100% positive that poise is something I would not want to calculate - and there are a shit load of other mechanics like that at work, like bleed. Even regular ass 5e swords of wounding piss me off with the extra bookkeeping.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      The parry mechanic is literally a button press in the video games that can be memorized based on attack frames, if there's no randomness to it every part of combat would turn into a parry fest

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Also if all you did was translate just the combat mechanics it'd be a pretty boring RPG, Dark Souls 1 is a single player game with incidental multiplayer, and linear combat challenges that encourage either running through all combat or using overpowered attacks to bypass enemies. Consider how linear each combat encounter actually is, and as the other anon and I mentioned a lot of the base mechanics do not translate well to pencil and paper where you don't have automatic calculations and enemies, in short, frick you read my damn 200 page book

      I spent 6 years developing a souls style RPG, had a psychotic breakdown towards the end, and while I think it's fun in the low level monsters aren't scaled well at all and quickly outpace PCs, however I'm slowly going back to it to rebalance monsters and a couple of other systems.

      There's still a lot of typos and uh, missing content in the base game but it's freeeeee

      https://anythingarax.itch.io/ruins-curse (includes map terrain in DL)

Leave a Reply to Anonymous Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *