Okay, I know I'm going to sounds like the typical "i just read this book/watched this movie and they totally should be a trpg about it", but is there any trpg like Dark Souls ?
>Gigantic, timeless ruins and cities
>Feeling of loneliness and despair
>Mysterious NPCs that still have a story to told if you dig enough
>Still a ray of hope even against the inavoidable end
Just finished it and i was blown away by the overall atmosphere. It's just great.
>>46607532
Dungeons and Dragons should do the trick
>>46607532
What ray of hope? Dark Souls is all abouthow nothing you do actually mattered and won't change anything either way. It's like this for both games, at best you simply delay the age of Dark, at worst you let it happen... but either way there's nothing you can do to break the cycle.
>>46607532
What you describe is all on the GM for the most part.
So, find a good GM.
>>46607532
The Song of Swords setting has always given me Dark Souls-esque feeling, but with additional medieval politics.
>>46607551
Sure. Make sure leveling is very fast and the casting stat for all classes is CON. But, give fighters and other martial a superior and very needed martial maneuvers to avoid getting splattered every fight.
>>46607642
Well is dark souls 3 any different?
I was thinking of making a souls like setting for a DnD 5th ed campaign. I was planning to just throw a party in a desolate, dying fantasy world full of danger, but then I got to thinking, making them undead could be interesting.
TPK could be an occasion occurrence and not treated as a loss. I was thinking of adding a "hollowing" condition track where PCs die and go down the track, when they die too much reach full jerky they go "insane" and turn into NPCs. The hollowing can be reset by finding humanity, but it's rare and players will only be given a few over the course of the campaign.
>>46607642>at worst you let it happen.
But that is the good end.
>>46607532
The atmosphere and everything else you described there could be done in most fantasy ttrpgs, you just needto be[\spoiler] a good DM.
If you really needed to capture Dark Souls in every way, you'd have to look for a combat based, dark low fantasy game. Unfortunately I don't know any.
>>46607759
Well I fucked up that spoiler.
>>46607532
You can do this in GURPS. It's pretty simple to create a PC that can't die / is undead and the hopeless futility that creates. It also has relatively brutal, weighty combat where a single hit can cripple or kill and putting on heavy armor means moving and dodging more slowly.
>>46607759
Dark Souls isn't really low fantasy though. It's more grounded than most fantasy, but it's not like, say, Conan the Barbarian.
>>46607828
>It's more grounded than most fantasy
Wut, Souls is pretty fantastical. It's all about magical fire and people who can't die.
>>46607532
>Still a ray of hope even against the inavoidable end
I thought you said you were playing dark souls?
Also.
>overall atmosphere
While a game system may AID this in very small ways. Atmosphere is 90% a GMs job. Period.
Many a Call of Cthulhu games have been Quote "Ruined" Unquote by players playing goofballs.
>>46607915
And the whole god killing part.
>>46607661
Not really.Dark Souls 3, from what I've heard, takes place at the START of an Age of Fire, rather than the end. But in all three games the overlying theme of existence itself in the Dark Souls universe is that everything is an inescapable cycle. Ages of Fire happen and life and hapiness happen in the world... then the Age of Fire fades and the world falls into an Age of Dark where despair and death rule, and then from this a new Age of Fire ignites into a brief and brilliant flare before dying out again... and so on and so on forever and ever.
It's also implied Humanity itself isnaturally aligned with the force of Darkness, and that the rising of Human civilization burns up and "exhausts" an Age of Fire quicker than it would normally take.
No, it's virtually impossible to cultivate much atmosphere in an RPG, and particularly the atmosphere you want.
At some point, someone on /tg/ probably complained about DS being the goddamn flavor of the month. It's been... what, five years now?
>not finding a glimmer of hope through jolly cooperation
>being this much of a dickwraith
>>46607642
>not realising man is the dark and kindling the fire only perpetuates the cycle of suffering.
So, a question about Dark Souls: How long does kindling the First Flame prolong the Age of Fire?
>>46608599
OP here. That's what i meant when i talked about hope, though i wasn't thinking specifically about Solaire.
Some NPC are friendly, despite the general atmosphere. I thought the whole Queelag's sister thing was also very touching.
Well, maybe I'm bad at interpreting, but I really do see some hope in the Dark Souls universe.
>>46609529
I'd say it depends entirely on the size of the soul that kindles it.
>>46609547
It strikes me less as hope than as stubbornness.
Or just making the most of the shit you're given, because as soon as you stop trying to do anything you go hollow. It's the ultimate hopelessness.
My erection for DS3, coming out tomorrow cannot get any harder. Your thread does nothing
>>46607532
Depends what you want out of it.
Some of Dark Souls translates easily to tabletop because it was in a major way based on early Western fantasy sources like D&D, which the game's director read growing up. Of course he wasn't great at English, so a lot of the finer details escaped his notice and he had fill them in himself. Hence the very do-it-yourself style of storytelling in Dark Souls.
So, if all you want is the aesthetic and the do-it-yourself storytelling, congratulations: D&D is the system for you! Maybe something a little more hardcore like an OSR spinoff, and be sure to be grim when you GM it.
Other features are a lot less easily translated. For example, the mercurial and transitory nature of human interaction, and the purposefully stilted communication, are two features that practically no tabletop RPG has. Being able to freely talk to your friends as a team is like the foundation of tabletop RPGs.
Similarly, Dark Souls is a very gamey sort of game that revolves around twitch combat. Few RPGs (notable exceptions being, once again, the OSR spinoffs) really cater to a game-first mentality, and practically none test "knowledge how" the way a twitch game does, rather than "knowledge that" the way turn based games do.
And in spite of being kind of gamey, the games are fairly immersive because they explain lots of their game-first characteristics explicitly in the fiction. The game's core conceit is actually just a very elaborate explanation of checkpoints, for instance. Lots of RPGs have game-first elements, but very few of them invent wholly new fictional constructs to explain them. Where's the game where you play craps with the avatar of Death whenever you have a near death experience as an explanation for saving throws? Pretty much doesn't exist, except Paranoia but that's a comedy game that gets its laughs doing that kind of meta bullshit.
Everyone wants to play DS TTRPG. Nobody ever does. For good reason.
On a similar note, in Dark Souls you fight actual gods. In DND gods are ridiculously overpowered, like level 50. And level 50 campaigns are retarded because there is hardly any content at that level.
How to manage that conundrum?
Dark Souls would make a good ttrpg setting. And, yes, there are games like Dark Souls. DnD is pretty much the fantasy setting. Just homebrew the setting. This shit is all imagination anyway.
And if they could make Hotline Miami a homebrew game, should work for Dark Souls. And I wish they would, because god knows the video games are fucking trash and not worth dog shit. So, a ttrpg would save the good ideas like the setting and drop everything else.
>>46611063
Crazy suggestion incomingDon't use D&D
>>46611174
Nice maymay.
>>46607532
Much as I love the series (fuck the haters, I will keep engaging in jolly cooperation until the day I go hollow), I don't feel like a lot of the things from the game, the atmosphere in particular, would translate very well to tabletop unless you have a REALLY good GM and players who are actually invested in maintaining the tone.
>>46607532
I've recently started working on a system and setting inspired by Dark Souls, because only three days of university this semester.
And it's only inspired because copying everything one-to-one doesn't work. A lot of the strength of Dark Souls comes atmosphere, and visual design and NPC personality. All stuff you need to do as the GM, with the system only a crutch for that.
Now, I'm really not very far into my work, but I can give a rundown of which elements of the series I find important and how I want to implement them. This might help you find/tweak a system to suit your needs.
>Exploration
Be it narrative, geopgraphical, variety of builds, etc.
I think you can rather easily lift the storytelling of Dark Souls for tabletop. I would write up item descriptions like in the game, and when the players find an item(or location, enemy, etc.), they get a card with the stats and flavor.
In the setting, this is due to a curse. When characters come across certain object, their curse triggers a memory. They just know what's on the card.
Of course that doesn't just tell a story, but also reveals weaknesses of enemies or possible item locations.
>Dread and despair
Not just because the world is doomed, but you, personally, are pretty fucked. Combat would be reasonable difficult and sloppy execution would be punished. Obviously, a player can't decide what number they roll, so having a bad roll put an end to the adventure regularly is frustrating.
Now, what a player can decide is to make that roll. So combat will be more about adapting to the situation, preperation and ressource management. Imagine the way you need to manage your Estus and spell casts in DS1.
Cont.
>>46615390
But combat isn't everything. The world itself is always dangerous to you. We can rip the mechanic to drop souls on death straight from the game. And because we're in a point buy system with different items costing different amounts of souls, the players can manage what they risk to loose on death.
And if they lost their souls, the players are forced back into the fight, because it's just a matter of time before some other adventurer find their stuff.
I'm also the kind of GM that puts a threat in the back of the players mind. Sure you sit in the middle of the roadd until you're all healed up. But a car is bound to run you over some time. Or more monsters come out at night.
Though, as this is inspired by the entire Souls series, the Fog. It sweeps across the land in regular intervalls, it kills you, and it spawns new enemies. The players must find or create special sanctuaries, the equivalent of bonfires. Those are your quest hubs, where players prepare for the field. And out in the world, the players need to weigh loosing some progress to backtracking and respawns and all their souls to the fog or an exhausted fight.
But one thing I'm still missing here is the equivalent for hollowing. With the respawning, it's kinda needed for a permanent end to a character. The entire curse part needs some more work.
>The chance to learn and overcome
If you fail in Dark Souls, die, die and die again until you succeed. Ideally, you learn something new with every death and this knowledge allows you to triumph in the end. As you fetch your lost souls over and over again you become stronger and get better at encounters even if you aren't prepared.
Cont.
>>46615406
How do we achieve this? For one, you can regain your lost souls. And those spent on items or stats stay with you. As you go out into world you also find new items, open shortcuts or get drops from enemies.
But there are also your sanctuaries, a place you can always return to. Where life naturally gathers, where a new friend can come by to give you hope if you just last one more day.
But most importantly:
>You are not alone
Unless you're running a solo game I guess. Unlike Dark Souls, tabletop is primarly group based. You don't need messages or bloodstains because you have other people with you in this journey. So teamwork becomes important for success. And combined with the danger of the world, failing to work together means death.
So basicly, your standard party compositon, properly integrated with the other mechanics and balanced. You enforce specialised characters to a certain degree while making sure everyone is equally important to success.
And balancing this thing will be a bitch.
>>46608714
The Fire can never ever go out. There will always be embers, waiting for someone to rekindle the flame.
>>46615390
I'm also trying to pull of a dark souls vibe with my system and the cursed items idea is really smart, I might have to work that in to my system.
>>46615578
Go for it, though I advise writing the cliff notes of the whole story first and then add the relevant bits to the item descriptions. Worst case, I can just make different variants of the curse as skill trees for the system I'm running and bump up the difficulty of encounters to balance that.
I also started writing a program to create/manage those cards easily. If my project comes to fruition, I'll post my ressources in game design general or one Souls threads we seem to get more frequently.
>>46615426
Fuck, mate I'd love to play this. Any chance you'd share this experience with other people on /tg/?
>>46615428
>There will always be embers, waiting for someone to rekindle the flame.
And what will happen when the fire rises once more?
>>46617604
I'll upload all the stuff here once it works properly. Having more people play is always helpful, especially since I mostly play with kids.
I had some plans to do a Dark Souls campaign using GURPS, but never got around to it cuz people were busy. The combat system is quite lethal so it would probably work pretty well. I had a plan to let the player use the souls of any creatures or undead to forge weapons and the weapons would gain attributes based on the soul. I have some homebrew on a google doc actually https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H07woxWHM3sD3xAj1xEdmFmgDTcI83YMzSRLXMo-Kwc/edit?usp=sharing
>>46609547
>Trusty Patches
