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Dark Souls RPG will be 5e, you say? Why wait for the official product? Here's all you need! Random NPC Personality Table [1D6] 1. Ends all conversations with a chuckle. 2. Ends all conversations with a snicker. 3. Ends all conversations with a cackle. 4. Ends all conversations with a giggle. 5. Ends all conversations with a chortle. 6. Ends all conversations with ominous laughter. Reward, please.
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Dec 23, 2021 16:13
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Nuns with Guns posted:I'd say that the Souls games themselves have a particular kind of dark fantasy aesthetic that's rooted in Berserk's visuals and other Japanese horror and fantasy in a way that's distinct from American/British takes, but it gets missed a lot when it gets adapted. For instance, I like most of the visual updates to the Demon's Souls PS5 remake, but a lot of the monster designs just feel... off in how they were translated. There's something unconventional about the original designs that was lost. This isn't me saying the Souls visual style is better or anything, just that it's going for something different than like Warhammer Fantasy. I definitely agree, and I find I largely enjoy the more prominent works that inspired this "grim and gritty" wave on their own merits. It's more that I think we've hit a saturation point in the market such that new works in the vein of Dark Souls, Berserk, Game of Thrones, The Witcher, etc. just feel derivative at this point. I think it feels especially pronounced in the TTRPG industry because one of the big trends within the OSR boom of the last 10 years was systems that leaned really heavily into the gritty, fantasy Vietnam aesthetic and there were a LOT of gritty OSR games that came out in that period.
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Dec 23, 2021 16:20
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Tekopo posted:They sent out an article saying that the reason why the game was not popular was due to how competitive players played the game: I wonder if Jervis Johnson knew he was basically making an immortal game when he penned blood bowl. KingKalamari posted:Can I just take a moment to express how sick to death I am of the whole "Grim and gritty" fantasy aesthetic? There's nothing wrong with it in and of itself, I just feel like the market is completely oversaturated with it. kind of bothers me that grim and gritty just makes everything look more dangerous and doesnt just put more homeless people and drug addicts in your game. In short, I like the Elder Scrolls games for all the mundane boring people that live as dock workers and hookers and poo poo but apparently grim and gritty is "write a horror novel, add elves, give happy ending"
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Dec 23, 2021 16:40
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I mean, Steamforged just found a lovely excuse for giving Guild Ball the boot, instead of just saying that the game wasn't making money and that they stopped concentrating on it after the success of their licensed kickstarters.
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Dec 23, 2021 16:48
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A bit on the nose maybe, but I always kind of wanted to do a Dark Souls themed game of Ten Candles at some point.
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Dec 23, 2021 17:54
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The whole paid playtest copy makes more sense when you realize that the consumer isn't the playtester in this situation. Paizo or whoever is just making the same material that the actual playtesters used at one point in development available for purchase. By the time the 'playtest rules' are actually in consumers' hands, the actual development rules have moved on several iterations anyway. It's more akin to paying for behind the scenes footage or something.
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Dec 23, 2021 18:07
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Tendales posted:The whole paid playtest copy makes more sense when you realize that the consumer isn't the playtester in this situation. Paizo or whoever is just making the same material that the actual playtesters used at one point in development available for purchase. By the time the 'playtest rules' are actually in consumers' hands, the actual development rules have moved on several iterations anyway. do you have a source for this? My experience with playtesting, and playing some of these playtests you have to buy, is not this. The paid playtest products I have experienced are substantially similar to the finished product, but are missing key features such as some art, extended campaign play rules and GM guidance, and advancement rules. No sane company is going to do a big print run of a speculative playtest that's expected to zoom forward several iterations. They risk losing a lot of money, confusing consumers, not to mention losing goodwill if it's really bad. Paid playtests of the kind being discussed are marketing and bug-fixing exercises in advance of the upcoming release. They have already been subject to internal playtesting, often extensively.
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Dec 23, 2021 18:21
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homullus posted:do you have a source for this? My experience with playtesting, and playing some of these playtests you have to buy, is not this. The paid playtest products I have experienced are substantially similar to the finished product, but are missing key features such as some art, extended campaign play rules and GM guidance, and advancement rules. Sorry if I was unclear, but that's basically my point. The rules you get in the "playtest rules" are basically *done*, the developers have moved on to other aspects of development and the consumers aren't going to be submitting any important changes. If somehow the process of 'players buy product, players play product, players post on forums or send email about their thoughts, developers translate from disgruntled gamer speak to actually identify the issue, developers make changes to rules' manages to happen fast enough to fit into the publication schedule, that's a neat bonus, but it's not the purpose of selling the playtest book.
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Dec 23, 2021 18:40
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Tendales posted:Sorry if I was unclear, but that's basically my point. I don't know how you meant "the actual development rules have moved on several iterations." I am saying the paid playtest rules are an excerpt of the current actual development rules to the greatest extent possible by their schedule. The less they have to change, the better, because all changes cost money, even before it's printed.
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Dec 23, 2021 18:56
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Tekopo posted:I mean, Steamforged just found a lovely excuse for giving Guild Ball the boot, instead of just saying that the game wasn't making money and that they stopped concentrating on it after the success of their licensed kickstarters. Guild Ball was at it's most popular in terms of player base in the lead up to the surprise cancellation, but Steamforged was just straight up not producing enough product for more than a year prior. This culminated with players basically begging for news that wasn't another licensed Kickstarter, Rich Loxam posted that big news was coming and to be excited, and then the big news was shutting the game down and blaming the players who were competitive for a game advertised as competitive. Tldr, don't buy poo poo from Steamforged.
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Dec 23, 2021 19:26
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Tendales posted:Sorry if I was unclear, but that's basically my point. The rules you get in the "playtest rules" are basically *done*, the developers have moved on to other aspects of development and the consumers aren't going to be submitting any important changes. If somehow the process of 'players buy product, players play product, players post on forums or send email about their thoughts, developers translate from disgruntled gamer speak to actually identify the issue, developers make changes to rules' manages to happen fast enough to fit into the publication schedule, that's a neat bonus, but it's not the purpose of selling the playtest book. That was explicitly the purpose of the Pathfinder 2e play test, there was an entire year between the play test and the final game so they could actually make changes. Paizo specifically did a linked series of play test adventures that were strictly controlled to get feedback on stuff like how resilient characters were, how many fights a party could do in a day, that sort of stuff. It was an actual playtest, and they made it pretty clear they cared far less about grogs whining “wizards aren’t cool enough” instead of their specific surveys and prepared questions. They even did a second round to try out a major mechanic that didn’t work the first time round, it sucked in the second round, so they mostly threw it out for the final game.
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Dec 23, 2021 19:30
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Hel posted:See this is the thing, Dark Souls means different things to different people: I would say that a DS game would be 90 dungeon crawler, avoiding traps and ambushes and looking for secrets with only rarely having big boss fights. Because it's basically action-Wizardry which was a way to do dungeoncrawls on computers. Hel posted:Isn't tons of meticulously described weapons with only minor variations within each class that allow the players to pick which one they think is the coolest, the definition of gear porn. Sounds like Dark Souls to me. I'm quoting these together because the answer to both is "Yes and no." The earlier games have a lot of functionally interchangeable weapons with minor tweaks to damage or moves or whatever, and a lot of that was shaved down with successive games. Similarly, the earlier games focused much more on the dungeon crawling aspect than the boss fights. Maybe because the boss fights are what people get excited about and analyze as skill checks or do lore discussion, but there's definitely a lot more of a setpiece aspect to them as the series goes on. (This also becomes a lot more apparent if you start with looking at Demon's Souls and also look at Bloodborne and Sekiro.) Dark Souls 1 as a singular thing did definitely lodge itself into the collective gaming psyche a lot more than its precursor or named sequels did though and people tend to just take it as representative of all the other games and games like it. Admiral Joeslop posted:Dark Souls RPG will be 5e with "XP loss on death" and permanent stat drain attacks. You know, it's funny but Dark Souls: the game everyone hypes up for how HARD and UNFORGIVING and maybe even BULLSHIT it is, does not have permanent stat drain attacks in it. They dropped those after Demon's Souls and never looked back. But somehow stat drain and damage things are one of those precious sacred cows in a lot of tabletop RPGs still... KingKalamari posted:I definitely agree, and I find I largely enjoy the more prominent works that inspired this "grim and gritty" wave on their own merits. It's more that I think we've hit a saturation point in the market such that new works in the vein of Dark Souls, Berserk, Game of Thrones, The Witcher, etc. just feel derivative at this point. As far as tabletop gaming goes, something like Dark Souls: the TTRPG feels more like a chicken-returning-home-to-roost situation. D&D was a foundational influence to the oldest PC RPGs like Wizardry and Ultima, which themselves filtered to Japan and carried over the D&D trappings. Those old dungeon crawling type games that were denser and more prone to opaque nonsense are what Dark Souls was designed around revisiting and modernizing. It had pretty similar objectives as OSR games do with older D&D editions, in a way. The grim fantasy fad around Game of Thrones feels like a parallel trend-chasing thing. "Oh there's an audience for Adult Fantasy That Fucks? Let's go milk that cash cow dry then!" But maybe it's all part of a broader insecurity around dorkier things like speculative fiction and video games hitting a mainstream critical mass and now you might actually run into other adults who can talk excitedly with you about dragons but who look like those JOCKS and PREPS who teased you in school?
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Dec 23, 2021 21:09
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Nuns with Guns posted:The grim fantasy fad around Game of Thrones feels like a parallel trend-chasing thing. "Oh there's an audience for Adult Fantasy That Fucks? Let's go milk that cash cow dry then!" But maybe it's all part of a broader insecurity around dorkier things like speculative fiction and video games hitting a mainstream critical mass and now you might actually run into other adults who can talk excitedly with you about dragons but who look like those JOCKS and PREPS who teased you in school? I mean, this seems to be a worldwide phenomenon even if the stereotypical suburban American high school experience isn't as universal.
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Dec 23, 2021 21:14
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I mean, this seems to be a worldwide phenomenon even if the stereotypical suburban American high school experience isn't as universal. Game of Thones’ success or do you mean some global dark fantasy resurgence?
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Dec 23, 2021 21:19
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Nuns with Guns posted:Game of Thones’ success or do you mean some global dark fantasy resurgence? Game of Thrones, other "gritty fantasy" stuff.
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Dec 23, 2021 21:22
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Hot take - Dark Souls rpg should be a Quiet Year type game about gathering misbegotten fools around the Last Fire, huddled together as the world falls apart. Throw in some light quest rolls where you wander off, kill a boss and maybe go insane. The Firelink/Majula with their Npcs are only a small bit of dark souls, but it's an important bit. It's also the only bit I think you could make a decent ttrpg out of.
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Dec 23, 2021 21:22
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Nuns with Guns posted:Dark Souls 1 as a singular thing did definitely lodge itself into the collective gaming psyche a lot more than its precursor or named sequels did though and people tend to just take it as representative of all the other games and games like it. So they hardcapped the curse as a non-stacking debuff and added a bunch more cures for it to vendors, since DS was a game about trying again, not getting turbofucked for trying. I don't know which outcome would be a funnier low effort license, if the new Dark Souls game just lifts the stats and from Dark Souls, nakedly reskins d&d.
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Dec 23, 2021 21:26
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Hot take - Dark Souls rpg should be a Quiet Year type game about gathering misbegotten fools around the Last Fire, huddled together as the world falls apart. Throw in some light quest rolls where you wander off, kill a boss and maybe go insane. loving sold on this idea.
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Dec 23, 2021 22:03
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Nuns with Guns posted:
I feel like that bit is some pretty deep shade you're casting on a relatively innocuous opinion. For me, personally, I will readily admit to being the type who's more prone to ignore things when they get super popular (And that statement is intended with the utmost of self deprecation), but what I'm getting at is really more a feeling of market oversaturation as a result of the post-Game of Thrones' and Dark Souls' trend chasing. We've had enough new works that are specifically influenced by or trying to ape the aesthetics of these works that the particular style of setting just feels stale to me unless they have some sort of extra novelty to add on top of it. It's like when we hit peak zombie back in the 2010s: There were definitely good zombie movies coming out in that period, but there were just so many it was hard not to get sick of them to some degree. Basically, if someone is trying to pitch their RPG to me as "A grim and gritty fantasy setting" my response is going to be "Yeah, you and everyone else's, what other selling points have you got?". I think we're even kind of seeing the effects of this in the industry as much of the more recent OSR stuff have been pivoting away from the grim and gritty stuff and into the more gonzo science fantasy.
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Dec 23, 2021 22:14
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Hot take - Dark Souls rpg should be a Quiet Year type game about gathering misbegotten fools around the Last Fire, huddled together as the world falls apart. Throw in some light quest rolls where you wander off, kill a boss and maybe go insane. That sounds dope as hell
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Dec 23, 2021 22:20
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Game of Thrones, other "gritty fantasy" stuff. Is there a global movement behind this beyond the whole “English language movie and tv producers chasing the Game of Thrones dragon?” Berserk is influential to Japanese fantasy stuff, yeah, but it’s more of an old pillar like LotR or Elric are for western fantasy than any new wave. Coolness Averted posted:I don't know which outcome would be a funnier low effort license, if the new Dark Souls game just lifts the stats and from Dark Souls, nakedly reskins d&d. The regular 6 D&D stats but then they also add the DS1 Resistance stat. KingKalamari posted:I feel like that bit is some pretty deep shade you're casting on a relatively innocuous opinion. I have absolutely no idea what innocuous opinion or shade you’re talking about.
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Dec 23, 2021 23:11
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Nuns with Guns posted:Is there a global movement behind this beyond the whole “English language movie and tv producers chasing the Game of Thrones dragon?” Berserk is influential to Japanese fantasy stuff, yeah, but it’s more of an old pillar like LotR or Elric are for western fantasy than any new wave. I think there's some of that? Some of the Netflix productions that seem like grimdark fantasy post-GoT are not English-speaking. I'm more talking about how GoT managed to get really popular outside the US without needing specific American high school clique mindset to prime it.
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Dec 23, 2021 23:15
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Nuns with Guns posted:The regular 6 D&D stats but then they also add the DS1 Resistance stat.
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Dec 23, 2021 23:23
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Nuns with Guns posted:
Sorry about that: I've reread your original post and realized I misinterpreted - I originally thought the "bitter nerd angry at the jocks for liking nerd things" bit was directed at me specifically, rather than as a broader cultural statement. I think something must have broken my reading comprehension as that's not the first time this has happened to me on here this week.
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Dec 23, 2021 23:29
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I think there's some of that? Some of the Netflix productions that seem like grimdark fantasy post-GoT are not English-speaking. I'm more talking about how GoT managed to get really popular outside the US without needing specific American high school clique mindset to prime it. I’m still not sure which netflix shows you mean. The Witcher? Which was propelled to success by the video games being such a big hit that the IP to a visible audience outside Poland, and which Netflix picked up in the wake of Game of Thrones? Because their Witcher adaption is pretty clearly playing to the GoT crowd. The original Witcher books the show is based on play a lot more with “dark fairytales” that they cut or tweak in the show. I was mixing up my trains of thought in that prior post though. I was rushing that post at lunch. I think there’s some… I don’t know a better way to put it but I guess “nerd anxiety” around niche things hitting a mainstream audience. I think that’s more obvious when it comes to like gaming communities feeling possessive about a video game. But in my mind what’s driving adaptions of GoT and other fantasy novels in a way that plays up the HBO aspects is a separate cynical media stooge anxiety to make sure this story with wizards and elves and poo poo gets taken “seriously.”
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Dec 23, 2021 23:32
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Nuns with Guns posted:I’m still not sure which netflix shows you mean. The Witcher? Which was propelled to success by the video games being such a big hit that the IP to a visible audience outside Poland, and which Netflix picked up in the wake of Game of Thrones? Because their Witcher adaption is pretty clearly playing to the GoT crowd. The original Witcher books the show is based on play a lot more with “dark fairytales” that they cut or tweak in the show. Very much not disagreeing cause I perceive this to, but this same urge was already present in nerd culture and society in genera. You’ve got the modern trend on top of the prior attempts to make fantasy “serious” that have been concatenating and are arguably going back to at least Tolkein (“it’s not fairy tales, it’s myth”), Lieber (“it’s pulpy thieves that just so happens to have wizards”) and, you know, children (“2 3dgy 4 u!!!”). Like Game of Thrones is HBO riffing off of the books that GRRM wrote in response to 90’s fantasy, yadda yadda. No idea how to tease these apart or how it ties into a larger general trend, but it’s an interesting question.
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Dec 23, 2021 23:56
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Nuns with Guns posted:I’m still not sure which netflix shows you mean. The Witcher? Which was propelled to success by the video games being such a big hit that the IP to a visible audience outside Poland, and which Netflix picked up in the wake of Game of Thrones? Because their Witcher adaption is pretty clearly playing to the GoT crowd. The original Witcher books the show is based on play a lot more with “dark fairytales” that they cut or tweak in the show. No worries, I definitely know the attitude you're talking about here: It honestly has a surprisingly long history in certain nerd circles (Remember back in the early 2000s where things like Penny Arcade would get their hackles up about Halo being video games for "jocks" and the like?) and it's only gotten more prominent as nerd properties have gotten more mainstream popularity. I think a part of it is that a segment of millennial-era nerds have internalized the common media portrayal of nerds as the "smart ones" or as being destined for greater things than their more popular peers as a way to kind of deal with the social ostracization, which has in turn promoted this kind of gatekeeper mentality where nerd stuff is only to be reserved for the special elites such as themselves. A sort of case people looking at "smart people often have geeky hobbies" and interpreting it as "Having geeky hobbies makes you smart". And I can definitely get on board with the idea of the HBO treatment within fantasy being at least partially the result of nerd anxiety over people taking the genre seriously. I can say from personal experience that there are a lot of fantasy fans with a chip on their shoulder because they think the genre isn't taken "seriously" enough by some nebulously-defined outgroup of non-fantasy fans. Just read through a few entries of the Sci Fi Ghetto page on TVTropes for some examples of this attitude in action!
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Dec 23, 2021 23:56
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Nuns with Guns posted:You know, it's funny but Dark Souls: the game everyone hypes up for how HARD and UNFORGIVING and maybe even BULLSHIT it is, does not have permanent stat drain attacks in it. They dropped those after Demon's Souls and never looked back. But somehow stat drain and damage things are one of those precious sacred cows in a lot of tabletop RPGs still...
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Dec 24, 2021 00:12
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Kurieg posted:Dark souls 2 had soul memory which reaches the same end result as permanent stat drain. And might even be worse. In both cases some cool ideas are presented and were iterated on later, but it's really hard to overlook the bad parts.
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Dec 24, 2021 00:30
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Hot take - Dark Souls rpg should be a Quiet Year type game about gathering misbegotten fools around the Last Fire, huddled together as the world falls apart. Throw in some light quest rolls where you wander off, kill a boss and maybe go insane. Goons: "How can we make this game about fighting your way through skeleton-infested ruins of a bygone age, measured against a limited attrition-based healing system, in order to fight a big monster at the end in a climactic boss battle, thereby gaining both treasure and an abstract magical currency that increases your personal power, into a TTRPG? Truly, it is an insoluble, unprecedented problem. Oh well, better go with a rules-light meditation on loneliness!"
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Dec 24, 2021 00:38
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like i know 5E sucks and admitting you like D&D is a social faux pas around here but Dark Souls is literally just an OSR game transported into real time, and with a narrative/mechanical hook that makes character death a setback but not a game over it even has the "your GM has a set of dirty tricks he constantly pulls on you but you've known him so long that a whole metagame has grown up around predicting, testing for, and avoiding them" thing going on
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Dec 24, 2021 00:48
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Goons: "How can we make this game about fighting your way through skeleton-infested ruins of a bygone age, measured against a limited attrition-based healing system, in order to fight a big monster at the end in a climactic boss battle, thereby gaining both treasure and an abstract magical currency that increases your personal power, into a TTRPG? Truly, it is an insoluble, unprecedented problem. Oh well, better go with a rules-light meditation on loneliness!"
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Dec 24, 2021 00:59
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Goons: "How can we make this game about fighting your way through skeleton-infested ruins of a bygone age, measured against a limited attrition-based healing system, in order to fight a big monster at the end in a climactic boss battle, thereby gaining both treasure and an abstract magical currency that increases your personal power, into a TTRPG? Truly, it is an insoluble, unprecedented problem. Oh well, better go with a rules-light meditation on loneliness!" I'd do it in gurps for maximum tactical realism, 150 point characters, go. But yes, the notion that everything just needs to be a PBTA/FITD hack is kind of absurd to me.
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Dec 24, 2021 01:01
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:like i know 5E sucks and admitting you like D&D is a social faux pas around here but Dark Souls is literally just an OSR game transported into real time, and with a narrative/mechanical hook that makes character death a setback but not a game over I'm sorry that jokes and discussion got you so upset you had to post twice
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Dec 24, 2021 01:04
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I think it's okay to be mindful of what you want to do with an adaptation from a different medium into role-playing games? And I think it's healthy to be suspicious of 5E as a system for it, considering how much shovelware that space has in the IP department.
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Dec 24, 2021 01:06
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Like my spitball for doing a Dark Souls games would be more rules light and narrative driven since that's the kind of RPG I'm into at the moment, yeah but I also think there's more meat on those bones than just slapping the IP on a generic d&d-like ruleset. Ideally if capturing the DS feel I'd include a despair mechanic to overcome, attempting to keep helpful npcs from succumbing as well, and probably some dirty trick tokens the GM earns from player success. To mirror things like ambushes uniquely coded enemies that "break the rules" as you learned them, or an npc betrayal.
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Dec 24, 2021 01:06
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If we're going traditional RPGs to reskin for it, RuneQuest's involved but spatially-ambiguous battle system seems like a better fit than D&D's simplistic grid-based tactics combat.
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Dec 24, 2021 01:10
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Honestly, Forbidden Lands seems good for Dark Soulsing for two reasons: 1. It's an OSRy fantasy system 2. The GM is meant to throw old legends at the players to fill in the blanks of, and there's even a random Legend Generator you can use to make up Soulsy lore on the fly. Here, I'll do it now. Rolls: 1,5 on timeline 2,3 on adjective 3,2 on person 1,5 on target 3,1 on reason 6,4 on location 4 on location proximity 5,5 on terrain type 1 for direction 2,5 for what happened 4,2 for what remains 3,3 for what danger lives there now OK, here we go. Long ago, before the Blood Mist, there was a treacherous rider, who sought their prophesied [reason] love [target], and traveled to a lake [table for location gave 'water source'] located a few days away, in the midst of a deep forest to the North. As the legend goes, it is said that they were never seen again, and their fine riding gear and gifts for their lover [table gives 'a large treasure'] are still there by the lakeside. But so too are the hungry saurians who dive for fish. Game literally lets you randomly generate soulsy bullshit item descriptions like this, flesh out as necessary.
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Dec 24, 2021 01:16
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Admiral Joeslop posted:I'm sorry that jokes and discussion got you so upset you had to post twice if you're that desperate for an environment where bad takes aren't allowed to get pushback, RPGnet is that way
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Dec 24, 2021 01:21
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:if you're that desperate for an environment where bad takes aren't allowed to get pushback, RPGnet is that way lol Merry Christmas friend
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Dec 24, 2021 01:25
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