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Rand Brittain posted:I feel like the mechanics of Dark Souls are way less of a problem to make into an RPG than its habit of implying a lot of stuff without ever really explaining anything. You can easily emulate this as a GM by just making your notes a bunch of scattered cool lore chunks you thought of and deploying them at random. Human pattern recognition will do the rest.
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Dec 24, 2021 07:20
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Arguing about what Dark Souls is is the dark souls rpg good session
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Dec 24, 2021 07:23
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Andrast posted:Arguing about what Dark Souls is is the dark souls rpg Maybe the darkest souls are the ones we met along the way...
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Dec 24, 2021 07:37
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Rand Brittain posted:I feel like the mechanics of Dark Souls are way less of a problem to make into an RPG than its habit of implying a lot of stuff without ever really explaining anything. I don't know why you need to call out my GMing style like that, I wasn't even participating in the Dark Souls discussion.
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Dec 24, 2021 08:54
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The beauty of dark souls GMing is that you can just throw out weird vibes and proper nouns and then whatever your players think is an interesting connection can be canon all along and they can't prove otherwise One game, me and my players all made up item descriptions all year long.
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Dec 24, 2021 09:25
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Jimbozig posted:I love all you cantankerous goons! Tuxedo is certainly not the only one here who comes off as aggressive. Yeah, but the tone of those mechanics I think is very different. 4e (and Strike!) can do swashbuckling setpieces where you kick people off bridges or into spike pits, but I don't think they can do "kite Smough the gently caress awaway from Ornstein and try and dodge the lightning". Maybe I was being hyperbolic when i said that the rest of DS won't translate to a ttrpg. Let me pull it back a bit - I don't think the bits that are specifically Dark Souls will translate to an RPG. I think if you take the exploration and traps and skeletons then you end up with just something vaguely OSR. Basically I want a game that captures the aesthetic and feel of Dark Souls. Unironically this: Tuxedo Catfish posted:Oh well, better go with a rules-light meditation on loneliness!"
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Dec 24, 2021 10:43
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Ferrinus posted:I cannot find it for the life of me, but I pretty cool rules for a Dark Souls TTRPG that gave everyone "stamina dice" which would refresh at the top of each combat round, and you could spend them to either make or dodge attacks. The heavier your armor, the higher a die would have to come up in order to count as a successful dodge. I thought it did a really good job of creating a turn-based version of the Dark Souls gameplay dynamic, where your ability to strike and defend both spend the same resource and you don't want to overcommit unless you're sure it's going to kill your target completely. That sounds like the Japanese Dark Souls TTRPG! Which was never translated officially, but there's a blog post from someone who played an unofficial translation here: https://blogofarcanesecrets.wordpress.com/2018/09/29/my-experience-with-the-dark-souls-tabletop-rpg/
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Dec 24, 2021 10:55
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Strom Cuzewon posted:I don't think the bits that are specifically Dark Souls will translate to an RPG. I think if you take the exploration and traps and skeletons then you end up with just something vaguely OSR. Basically I want a game that captures the aesthetic and feel of Dark Souls. strictly speaking you could argue Dark Souls doesn't capture the aesthetic and feel of Dark Souls - the actual gameplay thing-that-you-do in Dark Souls is fairly generic action-game stuff about recognising enemy attack patterns and developing muscle memory for dodging. even the whole super-lethal trial-and-error "prepare to die! a lot!" schtick is mostly marketing copy: it's the same as any other game e.g. Super Mario Land where you fail a lot while you're learning but fail far less once mastered, only nobody built up Super Mario Land as a brutal hardcore grim-and-gritty videogame for real gamers only which, I mean, you know, fine, whatever, if you want to have game mechanics that do drill down into the aesthetics that's cool and fair enough. but you could also just overlay those aesthetics onto a broader combat system, because technically that's what Dark Souls: The Videogame does anyway
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Dec 24, 2021 13:49
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Lt. Danger posted:which, I mean, you know, fine, whatever, if you want to have game mechanics that do drill down into the aesthetics that's cool and fair enough. but you could also just overlay those aesthetics onto a broader combat system, because technically that's what Dark Souls: The Videogame does anyway Right, but you literally just said it yourself: Dark Souls' combat system isn't actually what makes Dark Souls "Dark Souls," because it's fairly standard* action combat gameplay mechanics. *except for a few specific mechanics that have ended up defining the soulslike video game genre. The things that make Dark Souls actually "Dark Souls" are the writing, the aesthetics and the ambience. These things are distinct from the things that make any game (including Dark Souls) a soulslike. If you put stamina, dodge rolls, long animation locks and XP-as-currency-that-is-lost-on-death in a bog-standard fantasy adventuring setting, you have a fantasy soulslike, not a Dark Souls. GimpInBlack posted:That sounds like the Japanese Dark Souls TTRPG! Which was never translated officially, but there's a blog post from someone who played an unofficial translation here: https://blogofarcanesecrets.wordpress.com/2018/09/29/my-experience-with-the-dark-souls-tabletop-rpg/ This sounds like a very cleverly-designed way of replicating the mechanics of a soulslike game in tabletop form. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Dec 24, 2021 |
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Dec 24, 2021 14:13
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GimpInBlack posted:That sounds like the Japanese Dark Souls TTRPG! Which was never translated officially, but there's a blog post from someone who played an unofficial translation here: https://blogofarcanesecrets.wordpress.com/2018/09/29/my-experience-with-the-dark-souls-tabletop-rpg/ That sounds pretty good. I'd play that.
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Dec 24, 2021 14:23
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I'd suggest there's also a broader industry context to what makes Dark Souls "Dark Souls" - the "prepare to die" tagline found purchase because of the perception of contemporary AAA-games as carefully manufactured railroaded cinematic experiences. "x is the Dark Souls of y" became a hack journalist cliche for reasons unrelated to the game's specific actual feeling or aesthetics. much like the earlier discussion on satire in tabletop gaming, 50% of any read of a text comes from the reader and their baggage but my point was more that we're holding this theoretical Dark Souls TTRPG to a higher standard than the game itself. Dark Souls itself doesn't particularly intertwine its gameplay and aesthetics - why should its TTRPG version?
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Dec 24, 2021 14:36
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yo yo yo it's Dark Souls on the N64 Challenging gameplay like you've never seen before Link a fire and fight a boss the tightest gameply ever, like a boss
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Dec 24, 2021 14:44
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in order for Dark Souls TTRPG Edition to be a true Dark Souls game, you should have the ability to break into the houses of strangers also playing Dark Souls TTRPG Edition and start messing up their dice and papers
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Dec 24, 2021 14:48
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in order for Dark Souls TTRPG Edition to be a true Dark Souls game, the game needs to be great to start, flounder near the end, and most importantly the fans need to loving ruin everything.
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Dec 24, 2021 16:46
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Dark Souls is evocative in a way that most RPGs aren't because lore isn't explicitly given to the player in a handbook you can study. You can't really get the same "dots" to connect yourself when you've got a lore bible, or a DM to just ask what the deal is when weird poo poo happens.
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Dec 24, 2021 16:55
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moths posted:Dark Souls is evocative in a way that most RPGs aren't because lore isn't explicitly given to the player in a handbook you can study. Fortunately, you can make a game where players come up with the lore as they go, instead of having a pre-written lore bible or campaign supplement.
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Dec 24, 2021 17:03
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Jimbozig posted:I love all you cantankerous goons! Tuxedo is certainly not the only one here who comes off as aggressive. I'm not going to lay that argument at the feet of one offhand remark, especially when prompted the poster clarified that they meant that there features that are unique to Dark Souls are the bits that are hard to adapt as defined mechanical rules. And I mean, that's basically what a few other people said, too. I know I brought it up. The dungeon-crawling, mob-killing, trap-tripping, secret door-detecting, treasure-finding, boss setpiece-fighting, and then finding a new dungeon and starting it all over again are naturally central to Dark Souls. Heck, Elden Ring is taking that one step further and adding effectively overland hexcrawling with random encounters and events between the dungeons! The problem is that Dark Souls was an exciting game because it was doing something different from other fantasy RPGs and video games as a whole at the time. It was respecting the player's ability to think about what to do without needing markers or detailed waypoint maps to guide you. It also didn't do massive lore dumps, letting you infer stuff from dialogs or pick up fragments of background that were occasionally in item descriptions. It hosed up sometimes and could confuse you or get you lost, but that has its own kind of charm. In a TTRPG game, a lot of that is heavily contingent on the GM, but most GM advice trends towards already doing that. Giving your players some background details but not doing those breathless lore speeches of old from the DMs grabbing passages out of their unpublished fantasy novels. "The Dark Souls of X" gets thrown around a lot for a million things, but I think one of the big implications to that catchphrase is "Look, this is doing something fresh and interesting!" And I'd love to see how that translates to a tabletop RPG, because more than any other format, the dungeon crawling loop is already the room-temperature default for I don't know, 70% of games? Given that D&D and direct D&D derivatives compose the overwhelming marketshare of games still. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Dec 24, 2021 |
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Dec 24, 2021 17:39
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Lemon-Lime posted:Fortunately, you can make a game where players come up with the lore as they go, instead of having a pre-written lore bible or campaign supplement. True, but "make up your own lore" isn't going to sell an RPG. Part of what makes old school gaming and Dark Souls memorable is the discovery. A giant dinosaur cricket that dissolves metal is like a bug-eyed frog thing that turn you to stone. They're really loving weird. What makes them memorable was the unknown, not their particulars. It's a major pitfall of the OSR: Just retreading familiar ground is folly when so much of the joy came from exploring and experiencing the strange and unfamiliar.
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Dec 24, 2021 18:43
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Has Steamforged actually specified anywhere that they're designing a new game from scratch for Dark Souls? I feel like just translating a game that already seems to do it well would both easier and avoid any complaints like "you hosed it up when you could have just brought out the good game you assholes."
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Dec 24, 2021 18:45
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Gao posted:Has Steamforged actually specified anywhere that they're designing a new game from scratch for Dark Souls? I feel like just translating a game that already seems to do it well would both easier and avoid any complaints like "you hosed it up when you could have just brought out the good game you assholes." They haven't specified. I don't know if translating would be easier than a "new" rules system though. Their other tabletop RPG products have been 5e D&D products so they know the system well enough already, plus doing 5e versions of everything is apparently what sells well. The odds seem fair in that direction, but maybe they'll blow all of us out of the water and do a great translation of the stamina dice game.
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Dec 24, 2021 19:06
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moths posted:True, but "make up your own lore" isn't going to sell an RPG. I think the best example of this is Lovecraft. He specifically made up all his own monsters so as the audience you wouldn't know anything about them, and now people just take his stuff and import it into games as an audience everyone just knows it's Cthulhu or whoever right away.
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Dec 24, 2021 19:08
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Gao posted:Has Steamforged actually specified anywhere that they're designing a new game from scratch for Dark Souls? I feel like just translating a game that already seems to do it well would both easier and avoid any complaints like "you hosed it up when you could have just brought out the good game you assholes." You can absolutely trust Steamforged to make something low effort and dogshit.
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Dec 24, 2021 19:09
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neaden posted:I think the best example of this is Lovecraft. He specifically made up all his own monsters so as the audience you wouldn't know anything about them, and now people just take his stuff and import it into games as an audience everyone just knows it's Cthulhu or whoever right away. Yeah, I know a lot of fans had mixed opinions about August Derleth injecting more traditional morality into the mythos when he first started to codify it, but I feel like his bigger sin was trying to organize the whole Lovecraft mythos into a single, coherent whole. Part of what made Lovecraft's work interesting was that, despite the recurrence of names, terms and creatures we were never really given an idea as to how the cosmology of his stories all fit together, which gave off a much better vibe as it led readers to question the veracity even of the things revealed in individual stories. It really reinforced the idea that the horrible truths of the universe really were things that man was not meant to know.
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Dec 24, 2021 19:24
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imo the most fun way to make a souls game to me is actually to make a bloodborne or sekiro style tonally similar but fundamentally different setting as a hexcrawl with a lot of hidden and explicit timers. So you want a combo of like the pbta clocks but also a crunchy minis tactics engine against monsters that your players can't look up in a monster manual. Get that feeling of discovery and an unpredictable world.
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Dec 24, 2021 20:14
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Son of a Vondruke! posted:That sounds pretty good. I'd play that. Me too. That system sounds really interesting.
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Dec 24, 2021 20:19
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Warden posted:Me too. That system sounds really interesting. https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/let%E2%80%99s-read-the-official-dark-souls-trpg.857739/ Lots more info about it here
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Dec 24, 2021 20:36
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I was for a while trying to design a dark souls inspired miniatures game (the idea was very small figure count, maybe 1v1 or up to 4v4 or so), but I couldn't manage to make it work, it's pretty tricky. I tried a bag of tokens with 3 rock-paper-scissors suits and 1-6 (trumping gave you +3, so more likely to win), where you could see what tokens had been used and thus tried to guess what your opponent tried to play, but my opponents all said they just chose randomly, and I couldn't figure out how to combat that. I toyed with more of a system like those street fighter card games where you have a deck of moves, but I couldn't figure out how to marry that to the miniature positioning in an interesting way. Stamina management would definitely be a major aspect, and some sort of skill mechanic (like bluffing) rather than just rolling to see if you hit would be capture more of the DS feel. The Dark souls board game was just alright, (I backed it on KS, but only played it once), and Guild ball was great, but as mentioned handled poorly, so while I don't think Steamforged is a horrible company in terms of game quallity, they are pretty hit-or-miss.
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Dec 24, 2021 21:35
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GimpInBlack posted:That sounds like the Japanese Dark Souls TTRPG! Which was never translated officially, but there's a blog post from someone who played an unofficial translation here: https://blogofarcanesecrets.wordpress.com/2018/09/29/my-experience-with-the-dark-souls-tabletop-rpg/ I found that when I was digging around, but I'm prepared to swear I read some full-English rules for such a game a few years back that sounded like it was someone's homebrew. It had "fire" in its name somewhere. Possibly it was that very unofficial translation that that blog post is about.
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Dec 24, 2021 21:37
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Ferrinus posted:I found that when I was digging around, but I'm prepared to swear I read some full-English rules for such a game a few years back that sounded like it was someone's homebrew. It had "fire" in its name somewhere. Possibly it was that very unofficial translation that that blog post is about. I've seen something like this too, so you're not imagining it.
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Dec 24, 2021 21:44
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Chris Bissette, who made Wretched and Alone, also made a Dark Souls sort of game with some funky dice mechanics. Can't remember what it was called or how it works, but maybe that's the one you're thinking of?
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Dec 24, 2021 23:42
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The main issue I would see in doing a full-on licensed Dark Souls RPG (as opposed to simply capturing the mood) is that the game's setting itself is kept obscure and revealed through pieces of lore- it's hard to build a coherent picture of what's going on because not only has the civilization collapsed, but the entire world is in a weird death state, and reality itself is falling apart. And that's a big part of the feeling of isolation and existential struggle the games have, you as the player aren't saving the realm or even murderhoboing for fame and fortune, you're doing this because of fate or because you have nothing else to do. So the challenge- and it's not insurmountable- would be A) defining the world in enough detail for a GM to work with but not destroying the mystery and B) just developing it into a world with people you can interact with and defining how much you do outside of fighting monsters to get souls. System wise I'd want it to have some element of crunch because that is in the games, but I don't have many ideas as to specifics. Maxwell Lord fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Dec 25, 2021 |
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Dec 25, 2021 01:23
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Maxwell Lord posted:The main issue I would see in doing a full-on licensed Dark Souls RPG (as opposed to simply capturing the mood) is that the game's setting itself is kept obscure and revealed through pieces of lore- it's hard to build a coherent picture of what's going on because not only has the civilization collapsed, but the entire world is in a weird death state, and reality itself falling apart. And that's a big part of the feeling of isolation and existential struggle the games have, you as the player aren't saving the realm or even murderhoboing for fame and fortune, you're doing this because of fate or because you have nothing else to do. So the challenge- and it's not insurmountable- would be A) defining the world in enough detail for a GM to work with but not destroying the mystery and B) just developing it into a world with people you can interact with and defining how much you do outside of fighting monsters to get souls. What you're describing sounds a lot like MÖRK BORG.
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Dec 25, 2021 01:28
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I think it would be a better system if it had rules (and fuckloads of tables) for building your own mysterious world lore that your players could piece together and the game gave you guidance on reincorporating players' interpretations, but then people would be mad that they paid for a Dark Souls book and didn't get a canonical setting
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Dec 25, 2021 11:19
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Mormon Star Wars posted:I love Mystara but Shadow Elves are 100x worse than drow, lol. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5936-qj5fAMr Welch of 1000 things Mr Welch is not allowed to do in D&D just released his updated video on them. Their god is a ex-nuclear plant technician who became a god by accident when someone did a Whoppsie and blew up Blackmoor. They live in a hell hole and whose god has given them the job of cleaning up not-Chernobyl and whose elite's know but won't tell the populace, who don't have any luxuries like wood, glass or rock music. Their king is the one who wants to take over the Elf surface world because he refuses to compromise and lies to everyone to continue his millinery-industrial-complex built on lies. The first two expeditions went to a non-livable part of the Hollow World (Siberia I guess?) and the 2nd one was not-Afghanistan. Meanwhile the kids are starting to go to underground parties and listen to up-surface music and want to cross the border to see all the forbidden shows. I could easily see it written as being in an adventure in late-soviet not-Russia or not-East Germany as our heroes battle bureaucracy, the shaman-secret-police and the state to have a random low level officer accidentally open the gates to the top world. Way too imaginative for WotC to touch sadly. Comstar fucked around with this message at 13:22 on Dec 25, 2021 |
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Dec 25, 2021 13:20
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Millinery Industrial Complex is a solid gag so I really hope it was intentional.
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Dec 25, 2021 17:17
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Tarnop posted:I think it would be a better system if it had rules (and fuckloads of tables) for building your own mysterious world lore that your players could piece together and the game gave you guidance on reincorporating players' interpretations, but then people would be mad that they paid for a Dark Souls book and didn't get a canonical setting "Every version the tables generate is equally true; they produce shifting, multi-faceted, self-contradictory facts because the reality of Dark Souls itself is shifting, multi-faceted, and self-contradictory. Players' interpretations fold themselves back into the fabric of reality itself: there is no dream without a dreamer, and nothing can be observed without an observer."
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Dec 25, 2021 17:29
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Mormon Star Wars posted:I love Mystara but Shadow Elves are 100x worse than drow, lol. Meanwhile the orcs are too problematic for most of ENWorld, with the Native American inspired red orcs (complete with a "Big Chief Sitting Drool") and the Mongol-inspired yellow orcs. More here and art here. Admittedly that's a particularly bad supplement.
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Dec 26, 2021 04:07
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neonchameleon posted:(complete with a "Big Chief Sitting Drool") lmao what the gently caress. Honestly? I'm kind of surprised/impressed that a thread like this is being done on ENWorld and from what I'm reading so far nobody's really trying to "both sides" things or make it a free speech issue or ranting about "wokeness," given how wishy-washy moderation over there has been before about people calling out shitfulness I figured any thread like that would be a mixed bag, at most there's a few people going "well it's a product of the time" but even they aren't really trying to defend it that hard (and they're getting called out). e; okay there's ONE GUY who really keeps trying to hammer the "cultures are subjective, other times, etc" point a lot, to be fair. e2; nah never mind, the OP got a suspension for correctly calling a bunch of dipshits out lmao Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 12:42 on Dec 26, 2021 |
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Dec 26, 2021 11:05
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Kai Tave posted:e2; nah never mind, the OP got a suspension for correctly calling a bunch of dipshits out lmao 
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Dec 26, 2021 15:08
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I know this isn't the world's most perfect discussion zone but I am infinitely grateful I got into the RPG community here because you're generally allowed to tell a JAQoff to go gently caress themselves and the mods have the ability to interpret things based on context.
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