The Dark Souls RPG is Great, Actually

What Do I Mean by Great?

Greatness is a strange thing. It's not "good", or "bad", but a a vision, a singular thing that screeches something positive, new, above its issues and imperfections and problems. Greatness is not perceived via taste, but through spiritual perception, through a previously existing devotion to wholeness and something higher than quality. If something great isn't approached with wholeness, it produces violent reactions, whether it be with hatred, confusion, or a pernicious apathy whose poison isn't obvious to the one experiencing it.

The Dark Souls RPG, adpated from 5e 2014, is a great RPG. Despite its clear mistakes and foibles, it is one of the most singular visions produced in the last ten years of roleplaying games. It actually invents its own kind of table, with its terms planted like a seed in the mind.

Adaptation Isn't 1:1

The first thing to understand is that the Dark Souls RPG is an adaptation. I know, I know, that sounds obvious. But when you talk about something, its intention has to be looked at. 

What's Being Adapted?

The Dark Souls video games features a singular person starting at a checkpoint called a Bonfire and navigating a series of challenges, looking for another Bonfire to rest at. The challenges are almost entirely combat. If you kill the creatures, you get Souls, which is money and XP combined. If you die, you lose your Souls, and have to go reclaim them. If you explore the map more you'll find "Larger" Souls, which will just "hand" you Souls, as reward for your exploration.

When combat starts, your two resources are HP and Stamina. If you do anything other than a simple move of the joystick, Stamina is subtracted. It regenerates when not used. HP is subtracted when you're hit. Estus flasks, Humanity, and visiting Bonfires restores HP.

Items grant different boosts. Weapons particularly are complex, granting different types of animations and therefore tactics.

Someone who knows the videogames better than I can add more to this, but it is a factual statement of the typical experience playing Dark Souls the videogames.

Video Games Can't Be Directly Ported to TTRPGs

This should be obvious, but apparently the discourse around this game seems to have missed this. Video games don't play like TTRPGs.

The fundamental change, beyond the obvious ones of technology, is the social nature of a TTRPG. Dark Souls, by default, is a solitary experience. Notice the wording. I didn't say Dark Souls isn't social, I said Dark Souls is solitary, by default. Sure, you can summon, but that isn't inherent to the experience. The idea is that it is you against the world. Others can help you, but it's up to you.

Most TTRPGs don't work like that. With the exception of solo play, all TTRPGs are inherently social experiences. Even if it's just one player, the presence of a GM inherently changes the experience. This one change means that a ton has to be changed to keep the experience true to the video games, without trying to do something TTRPGs can't do. The mechanics, the experience, has to be changed to a social one..

And in this case, the Dark Souls RPG is a great but flawed translation.

Player-Driven Elements

The oddest thing about the Dark Souls RPG is that it has these player-driven mechanics, encouraging players to get involved in world building and giving GMs an idea of what to put in their levels. It wasn't strictly necessary to do this, but the way they were layered allows a GM to fill his Level, without compromising on his vision for it. It's a tight balance to strike, but the game does it!

There's three elements: Backstory, Memory, and Drive. A player can use them by adding details to their narration, saying why they should get advantage on that particular roll. This allows the players to add plot hooks they want, taking the smaller (and actually more difficult) elements off the GM's plate.

The Backstory is what your character was before death. 

Backgrounds are things like: 

"Failed warlord"

"Faithful knight of the realm"

"Wretched ravager of the hinterlands"

Backgrounds are meant to be a general catch-all, something that the player and the GM can grab at with little difficulty. The Backstory, being so wide, is only given a small boost: you can invoke your Backstory to gain advantage on a saving throw once per Long Rest. It's widely applicable, yet somewhat limited in power.

A Memory is a specific moment from before death that sticks with your character. 

Memories are things like:

"When I wrenched the sword out of my beloved's chest, it snapped at the hilt."

"When the ground fell from below my feet, there was a split second when I knew it and could have reacted."

"I kissed the demon, and it burned me"

The game doesn't give any guidelines on how often you can change your Memory, but there's nothing saying you can't change it.- specifically one thing that stuck out at you from before. It shouldn’t necessarily make sense, because it has been divorced from its context. If you can invoke this Memory, you get advantage on any check of your choice, once per Long Rest. This funnels the player into finding those specific moments and replicating them. That's not going to create problems, nope!

A Drive is why you think you have been brought back.

Drives are things like:

"I am meant to restoring  the King in Yellow to his glory, before he was corrupted."

"I will destroy the Serpent of Col-Foant, releasing his slaves."

"The Queen in White can be saved from herself. I am the one to do it."

All of these character elements have random tables you can roll on for inspiration or stealing, but Drives are the one spot where I think you should probably roll, given that players won't know enough about the Level to feel confident about setting a Drive. However, if you can help your players be confident enough, they can set some wild Drives, giving the GM a lot of ideas for the Level! You can invoke a Drive to reroll a failed check or saving throw. If players are chasing their Drive they get a lot of power, especially if they got advantage on the original roll: that's a powerful reroll!

Character Creation Is Almost Perfect

Character creation is actually very simple: pick an origin ", pick a class, choose some skills, and write everything down on the character sheet.

The origin grants you specific stats and Bloodied Abilities, which turn on when you're at half Position, which is partially your health. These Bloodied Abilities are very important, if not somewhat clunky in some spots, as some increase your stats, which can lead to some awkward mid-encounter changes. You always get more powerful if you get hit hard or sacrifice your own Position, which creates an interesting push and pull in the system. Which means the conversation at the table is impacted.

Notice the shift from solitary to social? We're going to be seeing a lot of that!

The classes, which are based upon the 5th edition of DnD, are also simplified down. You get bonuses from the class at every level. The classes aren't great sources of choice, they just reinforce a particular archetype and get out of the way. There's a good reason for this, and we'll get back to that in "Weapons as Features". The class also gives you your initial loadout of items. If two people pick the same class they will start almost identical, unless they have different origins, but that's unlikely. But, on the other hand, character creation is so fast that it creates a completely different table dynamic. Put a pin in that, too.

Position is Consequential

Instead of having HP and Stamina, the Dark Souls RPG has one meter: Position. This one number abstracts how vulnerable the character is and the amount of resources they have to do cool stuff. You use Position to power your items' special abilities, and it's also your health. 

You can spend Position to:

- Activate a special ability

- Increase your d20 rolls

- Increase your damage rolls

- Increase your speed, up to double

This creates a push and pull inside the system, where you can do some really incredible stuff.... provided you don't get hit. There are, not accidentally, a ton of reach weapons on this game, means that you can do the hit and run tactics of the video games in a tabletop environment, where you run in, poke, and leave.

So mobility and terrain are really important to this game. Like they should be. And if you get hit it hurts, and you feel like an idiot for not setting things up better. Like it should be, coz it's Dark Souls. This system is an unqualified blast to play. It works. I have thrown this at total noobs and they adored it. They understood, after five minutes, what was going on. They set up plans and tactics that other games could only dream about. People, normal people, understand "health as currency". They get it. This is honestly the masterstroke of the whole game. The core systems work beautifully.

Items as Features/Abilities

The decision to give each Item a special ability was inspired. Each item in the game has a special ability, usually requiring some Position expenditure to activate. 

Here's one piece of armor, as an example:

And some weapons:

Some of these abilities are good, some are bad, some are broken, but there is one equalizing force for the whole thing:

The GM is supposed to place all items on the map, ahead of time.

So if the GM doesn't like the ability on  something - and trust me, there are some real stinkers in this book - he doesn't have to put it in. It is his primary business. So, while some of the weapons are just.... not good... at all... enough of them are either good or amazing, to where you can just populate the map with the stuff that does work. Finding new items is based upon the players' ability to solve problems and explore within the world. Getting more special abilities is based upon player ingenuity and curiosity, and that is a good thing. There's also the "extra souls", which flat out grant more Souls, lots of them, that you can also get from exploration. It is a really good set up.

Death Is Fun!

The math in this game does not favor the players. Monster damage is high, their health is their resource for cool stuff, lowering their health faster. So death is always imminent. Fortunately, the fact that you're playing a TTRPG works in Dark Soul's favor. You come back, with your character, with the world reset to how you had found it. In a video game where combat is the only way to play, this can get tiresome and lead to running through challenges. In a TTRPG, however, this works to the players' favor. You are limited by what you can imagine, and given just how crazed the damage in this game can get, you'll want to find another way.

But this doesn't come without consequences. Each time your character comes back, you have to make a Wisdom save or go a little crazier. The more you come back, the harder it gets to not go nuts.

The Open Level

All of this comes together to make a new kind of table: the Open Level. A variation on the Open Table, the Open Level is when the GM makes an enormous and masochistic Dark Souls level, and lets everyone know when he is available to play. The players get some meaningful input thanks to their Backstories, Memories, and Drives, while the GM gets to world-build to his heart's content. Character creation is fast and practically brainless, meaning that guests have very few issues; in fact, the GM just coming to the table with pregens is so easy that it would be a bit silly not to do it. The slippery nature of Dark Souls time means that, until the Level is beaten, that creatures mostly reset, giving although some challenges won't, giving a sense of familiarity and progression. Players can drop in and drop out at their liking. If a new bonfire is discovered, the whole table benefits and doesn't need to have an explanation about why they return to a new warp zone. The players have to track nothing. The GM just marks where the new warp point is. Everyone wins.

There is nothing quite the Dark Souls RPG in the tabletop world. You could argue the Open Table is similar, but in the end nothing allows for the kind of challenge and continuity as the set up of Dark Souls. The table can expand and contract as it needs to. The Level

Problems, Thy Name is Legion

All this is nice. But. Boy, this game has problems. The text barely offers any direction, the items just scream of jank, and the editing is an embarrassment before God and man.

A Problem of Confidence and Direction

The direction on how to run the Dark Souls RPG is garbage. Straight up. Niceisms like "find what works for your group" are rampant throughout the core text. "Don't worry, as long as you're having fun!" What exactly is fun in this case? How is it accomplished? Telling GMs to experiment and see what works is a terrible thing to say, and the Dark Souls RPG says it all the time. If this was my first RPG I'd be incredibly lost and hate this thing.

And, because the text is so poorly edited, its detractors can rightfully claim that the game is unrunnable. What's clearly the barebones layout for a sandbox campaign can be safely ignored by the railroading "theatre kids", who claim that Dark Souls doesn't support a "story". Given that the bare amount of direction that is given very clearly indicates a sandbox for anyone who has played one, you can safely fill in the gaps. But if you haven't? Or if you want a "story"? This book isn't just useless, it doesn't indicate what to do well enough.

A Problem of Jank

Some of this game is just.... weird. The item abilities in the book clearly needed another pass, as some are absolutely unusable. This problem is mitigated by the way the game works, but that doesn't make it not a problem. You can compare these abilities and easily figure it out, but the sheer frustration of so many abilities being badly done can get almost unbearable at times.

The good news is that, if you know the video game, it's not too hard to fix these abilities. But if you don't? How on earth would you know what to do? And let's  be honest, why should you have to, because if they had done their jobs this wouldn't be a problem in the first place!

A Problem of Editing

The first printing of this game is an absolute nightmare. An utter nightmare. The furor around the initial release of this game was absolutely justified. Steamforged fixed the typos and obvious screw-ups... after having their customers email them what to fix. And even then, the newer print run is still poorly edited. It was a scummy move.

In the End, Does it Matter?

And yes, I gave them my money. Willingly. The book, now, is usable. It could be better, but it is quite functional. It's not difficult for me to figure out where they went wrong. It doesn't take more than a few minutes of reading anything about an open table to fill in the gaps and realize what can be done with this game, right out of the box. 

New ideas in tabletop are hard to come by. Dark Souls, as a concept, was new to video games. Translated faithfully, it should be new to TTRPGs. And the designers nailed that part. This plays exactly how it needs to, and recreates the jolly cooperation of the video games in a way adapted to tabletop. Heck, I'd argue there's an entirely new genre of TTRPGs here, or a subgenre at the very least. The idea is so good that it can overcome even the sloppiest of edits, the most predatory of practices.

This is a great idea. A great game. It deserves to be played. It deserves to revolutionize the space of TTRPGs.