So we ran a test session of the Dark Souls RPG Saturday. Two players (Billy, Sir Hazbil the Knight, and Nate, Fizbun the Pyromancer). It had been awhile since I had played this game, and it was a blast! We laughed, we laughed, we cringed hard, and laughed more. Despite me having all three books in the line, we only used the core. Mine's shiny. It's so nice. We made characters and played for a little while. I grabbed a random map off the web, printed it off, and resolved to use my encounter dice to populate it as we went. I grabbed the Cathedral of the Deep from page 248 of the Core Book for the random monsters and other stuff.
Character Generation
This was a breeze. The options were "lacking", in the sense that you just had prepackaged stuff that you picked from, with a lot of illusory choice, but it sure makes character creation quick.
Random Encounter Dice
Now, there are two ways that the book sort of presents prepping an adventure: make a site or a typical "trad" storygame. I cannot overemphasize how poorly the book serves both approaches, and if I had a true and actual criticism of this game, it would be this lukewarm support in lieu of "figure it out yourself". Fortunately, I have designed my own games and have read tons of OSR stuff, so I just took a few ideas and ran with them. I had some ideas on how I might do that.
I figured out quickly that my initial ideas on random encounters for Dark Souls wouldn't capture the full scope of the game. At all. I also hate the fact that there isn't an easy way to just randomly generate equipment. That's going to trip me up later.
But, for now, I decided to go with two dice - d8 and d20 - rolled every other turn, in areas you have not explored.
Step 1: The Danger Check (d8)
| Roll | Result |
|---|---|
| 1–2 | Monster: Roll on the Cathedral of the Deep table (p. 248). |
| 3 | Trap: Electric doorknobs, mimics, or pressure plates. |
| 4 | Soul: A Fading Soul or Large Soul of a Deserted Corpse. |
| 5 | Item: Random equipment or "rubbish." |
| 6 | Bonfire: Only if you confirm with a second "1" on a d8. |
| 7–8 | Nothing: Eerie silence... for now. |
Step 2: The World Tendency (d20)
| Roll | Result |
|---|---|
| 1–3 | Summon Sign: Roll for Purple (Mad), Red (Hostile), or Gold (Sunbro). |
| 4 | White Sign: Restores one player and one ally to full Position. |
| 5–7 | Shopkeep: A hollow merchant with overpriced Moss Clumps. |
| 8–20 | The Dark: No cosmic interference this turn. |
The Adventure
Fizbun gently closed the door.
And went back to the bonfire. Sir Hazbil was somehow feeling hardier (his Position/HP max had gone from 13 to 16). Only to find the door had restored itself as soon as he went in. They rehacked the door open, and started checking around... only to find there was a secret door in the same room their bonfire. They came out into a chamber with two doors, one to the front and one to the right.
Fizbun opened the door onto a lovely view of a cavern lizard's ass.
Fizbun gently closed the door.
They tried the other door, and found four undead hounds were minding their own business... and somehow they hadn't disturbed them. The hounds stood between them and another door to the front and a staircase to the left. So Sir Hazbil charged! Fizbun actually threw flame this time! They were putting up a good fight... until an unlucky crit took Sir Hazbil down. By that time there were two hounds and one of them was badly injured, so Fizbun figured he could finish them off.
Fizbun was wrong.
They both woke up at the bonfire. This time Sir Hazbil was weaker... and could no longer wear his armor. His respawning had weakened his Strength score by 1, making him unable to wear the Knight's Armor! Fizbun managed to get a -1 to his Charisma score... which is what he uses to cast spells.
We laughed our asses off.
And called it a session, coz Billy had to go.
Gameplay
The people who say this game doesn't play well are lying. They just are. There's more than a few reviews of this game that claim to have direct play experience that are absolutely lying their asses off, or are filled with players so impossibly stupid that I worry for their ability to walk and chew bubblegum at the same time. And I say this because this game ran really smoothly! Again! With a completely different group!
So Position is used for three things: improve your d20 roll, 1 for 1 (no limit), improve your damage, 1 for 1 (minimum of 5), and improve speed, 1 for 5 extra feet (can't do more than double speed).
If your Position drops to 0 you die and go back to the last bonfire... where you have to roll to see if something random (mostly awful) happens to you. It's a DC 18 Wisdom save. You're gonna fail it a lot.
Burning Position/HP to improve rolls is an incredible thing to do. Each failed roll (and there were a lot of them) the question became: given that getting hitting by a sneak attack right now would send me back to the bonfire, do I burn the health now, making a future possible hit worse, or do I whiff and hope the monster misses? Not all the monsters can burn Position like the Players can, and I didn't throw any of those at the Players, so they didn't have to balance that out. Yet. But each Player roll was intense. And this is the only game I have ever played that has justified a passive defense for the players: you can't spend Position on the GM's attack roll, so it's a genuine guess as to what could happen! The players intuited this problem immediately and had a great time measuring risk. We'll see what happens as they go through the dungeon. They're worse off than they were before, mechanically, but now the shock has worn off.
We will see what the players do next week. But we had a blast. Especially Billy, who now is walking around naked, with a shield. His AC is now lower than the pyromancer's.
What could go wrong?