@DuckTapeAl Well, the thing is, Dark Souls is brutally difficult and incredibly lethal. But it's OK for it to be those things, because it's fundamentally about skill.
The moment you add dice rolls, you're ignoring the most important part of Dark Souls.
I'm sure an RPG system for Dark Souls could be made. But making everything (blocking, dodging, attacking, etc) a dice roll is pretty much the opposite of how you would do it.
I just noticed, the OP made a chatroom to talk about it. Is it possible to move some of these messages over?
RPG design 101, the Big 3+1 Questions: What is your game about? How does your game do this? How does your game encourage / reward this? How do you make this fun?
@Miniman well, yes, but you don't stick around for a game of Dark Souls without getting really specific on what aspects you really like about it (to offset the frustration of dying). Anyways, I was asking to see if those elements could be translated to RPGs. If that's even possible :p
@daze413 Well, personally, I enjoy overcoming challenges through personal skill. And a big part of Dark Souls' appeal for me was that I could see my skills improving as I played - that kind of visible progression isn't common.
I personally liked the lore as well, gathering bits and pieces of it through equipment, seemingly unimportant background elements and NPC chatter is pretty neat.
Ah, yeah, like there is no real reason not to just sit down and rot in your cell for the rest of the first game. Quite honestly I didn't really bother about the story and everything until I saw those vaatividya youtube videos. Half of the time I was just playing to kill things and get to the next bonfire.
On the note of creating a game that feels like it "gets" Dark Souls, I want to share Ars Technica's review of the Bloodborne card game which they said felt like Bloodborne despite replicating almost none of its gameplay.
Toward the end in the "Found in translation" section:
> Instead of trying to simulate the single-player combat the video game is known for (almost certainly a losing proposition), Bloodborne: The Card Game instead replicates the feeling of playing Bloodborne. The game is all about creating the sense of dread you feel when wading into a battle with a boss, knowing your hard blood-collecting work could be taken from you in an instant. Get cocky, and you'll be punished.
To make a game translation that authentically feels like the original game, it's not important to recreate what it did mechanically — it's necessary to create what, in the medium you're designing for, will make you feel like how that game made you feel. Then you get the same experience, even if it is fundamentally a different game.
For the Bloodborne card game, that meant a game where you're working together with other players to defeat monsters and a dungeon... but only one person can ever win and leave the dungeon, and defeating a monster counts more to winning if you did more damage. So you want to help your "companions", but not too much, and if you could survive on your own, you'd rather just stab em all in the back.
And really you'd rather con them into helping you against their own interests.
...ahah, my "Cleric" deck in Magic. It was designed to support manipulation of the others in a multi-player game, pitting both ends against the middle and then backstabbing the winner.
@BESW Except where everyone also has an equally manipulative backstabby deck, and they're all politely smiling while preparing just how to best DRIVE THE KNIFE IN.
In the Bloodborne card game, fights involve everyone, and if someone doesn't beat it, everyone is worse off. So you want to cooperate to make sure you best it together, but you also want to conspire to beat it most yourself.
It's a game that simultaneously is "we're all in this together" and "every man for himself".
@daze413 For me, the fun lies in persevering to overcome challenges like Miniman said. In Dark Souls, RNG is almost entirely nonexistent, so the challenge is in learning your opponents, their patterns, the environment, and incrementally improving in anticipating and overcoming the challenges presented.
Player skill is king in that game. All the items in the world will do only a limited amount for you. The game rewards judicious strategy, and effort to develop game mastery.
There is a boss at the beginning of Dark Souls 1 who's meant to be impossible to defeat, because you have a weapon (the broken sword) that deals ~1% of his health and his attacks will take off all or most of your health. You run away or die and progress either way. You're meant to do that, then find a proper weapon, then beat him. Veteran players can still defeat him with the broken sword if they want to have fun doing it.
In the first level of Dark Souls 3, there's a boss and a secret miniboss. A friend of mine struggles with the boss for hours and has no idea how to defeat the miniboss. I can defeat both of them in a few minutes without losing any HP and I die only when I get cocky and lower my guard. (Hint: they'll still destroy me in 2 hits even if I'm generally going well.)
I beat that Dark Souls 3 boss on my third try ever, within ten minutes of first discovering him. The next day, that friend contacted me and was like "oh you're playing that game? how are you going on that first boss?? man he's hard, right? i've been at him for hours." and i was just like "...uh............."
but then, i've very well figured out certain things like rolling effectively. in dark souls 1, i'm also good at parrying, and have even beaten bosses using parrying. i'm still figuring out parrying in dark souls 3 though -- either the timing changed, or i'm very rusty at it.
Part of that game mastery factor is worth elaborating on: part of the primary challenge of the game is that it doesn't tell you how to play it. That's not bad, it comes from the old roguelike games like Rogue and NetHack. You get an explanation of the basic mechanics, then sent off to figure everything out on your own. You're not told what Curse does, or what Poison or Fast Poison are; you're left alone to discover that yourself.
Reading the wikis is effectively spoiler and makes the game much easier for yourself. You're not meant to know all the answers about how the game mechanics work; doing so will remove a lot of the challenge.
Dark Souls 1 has a sort of headquarters location after you beat the first chapter and leave the Asylum the game starts you off in. Infamously, there are three places branching off of that -- one place which is impossible to pass until you have the right item, one of which is meant for high-level characters, and the other of which is the least obvious and the place you're meant to go as a newbie.
I and many friends went off into the place meant for high-level characters. It was hard. We died. A lot. But it was the only place we could see. And the game's meant to be hard, right? Everyone talks about the game being nearly impossible. So we weren't sure we were doing anything wrong. WRONGO, head over this other direction and go enjoy the Undead Burg which shows you yeah the game's not impossible, you were just underleveled and underequipped for the area.
The game's also got super enjoyable lore and beautiful labyrinthine level design. Dark Souls 2 lacks that, and that turned a lot of people off that particular iteration in the series.
Dark Souls™ Conversion
Dark Souls™ Conversion