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View Full Version : Index Dark Souls II, D&D/RPGs, and Difficulty



Endarire
2015-01-05, 03:41 PM
Extra Credits did an episode on difficulty here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MM2dDF4B9a4) regarding using in-game mechanics to set one's difficulty.

This can be extrapolated to D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder (and many other games) in a similar fashion.

One major notable difference between Dark Souls II and tabletop RPGs is that Dark Souls II's campaign is preset while tabletop RPGs have tremendous flexibility. Dark Souls II already a finished and complete game while a ruleset (like D&D) still requires someone to build and arbitrate a game.

endoperez
2015-01-06, 11:23 AM
It would be quite similar to Original D&D and the various retroclones emulating that feel, wouldn't it?

Dying is easy. Surviving the first few levels helps a lot, but there's always going to be extremely deadly situations. It's possible to come back (through high-level spells), but it means permanent stat loss.

However, combat is supposed to handled differently. You get experience for the treasure you collect. If you bypass a fight but get the treasure, *DING* level-up!

Also, Tomb of Horrors...

GloatingSwine
2015-01-06, 07:37 PM
Consider the following: The Chosen Undead in Dark Souls is the ultimate expression of the D&D murderhobo. S/he does nothing else but wander the world looking for things to kill for the express purpose of levelling her/himself up, has almost no interactions with anyone which do not end in murder, and only really ends up following the quest because of the promise of ever more valuable murder at the end of it.

Dusk Eclipse
2015-01-06, 09:35 PM
I've never thought about the Chosen Undead in that way... damn, that shouldn't be so right.

Tengu_temp
2015-01-06, 10:18 PM
The difference between Dark Souls and an oldschool high-lethality dungeon crawl is that in the latter death either means it's over, or costs you a lot. Dark Souls is not just lethal, but it also expects you to die a lot, because you learn everything by dying over and over. And, even more importantly, the penalty for dying is very, very small - a slap on the wrist most of the time. It's pretty much the completely opposite approach to a highly lethal game - and one that works well in a video game, but not so much in a tabletop RPG.

Also, most of the time when you die (to a non-boss) in Dark Souls, it's because you got careless. Most of the time when you die in DND, it's because the dice were against you.


Consider the following: The Chosen Undead in Dark Souls is the ultimate expression of the D&D murderhobo. S/he does nothing else but wander the world looking for things to kill for the express purpose of levelling her/himself up, has almost no interactions with anyone which do not end in murder, and only really ends up following the quest because of the promise of ever more valuable murder at the end of it.

Meh, I played Dark Souls to save the world (or myself, in 2), and to look at the sights. The reason you have few non-hostile interactions is because friendly NPCs are so rare, not because you kill anyone you meet for loot. Well, you can play this way if you want, but I didn't.

goto124
2015-01-06, 11:45 PM
The reason you have few non-hostile interactions is because friendly NPCs are so rare, not because you kill anyone you meet for loot.

So it's bascially the reverse- you're not trying to kill everything, everything is trying to kill you :D

Comet
2015-01-07, 02:43 AM
The difference between Dark Souls and an oldschool high-lethality dungeon crawl is that in the latter death either means it's over, or costs you a lot. Dark Souls is not just lethal, but it also expects you to die a lot, because you learn everything by dying over and over. And, even more importantly, the penalty for dying is very, very small - a slap on the wrist most of the time. It's pretty much the completely opposite approach to a highly lethal game - and one that works well in a video game, but not so much in a tabletop RPG.

Also, most of the time when you die (to a non-boss) in Dark Souls, it's because you got careless. Most of the time when you die in DND, it's because the dice were against you.

I don't entirely agree. My experience of old dungeon crawls is that first level characters are pretty disposable and easy to replace. You're right that death still has more consequence than in Dark Souls, though.

As for the other point, I think that the common wisdom is that if you're rolling dice you've already messed something up. Old D&D thrives on "rulings, not rules" after all, so the only way to guaranteed safety is to find solutions that engage with the world and the fiction instead of the mechanics. Having to enter combat or roll a saving throw means that your plan didn't work.

This kind of playstyle comes pretty close to Dark Souls, I feel.

Zombimode
2015-01-07, 08:20 AM
Most of the time when you die in DND, it's because the dice were against you.

This doesn't match my experience. Bad choices and not remembering options have a high influence on character deaths. Not properly acknowleging the risk (ie. getting careless) the characters were in is also high on the list for causes of character death. Of course if a player still misinterprets the risk of a stituation AFTER a character death, I can see why the player would attribute the character death to "bad luck". But most of the time it is a misjudgement on the players part and/or a misunderstanding of probability (failing a saving throw is not bad luck - there is no such thing in a single roll with equal probabilities).

Bottom line: pretty much like in DS, a lack of skill or getting careless will likely result in death in D&D.

Tengu_temp
2015-01-07, 10:43 AM
I don't entirely agree. My experience of old dungeon crawls is that first level characters are pretty disposable and easy to replace. You're right that death still has more consequence than in Dark Souls, though.

Losing a character and replacing it with another one is a very different thing than dying and then coming back with the same character. For a start, you can actually still have a meaningful narrative if you do the latter, while in the former it's impossible because players have no attachment to their characters.


As for the other point, I think that the common wisdom is that if you're rolling dice you've already messed something up. Old D&D thrives on "rulings, not rules" after all, so the only way to guaranteed safety is to find solutions that engage with the world and the fiction instead of the mechanics. Having to enter combat or roll a saving throw means that your plan didn't work.

This kind of playstyle comes pretty close to Dark Souls, I feel.

No, it's different. Oldschool DND promotes minimizing risk, being overly prepared to the point of paranoia, striking only when you know you can win, generally being a coward. Dark Souls, on the other hand, wants you to courageously go forward, fight every enemy, explore every nook and cranny - it just also expects you to be smart about it.

Comet
2015-01-07, 11:42 AM
Losing a character and replacing it with another one is a very different thing than dying and then coming back with the same character. For a start, you can actually still have a meaningful narrative if you do the latter, while in the former it's impossible because players have no attachment to their characters.

That's true, though sometimes you go through characters so quickly they might as well be extra lives. In some instances of dungeon crawling games (Dungeon Crawl Classic springs to mind, obviously) you are expected to throw literally dozens of characters into the meatgrinder to see results. At that point it's pretty hard to form a narrative through characters. Instead it's the setting that is the focus, much like in my experience of Dark Souls. I never got much of a sense of character for my undead, but the world made up for it in spades.


No, it's different. Oldschool DND promotes minimizing risk, being overly prepared to the point of paranoia, striking only when you know you can win, generally being a coward. Dark Souls, on the other hand, wants you to courageously go forward, fight every enemy, explore every nook and cranny - it just also expects you to be smart about it.

Again, my experience is that some of those old school modules and their imitators are, in essence, so unfair that you pretty much can't prepare for them. So you die once or twice and then, once you know what you're dealing with, you prepare and plan and win. This was also what Dark Souls was like to me, at least from time to time.

You're right in that Dark Souls and oldschool D&D are not a perfect match, but I still feel they are very close. In Dark Souls you turn around a corner, bump into a monster, die, come back and beat the thing. In an unfair dungeon crawl you turn around a corner, bump into a trap, die, come back and beat the thing. You could very well just let your players be reborn instead of making a new character when they die in one of those dungeon crawl modules and it wouldn't change things too much.

Tengu_temp
2015-01-07, 02:59 PM
But the thing with Dark Souls is that its difficulty is not unfair. There are traps and ambushes but you can see all of them coming if you pay attention, instant kills out of nowhere are pretty much unheard of (it happens once or twice, right next to a save point), and most enemies can be beaten comfortably if you're halfway decent at timing and blocking, as opposed to oldschool DND where a lucky crit on low levels can kill you.

Also I don't think a game where you run through characters like crazy is able to hold the players' attention with anything that happens IC; you can't create a meaningful atmosphere in a high-lethality dungeon crawl. And the atmosphere in Dark Souls is extremely important; if you want to replicate it while keeping the game's high lethality, you have to make them some kind of self-resurrecting undead like they are in the game.

In fact, I'd say the atmosphere of Dark Souls is much more important in importing it to an RPG than the difficulty. Because a tabletop RPG, where the DM is the final arbiter of everything and pretty much everything is up to him in the end, is the worst interactive medium for creating a fair challenge. It's better to focus on the feel of loneliness within a once glorious, but now abandoned, slowly dying world.

zinycor
2015-01-08, 09:58 AM
In fact, I'd say the atmosphere of Dark Souls is much more important in importing it to an RPG than the difficulty. Because a tabletop RPG, where the DM is the final arbiter of everything and pretty much everything is up to him in the end, is the worst interactive medium for creating a fair challenge. It's better to focus on the feel of loneliness within a once glorious, but now abandoned, slowly dying world.

This, so much this. If you are going to translate dark souls into an rpg you must focus much more on the setting and on the feelings of loneliness and inconsequence of the world, rather than difficulty (at least on mechanics levels, accomplishing anything should be quite hard on the setting).

In terms of combat, i don't know if the undead mechanic will translate well into building well a setting, being so, you should do it so combat is hard, but not as deadly as in DS, otherwise your players would be dying a lot and not caring a lot about the world