How does one make Dark Souls into D&D?

[RumoCrytuf]

Heyo Playgrounders,

There's been this idea I've had. I want to convert the Dark Souls universe into a D&D setting. The one problem is, how the hell does one do that? Shoot some ideas over my way, help get these gears turning.

[GPS]

A buddy of mine on this forum, Jamgretter, found a bunch of dark souls 5e homebrew monster conversions. He doesn't post here much, but I'll see if I can't get you that link. He ran a few of them in his CoS campaign, they're pretty good conversions.

[mephnick]

You really can't outside of ... atmosphere maybe? Trust me, I'd love to do it, but D&D may be the polar opposite of Dark Souls. Dark Souls relies on practice through death, pattern recognition, giant enemies that kill in one hit, linear design, the sense of being alone and isolated (barring the odd summon), very limited magic, solo boss monsters, vague lore and the sense of satisfaction for finally overcoming . Most of these things are bad for D&D or boring for TTRPGs in general. It'll be barely D&D. or barely Dark Souls.

[Asmotherion]

well, first use the Short Rest=10 minutes/Long Rest=1 Hour variant. Dark Souls is meant to have you constantly on the run, and have no downtime.

second, get the BBEG in the boss fight an action with a minus to hit (maybe -5 or even -10) but has a huge damage bonus, thus a single hit would kill a character

Third, death is not the end. When a character dies, they instead loose all their humanity, and loose control of their character. You then time-skip them to a point were they somehow gain humanity back, and probably fall behind in dungeon progression. Make the questline a constant "exit the dungeon" quest, were they archive some "checkpoints", and the ultimate goal is to reach resurection.

Wile it may be a good one-shot, or even short adventure, it might become boring after 2-3 sessions, so you may instead use it as an introduction adventure to an other similar-tone Campain, like Curse of Strahd or Out of the Abyss for example. Or use it as a One-shot solo adventure for each character that dies in your main campain, for them to return to life without a resurection spell. In case they die too many times, make them return as undead NPCs instead of their normal selves, and they won't have an other chance to resurect untill their undead counterpart is defeated.

[Quoxis]

I think i've read about a setting of previous editions (3.x i suppose) where character's deaths are either of no real concern or even necessary. I think the name was ghostwalk or something, and the premise was that dead people came back at a certain location around which the setting's campaigns are set as ghosts - if you die, you just get up there again like in that one Tom Cruise movie - or "groundhog day".
As "you died, now git gud and try again" is the main gameplay mechanic in the dark souls franchise, i suppose you could look the aformentioned rules up and try to translate them into your homebrew.

[Spore]

I thought about that as well. I wanted to implement this for my Pathfinder campaign originally. I would have given the players an Estus Flask each that refill once per day and heals 50% of their HP (as potions infight are usually not a good idea at all). I would've killed them with a ship wreck (I mean it IS railroading but if they can defeat the Giant Kraken at Lv 3 they deserve any praise coming their way) and having them revived by a decrepit old voodoo priestess. They would get a talisman each that breaks after another death. and returns them to their last 'bonfire'. They would be taught how to create said bonfire, given an explanation how the charms work that protect them from death and the fact that they are neither living nor dead (for the purposes of healing magic they're alive).

All this would be done as an excuse to play without training wheels. Encounters would be challenging or epic as I felt combat was a tedious slog that annoyed more than helped the fun of the game. They would then have to explore an ancient ruin for the voodoo priestess as part of their spirit journey to unearth the magical McGuffin that allows them to create a bonfire. And the temple would be littered in traps (no rogue), undead or golemish protectors and jungle monsters. "Extra lives" would then be provided as MAJOR items.

I have always hated the fact that D&D combat is rigged to the player's favor but in the same mentality I wouldn't like to cut character arcs short because the player died from a poisoned trap door even from an epic battle. Maybe I would even use the ressurection madness table from CoS (you know because hollowing).

[War_lord]

Depends what you mean by "make" Dark Souls into D&D. What about Dark Souls? Dark Souls has that Dark Fantasy feel, you can take that into D&D with some good description. Dark Souls' exploration rewards diligence and punishes carelessness harshly. A good DM can walk that line without drifting into killer territory. What you can't port over, and it's always aggravating to see people advocating it, is combat mechanics. Dark Souls PvE is all about reading your enemy, knowing your weapon and figuring out timings and patterns, there's little to no "luck" involved in a well designed encounter. D&D is dice rolls, has always been dicerolls, and will never have videogame combat, because it's not a videogame and no amount of bad homebrew will "fix" that.

[wilhelmdubdub]

I think there is a dark souls table top game in development.

[CaptainSarathai]

What you have to understand about Dark Souls is that it's actually part of a genre of games that goes all the way back to Mario. See, initially, when you played a videogame you only got one shot, no checkpoints, no saves. This was true of Mario. Then gaming started to get away from that, and you got checkpoints. This totally trivialized gaming - now, anyone with enough persistence could get through something like Halo on Expert. With enough trial and error, you learn, and you adapt. What's interesting about stuff like Halo is that it's not really that hard to learn and adapt. Enter Mario. A guy used the level creator to add all of the feature you see in Dark Souls - hidden traps, invisible platforms - basically, stuff to just screw with you and make that constant, repetitive, "reload it til you remember it" gameplay a feature of the game itself. Rather than a game take 2hrs to complete because every death sends you back to the start of the level, games like Dark Souls take 2hrs to compete because, even though every death only sends you back to a checkpoint, you die a lot.
D&D is interesting in the fact that it doesn't have that problem. Even unique among RPGs, when you consider console games like Skyrim. Save before you enter the dragon's lair, and if you get ganked, reload and try again. You can't do that in D&D, so there's no need for that level of DM f**kery.

That's not to mean that you can't do it, just that it's not necessary. You could easily tell players, "this game is super deadly and every time you die, you roll a fresh character." The problem is that they don't get attached to their character for the non-combat side of D&D, and the story falls apart thanks to intra-character metagaming. You also can't really restart them at Lvl1, because then they drag down the whole party, which causes a death-spiral effect if you're playing Hard encounters.

That said, I've done it once and it took 4 DMs, a hex-crawl map, and over 30 players...

In college, I felt the D&D bug bite me, and wanted to set up a gaming group. However, due to it being college, people having oddly scheduled classes, and partying, and lives outside of D&D, I needed a sort of "drop in, drop out" system. So what I devised was a Hex Crawler game in a wilderness setting. The party goal was to map the vast uncharted wilderness. They would set off from the small frontier town of Creed's Landing, and go adventuring, but always had to return before nightfall, for at night, the raw moonlight would drive men irrevocably insane. Only specially roofed buildings could provide safety. As the map grew, I added small waystones for Fast Travel.
The entire goal was so that character who showed up would meet at the pub, set a goal and go on a short, 1-session adventure.

It became wildly popular, and suddenly I realized that I had invited far too many people into the group. I could have run games for small 3-5 player parties almost every night of the week. So at this point, I enlisted my friend to help DM for some other groups.

With 2 DMs, we still didn't stop growing. People still wanted in. We were starting people at Lvl1, because it kept the groups separate, but also made the long-time players feel accomplished, and made it feel like a living world with people of different ages and skills walking around.

Once we neared 20 players, we could have stopped, but we decided to go for a bit of a record. New faces weren't applying so often, and the first run of players were nearing max level. So we brought in 2 new DMs and told them that their job would be to handle the low level players.
"What low level players?" they asked.
"Just wait."
A horrible new enemy appeared and bent reality to it's whim. Rivers reversed course, mountains tumbled as verdant plains were shattered and thrust skyward to form new peaks, whole forests simply moved. The old map was useless, and monsters had infested the landscape once again.
But this time, it was different. 5 hexes from the town slumbered a Liche King. Ancient Green Dragons winged over the forests, and a cave was as likely to hold a coven of Medusas as it was to contain a simple Owlbear.

High level players were devoured and spat back out as Level1 again. Low level players would blunder into encounters where the only objective was to simply survive and flee and they would mark them down on the map.
"A17 is a Hydra lair, come back at higher level."
Groups were encouraged to post on the clubs' page and discuss their finds and coordinate adventures together. We had 4 DMs running 2 sessions each, every week. We started speckling a story throughout, with clues to a gigantic, primal, world-destroying god tearing it's way back into reality (a Terrasque). It ran for a full year and local players carried it into the summer before it petered out early in the next year.

As far as getting the Dark Souls feel, it's just a gothic, low-magic game. Pretty traditional D&D fare if you know how to DM to a theme.

[Herobizkit]

Using the setting is the easy part. It's dark and foreboding; there's a significant absence of life (ie practically no population centers of any size, no trade, little vegetation, little livestock); "evil" or "chaos" or "entropy" has won and changed the world as a result.

If you were planning on running this game as a solo adventure, there are a lot of easy ways to represent things mechanically. For example using the Revenant from the UA Gothic Heroes article (https://dnd.wizards.com/sites/default/files/media/upload/articles/UA%20Gothic%20Characters.pdf), you could have your hero be an Undead. They could earn experience points as usual, losing them when they die and having to fight their way though areas all over again. You could introduce Humanity that gives them, say, the equivalence of the Toughness and Durable feats while Human.

But I mean... if you have multiple players, adventuring as a party completely changes what the Dark Souls experience is all about. You're better off just borrowing the setting and finding something for them to do together.

[Yuroch Kern]

From what I played of it, it would require some world building on the DMs part. Lots of house rules too. It's a vague response, but Dark Souls is designed around single player. Something like saying you get no xp between the last time you rested and died, period. But you get up after 10 minutes, you crazy revenant, you. Also, minimize hp. You get 1 for d6 hit die, 2 for d8, 3 for d10, and barbarian gets 4. 1st level is 2 extra. That should simulate 1 hit kills, with Con working normally. It would encourage a lot of combat maneuvering, even though it would slow combat a bit as a result. My 2 copper.

[Beastrolami]

A friend and I debated this point. I disagreed, but his idea was to have big bosses, that should party wipe every time. Force the players to fight over and over again until they find some way to win. His idea was that the party would gain experience relatively slowly, and when they die, they drop all their exp, and have to go back to recover it. When you level, you are safe, and keep the level. Then you set the world in some bleak environment and force the party to crawl through it.