Dark Dice

[unseenmage]

Was watching a friend stream Elden Ring when I had a thought about a grim campaign setting I've been stewing on for a while.

The setting trappings are grimdark enough, but I wonder how one would modify regular old D&D 3.P to be more Dark Souls esque mechanically?

Thoughts on how to make the dice rolls darker while still remaining fun would be welcome.

[Beni-Kujaku]

Use some of the most punishing fumble tables out there, and every character that gets crit'd is dazed for a round, double the damage and health of every monster, but give hints of what they're gonna do at the beginning of each turn so that the PCs can react accordingly ("The dragon takes a deep breath, and you see sparks of lightning ignite in their maw", "the ogre prepares to charge, while taking his greatclub in two hands, as if he wants to put everything in that blow"), and allow the PCs to get immediately raised for no cost, or a reduced cost.

[icefractal]

So ironically, I think I'd do it by making death easier to recover from.

In Dark Souls, most players die a lot. Yeah, there are deathless runs, but that's something that takes practice to achieve, with a lot of dying along the way. And the thing is, when you die you try again. You lose resources, so it's not as painless as many games, but you don't restart from the beginning and you definitely don't uninstall the game.

In D&D, that's not the default. TPK might mean continuing in some form, but it might also mean the end of the campaign. And even if things do continue, they're likely to change a lot. The idea of "keep trying to get through this tough part, dying 10+ times in the process" is uncommon. As a result:
1) We tend not to make likely-TPK situations, since we don't want to end the campaign.
2) If you do have a high fatality rate, the PCs will soon lose all backstory or connections because what's the point?

So I would actually use something like the bonfire mechanic. Because that would allow deadly foes without having a really short campaign and/or losing all character connections because we're now up to Knuckles XVII and El Ravager XXIII. And that means a greater tension on encountering danger, because the players know it's possible it does kill them in one hit.

However, does that reduce the overall tension because you ultimately can't lose? Well - same question for the Dark Souls video games. The only way you can truly lose those (or any single-player game, even those with perma-death) is to give up, because ultimately you can try as many times as you want to. IME, there's still tension regardless.

That said, no reason you can't do a hybrid, where recovery damages your soul (so there's a limit how many times before you're too messed up to continue) or there's an external clock which keeps moving, or some other limiting factor.


The other factor that might be an issue is player skill. In D&D, a lot of things are partially luck. Save or die effects, for example. You can do things to boost your save, you can try to avoid being in a position to be targeted, but ultimately sometimes it comes down to a die roll, and you can always roll a '1'.

Not the case in Dark Souls. The first time you encounter something, you could die by effectively random chance since you have no idea how to defend against it. But with sufficient skill, you can theoretically defend against everything (see "hitless" runs).

Not sure how to represent that in D&D. Maybe have a variety of defense "styles" you can use when attacked, which are usually just flavor but any given foe has one that will guaranteed work, after being found by IC actions?