Design Exorcism: That Dark Souls Game I Almost Made

 There's about a million other posts I can or should be working on right now (from Princess Play, to an ARES recap, to Kaiju Environmentalism, to all the juicy stuff I've been working on for WILD). But someone mentioned Dark Souls as a TTRPG so here we are...

So way back in March of 2022 (that's been over a year already??) I was in a particularly Soulsy mood due to the recent release of Elden Ring. As such I decided to slap together a Souls-like game of my own on the fly and after a few playtests I'm actually pretty happy with the results! Unfortunately I didn't catalogue the actual gameplay as much as I would've liked, but I figured I could post the gist here. First off the character sheet:

As you can tell from all the blank space this was very much a WIP. It used a Mausritter-styled cut and paste inventory (which we'll get to later) along with some semi-traditional stat blocking. Eversoul is your magic pool, Pacts are Covenants and the rest should hopefully be self explanatory. Where the real magic happened was Stamina (tracked using the bar on the far right of the character sheet):

Players started each round at their Max Stamina. Stamina could be spent on actions (like attacking, casting or using an item) as well as being used to move 1 Space per 1 Stamina. (Combat took place on a Chess Board). Stamina (generally) could be spent at instant speed at any time, meaning even right before a monster attack. Thus Players were incentivized to save some of their stamina to "dodge roll" away from monsters, or to spend into shields to negate undodgeable DMG. At the end of the round (eg after all enemies had gone and players agreed they were done acting) Stamina refreshed back to max. The balance, we found, was a bit wonky but generally the system worked as intended.

Instead of you-go-I-go, battle became a precarious balancing act of when to spend Stamina on offense and when to save it for defense. Balancing on top of this razor's edge was the equipment:

Every piece of equipment had limited uses and different conditions under which uses would go down. When a weapon rolled its maximum DMG, that DMG would double (a crit!) and the Uses would drain by one. Armor meanwhile consumed Uses each time you took DMG, and Shields consumed Usage each time they were called. This was probably the biggest part of the system that would've needed rigorous tweaking and reworking to get just right. (Especially since dodging was by and large far stronger than blocking DMG).

Additionally weapons were built to Scale (SCL) to different Stats in true Dark Souls fashion.

Now you may be wondering how enemies work - Frankly so am I! Evidently (despite my excessive hoarding of paper) I have no remaining records of enemy stats or how those worked. I'm pretty sure they telegraphed their attacks and hit like a truck though. I remember the enemies I fielded were skeletons, skeletal archers, a skeletal executioner and of course a giant undead rat (who had been the main boss of the playtest scenario, where a barkeep had asked you to kill rats in his basement... his basement evidently also being an old cursed crypt).

On top of all of this, the game was built to allow Player death and recollection of Exp as per the Soulslike genre. In this Players took the roll of Threaded - Those weaved into the fabric of fate itself. They had access to a Loom as their player hub and could teleport to various locations to explore a dying world.

So why didn't I keep working on this? Well I just simply wasn't all that captured by it. It was good and serviceable, but fantasy remains to be really not my thing and Steel Hearts needed to get done. It's definitely a collection of ideas I've kept in the back of my head, but I feel the time has come to exorcise it and move forward with the projects that spark more joy in me. Maybe one day I'll come back to this like an ember rekindling an ashen fire...