I’ve played some of the Dark Souls video games, and they were intriguing enough for me to order Dark Souls The Role Playing Game.
So far reading it, it’s 5e, heavily modified for the setting.
I think what interested me the most is death brings you to a camp-side fire.
I’ve been working on my own Souls inspired setting for a few months now, I love the direction it’s moving in. Didn’t realize there was an official game, though I should have probably anticipated that there would be. Kinda disappointing that it sounds like it’s just 5e, though I suppose it could still be good. I am interested in how they handle the death mechanics. Sounds like you have just gotten it recently?
Yes, it’s newly arrived 2 days ago.
They got rid of HP and replaced it with Position, which is similar to HP. Some classes have higher starting hp. It’s more than just HP.
When a PCs Position hits 0, your character dies and ends up at the nearest bonfire sometime later, losing all collected souls. If over half the party dies, then the whole party respawns, losing all souls collected by everyone in the party.
Leveling up only gets +Con modifier per level. So, a 15 CON gets you +2. (Such as a 10th level Knight has basically 31 hp.)
That’s where the HP similarities end.
Position is tricky, because it fluctuates from one combat encounter to the next. At the start of combat a character rolls a Position Die per level as temporary Position. (A 4th level Knight gets 4d10 for the combat encounter).
Position is also used as a resource to be spent, but I haven’t figured that part out yet.
So far, this feels like they’ve translated the game world pretty well. I’m sure I’ll use much of the material even if I never get a chance to play it.
Really unfortunate that they let SFG create a new book instead of doing a translation of the Japanese RPG from Kurokawa. It sounds like that system was a much better fit for the setting. It’s been translated to French, so I’m still hoping to see it make it into English one day.