A series where I talk about what I'm working on. In this post, I cover the challenges of designing a Soulslike roleplaying game.
For National Game Design Month, I made a minimalist Soulslike RPG system and adventure titled Hollow. I’m far from the first person to have this idea. Many Soulslike RPGs can be found on itch.io. Some of my favorites include Exhumed, Runecairn, and Radikal Souls.
As I wrote the game text I stumbled across several design problems. Most of these stem from the change in medium. Dark Souls is a realtime video game that relies on timing precise button presses and absurd setting logic like teleporting to bonfires and reappearing there when you die. This is not the easiest thing to adapt to a tabletop world!
I’m going to cover the most challenging aspects of this adaptation in detail and both my initial and my amended solutions post-playtest. For context, I refer to the optional setting included with the game as The Grafted Palace.
The Challenges
If you want, jump to the challenge that you’re most interested in:
Respawning
Oh boy. This rule was so bad I changed it the first time we used it in the playtest. There is something I like about the 24 hours of being a shade, but practically speaking it means that either dead characters are waiting around while living characters play or vice versa. I do have a rule that when undead die they can act as a shade, granting stamina/focus to allies or manipulating the world like a ghost (blatantly stolen from Exhumed), but it felt like we were all just waiting for the Warrior to return to life during the session.
Additionally, I was worried about the setting ramifications of presto-respawning at a checkpoint. Let’s face it, Dark Souls has great atmosphere and environmental storytelling, and yes some of us know all about hollowing, kindling, and the first sin, but it has never made sense why we reappear at bonfires. Rising from death? Sure. Disappearing in a fine grey mist on death and re-materializing at the last bonfire we touched? Not so much. Sometimes video game logic and playability reign supreme.
Others may disagree, but I want as little of that video game logic as possible in a Soulslike tabletop RPG. I want an internally consistent world to play in. This is why I had dead characters return to their corpses when they died rather than their last checkpoint. In practice, this became a huge issue as characters were “trapped” in dangerous locations and living characters were dragging corpses around to safe spots on the map.
I’m not afraid to say it: there was too much corpse dragging for my taste.
Losing Souls
The runback is a staple of early Soulslikes. For the unfamiliar, players would drop all of their souls where they died and respawn at their last checkpoint. If they brave the trials that led to their death, they can pick up and reclaim all of their lost souls, but if they die before that happens the souls are lost forever.
The repetition of runbacks is formulaic for a video game, but daunting for a tabletop RPG. While a runback through Elden Ring’s Subterranean Shunning Grounds might take one minute, the same experience in a tabletop RPG could take hours. For this reason, I needed to remove runbacks and instead rely on players storing souls and .
On the one hand, you can argue this reduces the risk of death since you can store all your souls, attempt a difficult enemy, and suffer nothing if you die. On the other hand, if you encounter a tough enemy unprepared, you might lose all of your souls at once, which is more punishing than a normal Soulslike.
In practice, I found this rule roughly an equal amount of risk to normal Soulslike soul mechanics and did not end up changing it post-playtest.
Fast Travel
In most Soulslikes, there is a safe hub that players routinely return to after exploring the world. NPCs come and go, but often provide services in exchange for souls. Players can also fast travel from the hub to almost any location in the world they’ve already explored (although some Soulslikes make this an unlock).
I originally did not want any form of fast travel as it felt incredibly video gamey to me. However, as I saw players interact with the local map and ask if they could just “return” to previous locations they’d explored I realized that wasn’t too different from fast travel at the table. So I added some fast travel rules.
Farming XP
Farming XP is common behavior in Soulslikes. Sometimes you just need 10 more points in Vigor to beat a boss you’re stuck on. While this is boring in a video game, it is infinitely more boring and time consuming in a tabletop RPG. The players still engaged with this mechanic though as they wanted to level up before pushing into what they viewed as the more dangerous parts of the module.
I want to disincentivize this behavior and encourage players to explore more naturally and take on fights instead of walking around the easiest areas and backstabbing mindless hollows that are worth barely any souls. That’s not fun for players or the GM.
Damage
From my perspective, this worked well. At least one player seemed confused by it though and remarked how they couldn’t figure out “how weapons work”. Diegetic bonuses and penalties in tabletop RPGs are difficult for many people to wrap their head around. To me, a halberd is obviously a bad weapon to fight with on a stairway. A spear can poke from a safer distance than an axe can swing. A dagger is perfect for grappling. I think I found a way to rewrite the rules to be easier to understand though.
Blocking
Blocking was seen as an easy way to spend very little stamina and protect yourself. A player using the high-stamina, no-armor Knave class wanted to block with their dagger rather than dodge, something that you would never see in a Soulslike game. This told me I needed to rework blocking.
Dodging
Dodging was fine, but felt random and costly enough that players sometimes chose to block instead. Another issue was that there was no benefit to memorizing or recognizing an enemy’s attack. If a player realized an enemy was going to do their 5 damage attack instead of their 2 damage attack, they couldn’t go out of their way to decrease the damage—it was up to a die roll.
In a Soulslike, learning an enemy’s attack patterns is key to success, but if there is no benefit to learning how to react to the attack, then this aspect goes away.
Parrying
I did get to parry the Warrior’s charged longaxe attack and hit him with a crit, but it wasn’t very satisfying for player or GM. It felt almost arbitrary that the block was a parry. No skill, just a shielding NPC with a massive threat to a melee character. How does anyone attack that enemy type in melee in the future? Is there any way to avoid the parry from the player’s POV?
Final Thoughts
I went back on a lot of my early decisions regarding “realism” and instead leaned into a few of the more gamey elements of Soulslikes. I have other dark fantasy games that are more focused on realism; Hollow can remain a purer Soulslike implementation.
If you’re interested in Hollow or the starting adventure for The Grafted Palace, stay tuned. I hope to release an Ashcan version for free around the end of December.
The Dolent Chronicle is an RPG blog produced by Dante Nardo. If you liked this post, please consider sharing it on whatever doomed planes you reside.