Why D&D 5e Is The Chosen System Of The Dark Souls RPG
In many ways the upcoming Dark Souls: The Roleplaying Game is a fusion of the best elements of the Dark Souls series and Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. There are plenty of differences between the Dark Souls games and D&D - with the former being a (mostly) single-player video game emphasizing individual success and improvement and the latter being a highly collaborative experience where players don’t necessarily win or lose. Despite this, the Dark Souls RPG may yet succeed in combining the two by relying on tried-and-true mechanics to support new rules.
FromSoftware’s games, from 2009’s Demon’s Souls to the long-awaited Elden Ring, are largely defined by their challenging boss fights, high level of difficulty, and balance of risk-versus-reward decisions, with the Dark Souls trilogy standing as the studio’s defining work. While many tabletop RPGs prominently feature combat, these systems are often streamlined to accommodate slower gameplay and a higher number of players. It would be easy enough to build an RPG setting around the world of Lordran or Drangleic, but a game lacking weighty, brutal, and deliberate combat would struggle to evoke Dark Souls, which is where Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition comes in.
D&D 5e owes much of its success to the simplicity of its systems compared to previous editions. While high-level characters, reality-bending spells, and an abundance of powerful magical items can make D&D parties feel unstoppable in campaigns, the core of the system is incredibly straightforward. The vast majority of seemingly-complex actions and rules boil down to rolling a die and adding a number, with corner-cases and esoteric rulings being few and far between. This makes D&D 5e a perfect scaffolding for new rules and systems to be built upon. Dark Souls: The Roleplaying Game is one such system, starting with D&D 5e's fundamentals and adding new systems to capture the game’s deep combat.
In order to make space for Dark Souls mechanics, many elements of D&D 5e are altered or dropped altogether in Dark Souls: The Roleplaying Game. Iconic D&D character classes are replaced by Dark Souls', with the Knight, the Pyromancer, the Deprived, and others all featuring. Magic has been completely reworked, now utilizing a system of attunement slots that Dark Souls players will likely recognize. Each of the new mechanics draws on the spirit of the video game - even those entirely new to Dark Souls. Position is a finite resource serving as something of a combination of the video game’s health and stamina meters; players can spend it in combat on powerful abilities, but losing all of it results in a character’s death. Success demands players be smart, know their limits, and avoid overextending.
While an entirely new TTRPG could have emulated the systems of Dark Souls, recreating the video game shouldn’t be the goal, as anybody who wants that can just go play any of the Dark Souls games. An adaptation of an existing, functional system can instead evoke the game’s experience in a new format, allowing players to create their own stories. Dark Souls: The Roleplaying Game is set to deliver this to TTRPG tables when it launches in May.