So, continuing my quest to make every game more like Dark Souls. I was thinking about the 'starting gifts.' Some are great, some useless. I took the Master Key every time because it allows you to skip the shitty part of Blighttown and really makes life easier.
Since the PCs start with garbage Middenmurk-style weapons, maybe a table of 'inheritances' that could include decent gear would be cool: your grand-dad's old campaigning sword, piecemeal chunks of armour, stuff like that. Your fighter could start out with a pigskin jacket, rusty meat cleaver, and shiny platemail boots. Maybe he would rather sell them for rent money? Maybe other 1st level scrubs want to roll him for his old pop-pop's gear?
Of course I would need to create rules for piecemeal armour, which seems like wayyyyy too much fucking work. In the mean time, I dug out this chart I saved of d100 random items in your PC's pocket. I did some digging, and Hack & Slash had a link to another one on his big link compilation page. These are great, and I will begin using them IMMEDIATELY.
Had a fun-filled trip to Toronto last weekend; my head still feels like it's in a vise. I guess even I need to sleep sometimes. Took me a while to pare this down to a decent idea:
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Some of my roommates are playing Skyrim right now, so I tried it out. I haven't played an Elder Scrolls game since Daggerfall (in 2002 that game was already ancient history. Dear God!!). I remember having fun back then joining the fighter and mage guilds, crawling through dungeons, and contending with the god awful FPS sword fighting controls.
So I made a mean-looking orc with no plan beyond using heavy armour and big weapons, joining the Champions, just being a good-guy fighter clanking about which seemed to be what the game was hoping for.
It didn't work out that way. First it was the lycanthropy, but soon enough I was waging war for Malacath, backstabbing for Molag Bal and committing human sacrifice for Boethiah. I joined the Dark Brotherhood and slew beggar and emperor alike for hard cash. Now I prowl the countryside for friendly innocents whose souls can feed my Ebony Blade (it's basically Stormbringer, and gets more powerful when it kills allies & friends). Turns out, the bad dudes of Skyrim have the best quests and the hottest gear!
BEND THE KNEE, MORTAL.
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Everybody knows Elric, he is the classic good guy taking quests from an evil patron, and it works beautifully. Sticking to the simple law/chaos alignment axis of Moorcock and leaving questions of good and evil up to the hero's own conscience (you guys remember having one of those?) lets this work so well, and is why I always love simple L/N/C alignment in my home games.
Because alignment is ridiculous - your belief system/personality/morality is also a set of super-physical laws that bind what you can do and how magic works on you, etc? Let's see a game with the protection from secular humanist spell. Actually I would play that, but it's not the point. When some of my gamer pals and I get drunk, alignment becomes the subject of argument so often it's a running joke.
The best solution I have is to differentiate between the 'moral compass' portion and the 'cosmic allegiance/supernatural laws' portion. Alignment covers your cosmic affiliation in my game, and will change your religious options, magic items, some spells, and certain social interactions. In this way it's more like a 'cosmic vibration' than anything else.
It will *not* prescribe which actions your character is allowed to take. Soooo you can be a Lawful piece of garbage (check out most LotFP material for lots of these guys), a Chaotic good guy like Elric, or anything in between. If you don't care about the gods or unearthly forces, or don't want to participate you can be neutral.
So Skyrim had me thinking: what about PCs who say 'fuck it' and sign up for an evil cult to get fabulous cash & prizes?
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In Dark Souls (my personal fave of course), you can battle your way through a crypt rammed with skeletons, wherein a coffin can be climbed into, taking you to their boss - Gravelord Nito - who promptly offers to sign you up for his covenant and give you a magic sword so you can fight other players online in his name! This doesn't give you any protection against his skeletons though, because everything in the game is trying to kill you. This feels weird, but makes sense in the game's milieu.
Sign me up!!!
I've spent a fair bit of time outlining the deranged cultists that hunger to crack the PCs' skulls open and feast on their very brains. I suppose what makes this idea cool in Dark Souls is what makes it difficult at the table though. A friendly (albeit hideous) face in the middle of the dungeon who is part of a normally dangerous faction, but is nonhostile. Usually, my players would expect to chop their way through a horde of foul monsters to encounter a boss, oversized beast or evil mastermind of some kind.
To get there only to find a job offer is a bit of mental whiplash. Let's brainstorm:
WAYS TO SIGN UP WITH THE FORCES OF CHAOS
Divine Concealment:
Maybe the god you think you worship is actually... something far worse. Could be the god you started with, or one you just stumbled across, and like an idiot started hanging out at their lost and forgotten altar.
Desperation:
Remember in Saga of the Swamp Thing when Arcane appeared to Matt Cable as a fly and saved him from that car accident by possessing him? (Holy crap, I just remembered how great Swamp Thing was). This is great if your PCs get in over their heads, as mine do quite often. Instead of a TPK or some other catastrophe, they get stuck with a new patron who wants some harsh tasks accomplished!
Information:
This is another perennial favourite around my place, as the dudes relentlessly interrogate everybody until they can't say any more. Just let it be known that you have information they want - all they have to do is sign on the dotted line. Intel on their enemies, maps of the area, advice on the future, this is basically what Contact Other Plane is for.
Greed:
Especially with XP-for-treasure, my newfangled ultra-expensive jackass equipment lists and magic items being exceptionally rare, signing up with Arioch might be the only way to get the swag you need.
Compulsion: Being Dominated to do the Elder God's task might be cool in limited doses or over the short term, but who plays D&D to get bossed around? Make sure there is a way out, and/or prepare for your PCs to try and whack the entity that just Geased them, unless they get paid real well.
Supplies/Healing/Equipment:
Setting up the sinister cult as a dungeon or wilderness trading post forces the PCs to at least make nice if they want healing, rest and a place to resupply. This is basically how Dark Souls does it, since all the covenants give some kind of cool swag, a store to shop at or something else. Maybe that deadly new Chaos-tinted weapon you swing around is doing something to your... chakras... though?
Plot-related purpose:
This ties in with Information and others. Maybe there is a dungeon entrance in some forgotten corner of the cult's HQ (I mean, they could just fight through...). Maybe if we rise through the ranks, they'll give us a key that unlocks that damned door we cant get past! (This is straight from Dark Souls, where you need to rank up with the Chaos Servant covenant and a certain door to save Solaire in the end).
Hearing voices:
In Skyrim it happens the same most every time, you just walk up to an impressive-looking statue and hear the Daedra's voice in your head. I find this pretty heavy-handed, not to mention it doesn't really fit for Azathoth to do shit like that. Maybe for more small-time spirits or godlings.
Curses:
Using the great forbidden tome rules from Realms of Crawling Chaos, you might get more than you bargained for when you dig into that sweet new spellbook. Spontaneous alignment change being the least of it!
Mutation:
Remember that huge mutation table a few posts back? PCs who accumulate more of those will find their alignment inexorably turning towards Chaos.
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I'll add more as I think of them, but this post has gone on long enough. In the meantime, remember to DIE!!!!
I'm talking about one of the coolest, most fun and most brutal video games out there: Dark Souls. I'm surprised I haven't seen too many RPG gamers talk about this one, as it is certainly old-school enough. Here are a few D&Dable things this game does that most other video games completely fail to do:
COME TO THE MANTICORE FIGHT
1 - The world is fucking dangerous / no hand-holding
Dying is a thing in DS that happens a LOT. Giant poison lakes, pit traps, basilisks, enemies that roll barrels down the stairs, blind corner ambushes, pitch dark levels and all kinds of other sneaky tricks await. Enemies are not rated for your level, or divided into discrete areas of a certain difficulty. Almost all the enemies are bigger, faster, stronger and scarier than you.
Instructions are minimal. What happens when I use a bonfire? What can I spend my souls on? How does parrying work? Which weapons are good? How do I use magic? Where should I go next?? All these questions and more await your own solutions. The game doesn't belabour the point with endless tutorials, a great big quest arrow floating overhead or anything else. Here's the world: go. See what's out there. Try stuff. Have fun. Make mistakes. Figure it out.
2 - Not everyone is hostile / things aren't as they seem
No big deal, it's the first boss!
Just like any campaign setting, you need a few NPCs to sell you things and dish up a few rumours. They're found in the most unlikely places in Dark Souls. Those gross infected egg carrier guys? Nice fellows mostly - too busy praying to attack you. The spider ladies? Well... one of them is nice. Meanwhile, the normalhumans are some of the worst shits in the game, betraying at every opportunity, abandoning their comrades, dying in shame or kicking you into a pit.
3 - Fights are like puzzles / learn from your mistakes
Once you figure out how an enemy fights, how it "thinks," things get much easier. Boss fights especially are about trying new combinations, different weapons and spells until something works. Sometimes you need to move fast, just wear some short-shorts and run around real quick. Other times you need to gear up and stomp around in the heaviest armour you have. Maybe you can climb up a wall and jump down on a bosses head, or use a special weapon they are vulnerable to. D&D is the same - learning how the monsters fight and what the best strategies are takes place over the lives of multiple PCs, as your characters get wiped out by bigger and stronger enemies until you've gone toe-to-toe with the whole Monster Manual.
4 - The world fits together
On left, see the parapet where dude above is being chased.
There is a video here of a guy looking at the collision data for the ENTIRE map of the game. It all fits together as one piece. You can walk from one end of Lordran to the other and from top to bottom. If you're looking around and see an interesting area, you will be able to walk to it - that's the actual level you're looking at over there, not just a background picture! This is great because the world makes sense. By the time you get to Lost Izalith, you've been staring at it from a distance at several different points and can't wait to see what the fuck is inside.
I don't think this can be emphasized enough. It's key to how the game plays, especially as you unlock shortcuts to speed up your travel through the world. Backtracking happens a lot. Because enemies re-appear constantly, the world never stops being dangerous. Knowing how to get to your destination with a minimum of risk is important, and there are almost always multiple routes to take. In other words, the kingdom of Lordran is well Jacquayed.
5 - Actions have consequences
Whoops! Did you kill one of the merchants by accident? Tough shit. The game autosaves, so you can't just go back to a previous save if you missed some of his gear. Did you let that psycho killer out of his jail cell? Or maybe you said the wrong thing to somebody, and now they hate you? The game might be harder, but it wasn't picking on you - it let you make that decision yourself.
6 - Choose your level of involvement, or: it's all about how ballsy you wanna play it
Did I mention this is the first level?
If you like, you can sit around and grind monsters for XP until your character is way over-leveled and has all the best stuff. Or you can beat the game at level 1 if you want the sense of accomplishment and the cred. It's easy to wander into areas much too tough for your level - and
it's even possible to win through if you're good enough. This fact alone takes the game into the realm of good D&D thinking. The world is there, waiting for you - take it on however you want.
7 - Look under every rock & take anything not nailed down
Sometimes it's hard to figure out where you should go next. The entrances to some levels are hidden away, and the world is so big and open that it's easy to forget where you've been and where you planned to explore later. The blacksmiths who upgrade your equipment are easy to miss, the best treasure is always hidden somewhere, and even paths required to finish the game are off to the side where you might not think of looking. Sometimes you need to backtrack to places you thought were closed off, because they have since changed. There is no automapping feature.
That's the whole idea! You have to try everything, go everywhere and talk to everyone or you'll miss some key points. This is the kind of approach I want to see when I run D&D: players engaging with the game world and taking an interest because it's the best way to surviveand thrive.
That's an iron golem all right.
8 - Challenge your assumptions
You will hear a lot of people (including me) say Dark Souls is tough as fuck, it's impossibly hard, it will break all your controllers and eat your kids. I am in no way a man of quick reflexes or much speed on the controller - I'm useless at Street Fighter-type games, and if you want to play Counterstrike I'll be hovering around 0 kills & 20 deaths, just fodder for guys with steady hands and decent eyesight. I have stuck to turn-based RPG and strategy games to avoid this humiliation.
Why are they all so BIG?
So why do I like Dark Souls? Although it is hard, it's not as bad as everyone makes it out to be - it just works differently than most games. Sort of like dropping a group of Type IV players into The Grinding Gear. Sure it might be trying to kill you, but your undoing is sealed by assuming things about the game and world that aren't true. Once you know what's out there, new strategies are adopted and you can begin to thrive. I mean, basically what I'm trying to say is this.
None of this even covers the setting, story, scenery, multiplayer (a whole article in itself) or NPCs and monsters you'll meet. The more I think about Dark Souls, the more I think about great megadungeon stuff that I want to play in.
PS: To have a few laughs with (and at the expense of) a guy playing the game for the first time, go here.
