Kharon

Something that's always bothered me with traditional TTRPGs is how weapons are basically stat sticks. Really, this extends to some ARPGs as well, such as most Bethesda games (speaking on melee weapons, of course). Really, it made TTRPGs like DnD, and ARPGs such as The Elder Scrolls (take your pick which), fall somewhat flat on the combat. I had the most fun playing casters, which is a bit narrow. Salvation came in 2023, when my ex introduced me to Dark Souls, particularly Dark Souls Remastered. I spent many, many hours of spare time bashing my head against that wall, and I enjoyed every second of it. In pretty short order, I was hacking and rolling my way through DS2, its DLCs, then DS3, then the 2023 remake of Lords of the Fallen, and a bit of Elden Ring. I fucking loved the way these games played, and it got me thinking: What if Dark Souls,... but TTRPG?

So the first thing I decided on was the stats. Being what it is, the first few are fairly obvious. Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, Endurance, Attunement, Intelligence, and Faith. Those are all dead ringers, some variation appears in every Soulsborne/Soulslike. Then off to the wiki I went, to shamelessly copy the derived stat math for HP, SP, and Equip Load. It pans out to something like 1.5 HP per Vitality, 2.33 SP per Endurance with a cap at 40, 0.1 Attunement Slots per Attunement and Endurance plus 40 to derive Equip Load Max.

From there, I had some choices to make. First bridge to cross was handling spells. On one hand, rocking like 24 Fireballs and 8 Great Fireballs was funny, but other considerations come up. I feel durability is a little much for a TTRPG, especially for one with this much overhead, so having weapon arts take it is right out. Between that and balance considerations with stacking approximately one metric fuckload of the same spell, I instead opted for FP over charges-per-copy. This goes at 4.04 FP per Attunement. To round things out, I decided to include Resistance. 

The next is to do fixed I-frames and dodge distance (disregarding equip load), or to make it stat dependent. So yeah, despite how badly it went over in DS2, I've opted for Adaptability to make an appearance. It's simplified versus how it appears in DS2, specifically that convoluted mess with Agility derived from Adaptability Investment (ADP x 0.75) and Attunement Investment (ATN x 0.25) being added together into Agility and determining I-frames and dodge distance. The last was Luck, which only appeared really in Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 3. Lacking an item discovery mechanic that easily translates to a TTRPG, I opted to include it.

Then comes the real meat and potatoes here; the weapons and action economy. If you look at the example token to the right, you'll notice translucent red quadrants around the circumference of it, plus the little white arrow on the bottom one. The quadrants are damage zones, hurtboxes more or less, and the arrow denotes the front one. Facing matters. This system is, as a result, battlemap-mandatory. Any given weapon will usually have five attacks to throw out, two per hand stance, one each heavy and light, plus a weapon art (example pictured below). These consume Stamina Points when you throw out an attack. Every attack specifies which damage zones it lights up, out to what distance, and for how much damage. There's no rolling to hit; if it's in the zone when the attack procs, it gets hit, simple as. I feel this more than addresses my stat stick woes.

This leads me to action economy. You get one action per round. Bold choice for sure, but it goes hand in hand with simultaneous resolution. The round basically goes in two steps in practice; planning, and resolution. You decide what you're doing, and once every combatant is accounted for, it resolves at the same time. You and your enemy can trade hits, you reach your end location for the round at the same time, etc. To go with this, every action has an Action Point cost. When you declare an action, it will resolve a number of resolution steps later equal to the AP cost. A 1AP action goes off that round. A 2AP action goes off next round. 3AP, the round after that, and you get the picture. Your ass is locked in and committed after you declare. This can cause you to whiff or, worse, get ganked if you miscalculate. In other words, it plays like Dark Souls. In a turn based TTRPG format... Suffice to say, I'm excited for this.

Having run a playtest one-shot on the Saturday of November 1st, it went swimmingly. The combat was smoother than the math would suggest, as much of it is precalculated, the flow was engaging, and even with four participants, the combat remained challenging. Overall, the results are encouraging, the system will only iterate from here.