Lessons from Elden Ring, Part II

This is a continuation from this post.

Anyway, here are some more things you can do to make your tabletop game more like Elden Ring.

DO Give Players The Element of Surprise

When you’re playing Elden Ring, you usually see the enemies before they see you.  

This is especially true for powerful enemies.  It’s common to see a badass crucible knight standing on a cliff alone, doing some stargazing.  He’s not even patrolling.  He’ll just stand there forever until you choose to engage with him.

And when you finally do attack that crucible knight, you'll get a free hit.  You'll smash him with your best attack.  And then you'll die, because crucible knights are bastards.

This is very different from how most combats are run in D&D.  It's more like an old Final Fantasy game.  The party is walking along when OH FUCK ROLL INITIATIVE!  Here are some skeletons!  Please drop your minis on the map.  You lost initiative?  The skeletons move before you do.

(OSR players: yes, you play with reaction rolls, so you might end up talking instead of fighting, but my point is the same.  You're suddenly dropped into a situation--you don't get a choice of whether to engage or not.)

So why is this the norm in tabletop games?

1. It feels more exciting to throw a combat at the players.  "BOOM!  THE UMBER HULK BUSTS THROUGH THE WALL AND PUMPS HIS SHOTGUN!"  This is part of the reason we give monsters a surprise chance.

2. It's more "realistic".  If you can surprise the monsters, they should be able to surprise you.  This is the other half of the reason why we give monsters a surprise chance.

3. It forces the players to engage.  There's a worthy debate to be had about whether the DM should rely more on hooks (which force the player to engage) or lures (which tempt the players to engage).  It's a complicated question, but I will say that the best case scenario is when you're able to use lures that your players happily engage with, because they're intrinsically interested in the outcome.

Threatening your characters with death (e.g. "these goblins are trying to kill you; what are you going to do about it?") creates immediate stakes and an immediately dynamic situation.  (Dynamic = forces the players to come up with a new plan of action.)  It's a cheap and easy way to drive engagement.  Even the guy who was on his phone will start listening when you call for initiative.

4. It moves the game along faster.  This one is more debatable, but some DMs (slash game designers) don't want the players to sit around waffling about how to deal with the goblins in the next room--they want the clash of steel on steel.

These are arguments for allowing monsters to surprise the party, but allow me to suggest. . .

Alternate Rule: Monsters Never Surprise

The party is never surprised, as long as they are (a) moving at dungeoncrawling speed (1 room every 10 minutes of in-game time) and (b) they don't do anything stupid or risky.

Discussion:

I've actually removed monster surprise from my games a while ago.  It's great.  I don't miss the old days.

Exploration feels more fair, since they can choose when to engage in a fight.  Running away is a lot easier when you're never ambushed.  (We can debate what type of dungeoncrawling "feels fair" and for what type of players, but that's a separate blog post.)

Players get more agency, since they can more reliably choose to enter combat on their own terms.  And when you have a chance to scheme up some advantage before entering combat, it turns the combat into more of an OSR-style problem, and less banging numbers together like a brute.

Note that this rule still allows you to bait the players into taking risks.  See below.

Alternate Rule: Momentary Initiative

In addition to (a) players surprise, (b) enemies surprise, and (c) roll for initiative, there is now a fourth way that combat can be initiated: momentary initiative.

When the players have momentary initiative, they surprise the enemies, but only if they take an action immediately.  The characters effectively get a special half-turn in which to take actions.  They don't have time to fire a bow unless they are already holding a bow.  It is not enough time to cast a spell.  For most situations, this means that the players can do a half-distance charge attack.

Discussion:

This rule exists in order to create quick actions, but more importantly, it forces the players to take quick risks.

Players that choose to charge in get to make a free attack roll with advantage, but they don't have time to get a full description of their surroundings.  The archetypal situation is one where the players choose to ambush a couple of orcs dicing in an intersection of hallways, only to be counter-ambushed by a third orc who was sitting out of sight.

Elden Ring does this all the time.

And it's an interesting decision, each time.  Do I charge in and take the free attack?  Or do I proceed more cautiously?

Alternate Rule: Stealth Party

If a party is entirely composed of Thieves, they always surprise their enemies.

Discussion: 

Yes, this is a pretty big departure from our baseline.  

Try it anyway.  I bet it'll be fun.  (And maybe necessary, too.  If the party has no fighters or wizards, they'll need every advantage they can get.)

Videogames: Open and Constrained

Elden Ring is not exceptional in this regard.  In most video games, you'll see the enemy before they see you.  The player almost always holds the initiative.

You especially get free initiative when you're playing a spy/assassin game: Assassin's Creed, Deus Ex, Batman.  You also get free initiative (but to a lesser extent) in open world games like Elden Ring, Witcher, and Breath of the Wild.

These games are relatively open.  You have a lot of different ways to approach combat, both positionally and with interesting tools.  If you die, you can experiment and try new tactics.  This is "where the game is".  A big part of combat takes place before blows are exchanged, when you are planning how to initiate combat.  This aspect of those games feels very OSR-ish.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have games that are more constrained in how you handle combat.  You are plopped into combat, with minimal opportunities to engineer your circumstances and tools.  Street Fighter, Doom, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, and the boss battles of Elden Ring.  It's not that these games don't have tactics of their own, but these tactics (skill expression) falls along the lines of (a) reflexes, (b) memorization, (c) precision in executing a rehearsed set of actions.

These things are fun, too!  It's fun to be an arcane mage in World of Warcraft and successfully pull off your giant mana ramp-thing.  Or to watch yourself do some extremely accurate shooting in Doom.  These are fun things, but they're a different type of fun than the chaotic schemes you can attempt in Breath of the Wild.

And these types of games demand different types of systems.  In an open game, you want lots of approaches and tools that interact organically (e.g. a physics engine).  In a constrained game, you want interlocking mechanics that skilled players can exploit (e.g. combos).

I'm generalizing a lot here, but you get the point.  The fun comes from different corners.

Like when you're able to cheese a boss in Elden Ring by tricking them into jumping off the arena--that's a feature, not a bug.  The designers could've put up an invisible fence to prevent this from happening, but they instead chose to leave the opportunity open.

Elden Ring x Ghibli
by Omnileaden

DO Modulate Enemy Positions

All games tend to have you fight increasingly difficult enemies as you progress, but lots of games do this in a boring way.

Breath of the Wild had a painfully small enemy roster, but it also ramped up enemy difficulty in the worst way possible: increasing enemy stats and changing the color palette.

First you fight red bokoblins.  Then you fight blue bokoblins, who are exactly the same except they have bigger numbers in their stats.  And so on, and so forth.

Yes, it is often good to have some degree of enemy repetition in a game so that players can build up a level of knowledge and expertise.  But there was a lot of enemy repetition.

Elden Ring does it a bit better.  You might encounter a sleeping rune bear, then an alert rune bear, then a rune bear with some wolf buddies, and then a rune bear that has a sword for some reason.

Or you might encounter a huge knight in an open field before you encounter a huge knight in a tiny room with no room to maneuver.

Elden Ring tends to modulate the arena more than it modulates enemy stats.   (Yes, BotW does this, too.  But ER does it better.)

So

1. Re-use enemies as much as you want, as long as you change up the environment.  

2. Use enemies in mixed pairs.  (This makes for small-but-often-interesting decisions.  Should you kill the manikin spearman first?  Or the manikin archer?)

3. You can use high level enemies in low-level dungeons as long as you put them at a big disadvantage.  (E.g. the purple worm is sleeping.  The rune bear is too big to go down the stairs.  The death knight is standing where he can be easily backstabbed.)

4. You can use low-level enemies in high-level dungeons, as long as you play to their strengths and the players know what those strengths are ahead of time.  (E.g. On level 1, you fought a minotaur with knockback.  On level 4, you fight two minotaurs on a narrow ledge.)

MAYBE Create Areas Where Surprise and Schemes are Impossible

Elden Ring definitely has many encounters where the player can engineer the encounter to their advantage.  They can lure the enemy into terrain where they are at a disadvantage, attack from elevation, or launch devastating surprise attacks.

But there are many places where the player cannot engineer the encounter.  This is most clearly seen in the boss encounters.  You walk through the golden fog, and you're in the boss room.  The boss is immediately aware of you, and begins attacking.]

A lot of DLC bosses begin attacking immediately, giving you no time for summons.  You start the fight on your back foot.

Elden Ring does this in order to create arenas where you are forced to play straight combat.  No stealth, no bullshit.  Just dodge rolling, blocking, and attack windows.

Like I said before, the difficulty of Elden Ring doesn't translate well to the tabletop arena, since it's based on memorization, fast reactions, and iterative refinements to your tactics.  So, I'm not sure I recommend throwing your players into a strict boss fight, where stealth and schemes are intractable.  That's more viable in a 5e game, but less viable in an OSR game (where the real combat is the stuff that takes place before anyone rolls initiative).

DO Give Players Maps

When you reach a new area, one of the first goals is always to find the map for the area.  This is true for both Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild.  In both games, you can easily see where a map can be obtained.

There’s really two halves to this: (1) getting a map, and (2) having a map.

(1) The goal of “get the area map” usually exists alongside the other goals you’ll have in an area.  When you get to a new area, this is a new local navigation goal.  (Now that you're here, it's a new goal.  Kinda like a quest, except it feels more organic.)

It's kinda like getting a new quest, except you don't have to belabor it.  And it's never essential, so the players never feel forced.  And lastly, it's an organic goal because the value of a goal is simple and understood--you don't need to explain why a map is useful.  It's also ubiquitous--every area has a map that can be obtained.

(2) Yes, I know that having players do the mapping is one of the sacred calves of the OSR.  But hear me out.

A map is a much faster way to communicate an area.

A map doesn't have to be complete.  In fact, incomplete maps are preferred, since you still want players to have some sense of discovery.

A map immediately gives players new navigation goals.  As soon as players see a map, they'll want to visit some of the more evocatively named locations.  Part of the challenge of DMing a mostly-verbal game is that the players don't always know where they can go.  A map helps with that.

A map allows for a sense of completion.  Once the players know (roughly) how big the dungeon level is, they'll know that they aren't done exploring the level until they visit all of the areas described in the map (at a minimum).

A map also prevents players from getting lost.  Yes, I've played in some games and had fun being the mapper.  And yes, mapping accurately can absolutely be one of the skills that is tested when dungeoncrawling.  But the time spent mapping could also be spent doing other stuff, which can be more fun, and test other aspects of player skill.

Elden Ring has great maps.  They helped me mentally conceive of the game space.  They were evocative and big, so that each time I got a new map fragment, I pored over the map for new interesting spots to visit.  And they omitted a lot of interesting areas--I was constantly stumbling across interesting stuff that wasn't marked on the map.

There's also hidden features in the Elden Ring maps.  Details that are difficult to notice.  Sometimes when I’m struggling to reach an area, I’ll look at the map and realize that the path was there for me to see all along, if only I’d looked a little closer.  (This is very analogous to the OSR gimmick of "notice a blank spot on your map and realize that there must be a secret room there.)

Variant Rule: Map Dude

Whenever you get to a new dungeon area/level, you’re likely to bump into a graffito that says “MAPS →”.  There are 1-3 of these in each dungeon area/level.  They lead to the dungeon cartographer, who sells maps.

The maps are incomplete and do not list all of the rooms.  However, they usually show the extent of the dungeon level, in the sense that they show the most distant rooms.  If you visit all of the rooms on the map, it’s fair to say that you’ve probably explored the whole level (except for any secret areas).

Recommended Map Dudes (d6): 1 magical frog statue, 2 magical piggy bank, 3 a weird man-child dressed like an elf, 4 a big nerd bug whose wife misses him, 5 a machine that you stick a body part in to download the map into your brain, 6 a greedy little tree.

DO Have Tons of Secrets

I’ve always enjoyed putting lots of secrets and secret areas in my dungeons.  But after seeing how many secrets are jammed into Elden Ring, I’m starting to think that I don’t add enough.  

There are small secrets, big secrets, and entire secret areas.  Actually, From Soft games are notorious for hiding entire zones –people have discovered massive areas on their tenth playthrough.  Millions of players have walked past nondescript little holes in the ground that lead to huge dungeons with cool bosses at the end of them.  Millions of players have completed the game and never got to experience that content.  Elden Ring doesn't give a fuck.  You missed it?  Fuck you.

This is antithetical to most game designers, who want to design content that players will experience.  And so lots of games are designed so that all content (areas, quests, and major items) are signposted in a way that’s impossible to miss.

So why does From Soft take the opposite approach?  

To make discovery feel genuine.  

If I know a game is going to hold my hand, I won’t necessarily search the areas very carefully.  In Elden Ring, I search areas vigorously because I know there is a real chance that I'll miss something cool.  

A good counter-example is World of Warcraft, where every objective is heavily signposted.  There’s virtually no secret items to find, and I don’t even have to read quest text since I can just follow my quest tracker.  I have signposts on my minimap telling me where to go next.  Exploration isn't valuable or fun.

DO Bypass HP

In Elden Ring, there are lots of ways to die besides losing all of your HP.  The two most common ones are (1) falling to your death, and (2) succumbing to status effects.

Being killed by status effects is interesting, because it bypasses your HP bar entirely.  The most interesting one is Deathblight since it’s a little bar that fills up and when it’s full, you instantly die.  It drops naturally over time, though, so it’s almost like a second HP bar that regenerates.  This is great because it bypasses the normal defenses (armor and HP) making it threatening at a wider range of levels.  (It’s possible to have so much armor and HP that physical hits become non-threatening.  It’s hard to do the same to deathblight.)  Additionally, since Deathblight heals itself, it allows you to place some intensely dangerous enemies that drop deathblight, since you know that it will heal itself.  It's acutely hazardous, without causing any long-term attrition in our dungeoncrawlers.

Tabletop RPGs don't usually include situations where player characters can be shoved to their deaths.  Not a lot of minotaurs on catwalks.

This is because a minotaur attempting to shove you off a catwalk is functionally just a save-or-die effect.

I'm a fan of save-or-die effects, but I believe that you need to be very careful in how you deploy them.  The danger needs to be clearly signposted, and the players need to give informed consent.  

Compared to other forms of save-or-die (deadly poison, petrification, death magic), shoving a PC to their deaths is a lot more organic, and it has simpler countermeasures.  (A party can protect themselves against Pushy the Minotaur by chaining themselves together.  What's a good countermeasure to death magic?)

Anyway, threatening players with a death-shove is rad and we should probably do it more.

Alternate Rule: Curse Men

Lvl 3  Def chain  Sword 1d6+curse

Curse men wear oily black leather armor, lashed to their narrow limbs with string.  Their skin is similarly dark and oily.  Around their waists, they wear the old heads, tied by their hair.  Atop their shoulders, they leer at you with their new heads, which are not like heads at all, but if a comparison must be made, they are a bit like a man's head that has been squeezed into an imitation of an ibis.  They sleep together in crevasses, and stain the earth with their tears.

Death Curse - If you are struck three times with a cursed nail, you die.

Curse men wield swords that resemble a single large nail.  Anyone who is struck by this nail develops a black spot at the site.  A second blow causes black spots to erupt all over the body.  A third strike is instant death.  

Cursed nails are not the only things that give the death curse.

Discussion:

How long does the death curse last?  

Well, to be most analogous to deathblight, it should fade after combat.  It's an immediate threat (that bypasses HP and regular healing) but it is only a short-term threat--it doesn't impact your dungeon crawling.

You can make the death curse last longer, but then you're drifting further away from Elden Ring.

If the death curse fades at a rate of 1 per hour, then it's a soft limit on exploration/combat appetite.  This has some impact on your dungeon crawling.

If the death curse fades with the touch of sunlight, then it imposes a hard limit on how much exploration is possible in a day.

If the death curse is a full curse, and requires a priest, etc to remove, then this represents a permanent reassignment of goals, and you're doing something else.  <-- This is not what Elden Ring does.

Alternate Rule: Poison Swamp

In this dungeon, characters take poison damage constantly.  Poison damage can come from the air (unavoidable) or it can be linked to a sludge on the floor (which can be avoided if you can get above it). 

Bonus points if you tie it to both in-game time and IRL time.  For example, 1d4-1 (min 0) poison damage every 10 minutes of in-game time, and 1d4-1 (min 0) damage every 30 minutes of IRL time.

Discussion:

Miyazaki's poison swamps are another element that feels horrible, but actually isn't that hard.  When I think back to all of the places where I struggled, none of them were poison swamps.  It's another example of a gameplay mechanic that feels harder than it is.

What the poison swamps actually do is force players to move faster and take risks.

Normally, I explore dungeons at a crawl, looking around every corner for imps and skeletons.  But when I'm taking damage every second, I'm sprinting to the next safe location.  If I see an enemy, I am going to dodge past it, while planning where and how I'm going to turn around and kill it.  

It's a risky, unpleasant way to play, because the game is forcing you to sprint into areas where enemies will see you before you see them.  However, the enemies you meet in these areas (e.g. Swamp of Aeonia) are slow enough that you can usually dodge them, even though it feels nerve-wracking the first time you go there.

I haven't tried writing a poison dungeon yet, but you can bet your ass I'm going to.

DO Make Your NPCs More Independent (and More Tragic)

NPCs in Fromsoft games also have their own characteristic flavor.  Generally, they tend to:

1. Have their own quests.

1A. Elden Ring NPCs are usually pursuing their own goals.  Sometimes these goals overlap with your own, and then NPC might ask you to do a task for them (this is the classic quest-giver structure).

1B. Sometimes, the NPC has a private quest that is actually at cross-purposes to your own.  You might bump into them in a couple of places, and then on the third meeting, they attack you.

1C. And sometimes they just have private quests that are completely orthogonal to you.  You might meet them in three or four places throughout the game.  Each time, they're kinda just doing their own thing.  Unless you use guides, you'll frequently meet an NPC a couple of times, but then never find them again.  You never find out how their story ends (which can feel unsatisfying).

Why does Elden Ring eschew the classic questgiver structure (1A) in favor of the other two types?  Well, I think it's because they want the world to feel more alive, and to de-emphasize your character's centrality in the world.  They also want to have more hidden aspects of the world, to either reward people who explore exhaustively, or to give you some different experiences in different playthroughs.

Lots of games suffer from the "main character is the only character" syndrome, where everything seems to revolve around you, and your character is at the center of the universe.  You're drawn into the center of every story, and every story has a satisfactory ending.  When NPCs go their way, it can feel more natural.

Or, it also feel unsatisfying, to hear only the first half of a story, but to never find out how it concludes.

2. Don't just place NPCs in logical places.

Drop NPCs everywhere.  Drop them into the weird little rooms at the end of the dungeon.  Don't worry if it doesn't make perfect sense.

NPCs are like treasure chests.  They're rewards for exploring and interacting.  So put them anywhere you would put a treasure chest.  

3. Give NPCs Tragic Endings.

In most games, when you do all of the tasks that an NPC asks of you, there is a positive resolution for the NPC and the player character.  The NPC gets a happy ending, and the player gets a quest reward.

Elden Ring subverts this.  Frequently, doing quests for NPCs results in their tragic deaths.  

The reason for this is that (1) the NPCs are frequently just following their own agendas, often working at cross purposes to each other and the great forces at work within the world, but also (2) the world is a tragic one.  It is spoiled, and possibly past saving.  Your friends all die halfway through the game so that the endgame is more desolate and desperate, and there are fewer things distracting you from your destiny.  To become Elden Lord, you've had to leave behind many allies--and kill a few.

You never really get much of a safe haven in Elden Ring.  All you can do is forge onward.

Discussion:

I actually urge moderation with this one.  More than one commentator has noted that if you love the NPCs in Elden Ring, you should avoid completing their quests, since so many quest lines end tragically.  Personally, I've noticed that when players feel like they can't do anything to protect their favorite NPCs, it tends to disengage them from the game.  If players don't feel like they can help the NPCs that they want to help, they may stop trying altogether.  The lure of "learn more more" or "see another ending" doesn't hold much value in tabletop games.

MAYBE DO the Lore Thing

From Soft games have a very particular way that they dispense their lore.  Players will encounter a central story that has a lot of gaps.  You’ll also see traces of side stories, but these are thin on details.  Nearly all of the events take place before the game starts.  The game feels post-apocalyptic, usually with layers of loss and tragedy.  

The fascinating thing about Fromsoft games is that a player who digs deeper will find more bits of lore, which is all (1) internally consistent, and (2) also thin on details.  And although you’ll uncover large parts of the history, many of the most fundamental questions are never resolved.  Who is the Gloam Eyed Queen?  What’s up with the walking mausoleums?  

In this way the backstory becomes another treasure that you must work to earn.

This approach may or may not work with tabletop games.  I'm actually kinda leaning toward "no, it won't".  Except with certain groups.

If you want to attempt to drop lore in the Elden Ring fashion, you'll need a motivated audience.  If your players aren't interested in piecing together the history of the world through obtuse fragments, it'll never work.

Next, you'll need some obtuse fragments.  Handouts are perhaps best, since they can sit in a folder and players can review them for connections as curiosity prompts.

Also, be prepare your lore in a way that it leaves large holes.  Perhaps it's best to create a large thing at the center of your lore (the Crucible, the origin of divinity, etc) and then only ever allow the players to learn about things adjacent to it.  Never let them learn the full story that sits at the center of it all--only stories around the periphery.

This will require NPCs who are mad, ignorant, or reluctant to talk.

Don't deceive your players.  NPCs in Elden Ring are nearly universally honest in their assertions.  I can't think of a single instance where one NPC directly contradicted another NPC.  Since the player knows that they can trust the NPCs, they can ignore questions of veracity and instead focus on what the hell the NPCs are trying to say.

Use environmental clues.  Use repetitions in architecture to create links between locations.

Use out-of-place enemies to tell stories.  What is this knight doing in the necropolis?  He's a Son of the Dogstar, so normally he would be an ally to the Gravekeepers.  However, the Death-Melting Halberd that the carries implies that he must be an assassin, here to kill the Ancestors.

Create implications through parallels.  Marika is an Empyrean and has a double.  Therefore, the other Empyreans should also have doubles.  Who are the doubles?

This will unfortunately require you to do a lot of work figuring out the backstory beforehand, breaking it into the smallest possible chunks for dispensing to the players, and then finally finding a way to present that information with some degree of ambiguity (small or large).  

Alternate Rule: Item Descriptions

Whenever the players find a significant item, give them a card with the item on it.  The card has the items descriptions, stats, but more importantly, it has a bit of lore.

How did the party learn this lore?

Someone in the party heard about the item once.  Now that they've seen it, they're reminded of it, and they share they're knowledge with the party.

Don't overthink it.  (I actually encourage you to run high-knowledge games, where the PCs are given as much information as can be rationalized.)