Lessons from Elden Ring

I know I’m late to the From Soft party, but I’ve finally beat the Elden Ring DLC and after a couple hundred hours in that game I finally have enough opinions for a blogpost.

Many people have written posts about how to adapt Dark Souls to tabletop RPGs, but I intend for this one to be the most comprehensive.  The thoughts in this things that I recommend if you want to adapt as much from Elden Ring (or Dark Souls) as possible, but not necessarily things I advocate for every OSR table (although there's a lot of overlap).

I figure I can write this as a list of DOs and DON'Ts.

Let's start with the DON'Ts, because that's probably the most important.

Tanith and Rya
by Dane Celestia

1. DON’T Fixate on Difficult Bosses

I’ve been trying to beat the DLC boss for a couple of days now.  It’s a brutal fight, but I’m improving.  I got the boss down to about 20% last time.  The fight is fun because (1) I eventually memorize the attacks, (2) learn how to dodge them, and (3) learn the timing.  (UPDATE: I beat him.  Black Steel Greathammer + Cracked Hardtear.)

These things (1 memorization, 2 active defense, and 3 timing) do not translate well to tabletop games.  

(1) Actions take a lot longer in a tabletop game, so repeating a challenge until you memorize it is not fun.

Fighting Messmer for the 60th time and slowly learning how to counter his attacks is fun.  But if you asked me to fight a boss even 3 times in a tabletop game, I would sigh and collapse into dust.

(2) Elden Ring is fun because the bosses force you to play defense.  You can't just brute force your way through bosses--you have to learn to defend before you can learn how to attack.

Active defense isn’t usually desirable in a tabletop game.  For most games, the paradigm has been Active Defense and Passive Defense.  You actively choose your actions and your attacks on your turn, and then make your rolls.  But when it’s not your turn, you don’t have choices to make.  The DM makes a few rolls and tells you if you take damage or not.

The reason for this is that there are many ways to neutralize a monster (e.g. "How are you going to get past this hostile troll?") and a much more limited-and-relatively-boring list of defensive actions (e.g. "The troll attacks you with his club!  How do you defend?")

Some games flirt with reactions.  (5th Edition has reactions.)  You could decide that you are going to attempt to emulate Elden Ring as much as possible, and give characters stamina points that regenerate every round, and ask them to split it between offensive and defensive actions . . . but that would make for slow, mechanically heavy combat.  Some people will like a game like that, but I wouldn't want to play in it.

(3) Timing cannot be easily adapted into tabletop.  It’s just a different medium.  It has different strengths and weaknesses.  When I’m fighting a Dark Souls boss, I’m paying a lot of attention to recognize the different attacks before they are made, and I’m trying to figure out if I have time to make a heavy attack before I need to dodge again.  These are exciting calculations–I’m paying a lot of attention.  However, this doesn’t translate into a tabletop game.  It can’t.  There’s no analogue, because there’s never any ambiguity in the enemy’s actions, and once the best defense/attack is known, it can be selected every time.

So what do we do instead?  OSR games have plenty of tense moments, but they have to come from a different source.  Focus on those strengths.

And if you want more interesting boss battles, then. . .

Alternate Rule: Dynamic Bosses & Telegraphed Attacks

I’ve written about this before, so I’ll refer you to these posts about bosses and (especially) dynamism.

In a nutshell: if you’re worried about combat being boring, stop trying to make combat challenging and try to make combat interesting.  “Challenging” is one flavor of “interesting”, but not the only one.

The best way to make combat interesting is to make it dynamic.  This means that the players will often have to revise their plans, possibly from round to round.  If the players know how to win the fight on the first round, then it’s a little boring to just have to execute it across 3 rounds.  Better to have the combat finish in 1 round (since the players are executing the best tactic) or to have the situation change after 1 round, so that the players need to reassess and re-strategize.

A simple example is to just have your bosses telegraph their ultra-attacks.  A dragon begins inhaling at the end of its turn.  On its next turn, it’ll exhale, incinerating the party.  The party will have to pause whatever scheme they had in order to death with this immediate threat.  (Bosses do this pretty often in Elden Ring–wind up for a big attack.  Sometimes you have 3+ seconds before it lands–an eternity in combat.  Do you heal, attack, or flee?  It’s an interesting choice, and you have to make it quickly.)

2. DON’T Do the Death and Resurrection Thing

You die a lot in Elden Ring / Dark Souls.  But that’s okay, because you come right back to life at the bonfire/grace.  There’s an in-game reason for it: you are the “chosen undead”, etc.  But that’s something baked into the experience–that you’ll die, learn from your mistakes, and then come back again.

I don't recommend this for your tabletop game.

There are obvious narrative issues if you want to give characters the ability to automatically resurrect upon death.  It’s hard to have characters that are “just normal people” if they come back each time you cut off their head.  I mean, you can still do it, but it requires the player characters to be exceptional and inhuman.  And your plots will have to revolve around inhuman pivots.

So you’re already limited in what type of game you can play.  It’s tough to have a game about saving a village when the party is composed of immortals at level 1.  It also excludes you from a lot of published adventures, and makes some big impositions on the setting.  There's also the potential for a lot of misunderstandings about how/why the resurrection works.

That's the setting/fiction reason why your characters shouldn't be chosen undeads.

There's another reason to avoid the death-resurrection gameplay loop, and that is that it's just not that fun to do in a tabletop game.  I already mentioned some of this up above, when I was talking about boss difficulty.

OSR games don't need to have character resurrection because, in a way, they already do.  Think of this way:

Dark Souls games can employ self-resurrecting characters because they aren’t character driven games.  Your character doesn’t have a backstory.  They barely have a name.  I've completely forgotten what my character looked like under the helmet.  The games are entirely setting-driven.  It’s about exploring the world, conquering the dungeon, and learning the world’s history. 

Not the main character’s history.  You don’t have a history.

This is the same as most OSR games.  It's not about the characters.  It's about the dungeon, the dragon, the world.

And in both games, death is not much of a barrier.  The only difference is that you’ll return as a new OSR character, instead of the same one.  You could actually have this occur in Elden Ring, too, except you’d have to explain how the new guy picked up all of the dead guy’s equipment and quest lines.

This isn’t really a problem in the average OSR game, though, since the party provides continuity for dead players.  They’ll pick up the dead person’s gear and give it to the new person.  The rest of the party creates continuity.

So in a very real way, OSR games are already providing the Dark Souls experience.  Die, learn from it, and come back quickly to try again.

Side Discussion: How Punishing Should Death Be?

In many games, you drop your XP upon death.  Unless you retrieve it before your next death, it's lost forever.  In Dark Souls 2 (the only Dark Souls game I’ve played), your maximum HP goes down with each death, until you use a rare consumable to regenerate it (which later on becomes plentiful).  And in Sekiro, your deaths don’t matter mechanically, but they cause a disease to spread, impacting the NPCs (but not you).  

The weird thing about these death mechanics is that they're basically designed to feel bad without impacting your effectiveness too much.  Losing your souls/XP is honestly a pretty minor setback in most cases.  The dragonrot thing tugs at your heartstrings, but that's it.  It's almost a paradox.

None of these punishments really make you less effective at killing things.  They’re well-designed mechanics designed to make you fear death, while simultaneously reducing it's impact.  

This aligns somewhat with OSR games, which promote the idea of "Roll up a new character and jump back into the action", but sometimes the loss of levels can be pretty brutal.  

So if there is a lesson to take from the Fromsoft games, it would be that death should hurt, a little, but it shouldn't affect your efficacy in combat.

Alternate Rule: Avenge the Dead

After you die, you make a new character who is in some way related to the dead character.  A brother, a friend, or ally.  New characters are given a task that they must accomplish to avenge the dead character.  They are “born with a mission”.  

The quest is just something in their heart.  They know it innately.

Typically, the quest is just to kill the creature that killed the dead character.  However, if that creature is already killed, the quest is normally to fully explore that area of the dungeon, or to clear the floor.

Once you avenge the dead, you instantly gain a level.  Thereafter, you earn XP at double the normal rate, until you are the same level as the dead character.

You can only avenge a dead character who is level 2 or higher.  No one cares when level 1 characters die.

Alternate Rule: Soul Drain

Instead of draining a level, the monster drains your soul.  You lose a level, drop to 0 HP, and fall unconscious.  The soul drinker teleports back to its nest.  It will take the soul drinker 1d4+1 days to digest your soul.  If you are able to kill it before then, you can recover your lost soul.

The goal here is to create an alternative to level drain.  Now, you have a chance to regain your lost level!  All you have to do is come back and get sweet revenge.  It also creates a new objective the next time the players are deciding what to do in the dungeon: get the soul back.  

The reason the soul drinker teleports away after draining a soul, is to give the party space to retreat safely.  The character is unconscious, so it may be an opportune time to retreat, regroup, and strategize.  Yes, it’s giving the players an easy exit (since the monster teleports away) but honestly, losing a level is a decent punishment on its own.  And of course, you could always just have multiple soul drinkers in a single combat.

Remember that losing a level and being knocked unconscious is a pretty brutal punishment.  Be sure to signpost it so that players know what they are getting themselves into.

DO Give Local Navigation Goals

In Elden Ring, it’s pretty common to walk into a new area and see a cool place you can’t reach.  Or alternatively, a cool item sitting outside of obvious reach, prompting the player to look for the path.

Stuff like this has two purposes.  One, to motivate you to explore.  And second, to give you some information: until you obtain that item, you haven’t fully explored the area yet.  (It’s kinda similar to the DM telling you “nah, you haven’t found all the treasure in this area yet” which is very motivating for players to keep searching.)

These can also be thought of as “Dynamic Navigation Goals” because they weren’t part of the players' goals when they entered an area.  "Dynamism" is just how I refer to "it wasn't part of the player's original goals, but now that they're here, their plans have inflected around this new feature".  They didn't have a quest to loot that item, but now that it's staring them in the face, they're going to want it.

However, local navigation goals don’t typically exist in tabletop games.  There are two reasons.

(1) First, tabletop is primarily a verbal medium.  Because of this limitation, we tend to have simple environments. Lots of small square rooms with 1-3 things in each.  This is almost a requirement, since more complex rooms become harder to describe and harder for the players to hold in their imaginations.  Imagine trying to describe the Haligtree verbally, with its maze of 3D branches curving above each other, and you will realize that tabletop games just don’t have the bandwidth for complex environments that video games do.

You can still do it, though.  Give clear, accurate information about items that they can expect to find in a particular dungeon.  Give them local goals, like a treasure that they can’t immediately reach on the other side of a pit, or behind a portcullis that they can’t yet raise.  Show them a place/treasure that they can’t reach yet.

(2) The second challenge is that the players are very mobile.  If you put a balcony above them, the players will grappling hook over to it.  If you put a ledge down below them, they’ll tie their ropes together and climb down.  Put an interesting ledge on the far side of the pit and they’ll traverse the wall and anchor a rope with pitons.

This type of extreme mobility is not possible in Elden Ring.

Which brings me to my next point.

DO Limit Mobility

I’ve spoken before about the need to limit players in dungeons.  In my games, I’ve removed all darkvision, flight, teleportation, water breathing, and (most recently) spider climb from my games.  It allows me to keep the practical limitations of dungeons in place, & it allows for players to interact with the dungeon organically.

Right now, I can challenge my party with darkness, verticality, and underwater tunnels.  As soon as darkvision, flight, and water breathing become available, those challenges are reduced to “do we have the right races/spells for this?” instead of the more interesting problem of navigating an area with underwater tunnels.

It stops being an OSR-style problem and starts being a resource management problem, which is a lot less interesting.

Elden Ring uses all of these things to make dungeons exciting.  That fall will fucking kill you.  Deep water is utterly impassible.  Darkness requires you to bring a light source (I loved the Darklight Catacombs).  And if you hold the button for the torch, your character holds the torch up higher, illuminating the area a little bit more.  Wonderful.  It feels organic.

Verticality is used extensively in Elden Ring.  Tons of dungeons use verticality instead of walls, in order to prevent movement but still show you that it’s possible to reach a certain area.  Verticality is also used a lot in the DLC world map, where there are often weird little valleys (Rauh, Abyssal Woods, Finger Ruins) below you that you desperately want to reach, but are unable to since you cannot climb down a sheer cliff face.  Instead, you have to scour the map, looking for whatever nearby tunnel will provide a means of accessing that weird little valley.  They made the overworld into a 3d dungeon, with levels and hidden stairwells.  I haven’t seen this in a game before, but I love it.   All of the navigation challenges of dungeoneering are now translatable to overworld exploration.

Actually, the idea of "use verticality instead of a wall" is great because it allows you to see down into areas you can't immediately reach.  It's a non-magical version of an invisible wall.

In the Elden Ring DLC, there’s even one part of the map that I only was able to access after I looked carefully at the map, planning out the direction I would have to come from in order to reach that area, and then looking for a nearby “blank spot” that I hadn’t yet explored.  It’s directly analogous to mapping in an OSR game, when you map out all of the rooms and notice that there’s a blank spot in the middle of your map, probably indicating a hidden room.  I don’t think I’ve seen this is video games before.

Anyway, a lot of these navigation challenges are impossible in your average D&D game.  Even without flight, teleportation, and spider climb, characters are broadly assumed to be excellent athletes capable of climbing up walls and down into steep valleys.  Creating cliffs that are utterly impassible is a good way to make the map more interesting (and more dungeon-like). 

Side Discussion: Organic Interaction

When I say "I want my players to interact with my game organically", I mean something specific.  By 'organically', I mean that players already show up to the table knowing how things interact.  It doesn't require any special instructions or table-wide agreement.  

We all know (more or less) that a wooden door can be chopped down with an axe, that a person who has been underwater for more than a minute is in real danger of drowning, that a person can throw a grappling hook onto the roof of a two story building, et cetera.  

I don't have to explain these things.  They're already known.

However, as soon as we start talking about magic, counterspells, hacking subsystems, teleportation mishaps, the shields on spaceships, whether demons are killed or merely sent back to hell. . . I'm now doing something else.  I have to (1) explain the system (and the world) to the players, and they have to (2) remember it and (3) agree.

All three of those points are potential stumbling blocks for tables.  This is where disagreements can arise.  People might say "What?  I didn't know that would happen!" or worse "Well, if I had known that, I wouldn't have done that!"

Plus, even if you have attentive players with good memories and the best of intentions, you still have to stop the game to explain exactly how a counterspell counters another counterspell.  Even when it feels immersive, it's still extra work.

Which is why I like to use organic obstacles when possible.  A moat full of crocodiles is an organic obstacle.  It takes one sentence to describe, and then even a brand-new player can start thinking about how to overcome it.

A prismatic wall is a deeply inorganic obstacle.  Even after I explain what it is and how it works, new players wouldn't necessarily know how to overcome it.  Anti-magic fields are another deeply inorganic feature.  What exactly counts as magic?

Variant Rule: No Rope

Rope doesn’t exist in this world.  

That’s it.  That’s the whole rule.  

Maybe the necessary plants don’t exist.  Or maybe cordage does exist, but it’s too weak and heavy to be useful for adventurers.  This has major implications for delving and sailing, but we’ll make it work.

A 20’ climb (up or down) is now a non-trivial problem, since everyone will have to make climbing checks to descend.  A 40’ drop is probably more than can be managed safely.  (And honestly, based on my very limited experience with caving, I wouldn’t even want to fuck with a 15’ climb inside a cave.)

The value of this rule is that you can build dungeons that are more like Elden Ring dungeons.  You can’t just grapple onto the battlements of Castle Sol–you need to navigate through it.  

You might even be able to start implementing steep slopes that function like the one-way drops that Elden Ring loves (which function like one-way doors), but that’s almost a separate conversation.

DO Use One-Way Doors

One-way doors are all over the place in Elden Ring.  None of them are literal doors, though.  Instead you have: (1) short drops that you can jump down, but can’t climb back up, (2) stone coffins you climb into, (3) weird alcoves you fall asleep in, (4) teleport traps, and (5) boss fog that prevents you from retreating.

Why so many one-way doors?  Because it’s exciting.  You know that you’ll be stuck without an easy way to retreat.  If you’re in an underground dungeon, you can’t use your fast-travel.  You’ll have to find a new way back.  It forces you to commit to your decision, even when you aren’t 100% sure what you’re committing to.  Even if the environment is perfectly safe, my heart rate goes up when I know I can't retreat.

(Although retreating is a big part of OSR gameplay, so maybe don't go crazy with one-way doors.  Or when you do, leave a place for players to retreat to, even though it might not be the way that they came.)

Let’s just focus on #1 for a second: the short drops that function like one-way doors.  

These are wonderful little bits of game design because they force you to commit to a direction.  There’s no going back!  And the permanent nature of this decision is (usually) 100% transparent to the player.  You can see that you’re committing to a one-way trip before you make the decision.  The game respects your agency.

In most of these cases, the player can see that they are committing to some weirdness before you actually engage.  A save point right before a huge empty room?  Probably a boss room.  A stone coffin that I can climb into?  Something weird is probably going to happen.

The teleport traps are the clear exception to this, but even those are rare

So, I just looked up how many teleporter traps there are in Elden Ring.  There's less than I thought, and the only shitty one is the Sellia Crystal Tunnel one.

However, the shitty one is typically the first one you find.  Which then leads you to being scared of teleporter traps for the rest of the game.  (I know I was.)

This is similar to how Elden Ring handles dying.  The game wants you to be scared, but the threat is mostly illusory.  The game actually works pretty hard to protect player agency.  With the exception of Sellia Crystal Tunnel, the game doesn't yank you anywhere you don't want to be.  

You chose to go into that teleporter blindly.  You chose to attack the sleeping dragon.  You chose to jump in the hole without knowing how you would get back up.

A lot of DMs could learn from Elden Ring.

Some additional ways to implement one-way doors in your game:

• Water currents.
• Literal one-way doors.
• One-way teleporters.
• One-way elevators.
• Magical boats.
• Collapsing floors.  (Tough to make obvious/informed, though.)
• Steep, slippery slopes.  (Just do it.  Too muddy for iron spikes.)

Side Discussion: Fast Travel

You have fast travel in Elden Ring.  You can't use it when you're in combat, or when you're in a dungeon (like Sellia Crystal Tunnel), but it's available at all other times.

Can you implement this in a tabletop game?

Well. . . yes.  It's as simple as the players saying "we want to go to this place we've been to before, along a path that we've been on before" and then the DM says "okay, you're there."

The game still works.  

It's basically how it works in Elden Ring, too, since you can run away from nearly every overworld combat on your horse.  The game doesn't force you to engage with anything you don't want to.  Besides, once you get to your destination (some variety of dungeon), you'll have to fight your way through, laboriously, carefully, on foot.

However, Elden Ring's fast travel feels a lot like teleportation.  How long does it take?  In Elden Ring, we don't really care, since the game has no calendar or clock.  (And in fact, the timelessness of the setting is a plot point.)  But in an OSR game, strict time measures are (often) part of enforcing a living world, and honoring player actions.  So, I would advise against adopting the easy, instantaneous fast travel of Elden Ring. 

I guess the lesson here is to avoid belaboring travel.  When the characters move from Point A to Point B along a known route, roll up a minimal number of encounters.  Just enough to make it feel like time is passing.  (And you can reinforce the passage of time in your narration.  Talk about how the wineskin was empty after the first week on the road, etc.)

So don't spend a whole session travelling.  The destination is typically more fun than the journey.

(But also disregard that advice if your game is different, and the journey is actually more fun than the destination.) 

Part II

This post is long enough, so I'll stop here for today.

But I owe you a Part II.

I have some thoughts on how From Soft does lore, but it'll take me a second to articulate it.