The Dark Souls RPG brings fans of video games and D&D together on familiar ground

polygon.com:

When Dark Souls: The Roleplaying Game was announced last month, responses were mixed. On the one side were fans of the video game franchise who were excited to find out that their favorite fictional universe was being ported to the tabletop. On the other side were fans of tabletop role-playing games who were shocked to find that the game would be based on the open-sourced version of Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition rules.

I decided to run a little experiment: I gathered up some Polygon staff with lots of experience playing Dark Souls video games, and some Polygon staff with lots of experience playing D&D. Then I dialed up the game’s co-designer, Richard August, and had him run us all through a game. I played as The Deprived, armed with only a wooden club and a shield and with naught but a scrap of cloth to cover myself. I tried to hang back as best I could, and just sort of see what everyone else did during the game. The result? A weird and wonderful experience, one that was thoroughly enjoyed by diehard fans of Dark Souls and D&D alike.

Ultimately, the Dark Souls TTRPG isn’t all that deep, but it is a hell of a lot of fun to die horribly alongside your friends at the table. Here’s how it works.

The biggest deviation from bog-standard 5e here is the implementation of a new kind of resource, called position. In the Dark Souls TTRPG position functions as both a player’s pool of hit points and as a resource they can spend to pull off special moves. It is, in effect, an imperfect abstraction of how various mechanics in the original video games work. As a stand in for the moment-to-moment combat decisions of a Dark Souls video game, the position mechanic works fairly well.

Players can use position in a number of different ways.