The Most EMBARRASING TTRPG Launch Ever - Dark Souls TTRPG 

Howdy

My favorite weapon arts is: “when you get hit, can spend 2 Position to regein 1 position”, if someone hits you and make 22 damage, you can use ti ability and take 23 damage

Good to know they managed to translate the traditional DS jankyness into the TTRPG!

My question is, why make the Dark Souls RPG into a D&D 5e clone instead of developing a system that would more closely emulate how a Dark Souls Game would play?

Absolutely wild, cannot believe they didn’t even get an editor to look at this! Imagine paying for the Dark Souls licensing and then not going through the basic process of getting an editor 🤦‍♀️

Just a heads up, to anyone, if the current state of the Dark Souls RPG looks bad and wrong to you (and it honestly should) - do not buy anything Shadowrun made by Catalyst. It's like this, but multiple editions, dozens of books, and then topped off with embezzlement and not paying freelancers. How Catalyst still survives and continues to have both the Shadowrun and Mech Warrior IPs for TTRPGs, is beyond me.

1:58 another thing to say there's even an error, in this image, under 15, it's written a +3, which is normally associated to 16-17, and since all the other stats seem the same for their values... It's just a failure. Seriously you can have a dark souls adventure that's way better than this copy in either Pathfinder and d&d (2e and 5e specifically), by tweaking a tiny bit some rules, maybe taking down sadly some classes or modifying them (specially spellcasters), imposing human and human variants as only possible races, and other stuff which I won't talk about in here because it would be an immense comment.

From tweet to video in 14 hours. Now THATS an effective workflow!

I purchased my copy in the UK website. The book's gorgeous, but, what can I say? There are many flaws and errors like the ones you pointed out. I think it would require tremendous effort for me to run the game without heavily homebrewing it. Now, as a product that cost me 50 bucks plus shipping, it feels like I paid all that money for an artbook and will have to wait for the PDF to be able to play the game... Hope SFG erratas the PDF and, if they can fix the game in time for the US customers to get their copies with the updated/edited rules, offers some sort of discount or refund for those that got their physical books in this state. Sadly, they do not seem to be amenable to that.

This is "Dark Souls The Boardgame" all over again, but in TTRPG format; I swear, Steam Forged Games has to have the best IP agreements in the world, they keep getting these popular IPs, and they keep half-assing their work.

This just showed up at my FLGS and I was going to impulse buy. I then took a moment to think clearly. “I’ll go on RU-vid and look at reviews.” I said to myself. And you NoNat were the first video I clamored for. Thank you for the help.

I was creating a Dark Souls TTRPG that I laid aside for some time. Then I heard there was a "real" TTRPG coming out and said "Well, sad, but it was a nice experience creating this". You´re giving me hope I could one day still release my game :D

1:50 If they are going by 5e rules (and considering they literally copy pasted from them, I'm guessing they are), then it's not that nobody can start while wearing the knight armor, it's just that you're going to be slowed down by it by 10ft of move speed. If it weren't for all of the other things that were clearly just not finished, I would be willing to chalk that one up to, "haha, dark souls hard"

I recently attempted to apply the Dark Souls/Elden Ring stamina system to a TTRPG environment in the form of the game's action economy system. The amount of distance you can travel every turn would deplete your stamina, every weapon would have a set stamina cost for each attack available to it, and you would use stamina to block and dodge. Players would have opportunity react to attacks by blocking or dodging. Blocking may only absorb a percentage and the stamina cost would scale with the size of the attack, but blocks are guaranteed. Dodges would work more like saving throws with a bonus for light equipment load and a penalty for heavy load, and it would cost less than blocking. You would have to strategically reserve your stamina because, just as in a FROMSOFT game, blowing all your stamina on attacking will leave you defenseless until your stamina regenerates (on your next turn).

I kinda knew from the first announcement and the way they interacted with questions that they were in this as a cash grab. The first thing everyone asked them was "why 5e?" and every answer they gave (I saw at least 4) was pretty mealymouthed and/or boiled down to "this is what we think will sell the most" I'm not surprised they fucked this up.

The knight armour being too heavy for level 1 characters to wear actually feels very dark souls to me.

This is one of the reasons why I only buy PDF's any more. You can always download the updated version. What's amazing is how the got this past the UK's weapon laws. if the game "gives the GM so many systems so many systems they can use to kill the players as efficiently as possible", then I think it would be restricted. After all lots of games give GM's ways to kill characters, but ways to kill players is something else. Yes, I'm teasing you because this is something a proofreader could have easily caught. I still love you.

Aside from all the other unfinished and broken mechanics, The armor thing for knight is a funny nod to the original dark souls knight. you got amazing armor from the start at the cost of fat rolling if you wore it before leveling a few times.

Actually saw a copy of this at my local game store, I took one look at the cover and thought "ooh!" Then I saw the big 5e label and thought "nope" 5e is simply incapable of handling the kind of game that Dark Soul is, especially if there's a lot of direct porting of the core rule book. I honestly think a modified 4e would actually work better since that system is already very "video-gamey", replace healing surges with estus and I think you could be on to something.

0:49 "The book contains numerous typos, grammatical errors" - So, it's like typical Paizo product?

And this is the problem with 5e's ubiquity. You get lazy copy paste jobs from people that think 5e just means no work.

'I won't buy products from a company with products riddled with typos.' *looks at Paizo* To be fair I get the point though. It's one thing to be writing your own massive reams of content and having a lot slip through the cracks. It's another when you copy someone else's homework and it's glaringly obvious.

From what little of this book I've seen, this looks worse than nearly all dark souls 5e homebrew I've read, and I have never been satisfied by dark souls 5e homebrew so the bar wasn't very high in the first place. And i mean, this really does read like bad homebrew. Rolling a saving throw against your own spell save DC to make a spell's core functionality work (not things like dying from a botched Magic Jar, but the core functionality of the spell) or giving 24d8+20 damage to a CR 5 monster is unfortunately a lot like some of the garbage homebrew out there. Good video by the way: i like how you focused on the things you actually saw and read instead of just doing mindless speculation. Even with these limitations, you STILL eviscerated the game system, which is probably rather telling about the other content. If you ever get a chance to read the full book, I'd like to see a followup video! I bet we could learn a lot from the undoubtedly numerous problems of the system.

You're looking particularly fresh in this video. Nice hair!

As someone who is trying to become an Independent game designer (currently working my own gaming system), and one of the worst things I constantly worry about is being blatant rip off of other TTRPG's. This game from the few images I have seen in this video (correct me if I am wrong), seems to be a basic reskin of the 5e core rulebook. Which is such a angering thing to see, considering that darksouls already has a ton of mechanics in it, which can easily be translated over in TTRPG format. It is also so stupid that their are free homebrews on reddit that are more considerate of balance. Than the people charging $50 up to a $100 dollars for this book!

Remember when people said Pathfinder 2e's books were a bit janky (with some rules that are wrong here and there) I think the guys who made this game took that as a challenge

I've been trying to put together a video review of this book, and I hadn't even got as far as reading the beastiary to see its imbalances. I basically checked out once I got to Crystal Soul Spear. And I'm guessing they're getting so much hassle for it, it would explain why I've suddenly stopped receiving responses from the support staff. I contacted them about the errors I was finding the day after I received the book.Now they won't respond.

The knight can starts with 21AC, the mercenary is the PHB 5e ranger, the firelink greatsword has the abilty that buffs dmg of enemys against you by 1 if you use it and so on ...

I got the Dark Souls board game, and enjoyed it a bunch- holy hells is it clunky, but I had a blast. This news is really saddening- I don't know if I would have gotten the game, but odds are the Dark Souls TTRPG will have the 'botched release' albatross around its neck now, and will for some time, even if they fix it as quickly as they can. On a happier note, I love the music choice. The Dark Souls trilogy has some of the most amazing tracks the video game industry has to offer.

Too weak to wear the knight armour feels intentional (kinda). Why? Well, in Dark Souls 1, if you choose the knight origin, you start off with a full suit of armour, but not enough equip load to wear it. You either fat roll or take off _parts_ of the armour. Which I don't think you can do here.

If you want a 5th ed Dark Souls like game check out The Black Iron, inspired by Dark Souls and more like Elden Ring even though it was published over a year ago. The Black Iron is a 5 star bestseller on DTRPG so check it out

Spend of $50 on some pathfinder 2e or indie games instead of this.

I don’t get how the idea of constantly dying and having to retry a boss from the start would be appealing in a tabletop rpg. Imagine your party’s fighting a boss, and after half an hour to an hour, you get wiped. Now that half an hour to an hour basically ends up wasted and you have to retry the boss from scratch. This itself could fill up an entire session, and if it’s a difficult boss (which it will be since it’s dark souls), you’ll very likely end up spending multiple sessions doing nothing but fighting and dying to a boss. Sooner or later, some player’s gonna realize they have better things to do and skip sessions, and the boss fight becomes even harder since there’s less players now, so they’ll keep dying to a boss over and over until everyone leaves or they start playing a different campaign. I can almost guarantee campaigns played with rules from this book will not last unless it is significantly tweaked in terms of difficulty and mechanics.

Glad to see you do this kind of video. Good to see other system talk on here and talk about what doesn't work. Shame about such a storied and legendary game be treated with such lackadaisical quality check on multiple spots. Would be great to just get thr Japanese ttrpg translated but I imagine thsys hard to do on its own right.

Well here's hoping for round two. The PDF release of the rewrite shows zero effort.

I kinda assumed this was a lazy cash grab when they built it off a system as unsuited to the feel of Dark Souls as 5E but good lord I could not imagine it being this bad

Hello, a pleasure as always I am a great fan of the dark souls franchise, it has helped me to get trhougth the quarentine and to get in to the university and as i am seen that some of the few mecanics it looks more like what people who havent played dark souls think what dark souls is, that is what is bothering me personally, it makes me feel that there is no real committment to it, i was very exceptic with dark souls 5e but i had hope that they could make them work. But as i see now i will continue with my dark souls style homebrew, i hope that they will be able to make things better. God bless you, greetings from latin america and nice haircut, pardon for my english

I can't imagine the essence of a souls game would translate very well to a ttrpg. I just picture players rage quitting the table because of mechanics that, in a single player souls experience can be frustrating but ultimately rewarding when overcome, but in a ttrpg just makes everyone feel bad. If I spend 15 minutes fighting a boss and lose last second because I mis-timed my dodge, that's on me, no big deal let's go again. If the party just spent 2 hours in a boss fight just to be TPK'd into dust because of a bad roll, that is devastating and disheartening.

If they want to emulate getting your butt kicked until you are good enough to beat the boss what they should do is give the bosses weaknesses and resistances that you can learn while you are fighting the boss. Let the players know hey you probably aren't surviving the first attempt but that's fine as long as you learned about the boss. And they really need to make the weaknesses feel really substantial make the players feel rewarded for using different strategies for battle. It could be a really cool system if they work on it more.

Yo, this is wild. Kind of blown away to be honest. Good video man!

Thanks for this review. Sad to see it's an unfinished product. I believe this was the case with my DnD cookbook. There were typos and edit errors there, but hey it's a cookbook. Much more disappointing to see it in an official role play game.

Honestly, even if they fix all the details, I would doubt they have any idea how D&D works or any other TTRPG for that matter if they just copy and paste stuff. That shows me they have no idea what they are doing.

The book was supposed to release in the US yesterday, and we were supposed to get PDF's, but there has been no communication on the state of the release, so I decided to digging around the internet. I had no idea the book released a month earlier in Europe, and that it was so poorly received. I pre-ordered on April 12th, and apparently people started releasing details about how badly written the book was on the 14th, but I didn't think to look up the book after I pre-ordered (and I was preparing for the release, by logging as much of the lore as I could in the past month, while also playing the video games again). Now I'm so bummed by all of this. Their website showed them to be competent developers, who had released multiples board games that covered famous video games, with Dark Souls being one of their specialties. I've been DM'ing for decades, so I can how bad this book will be, and no matter how much effort I put in to repair it's awkwardly worded mess, no one I know is going to want to play a TRPG, where if a couple of them die, all of them do... for some mysterious stupid reason. I wish I could get my money. Worse thing is, I already wasted over 100 hours logging lore and stuff on the Dark Souls series, and now I feel like I have make own TRPG from the ground up... and I don''t want to. That's a lot of work and time, which I was hoping to avoid, by buying a professionally written book. Man, I'm so bummed out by this.

stores are getting the books now. the character origins tell you one way to get position while the core rules tell you a whole other way to get position. Not sure how I feel....

If you want a better "Dark souls TTRPG" try Runecairn Wardensaga The "theme" is roughly mixed with Vikings-ish stuff, but it's basically Dark Souls. The starting scenario proposed is basically Undead Asylum

I actually showed the TTRPG to my buddy (we both love Dark Souls) when I was showing him the local Game Store I go to and we contemplated getting it on a whim; HOLY HELL am I glad I didn't! While I have no doubt many in the TTRPG do this as well, I write as a hobby and have been doing so for probably a little over 13 years and I get annoyed at finding a single typo in my own writing. I can't even IMAGINE the levels of pissed of I would have been if I had bought that only to find the Crystal Soul Spear description or the Paladin copy-paste or the seemingly innumerable other things there probably are. I hope they get it figured out because a Dark Souls TTRPG sounds like it could be super cool but DAMN did they drop the ball on this one. It comes down to a simple, classic phrase: "If you're gonna do something, do it right or don't do it at all."

Those early copies of Dark Souls TTRPG could become collectors editions someday if the game ever catches on. TTRPG players will never enjoy the feeling of getting massacred by the DM. When I get destroyed in Elden Ring the profanity flies, not the sort of thing you want with your RPG group and dice on hand to throw, :). All I want from Dark Souls or Elden Ring regarding a TTRPG is a game world full of lore and atmosphere, a nice campaign map, some NPC's and maybe some adventure content. I'll adapt the the game system I prefer (cough - P2e) with some mutually agreed hardcore rules for our sessions. Thanks for the review, you saved me some money.

All the errors would lead most people to believe they didnt care about what they were putting out and just smashed something out asap. Whether this is true or not, this will slow the game down due to double checking the rules due to bad sentence structure or even having to adjust spell effects and damage because they printed the wrong spell description. Even just a wrong elemental damage type fundamentally can or will change how said spell effects what it is targeting. Even experienced TTRPG'ers would probably get flustered deciphering and/or tracking all of the errors which tends to lead to bad reviews and then you look at the amount of money one had to drop on it the frustration level will be huge.

i mean, i feel iv dodged a bullet with mine then... I preordered the collectors edition being a massive souls fan and the book looked amazing. However, iv not recieved mine so i thought id look at my purchase to see what the status of it was. And as it turns out, the company has actually cancelled my purchase without telling me, thankfully without taking payment... Like, iv not recieved any emails informing me that it wasnt coming. I only found out by searching deep myself into the order. I didnt think this company did that bad but christ... To the point where theyre literally cancelling preorders? Thats a first for me. I would be mad, but looking at how badly this book is written, i think im fine with the result.

I’m sad about this, wanted to run a DS TTRPG ever since I got into the souls series. I was super excited to try this despite my absolute hatred for 5e, and believed I was in good hands because I loved the other DS stuff SFG put out (tho I prefer the card game to the board game). To see it wind up like this breaks my heart. Le sigh…..

And this is why I wait to buy things. Thank Nonat for the good video as always.

Reminds me of the 3.5 Diablo TTRPG... where, in one crit attack on a monster, I broke my axe as a Barbarian (the durability system was jank)... and was pretty much done with it altogether... XD

As someone who works for a credit card company, I wonder if so many mistakes could be cause to contest the purchase...

The Brutes Str 15 with a +3 bonus should already indicate that this is a mistake in typing and Str should be 16. Not that it matters really, as there are plenty of similar cases through the book :D

Well, this looks like something I wrote while making D&D parody assets. It's hard to proff read your own stuff. My question is, how they make it to market without this step. 🤔

The have just confirmed a reprint of the book with corrected mistakes, and people who already have their copies will receive the new one for free. Can't ask for more than that tbh, but it should have been thoroughly checked before it's release, it's quite bad that some of these obvious mistakes had slipped through. Makes you think about how much thought actually went into the game itself.

has anyone seen a comment from them on all the complaints? Ive seen it from various sources they have to be aware.

The interesting thing about Dark Souls as a franchise, is that the previous games (Demon Souls, and Dark Souls 1 and 2) were fairly janky in mechanics, however that was a limitation of the engine, so it was understandable, then there's 3, which while not perfect, is still a very well polished game, one that punishes failure but doesn't try to "cheat", DS 1 and 2 have difficulty from Jankiness as well as being cheap, it's just a fact, Dark Souls 3 is more difficult because of Enemy AI vs your own Technical Skill The issue is, in a DS TTRPG, Dice inherently throw "technical skill" out the window, because it's random, so the game has to try hard to make it seem like the world doesn't care about you, while also making it not seem like the GAME MASTER doesn't care about you, just because the World hates your players, doesn't mean that you, the GM has to, and that's something this current iteration of the game doesn't seem to get, While I don't think the Bosses should be Easy, I do think that if you were to translate all of the Boss abilities to TTRPG mechanics, they shouldn't be as hard as they would be in-game point is, from a DS TTRPG standpoint. Punish a Player's Stupidity, not their Luck

Don’t you fat roll as a knight in ds1 with starting armor and shield and sword? So technically you’re under leveled in strength (stamina in the video game) anyway? Maybe I’m remembering wrong.

There are so many errors, that as a DM it is basically unplayable since the classes are unbalanced and many abilities they mention either are convoluted, don't exist or don't understand 5E rules and therefore are terrible or broken. Along with the fact that all bosses will more or less instant kill every player on turn 1 since they autohit and auto deal max damage. It is not a finished product. It is not proofread or even playtested.

The takeaway from this video is I need to surprise my wife with the Devil May Cry Board Game (which we didn't know exists).

May as well just play 5e or PF2 with a 'hardcore mode' and keep this book as a decorative thing for a book shelf.

What’s the update with the book now? Was hoping to pick this up as a gift for my friend as he’s a huge DS fan.

Looks like they were made aware and are actually doing a full reprint of the books and they will ship them out to everyone who got one for free as a replacement. Even if you got it at a game store. They don't have much I fo yet but that seems to be what their news letter said. So fingers crossed they actually did fix everything and it's better now.

Torm: Slam - players must make a DC27 Dexterity saving throw That’s basically it for one of his attacks. No damage, no effect 😂

does someone have a link for the book pdf?

Looks like there's been a lot of fixes Nonat & community! I purchased it today with a coupon from Free RPG Day and none of the mentioned errors are present! BUT the boss CRs and damage potential is still wildly high. I don't really know what they expect the average campaign to look like but. I feel like player characters can't reasonably face any of these bosses until they have several levels already under their belts. I'm going to try running a One Shot at some point soon so we'll see how it goes!

Dude this makes me so sad. I was hoping to play a dark souls like ttrpg. Is there some game that can be a replacement?

Jeez. This looks like it was written by those people whom you see when you go to D&D Beyond's Homebrew section and sort by worst.

So, worse than Werewolf: The Apocalypse's "See page XX"? Sounds like it.

Oh god...If the state of the RPG is comparable to the Video Game in Launch bugs.....Imagine what the Cyberpunk 2077 RPG would look like :/

Having the manual I feel compelled to do a mini-review. The product has good ideas, I have to admit it and it must be said. Everything else sucks. Unexplained rules, typo everywhere, creatures with huge errors (Sif with underground speed and the Nameless King with flight speed (No, the Storm king is a monster of his own)) I do not recommend it to everyone, in addition to the fact that I have requested a return and they are ignoring my emails and I had to switch to Paypal assistance.

So this IS an official product but it's written in a way that makes it look like a REALLY bad third party book(they have gotten LEAP AND BOUNDS better than I feel like they were back in the 3.X era days)?! With this knowledge there's PROBABLY third party product out there that is actually better than this, and it would have to be FREE, cause copyright law and whatnot! Though the cool art would be missing because that's not generally usable in stuff like this!

It's genuinely disappointing they didn't put any effort into it, and really shows how little effort is going into these licensed 5e OGL hacks.

Have there been any fixes since this video?

Hopefully they listen to the community and fix things before the PDF drops....

The fact that its an 5e OGL hack on top of it being a mess makes it so lazy.

Why position? I’ve never seen that in Dark souls, posture would’ve been better even though that’s from Sekiro. It’s like they’ve never played dark souls.

I mean, what did you expect? It's D&D but with the Dark souls brand printed on the cover.

If you want a good Dark Souls TTRPG system I recommend the Unofficial, Fanmade Dark Souls Tabletop RPG by RoosterEma. It's a unique custom system made to represent the Dark Souls combat mechanics (Isn't perfect but do a good job). It's simple and the mechanics aren't complicated.

Some concepts sound brilliant in the mind but in actuality, you run into issues, while you certainly can run a tough and gruesome campaign if the result is die, die, die and try again. I don't see many players adopting it. Dark souls are fun cause you almost immediately can retry with how "fast" combat is this means you will be busy a whole evening combating the same creature and possibly even fail. I don't see that design concept succeed on a long-term basis in a ttrpg. Not to mention how do you level up and spend souls if this gundyr is your first roadblock, imagine having to farm X skeletons to "git gud".

Why the duck did they use D&D as a base for this game? There are many many other systems that uses the OGL for their rules. Yikes.

Sounds like what happened to the latest Shadowrun edition.

Whats upsetting is the DS board game has combat mechanics that could have been expanded on to create a seriously engaging system. Have players and enemies use attack/manouvre/skill/spell cards and place them face down. You place two a turn. Once everyone has played cards are revealed. On the first turn everyone performs the first card, the second is your tell for the next round. Future rounds you combine your tell with one of your played cards. This lets you emulate DS focus of signalling attacks, learning combos and playing with committing to actions hoping your combo is faster or your poise able to weather the enemies initial strikes etc.

SFG makes 5e Encounter packs that can be dropped into campaigns and such. Plus 5e's popularity. Both combined in them making it a 5e based game. Oddly I feel Pathfinder, Genesys, Shadow of the Demon Lord, or even D&D 4e or the Adventure System Games would have been a better base game to use.

Also the Gaping Dragon has Deception 11 😂😂😂 THE GAPING DRAGON IS GOOD AT LYING TO YOU

That very much just looks like a homebrewed D&D book if you got conned into that its your own fault tbh

I was looking for fun to see more ttrpg systems, since i only own The Witcher, and DS TTRP cought my eye. It's sad to know that it sucks and is a poor cash grab. Welp i guess i'll save my money for D&D or Vampire: The Masquerade.

brb buying a 20-pound bulk dice to roll soul of cinder's auto attack

I'll let you know if its worth it because I already preordered for it months ago. The typos piss me off though

So, like I had no real interest in playing the Dark Souls TTRPG. I was mildly curious, but nothing beyond that. But know that we know it's kind of broken and bad... well. Now, I kinda do want to play. I wish to witness the horror.

Idk if DS would fare better if its using pf2e or OSRs. For me the 'git-gud' mentality may not translate well in the ttrpg space even with those who have been used to fromsoft's creation. If the party and dm are on the same page then coolio, praise the sun and pass the maidens. For me personally i ain touching soulslike video games with a ten foot pole and i'll probably do the same with ttrpgs that have that focus as well. Its not my thing. Im honestly worried that any future games using 5e as a base may be automatically hated on just for being 5e when it would actually turn out to be the better system to use instead of say PF2e, OSE or Savage Worlds.

Could this be a true contender for the crown that Spawn of Fashan has held for decades? 😄 More seriously, WHY would they put so much work into the quality and presentation, but the actual text be a steaming pile?

Falling back on the "compatible with 5e" when you've got a highly recognizable brand name is super weak sauce.

The Brute's Strength score should be a 16 not 15 because it has a +3, not a +2. A rule book shouldn't be this contradictory and confusing.

Its shame because I really like SFG. Their minis and board games are really solid. But this is horrible to see. Hopefully it gets fixed soon.

This entire thing of "Welp you died." "Uuhhh... you're dead again.." "Yup, that's it. You have your head chopped off." - just doesn't work for a Pen & Paper RPG. It works perfectly fine for a video game, but that's about it. The entirety of needing skill and patience to win doesn't translate at all into a cooperative story telling game. Instead the just should've made something like an "Addon" for DnD or something with their world but DnD's mechanics and rule set. This dark fantasy world is so beautiful for exploring, but not for fighting incredibly powerful monsters that kill you in 1 or 2 turns

Dang. I was excited enough to pre-order this. I think I’m gonna take your advice and get my money back. Can’t believe this business went the route of AAA video game developers.

I like steamforge games but their quality controls are a bit rubbish. I feel like I've had a few games from them that have had these kind of issues.

This is the real problem of the ttrpg market. Making aesthetically pleasing books with great art but with lackluster mechanics and even worse writing. We as roleplayers, as consumers of ttrpgs must stop buying games that only ends up in a shelf, never to be read or played. I'm an indie ttrpg designer(not published anything yet) myself and I really care about the things I design: the mechanics and the text which will convey the mechanics to the readers. Art is always, always secondary. I don't say that there shouldn't be any great art in ttrpgs but it shouldn't be the measure for which ttrpgs are designed. Mörk Borg is a good example of a game when both the text and art are near-flawless in execution(only the layout could be a bit difficult for some but I personally love it). So if you want to play something that feels like Dark Souls, I wholeheartedly recommend you all give Mörk Borg a try! It's that good!