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So I have recently become a huge fan of the Dark Souls Series, and one of the greatest aspects of the game is the "Story w/o telling". With the exception of the occasional peice of dungeon dressing (how'd this doorknob get in the iron maiden?) Or monster (How did the Hydra get through that 5ft door?), most stories in dungeons are able to be puzzled and figured out.
So how would you go about creating a dungeon where very little to nothing is explained? A game where NPCs are uninterested in holding their hands through quests or will lie and misdirect to achieve their ends, where they walk in the wake of great events and have to discover what happened before if they want a chance to get out of their situation alive? As a (mostly) nonvisual media, the game's method of hiding hints in scenery is impratical, and without item descriptions like in the game, hidden messeges and wordgame riddles will be harder to insert. Any ideas how to meet this challenge?
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Check out the following campaigns:
An Age of Deep Waters
Labyrinth Souls
The Inheritors Mark
I run two of these games. If you'd like to talk over stuff you can PM or I can try and answer whatever questions you may have. I'm doing some planning for a Bloodborne campaign myself.
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I think you have to start by establishing the right mood at the table. If you look at the new Horror Adventures book, one of the introductory sections talks about how it can be hard to create a good horror atmosphere with people joking around or checking their phones while they wait for their turn to come up like you often see at gaming tables, and I think something similar applies here. Before you can describe the stifling blackness of Blighttown, you need to make sure your players are up for getting immersed in the setting to this degree.
It's also worth asking whether Pathfinder is the best system for this sort of game. As much as I like Pathfinder, the skills system is kind of designed so that some players can tune out occasionally - the barbarian with 7 Cha knows that social situations aren't his thing, so he sits back and lets the bard handle the dinner conversation until the king sees fit to tell you whose skull he needs bashed in today. The Fate system, on the other hand, has mechanics that encourage players to pay attention to their surroundings in ways that might help this (e.g., "You said that the wooden supports go down far enough that we can't see the bottom, right? That probably means they're pretty rickety, so I'd like to use that aspect to gain a +2 on my next attack roll."). There may be other systems that would offer other advantages. Not to say you couldn't do it in Pathfinder, just that you might want to consider it.
...Get a copy of Dark Souls - The Board Game?
But more seriously... very carefully, and with a lot of work behind the scenes to get all the pieces moving together. If I were to do it myself, I'd probably use a mix of Dungeonographer and Realm Works to create and then detail the maps.
I'd suggest drastically cutting down the amount of NPCs they come across, and drastically upping how descriptive you are about every area they go into. When/If one of your player asks about particular facet, drop a hint or two about what might have happened, or what it's importance might be.
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Tyinyk's advice might work very well, depending on what kind of story you're trying to tell. An alternative would be to play the NPCs off each other - e.g., two candidates for the throne each accuse the other of underhanded dealings, etc.. Done correctly, you can get the necessary exposition out without establishing a character that the PCs feel they can trust.
You might also need to establish some metagame stuff up-front. You used the example of a hydra being on the other side of a 5-ft. door - as a player, I'mnot sure I'd assume that there's a good reason and not that the designer simply didn't think of that. If those sorts of details are going to be important, you might need to hint at that outside of the game. Of course, if you do that, you have to make doubly-sure there aren't any holes in your story.
Thanks everyone who posted advice. The campaign I am working on is a bit in the future, but I will probably sprinkle a bit of this in one of my ongoing games. My party can be very detailed orientes during a dungeon crawl for the first few hours of play, so I think that using something to make maps is a good idea. Lower NPC count is good too, since it will keep.the isolated journey feel I am going for and also recent games have been NPC saturated. Getting them in then right frame of mind, but giving them the heads up that I spent months getting this game designed and going may just get these guys less squirlly. If anyone has any other ideas plz let me know and thanks again Paizo community.
Something that you might also do if you have time and energy is draw/print your main areas out so that the players can see the area instead of relying fully on being told about it. The "If the GM described it it is important and if not it can be ignored" is a hard mindset to break for some. Making it so that the players are looking and searching the environment alongside the characters can help pull the players more fully into the world/story you create.
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You might want to think about how important Knowledge skills will be in this campaign and advise your players accordingly. Depending on what kind of story you're trying to tell, they could be very important (e.g., in a world of liars and thieves, the PCs own memories might be the most reliable thing), or you might want to downplay or even remove them so that your players see the world fresh (part of the atmosphere of Dark Souls is putting the player in an unfamiliar environment and letting them figure out which ways they can go and which ways lead to horrible death).
The comparison to Dark Souls gets a little tricky because it kind of does both of these - theoretically the players are lost and alone, except that they can always look at a wiki and figure things out that way.
Contributor—Canadian Maplecakes
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I have a great many thoughts on this...
1) I think it's important to note that Dark Souls does 'tell' certain things, beyond the architecture and placement of monsters. One thing that the game directly explains is background lore. This comes from how each item has a description. The descriptions of Dark Souls items tell a great deal of the story. That being said, I think this type of story telling actually works quite well in Pathfinder. Skills like Psychometry and spells like Object Reading are essential. I would suggest offering up a Psychometry style skill to all PCs in such a campaign.
With this in mind, I'd come up with similar descriptions for important 'psychoactive' items. Even if these descriptions include names of creatures or places the PCs don't know, it will prompt them to seek out where these names are from.
2) NPCS in Souls games are heavily based on player decisions / interactions. NPCs are also fairly rare, as most other creatures are hollows, and non-conversationalists. In a Souls-style RPG, I would include basic pros/cons in how the PCs interact with ANY NPC. I'd probably create some kind of basic template for NPCS with summaries on interactions.
The template might look like:
-Encounters: What areas the NPC would show up in. Where they could actually assist the party.
-Death: What the impact would be to the remainder of the story.
-Alignment/Group Recognition: Regardless of whether an NPC can 'detect good/evil' having NPCs react based on alignment is a powerful way of storytelling. It changes the dynamic of NPCs. So I'd include notes on how the NPC may change depending on the party alignment.
-Items: Important items in possession of the NPC, along with descriptions. What circumstances (beyond death) the NPC might part with those items.
3) Party Alignment would be another thing. Just like how covenants/world tendency exist in Dark Souls/Demon's Souls, I think basing a lot of the world around the alignment of the players is important. NPCs may change from monstrous horrors to beings of angelic light, as the players shift from Good alignment to Evil alignment over the course of a campaign.
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There is no storytelling in Dark Souls. There is no story in Dark Souls. Sure, there's huge piles of fragmented bits of background information that marginally fit together every once in a while in order to create a vague setting, but there's no story. How are you a fan of storytelling that isn't there?
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There is no storytelling in Dark Souls. There is no story in Dark Souls. Sure, there's huge piles of fragmented bits of background information that marginally fit together every once in a while in order to create a vague setting, but there's no story. How are you a fan of storytelling that isn't there?
Apply yourself, friend. It's there if you look for it.
There is no storytelling in Dark Souls. There is no story in Dark Souls. Sure, there's huge piles of fragmented bits of background information that marginally fit together every once in a while in order to create a vague setting, but there's no story. How are you a fan of storytelling that isn't there?Apply yourself, friend. It's there if you look for it.
The human mind is funny that way. You can see patterns where there are none if you look hard enough.
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The human mind is funny that way. You can see patterns where there are none if you look hard enough.There is no storytelling in Dark Souls. There is no story in Dark Souls. Sure, there's huge piles of fragmented bits of background information that marginally fit together every once in a while in order to create a vague setting, but there's no story. How are you a fan of storytelling that isn't there?Apply yourself, friend. It's there if you look for it.
Look, Dark Souls, by definition, has a story. There is a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end with associated events. You may not like the story, but it's still there.
Sure, it's not Elder Scrolls or Final Fantasy with over 60 hours of unnecessary dialogues and enough world lore to fill a textbook, but that doesn't take away from its storytelling.
Dark Souls ability to construct a cohesive narrative using environments and items is really interesting and a change of pace from other heavy-handed RPGs that either beat you over the head with a constant stream of information or hold the player's hand the entire way. Saying Dark Souls has no storyline/storytelling is disingenuous.
There's plenty to learn from it, especially for TTRPGs.
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The human mind is funny that way. You can see patterns where there are none if you look hard enough.There is no storytelling in Dark Souls. There is no story in Dark Souls. Sure, there's huge piles of fragmented bits of background information that marginally fit together every once in a while in order to create a vague setting, but there's no story. How are you a fan of storytelling that isn't there?Apply yourself, friend. It's there if you look for it.
Oh, there's a pattern there, just not the kind of pattern people think it is. Some of the bits of info you're given do fit together as setting lore, but it's not a story. I see so many people thinking that there's a story to Dark Souls beyond "You're undead now, chop of some heads now. Go light some fires, ya daft c@+%." and citing all that super-vague worldbuilding as evidence of amazing storytelling. FromSoft hasn't got a clue of how any sort of storytelling works (Armored Core barely has a plot, either, so it's not just Soulsbourne), but they definitely put a solid effort into setting up their worlds through implication. It's not storytelling, though.
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Contributor—Canadian Maplecakes
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There is no storytelling in Dark Souls. There is no story in Dark Souls. Sure, there's huge piles of fragmented bits of background information that marginally fit together every once in a while in order to create a vague setting, but there's no story. How are you a fan of storytelling that isn't there?
I'm going to politely disagree. Dark Souls has a large amount of lore and story, but it's not presented in extended cut-scenes, long periods of NPC dialogue, or other mediums commonly used in current video games. Much of the story involves events that the player steps in on after the fact, or actively works towards fulfilling alongside various NPCS within the game. As mentioned before, a lot of the fragmented information is intentional, as you need to put it together with the visual elements and NPC storylines to get a better picture of the greater lore of the world. Even then, not everyone agrees on the various lore points of the Souls series, and the discussion of lore-related items is a hot topic in online discussions.
If you're interested in learning more about the style of story telling in Souls games, mainly by dissecting various parts of the game, I would HIGHLY recommend watching VaatiVidya's Youtube channel, located here: https://www.youtube.com/user/VaatiVidya
Alternatively, if you're interested, I would also recommend reading You-Died, a licensed Dark Souls companion novel that discusses various aspects of the game, including the story telling. You can find more about the book here: http://you-died.com/
Part of the charm of Souls games, is that they don't force you to go through long periods of inactivity to 'watch' the story. Instead, the game is based heavily on interaction and immersion.
Bloodborne, another game from From Software, remains one of my favorite video games of all times. The first time I played through it, I had little/no understanding of the overarching plot, beyond small pieces I picked up here/there. Subsequent playthroughs made various things click in place for me, as did consuming vast quantities of additional media (as linked above).
Another (personal favorite) game that does somewhat similar story telling is Silent Hill 2. Much of the subtext in that game is told through the monsters and locales, rather than cutscenes. Admittedly, SH2 does have cutscenes that inform the player of various things, but they can be interpreted in a variety of ways.
All this being said, I think Souls style of storytelling is entirely possible in a home campaign. It's something I've been working towards for the better part of a year now, hoping to present it to my players (and maybe even as a 3rd party product) when I feel I can do it justice. That's why I popped in on this thread earlier, as I love the idea of this variant storytelling in a game, and would enjoy hearing about people who're passionate about it as well! :)
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atmospheric story telling in a tabletop can be quite difficult. i suggest keeping dialogue low and set the right tone. some simple atmospheric music would do nicely. i love using the bloodborne sound track to set a tone. describe important details and maybe point out specific ones that may be important. other than that try to keep your players engaged. if they get distracted they will completely ignore you explaining the details of the far away castle. one good way to do this is put in an interesting enemy and describe something strange about the creature that is either a hint to what it does or a weakness.
Oh, good idea cdkc! I was planning on letting enemy placement, description, and abilities help tell the story, but I was tending to forget the idea that it can help tatically. As for music I always love tossing in a soundtrack or two into combat.
You'll need respawn points.
I disagree. Set respawn points arent really necessary from a storytelling perspective.