Would Dark Souls translate well into a CCG? Maybe something similar

I think you could make a Dark Souls card game, but I think MtG/Hearthstone would be a really bad basis for it. You could do it, but it's really dull and unoriginal and wouldn't really add anything to the story.

What I think would work better? Borrow elements from the old Lord of the Rings CCG. The game was set up as a journey, with your deck containing both good cards to build your fellowship and evil cards to attack the other guys, with the aim of the game being to complete the journey or to kill the other guy before he made it.

In a Souls context, each deck would contain cards to build and enhance your character and to attack and hinder your opponent.

Each turn you would move forward, playing a new location from a side-deck if you were the first to move forward, so staying ahead gives you an advantage, letting you play cards that create beneficial passive effects for you.

You could blend together various different classes of each sort of card, building interesting blends of character and enemy decks, and could even include some interesting Souls specific elements.

Invasions could be a way of almost betting on the result of your opponents action. If you think they're going to fail and die in an upcoming area, send in an invader to reap a reward from their death. If, on the other hand, they seem like they're going to win and get some cool stuff from it, send along a friendly summon to benefit from their victory.

You could also do some odd things with the loss mechanic. In the LotR CCG, which I think is the best source of inspiration, you lose when every member of your fellowship dies, but in Dark Souls death is not the end. The only end of your journey is when you lose motivation and the desire to go on. Some sort of mechanic to represent that, the slow desperation of an Undead as each death drives you more and more hollow, could be interesting.

>>48361648

That's an interesting idea; I think, perhaps, the best way to handle hollowing would be something like how the old card game UFS handled the fact that you would cycle through your deck very easily in a regular match. Every time you cycled through, you shuffled your discard back into your deck and then removed the top ten cards from the game; as hollowing removes your drive, it takes away your ability to succeed, limitng you furthur and furthur with what you can do.

Some cards may reverse it, though, putting the cards back into your deck... though it would be costly, I imagine.

>>48361552
I would suggest taking a look at the new runescape card game they released recently, it's fairly unique and you might get some ideas.

>>48362571

The Runescape digital card game is really fun, yeah, and quite mechanically interesting.

>>48362540

I like it. That would make your deck your 'Memory', and the out-of-game pile 'The Forgotten'. It reminds me of Lucatiel's whole thing.

Other things I'm considering are the resource mechanic and how to divide up the cards.

In LotR CCG, the Light Side player could play any number of cards they liked, but each card they played produced Shadow, a currency the player who was currently on the Dark side could use to set up forces against them. But while it's cool, it's also kinda opposite to the resource economy of the Souls games- Killing dudes gets you Souls, that's the whole point. But then, how do you stop each player just utterly overwhelming the other guy every turn and always killing him, never giving him a chance to build up?

The other question is card 'alignments', as such. I think instead of having discrete colours, ala Magic, each card could have a number of different symbols, denoting different aspects of it, and various card effects would interact with or key off different symbols.

Basic ones are Strength, Dexterity, Faith/Miracle, Intelligence/Magic, Pyromancy, Dark, Shield, Weapon, Armour, maybe Heavy/Light (although that could be folded into Str/Dex), Bow... That's player side, I mean.

Monster side, well they'd likely share some symbols with player cards, but also things like Hollow, Creature, Demon, Dragon, Necromantic Undead (some better term to distinguish things like the Skeletons of the Catacombs from Hollows).

Hmm... Actually, that's an idea. In LotR, each area deck had to include areas 1-9 (IIRC) in order. This game instead could have a succession of area levels. Each person has a level 1, 2, 3 etc area in their deck. The player who goes second gets to play their area, perhaps.

Each area has a hard cap on how many Souls worth of opposition the enemy can play, and you need to win/survive your round to move on to the next area.

>>48362738

Extra thoughts- Two currencies limited by area, Souls and Boss Souls. Maybe some upgrades can only be purchased with Boss Souls, or you can trade them in for x regular souls?

In case it wasn't explicitly stated, the victory condition would be 'Get to the last zone, beat the last boss'. If you do that before you other guy, you win. That's your goal throughout, but going hollow is a constant risk of trying to progress too fast and pushing yourself too hard, an alternate failure condition.

I do think Summoning cards could add a really unique element to the game, too. Putting cards in your deck that let your character directly interact with your opponents in various ways.

You should maybe also take a look at Chronicle Runescape Legends, a recently released online ccg.
It is also based on two rivaling heroes on a journey, though it is not about reaching the end first, but instead gathering power for a final showdown after 5 gameturns.
It has two basic card types: adventure and support.
Adventure cards are monsters you place for yourself to fight and grant gold, waepons and armor as rewards to kill more powerful adventure cards in order to get even more loot.
Support cards usually have a gold cost and grant buffs or equipment or hinder your enemy by buffing his monsters, destroying his equipment or damaging him directly. (1/2)

>>48361552
I'm not sure about a CCG, but the relationship between characters, souls, their equipment and special abilities seems ripe for a deckbuilding mechanic.

And narratively you could have location-based enemy decks for solo play, a scaling mechanic to maintain that challenge for co-op, and of course you could just go straight versus (but at that point the deckbuilding makes less thematic sense).

So ultimately more like that LotR LCG than M:tG or what have you.

>>48366431
So after looking at the ideas presented here i could imagine something like this:

Each player has a bunch of area cards in an extra deck, maybe around 5 cards. Each area has a general effect on the game (combat modifiers, carddraw under specific conditions etc.) as well as an amount of Soul-value that allows your oponent to fill it with monsters. Invasions could be special Monstercards that allow the enemy "hero" to appear as monster. Player Characters shouldn't have that much health, death just means they reshuffle and lose some part of their deck, which they might regain if they beat the area on their second try. Otherwise those cards are gone forever.

Souls earned by killing the mosnters are used as ressource to grant yourself equipment and other buffs like summons etc.

Win-Condition is completing all areas or have your oponent deplete your deck.

The sheer amount of cards to be played might make it a good idea to draw more than just one card per turn or include a lot of draw in the rewards, so you always have at least some reward- AND monster-cards.

Another idea would be to have the monster- and reward deck separated, so you play one on your turn and the other one during your oponents turn, though i don't know how good this would be for gameflow. (2/2)

How about one like Chronicle where instead of reaching a set end zone, the end of the game is triggered when one player plays an expensive invade card to initiate a final showdown. The whole game would be balancing small buffs turn by turn to make sure you'd always be competitive in a one v one with your opponent.

>>48362738
The strength of the opponent limits what you can play.

Very strong characters would attrack the attention of massive demons. A very insignificant and humble traveller might just be able to sneak past it.

So a player could both get loaded with tools to defend against attacks, and be extremelly weak to the point that most big threats don't even notice him. Maybe sacrifying a card to stealth past a big demon, instead of having to fight it.

Another way to avoid agro rushing from being too lethal would be to simply limit how much you can attack. For example, by making big dangerous demons too expensive to play early on (with the mechanics above, it'd also be pointless because your opponent could just stealth past it). Sending lots of small/cheap demons is a risky move, because you're also feeding your opponent easy souls.

Though you could do that intentionally so he can't stealth past your big demons anymore.


Personally, I think I'd make it more asynchronous. Like, one player wants to rekindle the flame, another one wants to extinguish it. Or one player is the chosen undead while the other one is the environment and the enemies.