Darkest Dungeon - psychological gothic roguelike RPG

Same moderator, indicating the combat will be 2.5D as I suggested.

The monster designs I saw there are really cool and I am curious how 2.5d is going to work.

I was just about to say, I assumed the 3D graphics were just a trailer thing, no reason to believe that they're gonna be in the game. Maybe I'm missing something (I don't use reddit, so I'm not sure now to navigate it), but the post you linked doesn't seem to say anything about the graphics.

As for how 2.5D would work, if indeed it even is 2.5D, I can't imagine it'll be any different than how it was. Unless I'm mistaken, 2.5D, while having 3D graphics, still is only 2D gameplay, and the first game already had some 2.5D stuff going on anyway (parallax creating the illusion of depth, camera angles and perspective shifting during battle, stuff like that). I can't imagine the actual gameplay will become 3D.

It seems like the brief release of the Heart of Darkness was by itself enough to corrupt the rest of the world and drive it mad.

Seriously, fuck the Ancestor.

Edited by M84 on Oct 23rd 2020 at 3:23:21 AM

In all likelihood the battles and the dungeon delving will have some 3d aspects mixed into the backgrounds. The backgrounds might be more dynamic and active then the previous game.

I genuinely wouldn't be surprised. I imagine the Heart's range of driving people insane is far far wider then what the first Darkest Dungeon showed. What we are probably seeing in the trailer is invading angry cultists from a completely different part of the world that want to see the Heart rise again or perhaps the Heart isn't the only eldritch entity active in the world and it has siblings that awoke too after the Heart did which means humanity is double fucked.

One thing I did notice about all those enemies shown in that trailer. They all look like they are melting oddly enough with the first woman we saw having a robe that looks like its made out of human skin. They are also wearing hats that looks candle like. So possibly a different version of the flesh cult that has a more candle wax theme??

No matter what is going on in the second game I still blame the Ancestor.

Edited by Wispy on Oct 22nd 2020 at 12:43:04 PM

They had very similar 3D-graphics for the trailer to the new board-game:

Judging by some of the monsters seen in the trailer for DD 2, it looks like religious horror might be an even stronger theme than before. Looks like there will be vaguely Catholic-looking enemies, so it might be that the Church has taken cues from the Fanatic and Flagellant.

Edited by Mara999 on Oct 22nd 2020 at 6:41:49 PM

I really should get around to finishing this game.

I'm curious about the board game, but I can't help feeling it'll lose something in translation.

I'm tempted to buying the board-game just for the miniatures and using them to play the D&D module that someone made of Darkest Dungeon. But I might also try to convert my own minis to look like heroes and monsters from it.

I've never finished a game of this XD The last time I tried to I ended up stopping because due to not getting any Vestals on the carriage I was losing lots of people and couldn't heal them.

You are completely right that I linked the wrong comment like a git, so here's the actual statement I was meaning to use, another one from them saying the models are indeed in-game, and finally far more definitively, a FAQ stating among other things that the game is going to be in 3D while combat stays mostly similar.

Edited by VutherA on Oct 22nd 2020 at 1:59:15 PM

I too would quite like to run a TTRPG of Darkest Dungeon sometime :D Same thing applies though; while it works in the videogame to have a high character turnover, such a thing could become tedious in a TTRPG, so you'd have to find a way to balance that, retain the flavour of the videogame, the sense of high stakes, with the idea that characters are essentially disposable.

Of course, in a TTRPG, no-one, except maybe the DM, is playing the Descendant (is that what the player character is called? I might have just made that up), so the focus would be different. Maybe the conflict could come from the party finding out they're disposable...

I've only seen monster homebrew for 5e Darkest Dungeon, are there classes as well? I feel like the standard 5e classes would be a decent enough fit, with some restrictions and reflavouring.

No Vestals? That's brutal. Occultists are not to be ignored though; their healing might be less reliable, but I've found them more useful than I expected.

The only reason I haven't tried to finish the game is that I haven't summoned the courage to go into the Darkest Dungeon yet :D I think I have one boss left to kill, then I have no excuse.

I've never done a run with the DLC though...

Oh, and presumably, hopefully, the sequel will be coming to consoles too. I'm not much of a PC gamer.

I'm a bit torn on what to think about the transition to cel-shaded 3D, because I generally don't like that for either games or animation. One of the major drawing-powers with Darkest Dungeon for me has been the art-style, along with the many references to Lovecraft and Warhammer. Judging by the trailer they have clearly done a great attempt to still keep the same aesthetics, but I would like to see some gameplay footage of the figures in motion before I make up my mind.

So far I've also only found the monster manual for Apprentice-level foes, but there is supposedly more to come.

Edited by Mara999 on Oct 22nd 2020 at 10:17:49 PM

I feel like it might well lose some of the charm, but time will tell, I guess.

Missed your edit until I happened to look in again just now (sorry for the double-post).

If I'd bothered to check the PDF I had for links, I'd have found something that led me to this drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/15mpMoy6pbi6JpnrBH3J9CUq-CkW2OrQ0

Or a tumblr: https://dm-tuz.tumblr.com/tagged/darkest-dungeon

And a twitter too, but I'm not on twitter and I don't know how to navigate it, so I don't have a more specific link: https://twitter.com/dm_tuz

Ooh, nice! There used to be just that one monster manual. I believe that it is possible to recreate the oppressing feel of Darkest Dungeon for tabletop even with a slightly lesser character turnover. The risk of dying will still be high due to things such as poison, injury or stress-related heart-attacks. But with a tiny bit of nerfing the characters could survive a little bit easier, for added freedom to develop each one's characterization, to make it all the more heart-breaking when they do die horribly. Developing Doomed Characters and such.

I've actually been using that guy's DD work in my own Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Been going very well, his Thing From The Stars actually did quite a bit of damage. Next session will probably be using the pig men.

Edited by theLibrarian on Oct 24th 2020 at 4:02:17 AM

Oh, awesome.

This did get me to thinking about some Darkest Dungeon homebrew, how to reflect the mechanics of the videogame in a TTRPG, or within the D&D 5e framework at least. Things like At Death's Door, replacing the unconscious condition for player characters; instead of being unconscious, you fight on at 0hp, but make death saves as normal, and three fails is permanent death, but if you succeed three times, then you heal some HP.

There's gotta be a way to implement stress and critical heals too. Quirks could be reworked feats, or based on class or race features.

Anyway, just made my first foray into the Darkest Dungeon... it did not go well. My highwayman died probably about halfway through. I tried to soldier on, but decided to cut my losses, and a crusader died to cover the retreat. The edge was taken off upon returning to town and finding that the coach had a lv4 highwayman and crusader aboard :D

I think my party composition was bad, but I had no information to go on for what would be good. That said, I still have no idea :P Definitely not Man-at-Arms / Occultist / Highwayman / Crusader though.

Well critical s are already a thing in DND, as is Death’s Door.

Stress on the other hand I’m less sure about.

Critical hits are a thing, but not critical heals (as far as I know), and they depend on the attack roll, and you don't roll to hit for a heal. The obvious thing is to introduce something akin to an attack roll for healing, purely to see if it's a crit or not, the healing would always 'hit', but then what would you roll against?

What's the Death's Door thing you mentioned? Just death saving rolls? I already talked about that.

Personally speaking I feel like the game should not even have a sequel to begin with. The game was fine as it is and sometimes sequels are completely unnecessary, if not dilute what the original had.

I am interested in seeing how they might adapt the original game's playing-style for a "journey", as they described it. The earlier teaser implied that the journey will go to DD's equivalent of the Mountains of Madness, which to me feels like an interesting destination. But I could also see it as something for simply an expansion-pack, where the Hamlet is complimented with a secondary base-camp near the mountain, from where the players do missions in the frozen caves.

Is there in D&D something equivalent to the sanity-meter in Call of Cthulhu, or could it be easily implemented in a homebrew?

I believe there’s a sanity mechanic in Ravenloft? Not sure.

Hard disagree, the original is still there. A new game allows them to explore new forms of gameplay and settings. There is no cost, either it's good and the franchise expands or it's not and the original can be returned to whenever.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Oct 25th 2020 at 11:07:01 AM

I swear this game is just about giving you enough rope to hang yourself.

"Remind yourself that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer."