There are actually two different tabletop RPG adaptations of the Dark Souls games in the West and Japan, and each has a few differences.
There are actually two different tabletop roleplaying adaptations of FromSoftware's Dark Souls game trilogy – a recently-released adaptation called Dark Souls: The Roleplaying Game, made by Steamforged Games, and an earlier adaptation called Dark Souls TRPG, published by the Japan-based game studio Group SNE. Both these tabletop RPG adaptations try to capture unique aspects of the Dark Souls video gaming experience such as the challenging enemy encounters, intricate character customization mechanics, and ability of players to learn from the deaths their characters suffer. At the same time, the two game studios took different approaches in their goal of creating a "Soulslike" tabletop RPG; the England-based Steamforged Games took the rules for the popular Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition and hacked them to better match the gameplay of Dark Souls, while Group SNE took the dark fantasy gameplay of the Dark Souls series and tried to simplify it into a set of intuitive rules for tabletop gamers.
Hidetaka Miyazaki, current president of FromSoftware and creator of the thematically-related Demon's Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring games, has talked frequently about the eclectic works of media that helped form his unique game design philosophies. The PS2 minimalist fantasy game Ico wound up inspiring Miyazaki to go into the video game business, while his childhood spent devouring English-language books above his current reading level inspired his jigsaw-puzzle storytelling approach. The world-building and challenging gameplay of Elden Ring and his other "Soulslike" games, by most accounts, owes at lot to the many interesting books on his shelf – dark fantasy manga such as Devilman and Berserk, fantasy/horror fiction by authors like George R.R. Martin, the Fighting Fantasy and Sorcery! gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, and even sourcebooks for tabletop RPGs such as RuneQuest. Given how much of Miyazaki's inspirations are "analog," it's strangely appropriate to have his iconic computer RPGs return to their roots through printed tabletop RPG adaptations.
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Steamforged Games, a tabletop game and miniatures manufacturing company based in England, initially created official card/board game adaptations of Dark Souls, both designed to emulate the cooperative dungeon-crawling and boss-fighting gameplay of every Dark Souls game; more recently, they created an official tabletop RPG adaptation inspired by the game mechanics and plot-line of Dark Souls 3, using the open-source SRD for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition as their mechanical template. Group SNE, headquartered in Kobe, publishes light novels, video games, and popular Japanese-language RPGs such as the dungeon-crawling adventure fantasy game Sword World; their official Dark Souls RPG adaptation, published in 2017, is different from the Steamforged Dark Souls RPG by virtue of its very distinct design philosophy.
Like nearly every tabletop and computer RPG together currently extant in the world, Dark Souls shares a lot of thematic and mechanical "DNA" with the original Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game. In both Dark Souls and D&D, characters grow in power by "leveling up" attributes such as Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence, the art of magic is divided into destructive disciplines favored by bookish scholars and restorative arts favored by clerics, and adventuring heroes must contend with mythical creatures such as dragons, undead, and even hungry "mimic" monsters who disguise themselves as treasure chests. When Steamforged Games converted Dark Souls into an RPG built off the D&D 5e rules, they retained many of the central/weird rules and mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons – six character attributes, a rigid class system, polyhedral dice – without much issue. Other parts of D&D, however, had to be changed drastically in order to fit the feel and themes of Dark Souls 1 through 3.
In the gameplay of FromSoftware's Dark Souls trilogy, spatial awareness and resource management are key skills players must master if they don't want their Undead or Unkindled PCs to be greeted with the blood-red YOU DIED screen over and over again. They must carefully ration their healing flasks in order to keep their health just high enough to survive a enemy's attacks, retain just enough green in their stamina bar to dodge or block attacks, and control the spaces between themselves and their foes to avoid being cornered, ambushed, or rushed down.
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To represent this tense fight for survival, the developers (according to Steamforged Games itself) replaced the standard Health Point system of D&D with a resource called Position, an abstract representation of an Undead adventure's ability to keep themselves "un-alive". Position depletes when a PC takes damage, can be spent to enhance certain PC abilities at critical junctures, and replenishes when PCs rest at bonfires. Dark Souls: The Roleplaying Game also reworks the magic system of D&D 5e so magic is fueled by the Focus resource of Dark Souls 3 rather than "spell slots" and adds narrative stakes to the cycles of death and rebirth by giving each player character "memories" that can be lost after death, reducing them to a classic Dark Souls Hollow-type enemy.
The Dark Souls TTRPG published by Steamforged hacked the rules of D&D in interesting ways, but retains certain core assumptions from D&D (long-term adventuring parties, society-oriented quests, frequent NPC interaction) that don't quite fit the melancholy, dying world of the Dark Souls franchise. The Dark Souls TRPG of Group SNE, in contrast, seems to have been built from the ground up to create a Dark Souls-style tabletop gaming experience, and as a result, has some interesting and innovative gameplay mechanics for combat and exploration.
To represent the resource management mechanics of the Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Elden Ring video games, the Dark Souls TRPG has a unique gameplay feature called Stamina Dice, a dice-rolling RPG paradigm where players roll a pool of six-sided dice at the start of each round; instead of rolling dice for each attack roll and saving throw, Dark Souls TRPG players choose and expend certain dice from their Stamina pool to attack with certain weapons, defend against enemy attacks, and activate certain character abilities. It's an interesting risk-reward gameplay mechanic that forces players to constantly make Dark Souls-style tactical decisions about how much their PCs should commit themselves to aggressive attack or cautious defense.
When exploring a dungeon or monster-haunted area in the Dark Souls TRPG, maps are semi-procedurally generated using playing cards from a classic four-suite deck; in this playing card tabletop RPG mechanic, the Ace Card marks the starting area, the cards placed around the Ace Card represent different random encounters, and the King card represents the quintessentially lethal Dark Souls boss players must overcome. GMs of this Dark Souls tabletop adaptation also have access to a pool of Malice Dice they can spend to roll to semi-randomly afflict players with strengthened monsters and other threats, letting them keep players on their toes and incentivize them to seek out the dungeon boss as quickly as is practical.
A Chicago-based Writer, Author and freelance translator. Looking to prep his readers for the next renaissance or apocalypse, whichever comes first. Frequently publishes ScreenRant articles that explore the storytelling principles and design challenges of computer/tabletop RPGs along with small treatises on the history of influential game genres. Write and publishes web fiction under the pseudonym Aldo Salt on Inkshares.com.