Dark Souls D&D: part 1, hitting things

11 Apr, 2026

I am converting Dark Souls into a 5th edition D&D rule set. I've been working on this off-and-on for a few months now. I chose to start with 5th edition D&D because that is the most popular. Right away I bolted on some drastic changes to the rules that redefine how the game works, but at its core the rules I am writing rely on the movement-action-bonus-reaction economy of combat that 5th edition players would be familiar with.

Weapons are where I started.

Right away, going through tables on wikidot I decided to take the damage that was listed for each weapon, divide it by 10, and then assign a dice roll that would hit that as a maximum roll. For example, the Longsword does 80 damage. Divided by 10, this is 8, thus 1d8 damage. So far, not much of a difference. But let's also follow the halberd. It does 110 damage, so divided down to 11, I chose to replicate this exactly with a 1d10+1 roll despite the fact that D&D uses a basic 1d10 roll. I chose this method to determine the base damage because I knew that I would be multiplying these numbers drastically.

Which leads me to the next part: Stat Scaling damage bonuses!

In Dark Souls weapons deal more damage based on higher stat bonuses, but not all weapons draw from the same stats. There are Dexterity-scaling weapons, and Strength-scaling weapons, and sometimes Intelligence- and Faith-scaling weapons, and there are a lot of weapons that scale with multiple stats. The first thing I had to determine was how much of this scaling I wanted to retain.
There are different levels (or grades) of scaling. From lowest to highest, they're ranked by letter: E, D, C, B, A, S. I collapsed this down to four categories. Anything C or lower became a simple stat addition, these weapons you add your stat bonus and nothing more. B and A class scaling became the stat multiplied by two. Finally, the best scaling class of S is the stat bonus multiplied by three. Instead of using the letter ratings, these became numbers alongside the stats.

Here's how the Longsword converts:
in Dark Souls it does 80 damage, with C-scaling in both Strength and Dexterity
in my version, 1d8 STR+DEX

Here's how the Halberd converts:
in Dark Souls it has 110 damage, with D-scaling in both Strength and Dexterity
in my version, 1d10+1 STR+DEX

This is actually a dramatic change from before, because not only does the halberd have a slight advantage of damage over the longsword, but it retains that advantage as you level up. In the video game, the D-scaling will eventually be outpaced by the C-scaling. How will this affect long-term play? I think negligibly. As the characters increase in level a slight 1-3 extra damage will be small compared to the output of damage they will be capable of.

Finally, let's look at a weapon that uses a higher level of scaling: the Club!
in Dark Souls it deals 87 damage, with A-scaling in Strength
in my version, 1d8+1 STR2 damage
I've "rounded up" the maximum damage to 9 which gives the club the +1 bonus, and the A-scaling damage allows the wielder to use double their Strength bonus as a damage bonus.

I knew I had to address stat requirements as well, so I calculated out the 1 through 100 ranges of stats in Dark Souls and tried to emulate it along a 1 through 30 stat scale, which is how high 5th edition stats are allowed to go. This put starting stats at such a low scale that I removed negative modifiers for ability scores completely and created a new table for stat bonuses:

I'm sorry, I don't know how to make this table thinner.

This was a revision from my original notes, but I've done some funky things with the math to make the tabletop experience less of a curve. Nobody wants to grind for sessions to get out of the "soft cap" of an ability score, but I still retained some of the "grind" toward maxing out a stat.
This now gives me a baseline for creating stat requirements on weapons. The halberd requires a 16 strength and 12 dexterity in the video game, translating the stats into D&D put me at Strength 12 and Dexterity 10. My conversion means no character starts with a stat higher than 10 which means the halberd is now something to attain. In contrast, the longsword requires a 10 in both strength and dexterity in the video game, and because of the way I changed the scale between the two games I decided also to completely ignore any video game requirement of a stat of 10 or less. Any character can wield a longsword!
And we haven't even gotten into weapon improvement or items yet!

I'm sure more funkiness will emerge from my weapon writing that doesn't match the video game exactly, but I'm not trying to mimic the game. I'm trying to bring the feeling of playing Dark Souls into a D&D space.