I started playing D&D around the same time that I first played Dark Souls, two gaming obsessions (oddly not Dark Souls itself - I'm much more into Bloodborne and Elden Ring, but it's all of the same genus of game, from the same studio) that have stuck with me now for a bit over a decade.
While I personally prefer a class-based RPG system, I really appreciate how Souls-likes use a skill-based system to create very different kinds of characters (admittedly less for Bloodborne, which has a narrower style of gameplay for the most part).
It would be fun, I think, to find a way to make a system that works on the same principles for TTRPGs (basically using item scaling and stat requirements to govern what a player can do, and thus allowing different flavors of magic, for instance, to build into by focusing on certain spellcasting stats or spreading between them).
But while that's a really tricky bit of design to work out (we need to keep numbers manageable where you can just roll some dice to get your result and not need a calculator or an abacus) there is one element of these games that I think could be kind of interesting to work out:
The manner in which conditions work.
Ok, for those who aren't familiar with these games, or have never played them, there are often various conditions that can stack up on your character, or which you can inflict on foes. The most basic is Poison, which we'll use as our main example.
Getting poisoned in these games is pretty nasty, as while the condition lasts, you'll continually lose health. But you can avoid it if you're careful:
When an enemy has an attack that inflicts poison, you'll get a little bar on your screen, roughly below your character depending on your camera angle. Each poison-inflicting attack will fill that meter (or if you run through one of the many, many, many poison swamps in these games, it'll tick up for every second you stay in the fetid waters). Until that meter fills, you're actually fine. And if you go for a while without getting any more poison build-up, the meter will start to drain until it's empty and no longer displayed on the screen.
But if it does fill, you are hit with the condition - in the case of poison, that damage over time will continue onward. At that point, the meter will actually start to drain, with the condition lasting as long as the meter still has anything in it. (This actually means that once you are poisoned, you're effectively immune to poison build-up, though the second that the poisoned condition ends on you, if you're still wading through a poisoned waters, you'll start to build it up again.)
This is how all conditions work - some of them have instantaneous effects, like Bleed, which will cause a sudden burst of massive damage, which then instantly drains completely but of course makes you vulnerable to the next bleed. There's often a more powerful poison variant (in Elden Ring it's Scarlet Rot. I think in Dark Souls it's Toxic, and in Bloodborne it's just... fast poison).
Now, one of the interesting things is that often in these games if you equip an item that helps defend against these conditions, raising, say, your Immunity in Elden Ring, you'll actually see these bars appear on your screen, partially filled, and draining.
And that, to me, implies something about the way these work:
Typically, in these games, you have stats that affect your resistance to these conditions (as well as resistances to different damage types). What I think these resistances do (it might be more complicated than this, but bear with me,) is essentially make that meter longer. If you have, say, 135 Immunity, that means that you'll need 135 "poison points" before you actually get poisoned. If an enemy has an attack that inflicts 40 poison points on a hit, you'll thus be fine (other than the damage it causes) if you take three of them, but the fourth gives you this further problem.
The reason that equipping an item that increases your immunity causes that meter to show up on your screen, then, I'd guess, is that if you had 135 and now suddenly have 160, there's 25 points within that meter that suddenly have been added, and rather than just start you off with an empty meter, it's basically treating it like you permanently have Poison Points up to your maximum. I imagine they do it this way to prevent weird shenanigans that might be caused by swapping gear mid-fight. If we invert it - if we figure that with 135 Immunity you're "135 points away from being Poisoned," and suddenly your maximum is 160, then the game needs to drain your now-larger meter to get to your new maximum.
The point, though, is that this could be a system we replicate in a TTRPG.
Poison, of course, is different in D&D - you can be poisoned without taking any damage, and that damage-over-time association that it has in most games is not there in D&D (though there are some effects that have that).
But the way it generally works is that an effect subjects you to a Constitution saving throw, and if you pass the DC set by the effect (and/or the monster producing said effect,) you avoid being poisoned.
But let's say we built a system in which, say, your Constitution Score instead set your Poison Tolerance (Resistance and Immunity already have meanings in D&D, so we'll say Tolerance for now). We might then have monsters that inflict, say, 5 Poison Points on you with an attack. As it is now, higher Con makes it less likely for you to get poisoned, but it's more predictable.
Now, does this make sense in a game where we generally want combat to only last 3-4 rounds? Perhaps not. But if we were to build a new system that has a different attitude toward how fast combat can flow, maybe this would be an avenue worth exploring.
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