Tell Me How To Get Started

That was another player invading you.

What the fuck is an invader? Is this a thing that happens when I'm in human form?

Yes. When you are in human form you open yourself up to PvP, other players invade your game and can kill you. It also means you can summon help from other players for hard battles.
You can prevent this by playing offline (just unplug your internet for a second) at which point you can go human without worrying about multi player/pvp, or by staying hollow.
You become hollow again when you die, so if you only want to kindle a fire you could go human, kindle your fire, get yourself killed on purpose and then pick up your puddle with your souls and humanity.

I think playing offline is a mistake, IMO. The benefits outweigh the negatives. A death to an invader is like any other death, so just get back to retrieving your souls and get back about your business. I suppose you lose being human and have to spend a humanity to reverse if you were doing a boss run, but hard humanity is relatively easy to come by (get the gold ring in Sens and kill the rat in the Depths for the early game, the mid-late game is in the DLC).

Pro tip if you don't really like fighting invaders: backtrack. Since you probably cleared out from your bonfire to where you are, you should have an easy run back to your bonfire. Fight close to there and if you die you won't have a long, dangerous trek to your bloodstain. The game gives you a fair amount of waning when you are being invaded so don't worry about being caught with your pants down. I suppose you can reverse grief and suicide, but you don't lose anything for trying to fight.

False. Any time you die in this game it's because of a mistake you made. You picked the wrong fight. You pressed the wrong button. You misjudged a distance. Invasion is totally out of your control (aside from that one item that I think prevents it). It's a unique death, different from any other in the game. Sure you can get your stuff back, but it's still bullshit.

So, there you go. Different perspectives, both valid, on the PvP experience. You can engage it in early or later or never. I don't find cowering in a nerd rage fetal position about core mechanics of the game all that constructive relative to just giving it a try now and then, but you have to pace yourself. Humanity feels like a very constrained resource early on, so it's natural to be skittish about it when you're starting out; I'd say it's normal to expect to die after using humanity to boost those first two or three bonfires anyway, at which point you'll be at the blacksmith and can do a whole lot more to improve your position relative to invaders. So I guess my answer is "It's not unusual to want it out of your game at first, but try not to write it off altogether because it feels unfair".

For my money, joining the Forest Covenant is a great option because you can wear the summon ring wherever you want to be in the game as opposed to being area restricted, and you see a wide variety of combat styles in a relatively risk-free environment. You'll have duels, you'll have 2 vs 1, 1 vs 2, and everything in between. But the main thing is that it's fast, it's easy to get relative to the darkwraith covenant, and while you may die 30 times (consequence free, you don't even have to retrieve a stain) you only need 3 wins to get the fog ring which is fantastic at low levels. In fact, I would argue it's designed for low level characters who can get their primary damage dealers up to +5 or so and work together to take down the generally more powerful people they invade, as the rewards you get for winning are decent if you're low level but worthless to high level characters.

But again, people go their whole Dark Souls career without it and have a fine time, and there's really not much worth arguing about in terms of whether it's "bullshit" because you're looking at completely different views on what the game is actually supposed to be in the aggregate.

Me, I like invading new players although I scale my gear down accordingly and usually do something thematic or unusual. Judging from the responses I get, people seem to enjoy it when it's not done to grief them but more to provide an authentic fight that feels thrilling and unpredictable for the both of us. That's easily 9/10 interactions I have as an invadee, but obviously spread out over the totality of the game, and I do tend to have a less sporting plan B in case I'm dealing with someone who's obviously trying to grief.

With respect to the amount of control you have, it's true that as a new player you really don't have much going for you. But at the same point in the game as you gain more experience, you can do a great deal more to insulate yourself from being one-shotted or caught in a bad spot, plus you'll have a lot more soft humanity from dying less. Like everything else in the game, it rewards experience over the long run.

Absolutely not. There's a word for players invading newbs in the starting areas with low-level builds and high-end gear. My advice is to play Hollow as much as you can because you will be invaded by players who get their kicks out of killing you again and again otherwise.

Edit: This is for PC and for the early areas (Undead Burg and Parish) obviously.

Staying hollow is different from playing offline. The former is a decision that is built in to the game, and the latter is opting out of a significant part of the game altogether. Invasions are an exciting part of the game and anyone who decides they're bullshit after losing their first couple and plays offline from then on is missing out not just on them but on the rest of the fantastic and unique multiplayer. It should only be done as an absolute last resort imo.

It's also entirely possible that you ran into a hacker, although a sufficiently over-equipped griefer will seem indistinguishable from that to a character with unupgraded equipment. Either way, try not to take it as normative, as the griefers are not really representative of the PC or XBL communities. They just leave a hell of a mark every time they show up.

I'm still not super clear on the whole humanity thing. So far, the only thing I've used humanity for is to kindle fires because then I get twice as much health juice.

While I'm asking questions, do I have to be in human form to fight ghosts? I stumbled down into a very dark wet area with a bunch of no-attack zombies and then got murder-raped by ghosts. Do I need a special weapon or something to fight them, or is this another in a long line of the game trying to tell me I shouldn't be where I am?

Absolutely (because a like is not enough).

Here are a couple of good posts here about humanity.

As for those ghosts, no. You need an item, but that area is generally above a beginners station and being murdered like that is the games way of saying 'find another way to go.'

That's New Londo ruins (the area with the blacksmith) and I don't think you're supposed to be there yet.

On PvP: I play mostly offline because the game kicks me out regularly complaining about my frame rates and making me play offline. So most of the time it isn't an issue.
I got invaded once though, at a very low level in Undead Parish. The dude waited until my health had dropped to 20% (I was new to the zone and got ambushed by mobs) and just as I was about to drink a health potion he jumped from behind barrels and one-hit killed me, then started wildly gesturing before disappearing again. That sure was fun and taught me a lot. Well, it mainly taught not to get invaded again, since the game is hard enough for me without that sort of bullshit. (Mind you, I don't play on PvP servers in mMOs either, for exactly the same reason.)

I'm 40 hours in. Yes, in Dark Souls that's maybe not so long. But in any other game I'd either be done by now or be an unstoppable badass half-robot killing machine. Dude invaded my game, and before I even knew where he was I had a sword in my back. I'm sure you're not a dick, so that wasn't you. But frankly that's just bullshit. It's not curling up in a fetal position to point that out.

The game is rough enough on a new player without heaping additional punishment on them, especially since NOTHING IS EXPLAINED. I don't know what covenants do. I don't know how invasions work. I die so often my soft humanity has never been higher than 2. I get that it's part of the game. I get that there's technically a perfectly narrative-driven reason for it. That doesn't mean I have to like it.

On to other complaints.

I'm enjoying the game, but there's just way too much left out. Having to rely on the player community to fill out some of the more obscure stuff (hidden areas, whatever) seems fine in the sense of fostering a community, but this goes beyond that. My pyromancy flame is still +1 because I was focusing on other stuff and inadvertently sent the guy who upgrades it to his death. I answered a question the wrong way for the second one and, needing to get past him and not knowing who he was, killed him. Apparently there's someone else who can upgrade it but I can't find her. The Internet tells me maybe I'm fucked because I don't have it to +10, so for all this time I've put in it seems I'm going to have to just ignore that part of the skill tree.

These were all very stupid decisions to make, but I had no way of knowing that at the time. I shouldn't have to consult the Internet every time I answer a question to avoid having an entire part of the game closed off to me.

+10 is definitely not required for her to appear - both of my current characters can attest to that. It does seem to be the one thing that *guarantees* that she appears, but it's definitely not a requirement. Long story short, I'd check back to her spawn location from time-to-time.

So, I should just occasionally climb all the way the hell down into Blighttown on the off chance she might be there. More than anything, it bothers me that the community seems to have deciphered SO MUCH of this game, but the conditions for making her appear are a total mystery.

There will be another, much faster way, to boogie on down to Blighttown soonish. Also, you do know there are two ways down there? One does not involve going through The Depths.

Also, find other fun ways to annihilate opponents in the meantime. Archery? Really Big Swords? Huge Fuck-off Axes? The possibilities are endless! Also, sorcery. And Mmmmmiracles!

"I keep killing NPCs, how come I can't do the things I need NPCs for?"

Seriously, I understand if you don't like going to the internet for answers to every little thing, but why would you assume you should just kill NPCs at random?

asdfasdf cursed AGAIN on the way to that fucking boss. Goddammit.

To be fair I've almost done it a few times; you see a guy standing there and maybe he's an NPC, or maybe a mini boss and I can get a quick free swing in.

You're missing a shortcut Jeff - there should be no need to go to basilisk town in order to get back to the gaping dragon.

Yeah I figured as much. I haven't spent enough time in the sewers to figure out how to get back there though. :(

It's a really easy shortcut to miss, though. Or was for me. Explore that corridor just before Domhnall of Zena--you missed a turn in there.

I was describing the process we all go through that first time someone tears your shit up, fair or not. If you want to stay in that position permanently, that's your call. If you want to be an unstoppable badass as a product of raw time invested in the game, then you probably need a different game because that's just never going to happen.

It's not an entire part. It's a single tool that's temporarily closed off to you. If you can't handle "don't attack nonaggressive NPCs without expecting consequences" as common sense, then perhaps this game is not for you.

More than anything, it bothers me that you feel entitled to pyromancy or entitled to win or entitled to what the community should have figured out for you. 40 hours or 40 minutes, the key variable in how difficult any of the things you describe as insurmountable is you. If you want a pyromancer minus the choice you made to kill someone for no good reason, make a new one, as I promise you'll get to exactly where you are in no time. In fact, it's often that fresh start that's needed in order to get some perspective on how much you have learned and how much more control you have over your fate with a new character. With experience, the run from start to both bells is pretty much a matter of a few hours without rushing.

To answer your question, you need to be cursed in order to be able to hit and defend against ghosts. Being cursed for real is what happens when basilisks breath weapon you to death. It is not recommended as it's expensive to cure and takes half your health per curse, cumulative. The weapon the ghosts occasionally drop, the jagged ghost blade, can hit them without a curse but you still have the problem of not being able to block them, so it's generally a poor or Very Bold choice.
The optimal path is usually to use one of the two items you get out of the jar at the very start of that bridge, which are transient curses. There's another two just to the right of the first two ghosts in another jar. They live up to their name, in that they last exactly five minutes and then wear off, so if you're not paying attention things can quickly go south. OTOH, there's no hit to your health, ghosts are weak enough to pick off with decent bow skills or better than decent magic (a modestly upgraded light crossbow can work wonders for a low level character that doesn't want to scuffle). Ont the up up side the items you can find in the ruins are tremendously valuable, ranging from a firekeepers soul that's easy to suicide run (just to the right and back from the first ghosts, emphasis on suicide or homeward bone immediately after picking it up). Taking on the rather challenging boss, though, requires that you have beat the wolf boss in the forest, so that's probably not in your immediate future.

Second session down. I foolishly decided to explore in a different direction before going back to the Burg to reclaim my souls; after talking to the smith down in the New Londo Ruins, I thought the stairs kept going down but they did not and I fell to my death. Goodbye, souls. So I reclaimed those, snagged the Estoc, then went back to the Burg. Easily fought my way to the bonfire. At last, a new home base! Then I pressed on a bit further, needing souls to level up so I can move up to the dex necessary to wield the Estoc or the longsword that I found. A couple of false starts but eventually I fight my way through to the guy who throws the flaming barrel down the stairs at you.

Then I notice some stairs down under a treasure chest and decide to explore. As I come down, I see a giant, armored knight with his back to me, and some kind of item down the hall past him. I'm thinking, score, item! So I tiptoe up behind the knight and take a swing at him, and it does an amount of damage that is known scientifically as "fuck all." Then I turn around and start running so I can get up some stairs and try to do a drop attack on him. Which I manage, but which still does no damage, and then he one-shots me. Note that I still haven't done my leveling at this point so I'm still just wielding that starting axe and the pyromancer flame. Instead of fighting my way through, I decide I will just sprint back to the point where I got dropped. This works, but then I turn around and find that like twelve guys have followed me through that sprint, so I hole up in the bottom of that one tower with a sniper on top and axe everybody who tries to come through. Great success!

Then I try going up the stairs where the guy drops the flaming barrel. I climb to the top and find one of those curtains of white light and also a message that says "Try a drop attack." That sounds like a boss, so I go back down, open a door, and head down some more stairs. Here, I encounter a message that says "I did it!" Well, okay, congrats, whoever. And I keep going down and I see a huge, armored knight with a bigass club. So I sprint back up the stairs but I hear him following me, so I decide to hold my ground and try hitting him with some drop attacks. I manage to do so a couple of times but he doesn't seem to take any damage, just gets knocked down. I get in a couple of hits before he one shots me, and I am dead again. So I spawn, fight back to my bloodstain, then head back to the bonfire and level. Stats-wise, the Estoc doesn't look a whole lot better than my axe, but I haven't tried it out in combat yet to see if it might be a little better in practice. I might also be reading the screen wrong, because I am terrible at figuring out these stats screens.

Might try out New Londo Ruins or Valley of Drakes, rather than trying to wreck those huge knights. Or maybe I will go through the white light and see what's there.

I found the shortcut! I also got introduced to the dragon's tail!

One less gaping dragon for Lordran to worry about. Sadly I didn't get his tail; it was surprisingly difficult to hit it reliably and since I was being super conservative I only allowed myself one swing at it per charge.

Fuck you very much, Taurus Demon.

Haha, he is a total jerk the first time you run into him!

fwiw, I defeated him by cutting my weight down below the 25% threshold. That gave me much more mobility, which let me dodge his attacks. That, and I learned not to panic every time he twitched.

Yeah, motherfucker! I took a piece out of him today too! I think I'm finally getting the basics down - I'm now wandering through Undead Parish and am being taken apart by Something Gargoyles.

Twin Gargoyles sucked; I ended up going human and summoning some AI aid for that one.

I was amazed how easy they were the second time around, but the first time it was all fire and confusion.

Wow, the monsters in Blighttown are a big upgrade!

I cheesed him—stand at the top of the tower and hit him with a couple of firebombs, then go down the ladder while he's jumping up. When he jumps back down, climb back up and hit him with firebombs. When I ran out of firebombs, he was only one plunge attack from death.

Of course, then I went across the bridge, down a stairway, up a ladder, up a stairway, and ran into a goddamn black knight. And then after he killed me, I got killed on my way back trying to pick up my bloodstain. Goodbye, 12,000 souls.

Dark Souls is kinda weird in this respect; almost all the various weapons you find are competitive with each other, provided you upgrade them. You should pick weapons based on how much you like their moveset, not based on their stats. The stats will take care of themselves in most cases after upgrades.

The occasional pre-upgraded & unique weapons you find are a major disservice to new players, IMO. In my first playthrough I got the Drake Sworrd fairly early on, and that got me into the mindset of looking for weapons with high stats, which is just not the way the game really works.

I'm just saying I'm not exactly just starting the game, and having someone be able to invade and one-hit at this stage is a bit bullshit.

It's an entire class of tools, which is a fairly significant thing to have potentially completely closed off due to poor communication from the game.

His conversation tree was closed off to me because I answered a question wrong. I know now (because I had to look it up) that I should have left and come back later and he'd have asked me again. Let's just lay this out though. I'm at the bottom of Blighttown, near dead from a boss fight, with a pocketful of souls and a bonfire clearly visible and blocked by an NPC that seemingly will never talk to me again. The lack of information from the game tells me I can either fight my way back out to the Blighttown bonfire and probably die from poison, or go through what seemed to be a dead-end NPC.

As for Laurentius, what's the excuse there? I didn't attack him. My mistake was apprently to not be an asshole to him. He asked me if I can tell him about a cool spell I have. What kind of a dick says "Fuck you, not telling"? The thanks for my kindness was that he's now gone forever. That's just flat out shitty design.

I don't think I said anything about being entitled to anything. I just pointed out that the opacity of the game can be intriguing at times, but at other times is simply frustrating. I don't want it to hold my hand the whole way through, but there's a gray area between that and being incomprehensible to most players without external help.

Sure. I'm the problem. The game is never wrong. Got it.

Bad game design left you without access to a weapon you were interested in pursuing? Throw away the last forty hours and start over. Sounds totally reasonable.

I'm a little farther along than just ringing the second bell. I doubt I'm going to make it through Bell Gargoyle, Taurus Demon, Spare Demon, Iron Golem, Capra Demon, Quelaag, Gaping Dragon, Sif, Moonlight Butterfly, Pinwheel, a Hydra, an Elder Dragon, and all the various Titanite Demons in a few hours. As you've gathered already, I'm not exactly an expert at all this. I long ago decided to just suck it up and at least make it to the end on this build.

I'm not saying I didn't make mistakes, or that the mistakes were unavoidable. I'm just saying that it's entirely possible to make these mistakes without malice or idiocy and find yourself in a shit situation. This is a good game, but it's not perfect, and the blame for this situation is not 100% on me.

I agree that the triggers for NPCs going hollow are often obscure. I think that Laurentius is the only one that really screws you over though as most of the others only go hollow once you get all their stuff. The miracles guy vanishing sucks as well, but at least he comes back.

Can Eingyi upgrade a pyro flame? The wiki says yes, after you jump a hurdle for him.

Yup. Here's the trigger:

I do understand where you're coming from, and the situation is not at all 100% on you. But part of the attraction in Dark Souls, for me at least, is that there is permanent consequence to actions. Sometimes the consequences of actions are obscure or inscrutable -- just like real life -- and this lends events in game significance. You are never going to forget the time that you killed the NPCs, or the time that a vendor went hollow on you. It sucks that you don't get to access pyromancy, but that's a choice you made: you killed a character that you didn't know or understand in order to reach temporary safety. You may regret that, but it's part of the appeal.

Incidentally, the fight with Queelaag gave you a homeward bone. You could have just used that to warp back to a bonfire if you were worried about dying. If it's any consolation, pyromancy is not needed to complete the game, or even all that helpful (IMO). You don't have much invested in it, so why not just move on and try to enjoy the experience for what it is?

I actually really like what happens to Laurentius. He's doing his own thing. He's not a character that exists to further your progress, but instead has his own agenda that he will (eventually) pursue on his own. Few of the characters in Dark Souls are standard RPG vendors. Most are in Lordran for a reason, and it's interesting to learn about those reasons and find out what happens to the characters. It's also very interesting the ways you can subvert or prevent certain events, once you understand each of the characters' cycles.

So yeah, you said the "wrong" thing to Laurentius. That's because he's not just a resource to be exploited. He has his own agenda, and he pursues that. I don't think that's bad design. I think it's very interesting design. It also should make you question what kindness actually is in Lordran.

Laurentius is pretty much a dick. I don't know what you did to him or what happened, but it's probably for the best.