I started playing this yesterday - I've never played any game like this before in terms of the difficulty/learning curve.
Managed to ring the first bell at the church but have probably died 30-40 times.
People said to discover the World yourself, but I did end up spending 10 minutes watching somebody play the bit I was on, which clarified what I was doing wrong...
Main things I was doing wrong:
Holding the block/shield button down and not releasing it between blows, so my stamina wasn't recharging
Not utilising the back-stab effectively. That made so much difference to how quickly I could kill things.
I was reading about armour weight, so I need to look at how much I have as my starting class was the knight and he seems to move/dodge quite slow. Is it worth hording any gear in this? I've been dropping a lot of stuff. Can you sell it for souls anywhere? Blacksmith doesn't seem to buy them.
I had always managed to retreive my power from a bloodstain and had 13 Humanity, but I went to an area with loads of Ghosts and they mullered me and I wasn't able to get back to my body so I lost all that