The world of Dark Souls' most frustrating NPCs, a character named Patches, that is exactly the case. Players are required to do some serious digging to learn what he is all about.
The nature and history of Patches are both just as mysterious as the rest of Dark Souls' series lore. Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to find this lore in any single one of the Souls games. In order to uncover the mystery of why Patches is the way he is, players have to take a much more comprehensive look at the series as a whole.
There are several different occasions where Patches tries to kill the player in the first Dark Souls title. First, upon meeting the character, Patches will ask them if they are a cleric. If players respond "Yes" he will immediately attack them. Later on, in the Catacombs, he tries to flip a bridge that the player is walking across. Lastly, in the Tomb of the Giants, Patches tricks the player into looking over the edge of a cliff before proceeding to kick the Chosen Undead off. Additionally, the character again appears in Dark Souls 3 as the Unbreakable Patches and yet again attempts to deceive and murder the player. The character's dialogue from all of these games suggests each version is the same duplicitous character, and that he is motivated solely out of self-interest.
It's In Patches' Trans-Universal Nature To Deceive
As it turns out, the character "Patches" appears in several different FromSoftware games within the Souls series. In each of these installments, he is also incredibly untrustworthy. A character named Patches is also in Demon's Souls and another FromSoftware title, Armored Core: For Answer. This suggests that the character is actually trans-universal in nature, thus explaining why he doesn't have any sort of concrete origin.
Yet another form of the character, going by the name Patches, appears in Bloodborne. At first, this seems to be a mere coincidence, given that the Patches of the Dark Souls games is a normal person and in Bloodborne he is a spider. However, yet again, this form of Patches. Patches the Spider tricks the player into dying by knocking them off a cliff, just like in Dark Souls.
For players that want to learn about Patches sordid history, they won't be able to find it within the lore of the game. However, by looking outside of Dark Souls at the series as a whole, along with the history of the developers themselves, it becomes a little more clear where exactly Patches came from and what he's all about, and it turns out he's always been around waiting to trick the next unlucky person to stumble past.