Failed Save vs Crappy Movie

No sooner do I invoke the name of the DnD movie than I am exposed to this: the trailer for Dungeons and Dragons the Movie 3: the Book of Vile Darkness. It is really, really sad.

So I pointed out in my post on a few weeks ago that fantasy movies don't specifically have to be bad. Yet the D&D ones consistently are. Why is this? Simple: they are not paying attention to what is different from a generic fantasy movie and D&D.

D&D is composed of two things. One part is the plot and the heroes who quest in a land of danger, magic, and destiny. The other is about the people who sit around a table (possibly drinking Mountain Dew) while rolling dice. You film one without the other and you end up with either a bland fantasy movie or a boring documentary.  Ah, but you put them together and you have... Dungeons and Dragons!

Dead Gentelment Producations (last I checked, these are local boys stationed out of the NW!) the creators of  The Gamers and The Gamers 2: The Dorkness Rising understood this. In both of these movies, there are two stories going on:  the story of the Gamers and their personal conflicts in the real world, and the story of their campaign where the same actors are acting out a fantasy movie. They use this primarily for comedic effect and execute it brilliantly considering the low budgets they were working with.

As the worst Futurama movie, it is still 10x better than
the D&D movies.

Another way to handle this duality is a concept that is actually right there in front of the guys at WOTC: the gamers somehow end up actually in the game world. If it seems like you may have heard this before, it's because you have. It is basically the same thing that happened in the D&D cartoon, except they used a carnival ride as the plot device instead of the actual game to make it more Narnia-ish; likely to appease book burning fundamentalists who were overly focused on D&D at the time. It's also reminiscent of what happens to the Futurama crew in Bender's Game.


It doesn't have to be that cheesy or ironic though. Joel Rosenberg used this mechanic in his 1983 book "The Sleeping Dragon", which became the Guardians of the Flame series. In this book, a group of college students playing a D&D-like game suddenly become their characters in a fantasy world. He does a good job of capturing the real reactions actual people would have such as panic, anger, despair in addition to wonderment. One character that enjoys it too much and treats it like a game ends up dead early on, establishing the gravity of their situation. You could also soften it up, but gritty material like this could also go over well now that Game of Thrones has set the stage.




So there we are. Two effective ways of making a D&D movie. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and WOTC chose neither, tromping out into the wilderness without supplies and ignoring the baying of hungry wolves. And that has made all the difference.