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.

Living Geek

(Note: This is part three of my retrospective look at D&D)
I remember being terrified of turning 30, but really, it was one of the best years of my life. H and I were in the beginning stages of our relationship, I had some amazing friends from grad school, and things were falling into place. Whenever you hit a landmark age, though, you also re-evaluate your life. You decide what's working, what's not working, what to try next, and maybe what's worth revisiting in your life. On my 30th, I decided to start playing soccer again and to try playing D&D again.  Both have been great decisions for me. However, I'm not sure my D&D resurgence would have taken root except for one factor:  Living Greyhawk.


Living games are games where your character exists independent of the modules. What I mean by that is that I can start off with a first level character playing with four people locally, take it up to 8th and gain a bunch of magic items, then fly across the country to a convention in Chicago, play with 4-5 complete strangers, and I can still use the SAME CHARACTER!  I think this is unbelievably cool.


You see, I'm the type of person who likes the blackjack tables in Vegas not because of the game, but because of the people you meet. Everyone who comes to the table has a story and since none of you are competing against each other, people tend to share. Last time I was there I talked with a dealer who had spent most of his life working at The Sands Hotel until it got torn down and it was a really fascinating life he had led.  Living Greyhawk (LG) was kind of like the D&D blackjack table. Meeting people from all walks of geek life was great. Some became regular faces. Others were one shot partnerships. Sure linear story and character development were sacrificed, but in return you were exposed to a multitude of playing styles, character concepts, and player personalities.

Home Sweet Home

Alas, the only thing constant is change. LG was a grassroots, volunteer run organization only sponsored by Wizards of the Coast. It was divided up into regions that were assigned virtual territories in the world of Grehawk. Washington, Oregon, and the rest of the NW were The Duchy of Urnst.  Adventures were developed on a national level about the world and destiny of Greyhawk, but also at a local level about your region by people in your region. This allowed for a massive amount of flavor, customization, and genuine regional difference. Adventures designed by people in Australia for their region "Perrenland" would feel genuinely different than Oregon adventures. While this created a ton of flavor and details, it did not offer enough control to the people at Hasbro, WOTC's parent company.


LG was killed off and Living Forgotten Realms was launched in its place; a living game that was very vanilla and completely controlled by the corporation. Initially I didn't like 4th edition, but I now realize it wasn't really 4th edition I didn't like, it was Living Forgotten Realms. They had taken away my quirky local coffee shop and replaced it with Starbucks. Yeah, maybe not everyone was a fan of free trade coffee sponsored angry lesbian slam poetry night, but it's better than homogeneity of assembly line coffee any day. Life goes on, the sting fades, and while I may not play living games anymore, I have at least gotten over my issues with 4th edition.

The Red Box and Jason

Note: This is part 2 of a series of posts leading up to 5th edition.

Ten Dollars?!?

I thought I'd continue my journey down memory lane regarding D&D and get a little sentimental. Very few people played first edition. Unless you are about twenty years older than me and 100 times geekier, you probably didn't. First edition was very basic. Illustrations by Gary Gygax basic. It was that bad. It was the evolution of the Chainmail system by Gygax that Arneson usded to take the focus off of miniature wars and put them on individual miniatures. However, this was a different time and these were old school geeks who were into the details more than anything. Kind of like how old school nerds designed computers to be functional and hadn't ever considered that they could be sexy until Steve Jobs got his hands on one. In the old books, the dungeons and tables were the centerpieces. Characters and sometimes story were incidental.  A far cry from today where characters are the centerpiece.  I never played this version though.

Happy National Geek Day!

What I can speak to is the original Red Box. I actually have my old Red Box books.I got it in about 3rd grade, so that places things in the mid to early 80's. This is the one where there are only seven classes: fighter, cleric, magic-user, thief (not rogue!), elf, dwarf, and halfling (the races WERE classes then).

Why did this unlock my imagination so? I'm still not sure. I suppose that since I was into fantasy books, the prospect of making my own fantasy adventure was empowering. I bought a bunch more of the Advanced D&D books but I essentially lived in the rural country. The closest person my age lived about a mile away, so my odds of finding someone I could actually play with were really slim. I attempted to play D&D on a few occasions around school and with friends, but without a car, gatherings were nigh impossible. It possibly would have faded from memory if not for Jason.

When I was in middle school, my mother brought in some extra income by tutoring a teenager named Jason. My mother would pick me up from school and I'd wait in the car while she tutored Jason in math and I would come in towards the end of the lesson when I couldn't stand the boredom. Jason was a paraplegic who only had the most limited movement in one hand due to a car accident, but had a fully functioning brain. In a situation like that, it's only natural that you would develop an amazing imagination. Jason had long hair, loved heavy metal music, and had an large colleciton of crazy RPG materials like Gamma World and Shadowrun that he would talk up and lend to me.  He was eccentric and intelligent and I remember thinking he was pretty cool.

Unfortunately, the age gap prevented any real friendship (I was in 7th grade and I believe he was a sophomore in high school). Very sad really. While 4 years age difference doesn't seem like much now, it was half a lifetime back then. By the time I was a teenager and likely old enough to hang out with him, I was way too much into all the teenage high school drama to think of contacting him and my mother had stopped tutoring him years ago.

Jason is gone now. He passed away in his mid 20's. When my mother showed me the obituary, I did find myself feeling regret. In some ways, I feel like my self consciousness about being a geek really robbed me of experiencing some truly legendary adventures with a great guy. Maybe it's kind of paltry, but I like to think that when I put myself out there on a limb openly indulging my geek nature by doing things like going to conventions or unapologetically confessing my love of D&D, I'm at least doing right by his legacy.

The New Edition

(Note: I originally planned to do this as one post, but I have decided to break it up into a series of posts leading up to my impression of 5th ed)
Today is the day that the D&D Next playtest comes out.  Despite every fiber in my body protesting this, I am excited. Why do I have such reservations? Because being let down by D&D has been a trend in my life. It's like Jagermeister. On the one hand, Jagermeister is brought out only when it is party time, so it's good and brings out good memories. Unfortunately, it's appearance can also often be traced back to when the party went seriously downhill and you had to spend the night emptying the contents of your stomach. That's what a new edition of D&D is like. You yell out in an intoxicated cheer every time it's brought out and end it feeling sorry for yourself on the bathroom floor. Sad.

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My first disappointment with D&D actually came before I even played a game.  I remember being just crazy excited about the D&D cartoon. Yeah, almost all of the magic weapon powers sucked and the episodes were mind numbingly bad, but that ranger bow rocked! (the shield was also pretty cool, but who wanted to be that whiny guy?)  It's almost exclusively the reason I bothered learning how to shoot a bow. Throw in some confusing pre-adolescent feelings about the chick with the invisibility cloak and the acrobat that made a staff... become longer... and I was there every Saturday morning.

WTF D&D?!?

Unfortunately, there was never any closure. The kids, transported to this magical dimension and tormented by Vengar and Tiamat, never found their way home. THERE WAS NO FINAL EPISODE!  It was planned. They just decided to not make it! For a while the script of the final episode was floating around the internet. There was no internet back then, though. Just one Saturday you woke up, D&D is not in the rotation, and you were left feeling confused. There is a guy starting a Kickstarter project to do the final episode. I'm not a fan of his animation style, but I suppose half a loaf is better than the dark empty hole in my childhood.



Honestly, this cartoon is kind of what's lacking for Wizards of the Coast. I don't know if I would have bought that Red Box set if I hadn't already been intrigued by the cartoon. Getting it to fly in this day and age would be tough. Cartoons were allowed to be more violent back then and even by the standards of the 80's it was singled out as being too violent.  A way to get kids into the game that doesn't dumb down the game is sorely needed.  Just make sure it has an ending!

Sigh.  Even if it means including a stupid  unicorn in the party...