Dungeons and Dragons (2022)

[Dienekes]

The Sorcerer and the Wizard being the romantic tension while they nerd fight over whose academic discipline is better seems perfectly suited to modern audiences.

Not where I was intending to go, but essentially yeah. Easiest ways to get the audience to handle finicky world building details is to make it a point of contention among characters the audience likes.

[Tvtyrant]

Not where I was intending to go, but essentially yeah. Easiest ways to get the audience to handle finicky world building details is to make it a point of contention among characters the audience likes.

Yup, and what better way to do it then to use classic romantic tropes? I saw a few episodes of Bones, it is almost literally the same characters but as police people.

Selling an argument between a Totemist and a Druid seems harder.

[Tyrant]

I actually find two of those references to be cringey (the Paladin/Bard one works, just). Especially the entire Wizard/Sorcerer/Warlock divide, it still doesn't make sense to me for those to be in-setting terms. At least not in the way D&D uses them (something like The Dark Eye's Mage/Witch distinction makes sense to me, which you are depends on your training).

Then again that's one of the reasons I've done off modern D&D, I'd much rather run something like Basic Fantasy with it's more generic classes these days.

Or to put it simply, references to classes should be references to actual logical in-world terms. Like the Mages in the first film, an order of Paladins, Warlock as in a 'deals with demons' term, necromancer because they use death magic, and so on. The Sorcerer/Wizard disctinction, while great in the tabletop game where they let us separate two sets of mechanics, makes less sense in a film where making such a distinction can slow the pace down if the film isn't specifically about magic users.

Unless the big bad is an evil Sorcerer and the party Wizard insists on making the distinction to the mild confusion of her party members they should probably be used relatively interchangeably. Because as far as the non-D&D playing section of the audience is concerned one throws fireballs and the other throws fireballs.

Assuming they go Forgotten Realms, one of the only reasons I can see them seriously going into it would be if they are dealing with Thay. Wizards are the rulers, not Sorcerers, and that is relevant to their whole outlook. Having said that, the Haunted Lands trilogy of books seemed to throw around the term Warlock an awful lot when referring to Red Wizards for some reason. I really wouldn't expect them to delve into it beyond some of the examples people have mentioned (a Wizard and a Sorcerer debating, some plot relevant distinction between divine and arcane magic or possibly psionics, etc.).

[Psyren]

I think he's referring to Bender's Game.

Correct!

That said I wouldn't go overboard. Any more than 3 types of magic might be pushing it for the audience to comprehend and care about in any meaningful way.

And those three types should be as broadly different as possible. People can grok "wizard vs. cleric" - in part because one wears armor, prays a lot, and is the one that heals. So you could use them to do arcane vs. divine. Arcane vs. arcane would probably be too much for a movie trying to be economical with its runtime.

[Hopeless]

It could be done easier by wizards believing they're in charge of protecting reality and look upon sorcerers as dangerous threats to their place as the Jedi to the Republic, when they're actually the Sith, they've just done a great job hiding the truth behind their rise to power!

I mean am I the only one who despite Gandalf claiming he's one of the only 5 wizards think he's actually a Cleric of the Light God whose just trying to prevent a fallen counterpart conquer the realm or free his imprisoned deity?

[Anonymouswizard]

And those three types should be as broadly different as possible. People can grok "wizard vs. cleric" - in part because one wears armor, prays a lot, and is the one that heals. So you could use them to do arcane vs. divine. Arcane vs. arcane would probably be too much for a movie trying to be economical with its runtime.

And we should really great this as a reboot of the D&D movie series where audiences can't be expected to have seen the previous films (because I suspect the majority of the intended audience hasn't). Note that the old films introduced Wizards in the first film, Clerics in the second, and Paladins in the third, so they barely scratched the surface.

If you want to introduce three kinds of magic in one film you probably want to go broad with Arcane/Divine/Psionic or Arcane/Divine Primal. Pick two to four distinctive spells for each type of magic and sick to them, Arcane casters their for, lighting, and teleport, Divine casters heal wounds and turn undead, and Primal casters summon animals and storms. You could probably do an entire film with just those seven abilities of you wanted and not have anybody raise hope we spells show up.

Then in movie two you introduce Warlocks and Mystic Theurges, and in movie three Sorcerers and Paladins, or something like that. Movie four then includes Wizards versus Sorcerers as a more explicit thing, before film five revolves around a Druid protecting their land from an evil artificer...

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I think having three kinds of magic in one film could work fine. You don't have to explain everything, you just need to show that character one, with the black robes and the red eyes, calls herself a sorcerer/sorceress/warlock/whatever and blasts everything with fire and lightning, while the tame archmage wizard from the good lands with the red robes and the reading glasses casts spells that modify the environment and strengthen his allies. Maybe explain specifically that he has to prepare spells, because otherwise it leads to plot holes where he could have just won the final fight in a premature and anticlimactic manner by creatively applying something he did earlier. It does not matter if all of the audience can tell all sorcerers and all wizards apart, you just need to tell them that these are both magic users but they're different. People got that Luke Skywalker couldn't sprout lightning from his fingertips for some reason, they'll get this. It gets easier the more dissimilar the characters are. A necromancer sorcerer, a classic "that's so a ripoff of Radagast from The Hobbit" druid and a paladin of the goddess of light can not exactly be mistaken for one another.

[Aotrs Commander]

It could be done easier by wizards believing they're in charge of protecting reality and look upon sorcerers as dangerous threats to their place as the Jedi to the Republic, when they're actually the Sith, they've just done a great job hiding the truth behind their rise to power!

I mean am I the only one who despite Gandalf claiming he's one of the only 5 wizards think he's actually a Cleric of the Light God whose just trying to prevent a fallen counterpart conquer the realm or free his imprisoned deity?

Yolu're half-right, except that he (and the other fur wizards) are not clerics, but straight-up demigods. (And Morgoth was also not a diety, just a particularly powerful demigod; Middle-Earth technically only has the one actual deity, Eru.)

Gandalf is not a good example, despite the superficial appearence, of what a "wizard" is in D&D terms is.



Alao, band of of five; divine caster, arcane caster, spontaneous arcane caster, warlock and psion. (Or whatever that translates to in 5E nowadays, I duno.) Go the whole hog...

[Anonymouswizard]

It's going to be very close to Cleric/Fighter/Rogue/Wizard/Bard with more focus on bardic music than spellcasting. Something generic and recognisable so as not to alienate people.

(Or, for a three person party, Fighter/Rogue/Wizard, because of the popularity in computer games making it recognisable).

[EggKookoo]

Also, this form of simplification doesn't say much about audience intelligence so much as it's just a reality of telling a story in 2 hours. In a movie timeframe, you have to trim the fat and get going. This is why we see things like conservation of races (one elf, one dwarf, etc.). It's just economics. Unless the story is about how two elves in a party are distinct individuals, or there's a joke or culture reference to be made, don't expect too much variety there. Merry and Pippin were interchangeable in the LotR films mostly for this reason. Cognitively, they were one character.

A single, typical D&D play session is twice as long as this entire movie will be. Think about that, and how you'd convey important information in that time. How much would you expect newbie players to understand halfway through their first session? That's your audience.

What D&D needs, rather than a movie, is streaming-service series, like on Netflix or something. Then they could take their time and explain all the nuances of the setting.

[Dienekes]

And those three types should be as broadly different as possible. People can grok "wizard vs. cleric" - in part because one wears armor, prays a lot, and is the one that heals. So you could use them to do arcane vs. divine. Arcane vs. arcane would probably be too much for a movie trying to be economical with its runtime.

They should be presented differently. But I think that difference has much more to do with the presentation in the movie than if it fits some category.

Going back to my example, differentiating them by wild magic and learned magic is I think different enough for the audience to grasp quickly and allows the action taken by the characters to look and feel different. Of course having someone kneel down and pray to make their magic is also a clear visible distinction.

Of course that would then be the three. I wouldn’t then add druids, bards, and warlocks to the mix until a second or third movie.

But I can see a way to pick any three of the mage classes and have it work fine.

[dancrilis]

I don't think differentiating Wizards from Sorcerers is that hard - to take my earlier example:

Primary Main Character: We need to hire a Wizard.
Secondary Main Character: Will a sorcerer do? I think I might know one who can help.
Primary Main Character: You're always so semantic ... what's the difference?
Secondary Main Character: Wizards study and learn how to control some of the forces of magic - Sorcerers are, I think, descended from magical creatures and so have more innate abilities, same basic idea but I understand they have greater reserves of power but are less knowledgeable about what they are doing - so can do less.
Primary Main Character: So they do less but better?
Secondary Main Character: Kindof ... not really ...
Primary Main Character: Look stop, I don't really care about any of this, can they remove the magical protections we need to bypass.
Secondary Main Character: Probably.
Primary Main Character: Fine lets talk to them and find out, if they can't they might be able to point us in the right direction.

Written much better it could be a fine piece of character estiblishment for PMC and SMC while perhaps given the audience a view into TMC before they meet them (and why they are meeting them) - without taking too much screen time not everything has to be running, explosions, romance, fighting and cgi after all, some character pieces could be nice.

[Elves]

Making a generic sword&sorcery flick and slapping the D&D logo on it is doomed to bomb. To have any chance at making money the movie has to break the 4th wall in some way and sell the fact that it's a game. The only fully in-universe thing that would have any chance of making money is a Drizzt movie, and even then it's unlikely. Either way, teaching moviegoers the arcana of class divisions is the last thing they should worry about.

[EggKookoo]

I don't think differentiating Wizards from Sorcerers is that hard - to take my earlier example:

Primary Main Character: We need to hire a Wizard.
Secondary Main Character: Will a sorcerer do? I think I might know one who can help.
Primary Main Character: You're always so semantic ... what's the difference?
Secondary Main Character: Wizards study and learn how to control some of the forces of magic - Sorcerers are, I think, descended from magical creatures and so have more innate abilities, same basic idea but I understand they have greater reserves of power but are less knowledgeable about what they are doing - so can do less.
Primary Main Character: So they do less but better?
Secondary Main Character: Kindof ... not really ...
Primary Main Character: Look stop, I don't really care about any of this, can they remove the magical protections we need to bypass.
Secondary Main Character: Probably.
Primary Main Character: Fine lets talk to them and find out, if they can't they might be able to point us in the right direction.

Written much better it could be a fine piece of character estiblishment for PMC and SMC while perhaps given the audience a view into TMC before they meet them (and why they are meeting them) - without taking too much screen time not everything has to be running, explosions, romance, fighting and cgi after all, some character pieces could be nice.

So this would be fine, but now multiply it by all the things you'd (and everyone else might) want broken out like this, over the course of a 2-hour movie. One exchange like the above would probably be acceptable to a mass audience, but it would be pushing it. How do you decide how many of these "game detail" conversations to have?

[Rogar Demonblud]

Similarly, Harry Potter never explains the difference between Charms, Transfiguration and Hexes, yet the characters use all three over the course of the movies without totally losing the audience, many of whom are small children.

By the time the first movie came out there were already a thousand pages of source material that you were expected to have a nodding familiarity with. And if you weren't, the movie left it completely unexplained so that anybody who wanted to know would go buy and read the four volumes already out.

[Tvtyrant]

By the time the first movie came out there were already a thousand pages of source material that you were expected to have a nodding familiarity with. And if you weren't, the movie left it completely unexplained so that anybody who wanted to know would go buy and read the four volumes already out.

As opposed to D&D, which has to explain it all from scratch. D&D is as old as star wars and is at its peak popularity, I think it would be pretty safe.

[EggKookoo]

By the time the first movie came out there were already a thousand pages of source material that you were expected to have a nodding familiarity with. And if you weren't, the movie left it completely unexplained so that anybody who wanted to know would go buy and read the four volumes already out.

TBH the first Harry Potter movie is a slog. They got so much better (as viewing experiences) as they progressed and gained the confidence to drop all the dense detail.

This isn't a criticism of the first book. The books (IMO) go in the other direction and become less accessible as they go.

[Psyren]

If you're going to differentiate wizards and sorcerers on-screen, the most economical way of doing that would be to put them on opposing sides. That way you can bake the explanation of their different approaches to arcane magic in along with the explanation of their differing goals/motivations to save runtime.

The trick then would be to do that in a way that doesn't imply that one is evil and one is good. Even a sorcerer that descends from an evil dragon doesn't have to be evil themselves, after all. Ultimately I think it's doable, but likely to be more trouble than its worth.

[DavidSh]

I know it would be wrong, but what I'd like would be to take several early Fafhrd & Grey Mouser stories, and put them together into a movie. Sort of like how the first Conan movie was made. Sure, it isn't exactly D&D, but that was one of Gygax's main sources.

Quarmall is All.

[Anymage]

What D&D needs, rather than a movie, is streaming-service series, like on Netflix or something. Then they could take their time and explain all the nuances of the setting.

D&D would still suffer as a Netflix series for the fact that the overall brand is too generic. An animated series set in one of the setting worlds would be a relatively cheap way to work on setting specific IP while still slapping a D&D logo on it.

If you're going to differentiate wizards and sorcerers on-screen, the most economical way of doing that would be to put them on opposing sides.

And why is academic magic vs. wild magic a meaningful enough difference between spellcasters to build the plot around? There are like a gajillion other plot threads that could be followed up on for the movie instead. Especially because one constant I expect to see in a D&D movie is a party. Solo protagonist movies can work for other ideas, but the party dynamic is deeply tied to D&D as a concept.

Jumanji-ing it could allow the knowitall to understand and take advantage of fine differences in rules like that, although it would have to be limited to avoid overwhelming the audience. Otherwise, explaining those fine differences means something else has to be left on the cutting room floor to stick to the runtime. And fine differences between generally similar character types isn't a good use of runtime by itself.

[Psyren]

And why is academic magic vs. wild magic a meaningful enough difference between spellcasters to build the plot around? There are like a gajillion other plot threads that could be followed up on for the movie instead.

You're asking the wrong guy, I'm on team "audiences won't care enough for it to be worth it." I'm merely providing some suggestions for those who want to go this route.

[EggKookoo]

D&D would still suffer as a Netflix series for the fact that the overall brand is too generic.

Yes, any straight D&D story (i.e. not a Jumanji) would have to create a kind of distilled setting that combines the unique qualities of FR, Greyhawk, and even some of Eberron and Dark Sun, into something new that really only exists for the story. Play up the "we'e not in Middle Earth or in Medieval Europe" as much as possible. Maybe Dark Crystal it a bit, with some weird architecture and pseudo-magic/bio/punk tech.

But I think an ongoing series has more space to work with. Because it doesn't have to cram its complete story into 2 hours, it can take the time to explore the details.

[Psyren]

The trouble with D&D is that it does have more interesting settings than the standard orc/elf/dwarf fantasy - but you almost need to present that standard setting first so that you can contrast the ways those other settings differ. A fantasy story set somewhere like Eberron, Ravnica, Athas or Ravenloft would definitely feel pretty unique - but it would also present a misleading portrayal of what a typical D&D game is like, without the more standard Faerun or Greyhawk stuff coming before it.

For me - a setting that is "standard fantasy" but interesting enough to not feel generic would be Dragon Age. Some of the darker elements in Thedas would resonate with audiences pretty readily in my opinion - things like balancing personal vs. civil liberties, the plight of declining indigenous peoples, militarized state-run peacekeeping organizations etc.

[Peelee]

The trouble with D&D is that it does have more interesting settings than the standard orc/elf/dwarf fantasy - but you almost need to present that standard setting first so that you can contrast the ways those other settings differ. A fantasy story set somewhere like Eberron, Ravnica, Athas or Ravenloft would definitely feel pretty unique - but it would also present a misleading portrayal of what a typical D&D game is like, without the more standard Faerun or Greyhawk stuff coming before it.

A couple lines in the beginning could fix that, no? In the realm of Dungeons and Dragons, many worlds exist, linked but distinct. On the Plane of the Dead, also known as Ravenloft, adventurers are trapped to be hunted by the ruler of Ravenloft...

Ya know, but better.

[Anonymouswizard]

A couple lines in the beginning could fix that, no? In the realm of Dungeons and Dragons, many worlds exist, linked but distinct. On the Plane of the Dead, also known as Ravenloft, adventurers are trapped to be hunted by the ruler of Ravenloft...

Ya know, but better.

Yes, like not getting the Demiplane of Dread's name wrong

In all honest, I think Eberron may be the best bet. 'In the world of Eberron, where magic is studied as science, a relentless army of magical robots known as warforged are undergoing job interviews for a new receptionist position in Sharn. Meanwhile our story begins with the explosion of a lowly artificer's workshop...' (except, you know, not written for comedic value.)

[Peelee]

Yes, like not getting the Demiplane of Dread's name wrong

How dare you cast aspersions! The movie is homebrew, obviously.

[Psyren]

A couple lines in the beginning could fix that, no? In the realm of Dungeons and Dragons, many worlds exist, linked but distinct. On the Plane of the Dead, also known as Ravenloft, adventurers are trapped to be hunted by the ruler of Ravenloft...

Ya know, but better.

"Narration." (ding!)

Kidding aside - while this could work, I'm not sure Eberron or Ravenloft are the right settings to do it with. They're the kind of settings where you can't explain the differences one time at the beginning and then be done with it. Wth Eberron in particular you'd have to devote quite a bit of time to explaining why there are robots running around along with the elves and dwarves, and they probably wouldn't have time for Kalashtar at all. (Yet you can't leave the Warforged out, otherwise there's no point in being in Eberron to begin with.)

As for Ravenloft - it's probably simpler, but then you run into the issue of how do you make it just not be Castlevania 2.0.

[Rakaydos]

A Paladin as an armored fighty type with magic is easy enough to understand, especially with magics a fighter would REALLY like, such as Healing, Mending, and Smites. This fills the Fighter archetype in a way that feels like a smart thing for a fighter to do in a world of magic. The oath can just be incorporated into their personality, without the consequenses of it being made plot relevant.

Legolas type treetop archer has been played around with a lot, but emphasizing the nature magic angle of Ranger might make it distinct from "smug elf badass". Paladin has the mission, Ranger knows the way.

Evil destroys a town, heros find kobolds in the aftermath, interrogate one, find out they just maintain the sewer system, and have an idea where evil went. "I help you, you leave us alone." Also turns out to be the party's not-fully-trusted magic blaster, who is also ruthlessly pragmatic with a rogue dip.

No Bard- I dont think it's possible to top the sheer bardy-ness of the character in The Witcher, and there's no sense trying to be second best.

[Peelee]

"Narration." (ding!)

Let me know when Cinema Sins pulls in $460,000,000.


As for Castlevania Redux, it's not like the Venn Diagram of Castlevania fans and D&D fans has a small overlap, ya know? The ones who notice won't mind and the ones who mind won't notice, for the most part at least.

There, that should be enough after the Gladiator reference to distract from the fact that it's a terrible analog here.

[Tom Kalbfus]

Apparently there's a new d&d movie coming. Like the previous attempts it will be a semi-serious in-universe story, rather than say something like The Gamers.

So, knowing that? How high or low are your expectations?

For a fun experiment, type your first response before looking up anything else about the project, like director(s), budget etc.

So is it going to be that Dragonlance Movie I heard about? I don't much like the sound of semiserous movie, there were plenty of semi serious D&D movies, and I want a serious one! You ever watch that youtuber Shadiversity? He is a medieval combat expert, a good movie will make you feel like you've entered another world, if I feel like these are actors playing a part, then the movie has failed! I don't want some princess speaking like a Valley Girl from California, I don't want troupes played for laughs, I don't want something like Police Academy, the Naked Gun, or Airplane!