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D&D Movie on The Way
A lot of people have been sending the story at Wired about Dungeons and Dragons, the movie. There's a strong emphasis on how the movie will be based on the rules systems, which seems strange to me. I'm not sure how to visually represent a number system for people - but we'll see. It should be out in October of 2000.
A few replies saying in essence "your GM wasn't creative enough, etc." Sorry folks. I've been GMing for twenty years in a dozen systems. The only way to get a halfway plausible, realistic or internally consistant D&D game is to ignore some of the rules, add your own, or both. This is no big deal, every halfway bright GM does that in any system. However, the story was about a movie intending to "follow the rules". I was just pointing out that if they follow the rules too closely they'll be destroying realism.
Let's put it another way. What possible difference should it make what rules they use, or whether they use any rules at all? Take the same story line, characters, etc., but film it twice, once using D&D rules and once using RM (or RQ or anything else) rules. What kind of difference would you see? If the producers tried to stick with any sort of plausibility, there should be ZERO differences.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
If you want to know how that got started, there is an excellent report at The Gamer's Realm. I highly recommend this to anyone who was told that D&D was "evil" or "satanic" in their youth.
BTW Patricia Pulling died earlier this year IIRC.
I read the internet for the articles.
Elf stature is based on the setting, not the game system. Therefore you find elves of different heights depending on which fantasy world you, ahem, "visit."
Elves from Tolkein's Middle Earth are tall and wiry, and never need sleep.
Elves from TSR's Greyhawk (the orignal setting) and Forgotten Realms are short, about 4-1/2 to 5 feet.
The setting for the movie doesn't appear to be established, although it's TSR's policy that if you use the rules and don't explicitly declare otherwise, then you're playing in Greyhawk.
I can see the fnords!
1) Elves are short in AD&D, being 55 (male) or 50 (female) plus 1d10 inches tall. That gives a max height of 65 inches, which is 5'5". Humans have a max height of 6'8", while Dwarves have a max height of 4'5". Seven-foot Elves are from J.R.R. Tolkien, not AD&D.
2) They certainly aren't using AD&D 2nd Edition dragons. As both 2nd Edition red and gold dragons are immune to fire, but gold dragons have a poison gas breath weapon as well, any red-gold fight between dragons of anywhere near the same size results in a scratched gold and a dead red. Furthermore, the golds have systematically chosen spells while the reds have fewer and haphazardly acquired spells, so that isn't an effective equalizer.
In short, any massive duel between a group of Gold and Red 2nd Edtiton dragons is a rout for the golds unless massively outnumbered to start with. So these are old-D&D, 1st Edition AD&D dragons, or possibly 3rd Edition (A)D&D dragons.
How do you pull an interesting plot out of a Drag & Drop protocol? :-)
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
It is amazing that it has taken this long, and maybe a good thing for a movie to come out. Will always remember the cartoon on Saturday mornings, and playing the two versions of D&D for the intellivision, and of course the role playing game......Hope they do it justice.......
Funny and I thought Perl == Paid employment recently located
(Personally, my favourite AD&D memories were of seriously strange things. I came up with Duodimension Others, which turns anything two dimensional. I had a pad of A4 boulders, which came in handy, especially with antimagical creatures. Another fond memory was the pump-action Wand of Wonder, with an automatic setting. Lastly, there was the modified Unseen Servent, which could cast 3 spells a day - one to generate another Unseen Servent, one to Create Tower, and one to Create Astral Gateway. Anyone spell "Infinite Loop"?)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I may be wrong on this (If I was at home with my trusty bookshelf of AD&D manuals within reach, I could confirm...) but I think the big confusion over the height of elves in the D&D universe is that in the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance worlds (made by TSR, based off of D&D), Elves are as tall or taller than humans. Yet in the original D&D manuals and books (as well as the AD&D rulebooks, I imagine) they list elven height as being generally much shorter than humans.
A lot of readers of "D&D fiction" , ie, Dragonlance and FR (yes, there are more worlds than that, but they are the most popular 2 D&D universes) think of the elves from these works of fiction (and the numerous and beautiful artwork that can be found for them) when they think of elves.
I'm pretty sure thats where the confusion over the height of elves comes in. Does anyone have any manuals handy they can check out to confirm? (I'll have to investigate after my workday ends.....)
And I dont know about other AD&D fans, but I'm really looking forward to seeing the AD&D 3rd edition rulebooks comeout, I'm interested to see how they revise the rules-sets this time around. Especially since NeverWinter Nights will be using this ruleset.
--
Chris Warden
Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards for you are Crunchy and taste good with Ketchup.
If you want to see a Dungeons-&-Dragons-like show with some actual plot and no Yoda-oid floating deus-ex-machina, may I recommend the anime series Slayers?
... same thing), magic shops, trolls, dragons, dragon gods ... what else do you want? :)
Wizards, fighters, goblins, incantations, elves, demons (well, mazoku
In all fairness to Gygax, the game predates the publication of "The Silmarillion" which I believe didn't actually get out to the world until about 1977. TSR can't be blamed for conflicting there (although perhaps they should have "fixed" it in 2nd Edition AD&D).
I can guarantee you that we're not beyond that type of hysteria, it's just that D&D isn't the current focus of it. If this movie and LotR succeed, and RPGs regain popularity, all the old attacks from the usual suspects will resume in full force.
---
Have a Sloppy day!
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Ahhh, a classic. Remember this one, with Tom Hanks as the kid who goes crazy playing D&D and runs around the subways of New York? I remember that live D&D in the fields around our school became big after that (hey, we didn't have many caves to play in, just really tall swamp grass). And who was that kid who whined about only being into computers because he wanted to write videogames? I distinctly remember walking from my room to my parents' room, where they were watching the same thing, and saying "SEE!?!"
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You've obviously never tried to properly played 'proper'. An incredible roll doesn't mean you sat there and 'took it'. It means you managed to survive by some chance of fate.. You managed to duck a behind a rock, etc..etc..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
But I can't imagine why anyone would bother making a movie out of D&D. I mean, other than to cash in on the name.
D&D isn't exactly the stuff high-quality fantasy. It doesn't encourage interesting drama or require much in the way of imagination by the DM (at least, since they started selling those damn pre-made "modules").
You could maybe make an interesting spoof fantasy based on a D&D universe, with characters (over) acting as though controlled by badly socialized geeks, hordes of insensate orcs attacking at every turn, and improbable bad stuff suddenly happening when the characters look like they're succeeding.
Stefan
* Well, no, not really. But carved wooden dice would probably have been better than the crappy brittle plastic dice TSR sold back then.
In any case, I doubt very much that that being "true to the AD&D rules" is meant to extend down to the level of individual die rolls. I read that claim as meaning that the characters should be recognizable as something that might crop up in an actual AD&D game; that is, the spells would be actual AD&D spells, mages would memorize them the way they do in the game, thieves would have the abilities you would expect, and so on.
Actually, I think the main feature that determines AD&D compliance (so to speak) is the magic system. When you think about it, swinging a sword looks the same no matter what the mechanics for resolving it are. Presumably that is because it is based on something that one can actually do in real life, and so we have a pretty good idea what should or should not be possible. Magic, on the other hand, differs wildly between game systems, and the restrictions (or lack thereof) placed on magic use can heavily influence the tone of a story.
So, my guess is that they have stressed this going on about the AD&D rules means they have stressed the workings of magic somewhat in the movie. This can be either a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, having some hard and fast rules regarding magic can prevent some sorts of plot holes where magic is all-powerful in one scene, but next to useless in another. On the other hand, AD&D magic does have some serious warts. For instance, do we really want to see the mages sitting around for 4 hours every morning memorizing spells? And if the system really does work like AD&D, why doesn't everyone load up with 14 stoneskins before the start of the adventure?
Still, one hopes they will exercise enough discretion to chuck the stuff that doesn't work story-wise. I mean, if we managed to come up with a workable subset of the rules using only enough funds to supply the group with pizza for the evening, surely they can do the same with $30M, right?
-r
But... Who cares? Everyone sitting in the cinema will go, 'Oh, darn, he must've hit a natural 20!' or, 'Good gosh, I never knew a Fireball was so messy... Cool!' or yet again, 'Oh, shit, a Beholder! Do you know how many HP these have?'
In short: it'll be a geek-o-rama. You bet I'm gonna see it. Story? Who cares! I bet the ratio of people who had sex before their 20's will be insanely low in that theatre... :)
And then, Lord of the Rings will come out, and the D&D movie will go down the drain because it won't hold to comparison either on the acting, SFX or story... And the D&D movie will be history.
I'm not surprised they're putting it out this year... If they put it out after LotR, it'll be too late to ever make cash on it. Now, with the LotR hype building up, the timing is perfect.
Keep on... Geekin'!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I was in Prague when they were doing filming there. The scenerey is awesome in Prague, very medieval and grandious. Prague is like Disneyland for real, statues everywher - guilded with gold. Castles and towers that have withstood the test of time. Prague is an excellent backdrop for D&D - I know I loved D&D and I get the shivers just thinking of how beautiful and majestic Prague is.
I can't say much for the movie itself. It's unclear whether it will be as good as the scenery around it.
Joseph Elwell.
As far as I know, AD&D elves are always tall (presumably modelled after Tolkein elves). Certainly the two in our current campain are over 6' tall, and I don't recall having short elves in any previous campaigns.
I have to say I'm dreading the movie. I'm one of those that believes is virtually impossible to do fantasy well on film (as opposed to SF, which is easy), and as fantasy goes, AD&D is pretty much at the top of the pile. I'll go and see it anyway, but I'm not expecting much from it. It can't possibly live up to what I see in my mind anyway...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Ummm...
TSR sold to Wizards of the Coast...
Wizards of the Coast sold to Hasbro...
D&D movie announced, due late 2000. Just in time for D&D 3rd Edition.
Can anyone say 'marketing'!
Binky
(who's hopes aren't 'high' for this one)
I'm not sure how happy I am on the repeated emphasis on how much the movie will be based out of the rulebooks.
Some of the worst fantasy novels out there are the ones transparently drawn from someone's camapign. I'm not saying that there aren't good novels set in the (A)D&D universe or that some of them didn't grow out of the writer's own campaigns (the Dragonlance books fit both those criteria), but that being aware of the mechanics distracts from the story. Good writing can overcome this, but they're not saying what a great story they have to tell - they're saying how much the viewer will recognize from the sourcebooks.
Most of the best role-playing campaigns I've been in (D&D or otherwise) have deviated from the printed material one way or another. A book of rules alone does not make a good game.
Frankly, most RPGs are more fun to play than to watch. The part that needs to translate to the big screen is the story and world, not the stats and die rolls.
-- I'm not evil, I'm
D&D, and rpgs in general, don't have a set plot... So how do you make a movie out of it? Pick out parts of the world based on the rules of the game and then write the plot? Interesting..
I think I would be more excited about a Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms movie... Those seetings have some stories and characters that I would love to see done (well) on screen.
But how do you make a plot from the Players handbook... I guess you could use the examples from the book...
Scene 1:
Rothgar is pummeled by several orcs to demonstarte pummeling rules.
Scene 2:
Borkfast carefully dons his armor and shoulders his pack to help explain encumbrance...
Who knows... I'll go see it as soon as it comes out... even if it's dumb as dirt.. Come on, its D&D!!!
/* CDM */
Okay, this is sure to be a huge success, just like the Final Fantasy Movie. There's an obvious trend here, towards movies slavishly following games... So when are we going to have "Angband: The Movie"?
I can see it now:
Our hero, a heroic @ symbol, has against all odds fought his way down to the 40th level of the evil dungeon, with its random maps. After killing countless evil beings such as yellow-capital-T's (Troll Priests) and the malignant capital-D's (Ancient Dragons), holding 23 items, no matter how large, he is ready to challenge the ultimate evil: Level 41!
This would make a perfect series, too. Endless possibilities, *great* special effects, and whatnot. (3D-rendered ASCII! Just like The Matrix!) I can't wait until "Angband II: Level 50 is in sight"!
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Now where'd I put that 11th level thief...
They're going to base this on the rules system? I thought movies were supposed to attempt at least a suspension of disbelief.
Our heroes will have no skills. Chain mail will ward off arrows better than rigid leather. Rangers can slay dozens of foes in a ten second time period (but only if they're humanoid). An unprotected thief can take the full force of dragon fire face first and leave if the dice roll right. Warriors can take dozens of full-on full-force sword hits before they finally succumb to a lack of HPs, but he still won't bleed.
And if they also follow the typical and recommended (ala official adventures) economic structures, then we'll have a bizarre economy based on one-ounce gold coins in plentiful supply, dungeons with more gold laying around than all the gold ever mined during the Alaskan gold rush, and these dungeons are always just outside of town. And let's not talk about social structures or I'll have to mentions barons ruling entire kingdoms and kings ruling mere cities.
I fully understand that "realism" is a filthy word that will get you kicked out of GenCon for uttering it, but at least movies should make some sort of sense.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned