My friend Luau Lou had me on his podcast This Ol’ Dungeon to talk about my history in gaming, designing for Dungeon Crawl Classics, and my current projects:
Give it a listen, and if you like Lou’s style be sure to subscribe to the podcast!
Tag: Dungeons & Dragons
Movie Review: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a fun romp whose middling story is lifted by the charm of its cast. It owes an obvious debt to the popular (and lucrative) Marvel films, even if it’s more of a Thor or Captain Marvel (movies I put in the middle of the MCU spectrum) than an Iron Man or Infinity War.
If that seems like damning with faint praise, it’s not meant to be. Chris Pine’s natural charisma is on display as the lead, Edgin Darvis, a widowed father who turns to thievery as a means of providing for his daughter. When he takes a chance to pilfer a relic that can resurrect his dead wife, he winds up imprisoned, which is where we find him at the start of the film. He and his friend, Holga, an exiled barbarian, team up to recover his daughter and the relic, both of which are in the hands of the conman who betrayed them.
They assemble a small team for the heist, including Simon, an inept sorcerer, and Doric, a druid with a talent for shapeshifting. Regé-Jean Page’s chivalrous paladin, Xenk Yendar, is in less of the movie than I would have suspected from the trailers, but is a fun foil to Edgin. As the group’s plan unfolds they discover that the troubles in Neverwinter go deeper than they expected. At this point savvy moviegoers will no doubt be able to guess how the story will play out, but it’s an entertaining ride nonetheless.
Packed with Easter eggs for hardcore D&D fans, Honor Among Thieves is accessible enough for those who don’t know Baldur’s Gate from Ten Towns. In fact, the movie doesn’t try to overexplain the lore of the Realms (we’re told Doric is a tiefling, but not what a tiefling is), which would have been an easy trap to fall into. The filmmakers also display a love of practical effects in the realization of many fantastical creatures and characters, although I suspect the digitally-created red dragon Themberchaud will be the fan favorite.
My bottom line: if you’re looking for a fun popcorn flick to pass away an afternoon, Honor Among Thieves will fit the bill. If not, you could certainly wait for it to come to streaming. Personally, I’m hoping it does well enough to warrant a sequel; there are plenty more tales to be told — and creatures to be spotlighted — in this world.
In Defense of 4e – Part 1: Love for the Dungeon Master
At this point it’s common wisdom that the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons is the worst. It’s certainly the most maligned edition, with a general consensus that it parrots video game mechanics, straightjackets PCs with predefined abilities, and eliminates much of what makes individual classes special.
And I love it.
Which isn’t to say I don’t have criticisms (lengthy combat and lack of support for the epic tier being two of them), but I also think there’s a lot to recommend a second look at 4e. Over the next few months I’ll be posting some of the things I think 4e got right in its changes to the fantasy RPG formula.
For instance, 4e is the edition that was made for Dungeon Masters — literally. Not a lot of people seem to remember this, but one of 4e’s explicit design goals was to make running the game as easy as possible. In the Worlds and Monsters promo, Matthew Sernett writes:
“It’s going to be a lot easier and more fun to be a Dungeon Master in 4th Edition. You’ll have to do less work to put together and run great adventures. The time that you used to spend on math can be spent on coming up with cool ideas for encounters and adventure plots instead… Making being a DM easier (and making it easier to be a good DM) is going to get more people to try running a game.”
One place this mindset is reflected is in the layout of adventure modules. Almost every encounter is laid out as a two-page spread, meaning the DM doesn’t have to flip pages back and forth while running an encounter. All the information needed is in those two pages: environmental descriptions and effects, monster stats, traps, tactical suggestions, etc. By contrast, I’m constantly flipping pages in WotC’s 5e adventures between the encounter description, the map, and the monster stats in the Monster Manual, and any spells used by the monsters in the Player’s Handbook just to run a simple encounter.
4e also featured fantastic advice in it’s 2 DMGs. The Dungeon Master’s Guide 2, in particular, is a great resource for DMs of any edition. It has advice on crafting long-term campaigns, including story structure, avoiding dead ends when PCs fail to overcome an obstacle, and integrating flashbacks, transitions, and even third-person teasers into a session. It also has great examples for creating more interesting encounters, building traps, customizing monsters, and offering alternate rewards. Anyone interested in RPG design would benefit from the DMG2’s insights.
In the end, the focus on DMs is probably one of the things that worked against 4e. Since most D&D players are, well, players, they weren’t as invested in the upgrades to running the game and didn’t see the benefits. Which is a shame. While 4e isn’t perfect, it did a lot to lift some of the burdens on DMs — a fact for which I am grateful.
Book Review: Game Wizards
Jon Peterson has made a name for himself as a gaming historian. His rightly lauded and fastidiously researched Playing at the World may well be the definitive treatment of the historical antecedents of modern role-playing games across the centuries.
Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons (MIT Press, 2021) tackles a more focused topic: the creation of D&D and the first 12 years of Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) from its founding to the fateful evening when Gary Gygax was removed from direct control of the company. Peterson is particularly interested in divining credit for the game’s creation, sifting through the competing claims of Gygax and Dave Arneson, and detailing the (mis)management of TSR which led to Gygax inadvertently placing himself in danger of losing the company he co-founded.
Like Playing at the World, Game Wizards is well-researched with 30 pages of endnotes citing various trade magazines, columns in Dragon, and other sources. But what makes the book more readable than, say, Playing at the World is that Game Wizards has a compelling narrative on which to hang the various financial figures and convention numbers. No one thought Dungeons & Dragon would be an especially profitable idea (Peterson regularly reminds us that Gygax and Arneson thought it might be a “$300 idea”). So when the game takes off, what had been built on nebulous contracts and verbal agreements quickly becomes the focus of intense legal battles as various players seek their piece of the pie.
Those battles seem to have been exacerbated by the interpersonal conflicts that inevitably arose when a bunch of hobbyists tried to run a business. Broken promises, poor HR policies and procedures, and the lure of wealth and fame seem to have taken its toll on those who initially banded together to bring D&D to life, leading to the sad but inevitable climax of Gygax’s reign.
Game Wizards is a treat for RPG fans, especially those (like me) who came to the hobby well after the events it depicts. I highly recommend it.