It’s a great fun movie. The plot’s great, the pacing is great, the references are great, the comedy is great. It’s a fun adventure with a relatable team of misfit heroes.
It takes some liberties with the game mechanics to accomplish this. If you can’t forgive that, you’ll have a rough time, especially if you like wildshaping druids and spellcasting bards.
This is the most accurate description, IMO. If you’re looking for something that’s going to incorporate all the game mechanics into the story, and do so accurately, this isn’t it.
If you want a great time at the movies with excellent comedy, action, and characters you care about - while still holding true to the fantasy and adventure spirit of D&D?
Our last two hour session was combat round 2, continuing from combat round 1 from the previous week. The week before that was the end of the puzzle before the combat round.
It's our groups first quest, we've been going for almost a year, and have done a dozen or so combats and 3 "one offs" that 2/3 lasted more than one session. The DM loves it because he gets to fill in a lot of flavor/lore for everything, we love it because we move at our own pace.
2 hour sessions can be rough. Even just bumping up to 2.5 hours feels like you get a lot more game per week. I do love how unhurried you guys are though. Sounds like everyone in your group is fully engaged and immersed.
One of the rare movies that starts shaky and then finds its footing and breaks out into a conditioned run by the end of it. Didn't go in expecting much, got a good time.
Rest ye Jarnathan, you deserve a break.
Edit, and the dragon! My wife is obsessed with dragons and she was in love with the one in the movie, it's like her favorite dragon now.
While it does skirt some game mechanics, probably due to it being a movie and it's a strange medium to adapt, it also does some really cool subtle things with the mechanics. For example, in the final major fight all of the characters attack in the same order. They're in initiative!
This, pretty much. Pretty hard to be 100% game accurate and make a good movie. Appreciated where they took license, and where they stuck to some (often, obscure) lore.
My wife suspected this about that final fight, but it goes by quickly in the theater, and unfortunately it’s streaming on one of the few services we don’t have or want to pay for, so we haven’t re-watched it in a pause-able format.
There was a campaign a long time back where I gave the party something called the "Infinite Tapestry." It was kind of a low-grade portable hole, a 10'x10' tapestry that depicted an image of an empty stone masonry chamber with bare walls. If the tapestry was hanging vertically and you touched it while speaking a command word, you would appear inside the tapestry where there was another similar tapestry on the fourth wall of the chamber showing the outside world. Both tapestries had to be hanging flat and vertical for the connection to work, otherwise the other tapestry turned black and temporarily inert.
Basically, it was a portable clubhouse. They furnished it, went on a minor quest to get ahold of a magical hot tub to put in there, used it to store all the unwieldy things that parties liked to lug around. Since the connection was relatively "fragile" and could be disrupted easily, trapping whoever was in there until the tapestry could be hung from suitable supports again, they were always careful about using it as a literal camp - they slept outside of it whenever possible and took care not to all be inside at the same time. Which was a bit frustrating because there was a secret to the tapestry that I really wanted to force them to discover.
It wasn't a portable hole, the chamber wasn't an extradimensional space. The tapestry was actually a two-way portal to the Feywild, specifically to a chamber in the basement of an ancient abandoned castle that was the ancestral home of the secret Big Bad of the campaign. But they never examined the masonry inside to discover that the "back wall" was slightly different from the rest (it was a bricked-up corridor leading to the rest of the basement) and circumstances never arose where they'd be able to determine that they were on a different plane of existence in there rather than an extradimensional space.
Eventually, though, an opportunity arose. Through sheer happenstance a minor enemy of theirs discovered the secret of their tapestry, including the command word. He went into the tapestry to search through the party's stuff, but the party spotted him entering it so they took down the tapestry to trap him in there. They spent a day prepping to fight the guy, and then when they were all good and ready they put the tapestry back up... and saw that during the day the guy had spent trapped in there he'd figured out the thing I had wanted the party to eventually figure out, breaching the back wall and escaping into the castle in the Feywild.
So now the party had to dungeon-crawl the ancient castle chasing the trail of this guy, discovering a bunch of stuff about the real Big Bad of the campaign in the process, and once that whole multi-session extraveganza was finished they had graduated from having a simple "clubhouse" to having a whole castle in their pocket. It became their major base of operations and many future adventure seeds focused around it.
It was a lot of fun, but if you're a DM that likes a well-organized storyline it might be troublesome. I had no idea when exactly they were going to discover that whole new branch of the campaign they were carrying around with them.
This is such a great idea! I guess your party already knew about portable holes from previous campaigns and were just assuming that’s what it was? A tricky instance of characters acting according to player experience! Sounds like it worked out really well though.
Yeah, most of my players over the years have been veteran enough that the standard stuff can usually be assumed background knowledge. I think I even gave them a bag of holding so that they'd eventually have a clue from the fact that it didn't blow up from being taken into the tapestry, but as soon as they realized what it was they got rid of it to be "safe" and never took it in there. In hindsight perhaps I should have had a bag of holding be already inside the tapestry chamber when they discovered it, left over in there as loot from the previous occupants. Though that may have clued them in too quickly. Always a balancing act. :)
Mods: to make it abundantly clear where not to go for pirated material, please include those domains in the rules for this page. We wouldn't want users to accidentally provide links to places like 5etools where they can find everything they need to DM without paying.
And, srsly, it's OK to say the domains where stuff is. Google does that at the bottom of search results. If you have it in a sidebar saying don't link to here, 1) nobody is confused as to why they can't use the site, and 2) you can point to that rule as enforcing anti pirate
Nat 1s aren’t an automatic failure on a skill check in 5e. Your DM played it correctly. Don’t try to attribute their actions to going easy on you. They played it by the book.
There will be tales of the mysterious stranger who gifted the party arcane knowledge before vanishing in the blink of an eye…
As the young adventurers rushed to their guild, ready to share the treasure they were handed by the kind traveller, they could hear seven canaries singing happily.
It’s more massive than any standard or even epic bag of holding could possibly carry, either you just temporarily banished it to a random spot on the Astral Plane, or it dumped back into your puny colon, which again is far too small to contain an Ancient Brass Wyrm.
Also in doing so, you just irritated the rest of the canaries, (all metallic ancient Wyrms) and the old man.
Roll initiative, and I certainly hope you can survive 6 breath weapons, I wanna see what Bahamut does to your impertinent person.
It’s an avatar of Bahamut (the god of good dragons) and 7 metallic (good) dragons in disguise. You don’t wanna piss off the old man or the birds. I normally have them as ravens, but canaries works.
Due to how the gods of dragons work, Bahamut doesn’t have a lot on his plate, so he will wander the planes and see who is a murderhobo, that needs dealt with, and who is an adventurer that he will give a favor or token to
That’s just Pass without trace for you. That spell is so poorly balanced, it’s effectively an auto success on group stealth checks. Just a few things to note here when it comes to RAW:
There are no crit fails on skill checks
For a group stealth check it doesn’t matter if one party member fails it. It’s still a success.
If more people in the world were like you, it would probably be a better place. You have no idea what positive impact this will have on these kids but I promise you that they will remember you.
Academically, how does this genuinely lovely act of kindness & compassion differ in essence to, say, sharing PDFs of the same already-purchased book with strangers simply wanting to play the game?
edit: please, be civil and don’t dogpile, this is simply to spark a deeper understanding of intentional labeling and how we, as a society, often take that for granted (ie. assume it’s in good faith).
In essence, it doesn’t. In a practical sense, however, one is taking something that’s been paid for and passing it on while the other is stealing. You can try to justify it morally all you want but those kids clearly didn’t have any qualms with giving WotC their money so you stealing on their behalf is simply an excuse.
Yeah, but as a creator, I have to be principled. If you want more things that you like, you have to pay for them. I don’t like the system and I fight to change it at every turn but it’s the system we have.
I’m not insinuating guilt, I’m outright stating it. Someone created those books. Whether it was one person in their basement or a company like WotC, you’re depriving the creators of income that they would have otherwise gotten when the normal social contract is observed. If you want more of a creator’s work, you need to pay them.
In your initial reply, you asked how it differs academically. It doesn’t. Sharing is sharing, from a purely academic perspective. From a non-academic perspective, which would include economic, financial, and contractual perspectives as well, it matters very much to the people creating the things being shared.
I gather that you’ve a personal investment to the point of blinding bias, but your self-righteous ire is misplaced and unappreciated. Thanks for letting me know I don’t have to spend time watching you put in that work, though. I hope you find ways to be a better person.
I’m confused. Explain to me how it’s self-righteous to expect people to pay for things that people create as opposed to stealing them? The only “personal investment” that I have is that I create things for a living and need to get paid for those creations in order to survive and support my family… If only one person bought it and then freely shared it with everyone else, I wouldn’t be able to pay my bills.
I’m confused where this question comes from and why you asked it, but will provide my own opinion on it.
In the OP’s case, the book he had already purchased is a physical copy; by giving it to the kids, he transferred complete ownership and now has to purchase another book in order to have the same product for himself, providing the company with more money. With PDFs, you can just email the file and then both you and the person you gave it to have copies of the book, effectively getting 2 books for books for the price of 1.
Legally, this is piracy/theft. Morally, both are totally acceptable in my opinion. Of course, if you like something, you should support the creators whenever possible.
As far as franchised products based films it’s very rewatchable and I imagine will be a comfort movie on the future.
Id put it just a little below the Lego Movie for quality for what’s essentially an advertisement movie. No complaints however.
As a D&D fan it hits the sweet spots of references but not to feel like it’s pandering (see Super Mario Movie). For a die hard D&D fan you can feel the die rolls going on in the movie.
I imagine Hasbro will kill or ruin Studio One somehow which is a shame I would want more of these kind of D&D movies
As a D&D player, that was my favorite part. The times when the party was getting creative and you could see the DM say, "Ok, roll for xyz to see if that works."
So many times when I thought, "Yeah, I could see us coming up with that." Followed by, "Oh yeah, our DM would definitely do that." And yet it managed to have enough heart and be generally entertaining enough that your non-D&D friends will enjoy it too.
Especially the very beginning, where they come up with the crazy plan to escape, somehow manage to actually pass the persuasion check they didn't think they would pass, then go through with the plan anyway because they worked hard on it.
Not just feeling the die rolls, I could also feel the DM going "oh crap, the bridge is gone now, how will they get across? I know, I'll give them a portal gun." And then for the rest of the movie the DM going "oh crap, they have a portal gun now, how am I going to stop them from bypassing every challenge with it?"
In my campaign the dwarf decided to nose dive dive into a mosh pit full of thousands of kobolds. The ranger failed to pull him up and went down with him.
The only reason they got out was I had planted hints an eldritch god needed them which was the hail Mary In case them or I did something so stupid and needed a way out 😂
I had a campaign where the climactic key moment to "win" involved the party fighting their way up to a portal to hell and then casting a gate spell from a scroll to permanently close it. Gate is 9th level, though, which was above the level the party wizard was capable of reliably casting. Rather than let the resolution of the campaign hinge on random chance, I provided the party with an NPC who was capable of casting 9th level spells, but who had various reasons for being incapable of simply blowing through enemies for the party. I thought of him as my "Gandalf" character.
In the final battle the party wizard managed to reach the portal, and walled himself in with a resilient sphere so that he'd be able to use the scroll in his next turn without being disturbed. Fortunately my Gandalf still had a teleport spell available to him and teleported into the sphere next to the party wizard, offering to take the scroll and use it to save the world.
On the party wizard's next turn he used telekinetic shove as a bonus action to shove my Gandalf through the portal to hell, and then once the Gandalf was through he tried casting gate to permanently seal the world off from hell. Turns out he'd never trusted my Gandalf, suspecting him all along of being secretly evil, and so he backstabbed him at that crucial moment before my Gandalf could backstab him. There was literally nothing in my Gandalf's repertoire of remaining abilities that would have allowed him to overcome this, so off to hell he went.
And then the party wizard flubbed his attempt to cast gate, using up the scroll in the process. :)
Fortunately I'd prepared a backup cinematic for that outcome, the flubbed casting was still able to collapse the portal to hell and ruin the bad guys' plans. It just left the world in a much more "interesting" situation than the party had been aiming for. I frankly preferred that outcome anyway, so I'm not even mad. Though my Gandalf was rather peeved.
I just wish that Larian Studios would buy it. They could save their licensing fees for BG3 and could keep DnD community driven. Would also make it much easier for them to introduce new game mechanics into future games and pull those changes back into DnD.
Edit: I just read that tencent owns 30% shares of Larian which is kind of a bummer. Still would be much better with Larian directly, because tencent doesnt have a majority say then.
They have over 450 employees and operate in six different countries. I don’t know what DnD would be worth but it’s not like Larian is small.
Logically I think it makes more sense for Larian to want to buy the video game rights specifically as anything beyond that would be outside their scope.
Imagine how much staff works for Hasbro or Tencent, because that’s the league we are playing in here - after a quick Google, Hasbro has 6480, Tencent has 108,436. Larian is a dust mite to Tencent and DND has been around for half a century, had a film based on it recently, just had a game of the year based on it and a two decade old dnd IP. DND made $100-150 million in 2022.
Those would be mad expensive too - think about all the awesome D&D video games that have ever been made. Yes they’ve been less so in the last decade, but any company would know the power of the name and want the game rights as well as the printed media and other rights. It’s a whole deal. Larian could almost never hope to have the kind of money that would convince Hasbro to sell the game rights separately, much as we’d basically all prefer that.
If this site can be trusted, BG3 has about 90 Million users in total. With the game not being on sale for less than 53€ if we use that price as our baseline and remove the 30% that steam takes, they would be around 3.3 Billion euro in revenue. With 450 employees, investors like tencent and previous games financing a large chunk of early development, and a marketing budget of a few million euros, I assume that after taxes they still have at least 1 billion in money leftover, probably more.
Granted, thats not quite the 2 billion that you mentioned D&D is worth, but putting Larian into the “millions” category is underselling them quite a bit and if tencent as their biggest investor backs the idea and pumps money into it, I wouldn’t be suprised if they could come up with the money somehow. Wouldnt be the first time that a company takes on a lot of debt to aquire a valuable asset for them to pay off through the estimated revenue in the upcoming years. The possible ROI for Larian would be way larger than for many other companies just based on the current success of BG3.
Impossible Film also took over the Polaroid IPO in a similiar way. And Porsche nearly took over VW even though they were a way smaller player before VW aquired them.
Why would they do that, though? They’re a private company. They didn’t have to let Tencent buy in in the first place, which means it was purposeful.
And the reason companies give Tencent a cut of themselves is to have better access to the Chinese market. You need a Chinese publisher or partner to operate there, and Tencent offers that to software companies in exchange for letting them buy in. They always buy minority stakes, and they don’t take over editorial control of anything.
They’re actually a good business partner for anyone wanting to have their games distributed in China.
They’re just also a really aggressive F2P developer.
I struggle to think of a buyer that would be worse for the players than Tencent.
On the bright side, Hasbro’s last big D&D blunder prodded the community into developing alternative gaming systems and licenses, so I think we’ll be in good shape to carry on without the brand if this happens.
Sure, but that doesn't mean we can't complain about the directions the fluid is flowing. In this case a specialized term for something that didn't previously have a popular term describing it has been rapidly diluted to mean "bad change I don't like." So that thing doesn't have a specialized term any more, which hampers discourse.
The perils of language in the modern age, most people are not smart, and once a new word gets popular enough the majority of people using it will resemble the majority of society, ie, not smart people.
The thing is, “enshitification” was never defined as “abusing their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves”. That’s merely one of the stages that Doctorow outlined as part of the enshitification process.
Enshitification, as a whole, is the process of stripping value from a product or service from everyone except for shareholders.
It's a specific process, though. It's the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets. Dungeons and Dragons doesn't have that sort of structure, and that's not the sort of quality decrease that the people who are using "enshittification" are talking about.
I despise Tencent and the general business model of just buying up shit, but worse than Hasbro? Tencent played quite the part in BG3‘s making (By buying 30% of Larian years ago to keep cash flowing) and everyone loves it. They usually let western companies do as they please. If anything Hasbro selling it is yet another proof of why they shouldn‘t have it in the first place. And if WotC had anything left of a spine they would try to buy themselves free but that sure as hell is not going to happen because they do not care.
That would be anything produced after 3.5. The brand has been going down for a long time. That’s not to say there is nothing good in the current 5e, just for me it seems like it lost its soul with corporate oversight.
5e i’ve actually come to really appreciate. It’s just crunchy enough while also leaving room for interpretation and bending in a way that 3.5 I felt just didn’t really invite. Obviously you can do whatever you want, the goal is to have fun, but certain systems invite more shenanigans than others. And I personally like allowing shenanigans. My players get the most invested when they throw out an absurd idea and I immediately start walking them through how we are going to resolve it.
Maybe I have just gotten more experienced with TTRPG‘s and more comfortable going off the cuff, but I really do feel like 5e opened that door in a more inviting way if that makes sense.
That being said, I will always appreciate how with 3.5 it’s pretty difficult to come up with a situation that there isn’t an explicit rule for!
I moved to Pathfinder 2e and I couldn’t be happier. The only issue I have is that one of my players is Mercer-coded (is that a thing?) and really hates any time a skill, class, or spell isn’t a 1:1 copy of DnD. He recently grabbed Bane as part of a feat for his barbarian and learned it isn’t the same as DnD Bane and had a meltdown.
I don’t understand why being mercer-coded would make them hate anything not dnd, mercer plays various systems when his friends do oneshots, and knows several systems.
We’re all close friends outside of the game and we are all used to each other’s quirks. It’s a pain sometimes, but he does genuinely enjoy the game, though. He’d only played 2 campaigns of DnD before-hand (Strahd and Frostmaiden), but has listened to every episode of Critcal Role. I decided to homebrew a full 1-20 campaign for the group as an introduction to Pathfinder so we could all (GM included) get a taste for it across the entire span of character growth, and it’s been a learning experience for us all.
Pretty unfair take of 5e. Though I will say 5e has a high-level problem. Once you get to like level 11 or 12 there isn’t a whole lot to do until you’re 18 or 19. 3.5 I felt suffered the same issue though.
4 and 5 I think did a a lot to make the game more intuitive and not take 2hrs to resolve a round of combat, 4 just also had a lot of bad mechanics. You call that dumbing it down and anemic but I don’t think that’s a very fair assessment, but to each their own I guess. I for one I’m glad to see a lot of the changes and ideas they brought to the table, in particular 5e. I feel it caters more to RP which I value.
That's a common way of putting down 4e, but it's not so. I have no interest whatsoever in WoW but I really liked 4e. 4e's approach was to build a very consistent and rigorously-defined framework for the game, and then build its various elements (classes, monsters, abilities, etc.) strictly within that framework. I think it actually hit a very nice sweet spot; the framework was sufficiently flexible that a huge amount of interesting and distinctive content could be made, but it was also well-defined enough and simple enough to understand and apply that everything "just worked." You could play as a fighter for a whole bunch of levels and then pick up a completely different character sheet for a wizard and you'd find that most of the mechanics worked the same. Combat was very positional, with lots of abilities that allowed you to set other players up for success, which encouraged teamwork and player interaction.
It annoys me greatly that WotC tried to set the system up to be dependent on their online tools, failed, and then tore the tools down to leave the wreckage largely unplayable. I can still play a 3.5e campaign just as easily as I did back in the day but it'd be rather hard to play 4e as easily even though I still have the books. The best tools were WotC-owned and they don't allow third parties to fill the void they left when they decided to transition to 5e - presumably to avoid another Pathfinder situation.
If it’s really mostly about the one magic item, I suggest a different course of action entirely:
Pull the player aside. Tell them it has to be weakened for now, but give them a longer term quest to make it better. Most players will love the extra involvement more than overpowering the rest of the group.
@Pronell
I don't know. Giving them a long term quest might work, but giving them a long-term quest to pretty much fix what you just took away from them feels cheap and obnoxious. (Please don't take this as an insult.)
I'd discuss it with the player, putting your foot down if absolutely necessary, and I might look for an opportunity to make their character especially integral to a quest as a reward/compensation, but not a quest to fix the item, and only if the other players won't mind.
I meant bring it back to the power it was and then some, help it scale with the player.
One of my players has two pieces of Fraz’urbluu’s staff. He knows he can become a lot more powerful with more pieces but that it comes with consequences he would rather avoid.
It’s all a deep part of his personal plot and he loves it. Granted it was never something I took from him and nerfed.
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