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.
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.
Good fun! Not an amazing movie but thoroughly watchable. I don't know a lot about D&D and at no point did I feel like I was missing some necessary background info.
Other than that it was entertaining, however from a critical standpoint it seems like they tried to fit too many storylines into a movie that wasn't long enough to support them. Could have easily been 2, or 3 movies worth of content.
First off I mean this in a good way. I thought it felt a lot more like a movie of how real life players would play the campaign, rather than an attempt at a movie adaptation of a book. And having played D&D, I think it made the movie more relatable to the core audience.
I didn't think it was. I'd definitely be down for more movies in the dnd universe though if this was an example of what they'd be doing if that helps at all. Probably not a theater level movie but a good home movie or fun with friends watching for sure.
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