D&D General What *is* D&D? (mild movie spoilers)

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Only 100%? How does that math work?

I'm only sure that one of my city council members isn't a wizard, obviously. The rest, I don't know about.

 

[DND_Reborn]

But how can you expect someone to make a movie of your D&D, when your D&D is so different to everyone else's D&D?! I mean half elf PCs have been part of D&D since 1977, and Tieflings since 1994!

Mine isn't different from everyone else's. In fact, all the people I've played with from 1978 until now have played pretty much the same as I do. When I meet people who play their own version of D&D, I don't play with them. True, we are the minority, and I understand that, so while many of you will see (or have already seen) the movie, I won't. Just like there are thousands of other "great movies" out there I won't see.

You are basically in the same position as all the non-D&D players who go to see the movie. It's still a good movie irrespective of if you happen to play the game it's based on.

No, I'm not in the same position as non-D&D players. They have no basis for comparison---I do, since I actually play the game.

It's sort of like if someone told me "Hey, there is this great football movie and you have to see it! You'll love it!". Ok, I'm a big football fan, so I check out the trailer online and... oops! it's SOCCER. So, European as opposed to American. They are both sports and have lots of fans, but my preference is for the American version of the game known as "football", while soccer really just isn't to my taste.

I've never said the D&D movie isn't based on D&D, just "not my D&D".

Iconic D&D specific monsters are anti-D&D?

When all of them are, sort of... When all those things become so common they can be used in gladitorial combat, they cease to be magical IMO. It is the reason why Romans continued to find more and more exotic animals for their combats, because what was once new becomes old.

In my D&D, I very rarely use most of those monsters. They are things of nightmares, not things of amusement. Non-adventurers will rarely encounter them, and if one happens to, they likely died in that encounter. Fortunately, PCs have better odds... usually.

 

[occam]

But if you don't look beyond, or you wait until you're higher level to look for that stuff, you can and are in fact assumed to be playing in a much more mundane/low magic world. Not no magic, but not in-your-face magic either.

I will say that my version of Neverwinter doesn't look like the one in the movie. It certainly doesn't have a giant arena with magically elevating floor sections. In general, I don't think my PC's day-to-day experience would be all that different whether they were adventuring in the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Mystara, or Dragonlance, depending on what the DM leans into. Or they could be very different, again depending on the DM (or movie writers/directors).

Like any D&D campaign, what we're seeing in the film is a particular view of a setting. You can play for decades in the Forgotten Realms without a single hot air balloon rearing its bloated mass.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think part of the disconnect is that it's very easy to conflate the Known World (the vaguely defined setting of early basic modules and box sets) with Mystara (the setting developed around it through the Gazetteers and later box sets). The setting as told though the Basic and Expert and early BX modules is fairly low magic. It's also barely Mystara. The Keep on the Borderlands is not a fair representation of what the setting looked like come the Princess Ark.

You can map that same trajectory to Greyhawk (Gygax's folio is a very different setting from the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer) or even Forgotten Realms itself (the original books are lower magic than the setting would eventually become). You can't judge a setting purely based on its original version.

Which is why people took such issue with that characterization; it doesn't reflect what the setting became, only what the proto-setting from which it emerged was.

I'm talking about the setting as originally expressed, though, in all those settings actually. Just about everything becomes crazier and more fantastic over time and development.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Honestly, the hot air balloon was one of the few things that didn't make me say the movie's setting was too high fantasy for me. Given the technology levels suggested in the PHB, hot air balloons are completely reasonable, especially since the Leonardos of the D&D world can actually interrogate inhabitants of the elemental planes about hot air rising and such.

Hot air balloons are terrible forms of transportation without additional things being applied to them, so they don't really break most settings, are a good visual and can be an exciting location to stage a battle. (Hope you didn't plan on using a lot of fire spells today!)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'm talking about the setting as originally expressed

By that logic, there's only one superhero in the MCU, if you decided to only count the setting as originally expressed in "Iron Man."

 

[Micah Sweet]

Which has a half-demon king, a secret Illuminati of wizards, and... Castle Greyhawk.


Which has a kingdom (er, principality) of magic-users.

You want to play in a low-magic world, try Middle-earth. There are literally 5 wizards in the whole place, and the flashiest trick one of the most powerful of them can manage is lighting a pine cone on fire. (And arguably he could only do that because of a magic item.) From that standpoint, virtually all D&D is high-magic.

This has been given context. Please read the whole thread.

 

[Minigiant]

I have no idea what you're talking about here. The high-level NPC in question (Zenk) isn't even in most of the movie. He's just part of an optional sidequest. If the players e.g. follow the treasure carriages straight to the treasure chamber under the arena, they'll never even meet Zenk.

My point is without fudging that side quest and boss fight is suicide at low levels.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Which has a half-demon king, a secret Illuminati of wizards, and... Castle Greyhawk.


Which has a kingdom (er, principality) of magic-users.

You want to play in a low-magic world, try Middle-earth. There are literally 5 wizards in the whole place, and the flashiest trick one of the most powerful of them can manage is lighting a pine cone on fire. (And arguably he could only do that because of a magic item.) From that standpoint, virtually all D&D is high-magic.

modern D&D.

 

[Micah Sweet]

By that logic, there's only one superhero in the MCU, if you decided to only count the setting as originally expressed in "Iron Man."

That makes no sense. I'm talking about classic D&D, not the MCU. Please remember I said I liked the film.