WotC's Nathan Stewart: "Story, Story, Story"; and IS D&D a Tabletop Game?

Forbes spoke to WotC's Brand Director & Executive Producer for Dungeons & Dragons, who talked about the 5th Edition launch and his vision for D&D's future. The interview is fairly interesting - it confirms or repeats some information we already know, and also delves a little into the topic of D&D as a wider brand, rather than as a tabletop roleplaying game.

In the interview, he reiterates previous statements that this is the biggest D&D launch ever, in terms of both money and units sold.

[lq]We are story, story, story. The story drives everything.[/lq]

He repeats WoTC's emphasis on storylines, confirming the 1-2 stories per year philosphy. "We are story, story, story. The story drives everything. The need for new rules, the new races, new classes is just based on what’s going to really make this adventure, this story, this kind kind of theme happen." He goes on to say that "We’re not interested in putting out more books for books’ sake... there’s zero plans for a Player’s Handbook 2 any time on the horizon."

As for settings, he confirms that "we’re going to stay in the Forgotten Realms for the foreseeable future." That'll disappoint some folks, I'm sure, but it is their biggest setting, commercially.

Stewart is not "a hundred percent comfortable" with the status of digital tools because he felt like "we took a great step backwards."

[lq]Dungeons and Dragons stopped being a tabletop game years or decades ago. [/lq]

His thoughts on D&D's identity are interesting, too. He mentions that "Dungeons and Dragons stopped being a tabletop game years or decades ago". I'm not sure what that means. His view for the future of the brand includes video games, movies, action figures, and more: "This is no secret for anyone here, but the big thing I want to see is just a triple-A RPG video game. I want to see Baldur’s Gate 3, I want to see a huge open-world RPG. I would love movies about Dungeons and Dragons, or better yet, serialized entertainment where we’re doing seasons of D&D stories and things like Forgotten Realms action figures… of course I’d love that, I’m the biggest geek there is. But at the end of the day, the game’s what we’re missing in the portfolio."

You can read the full interview here.

 

[Staffan]

Because it failed the last time they tried a theatrical release.
But... you could say the same thing about, oh, Lemony Snickey's A Series of Unfortunate Events or The Golden Compass/ His Dark Materials, Daredevil, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a myriad other properties that produced a terrible first adaptation.

(Ironically, of the ones I grabbed, looking back they're all now TV series...) .

To be perfectly honest, I think D&D would work a lot better as a TV series than as a movie. The basic format of D&D is episodic: a campaign made up of multiple adventures. You also want an adventuring party, which means an ensemble cast, and that works better on TV where you can focus on different characters in different episodes.

Also, they should get John Rogers to run it.

 

[Parmandur]

Exactly.
There's a lot of people with superhero fatigue. I'm not one, but do think some diversity among franchises would be nice. Rather than lots of DC Universe movies, Warner Brothers could have fewer of those and more fantasy and Potter. Which leaves Marvel more room as well. Everyone wins.

Really, if the WB could have regular new Tolkien films, they would. They'd love that. But they can't, and Christopher Tolkien ain't giving them the rights to the Silmarillion anytime soon. (Until he dies anyway, and the WB backs up a dump truck full of money to the next literary executor.)
In the meantime, a D&D franchise is just as good. They can make as many of then as they want for as long as they want.


Sorry I got your hopes up.
But it's coming!

D&D is kind of ideal to continue what they were doing in the LotR franchise: battles, monsters, magic, etc. Buy no literary legacy to be concerned about, go hogwild, and nigh infinite story possibilities.

 

[Parmandur]

To be perfectly honest, I think D&D would work a lot better as a TV series than as a movie. The basic format of D&D is episodic: a campaign made up of multiple adventures. You also want an adventuring party, which means an ensemble cast, and that works better on TV where you can focus on different characters in different episodes.

Also, they should get John Rogers to run it.

Dollars to donuts we will get a D&D cartoon: I want to see something like the Jason Thompson dungeon walkthrough map comics, but maybe I'm just crazy.

 

[Dire Bare]

I believe they can maintain the pace of 2 adventures, supplements, or whatever else you call it per year as long as there is not major competition. If there is a new breakout RPG and players want something new, then progress forward will diminish or stop. At that point they will have to decide if investing in more rules, etc. is worth it. I believe that is the biggest change in reference to the current version of D&D, versus predecessors, i.e. the lack of competition or something new to draw players away. Regardless, story is always important.

There may be a "breakout" RPG in the future, but it will be no competition to D&D. The only time D&D hasn't been the top dog RPG is when they weren't printing books (at that's just sales, there where still probably more people playing the game than other games). Nothing competes (at the same level) with D&D, and I really don't expect that to ever change.

 

[Dire Bare]

I find the "story, story, story" push depressing. It's probably why I've purchased zero of the big adventures for 5e.

Would you rather have adventures without story? Or are you just not a adventure type of person when it comes to purchases?

It's like I'm just playing a computer game where the entire story and conclusion have been pre-chosen by someone else.

Luckily, none of WotC's 5E adventures do this.

It's an RPG not some poorly written comic. I always thought there should be a separation between what happened in the books and what happened in the setting itself. That the books should be an example of the adventures you could have yourself and not that the events and characters, like Drizzt, actually exist.

This complaint is a bit played out at this point. "The Sundering" that launched the 5E Realms was the RSE to end all RSEs (Realms Shaking Events), and it had nothing to do with any of the published adventures. Well, some of the novel characters make an appearance, but they are cameos . . . easily ignored or name-changed to NPCs of your preference.

The 5E Realms adventures have been screamingly easy to run without any prior knowledge of the greater Realms setting, and they have also been super easy to convert to other settings, official and homebrew.

 

[Parmandur]

Would you rather have adventures without story? Or are you just not a adventure type of person when it comes to purchases?







Luckily, none of WotC's 5E adventures do this.







This complaint is a bit played out at this point. "The Sundering" that launched the 5E Realms was the RSE to end all RSEs (Realms Shaking Events), and it had nothing to do with any of the published adventures. Well, some of the novel characters make an appearance, but they are cameos . . . easily ignored or name-changed to NPCs of your preference.



The 5E Realms adventures have been screamingly easy to run without any prior knowledge of the greater Realms setting, and they have also been super easy to convert to other settings, official and homebrew.

To be fair, he said he hadn't gotten the APs, so clearly not knowing about them is kind of to be expected.

 

[Jer]

Not sure still why people are so confident that the movie will fail; Warner Bros. is throwing major resources at this, could go either way, easy.

Because it failed the last time they tried a theatrical release.

That's a big part of it. But also because D&D is unlike other adaptations and so it's hard to see how it can succeed. It's not a literary adaptation like "Harry Potter" or "Lord of the Rings". It's not an adaptation of a beloved children's cartoon from the 1980s/1990s like "Transformers" or "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles". It's not an adaptation of the adventures of a long-running serialized comic book character like all of the Marvel movies or the Batman franchise. It's not even an adaptation of a video game like the Resident Evil movies.

They're attempting to adapt a tabletop game to a movie. This is not an easy sell. Previous attempts to do this brought us "Clue" (a movie I love but was not a success) and "Battleship" (ugh). What's more, D&D is a narrative game so on the one hand it seems like it would be easy to build a film narrative around something in the game and make it work, but so far there have been three D&D movies and none of them have worked (though the second one was kind of hilarious in a "Hercules the Legendary Journeys" sort of way).

I think this is why a lot of people say things like "Why don't they just do Dragonlance?" or "Why aren't they doing the Drizz't stories?" Because those would be literary adaptations and it's easy to see how they could be done (though I think they are problematic for their own reasons). The concern is that whatever is done with the D&D movie it'll be a generic fantasy movie with the D&D name slapped on it. Or if we're "lucky" a generic fantasy movie with a few fanservice namechecks thrown into the dialogue (i.e. a "Why I haven't seen danger this severe since that time we fought those cultists of Elemental Evil - remember that one boss?" sort of thing).

I'm hopeful it turns out good but it's uncharted territory. You need a writer (or group of writers) who can come up with a screenplay that holds to the spirit of D&D who don't really have a plot laid out before them to adapt. They're not doing something wholly original, but they aren't just taking someone else's vision and putting it on the screen. That's going to be hard, and you'll need some special people to do that.

 

[Dausuul]

Not sure still why people are so confident that the movie will fail; Warner Bros. is throwing major resources at this, could go either way, easy.

Mostly because of Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. Out of every ten new things, nine are crap. It may not seem that way, but that's because we quickly forget the nine crappy things and remember the one thing that wasn't crappy.

The only way I know of to beat Sturgeon's Law is to start from a thing that isn't crap and build on it. If you take a good book and adapt it to a movie, you can do substantially better than a 10% chance of making a decent movie. (Though you're still nowhere near 100%.)

The D&D movie is not using this strategy. There is no pre-existing story to build on. A new one will have to be written from scratch, and Sturgeon's Law applies in full force. Therefore, there is a 90% chance that the movie will be crap.

 

[Jester David]

There's also no pre-written story for every non-sequel or non-adaptation. There's a *lot* of great movies based on very little.

And unlike other game based movies, there's a lot more to drawn on than "ships firing blind and pegs" or "a murder and people with colour themed names".
Heck, Fantastic Beasts is based on a bestiary. And that's becoming a multi-film series.

And while most franchises have an origin story, they go in their own direction. Rogue One is likely pure original, and Captain America: Civil War only has the barest connection to the source material.

 

[Parmandur]

Mostly because of Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. Out of every ten new things, nine are crap. It may not seem that way, but that's because we quickly forget the nine crappy things and remember the one thing that wasn't crappy.

The only way I know of to beat Sturgeon's Law is to start from a thing that isn't crap and build on it. If you take a good book and adapt it to a movie, you can do substantially better than a 10% chance of making a decent movie. (Though you're still nowhere near 100%.)

The D&D movie is not using this strategy. There is no pre-existing story to build on. A new one will have to be written from scratch, and Sturgeon's Law applies in full force. Therefore, there is a 90% chance that the movie will be crap.

If anything, adaptations are behind the curve: never, ever live up to the book, even when decent.

The only way to beat those odds is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. And we don't have much to judge on, other than the fact that a major studio, with a successful producer (LEGO Movie!!) putting years of work into it: the previous efforts were low budget amateurs at work, so set no precedent.

Time will tell, but I will never bet against the man who sheparded the LEGO Movie into being.