D&D General What D&D reflects today, media wise...

[BookTenTiger]

Another thing to note is that the writers of recent WotC adventures have been very transparent about their influences.

Strixhaven is obviously inspired by Harry Potter and other magic school settings.

The circus setting of Wild Beyond the Witchlight echoes Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Rime of the Frostmaden cited The Thing as an inspiration.

Descent into Avernus has a whole
Mad Max section.

These are not the only influences, but you can see a wide variety of media and genres inspiring modern creators! I think that's really exciting.

 

[Reynard]

You misread me. I wasn't retorting you, I was agreeing with your post and adding more reasons to disagree with the OP.

Sorry. Long day.

I think Record of Lodoss War was the second anime I ever saw, after Saturday Morning Robotech. I don't remember a lot of details but I love the scale of the Dragons. In my mind, dragons are always city levelers.

 

[TwiceBorn2]

Edit to add: I had to google what DOTA was, because I had no idea.

Same.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

D&D has a hard time recognizing it's own identity. It has always modeled itself after other sources and trying to appeal to the largest spectrum of audiences. If you look back to its creators and influencers, you'll see bits and pieces taken from specific works like Vance's Dying Earth, Moorcock's Elric saga, and Leiber's Lankhmar.

In this current day where fantasy and geek have become more mainstream and chic, it's not surprising to see a wider range of influences like Pokemon and Harry Potter. Even D&D has become it's own influencers by tapping into the nostalgia factor to recycle old materials and ideas that have long outgrown their relevance in modern social norms.

This is something where 4th edition really stands out. Monsters didn't just fill up a space on the page. The authors took a lot of thought and care to give every creature a place and a reason in the newly designed cosmos. It was the first time that D&D felt like it's own universe and not just borrowed bits of existing ideas and literature. This is something a lot of people seem to have missed, even though a lot of it was quietly carried over.

 

[Krachek]

DnD, media wise, let me think
Conflicting characters,
unique back story,
unsuspected turnover in a realistic setup who finally appear full of holes,
…. Process…
La Casa de papel!

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I too miss the LotR mixed with Conan roots of the game....

In which book does Frodo go through a crashed spacecraft in the Misty Mountains again? That was quite the inspiration for my D&D. Same with the scene in Conan the Conqueror where he fights against space hyppos chucking grenades at him!

Joking aside, and since I'm one of those ''new players that loves MMO and pokemons'', I've always seen D&D as more of a pastiche of classic fantasy thrown in a 70'-americana fueled blender with a bunch of Moebius comics and maybe a few He-Man/She-ra action figure.

The results being something that principally reflects its own thing.

 

[DarkCrisis]

I too miss the LotR mixed with Conan roots of the game....

In which book does Frodo go through a crashed spacecraft in the Misty Mountains again? That was quite the inspiration for my D&D. Same with the scene in Conan the Conqueror where he fights against space hyppos chucking grenades at him!

Joking aside, and since I'm one of those ''new players that loves MMO and pokemons'', I've always seen D&D as more of a pastiche of classic fantasy thrown in a 70'-americana fueled blender with a bunch of Moebius comics and maybe a few He-Man/She-ra action figure.

The results being something that principally reflects its own thing.

You have Dave A to thank for the sci-fi additions, I believe.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm of the opinion D&D no longer really "reflects" anything. It's become a source in its own right. We're approaching the 50th anniversary, after all. When Gygax and Arneson and the other luminaries were putting D&D together in the 70s, that was around the 50th anniversary of many of their sources. The 30s gave us the initial writing for Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, the start of Conan's adventures, and The Hobbit. The fuller depiction from The Lord of the Rings was even newer--less than twenty years old.

At this point, D&D has spawned literally entire genres of video games, created archetypes of its own almost from whole cloth, and cemented itself as THE tabletop game in the public consciousness. Just as LotR was big enough to spawn some generally quite excellent films (the Hobbit films...more debatable, shall we say) fifty years after its publication, so is D&D still able to drive Big Stuff as we approach its 50th anniversary.

But, unlike LotR and a lot of those other things, D&D is still a living thing in many respects, it can still grow and change and do new things. In that sense, what we're seeing is less imitation of other things, and more players finding what they like and running with it. You see this most strongly in the shifting demographics of characters on D&D Beyond (and the rise of good art you can find via Google, too!) Dragonborn art used to be precious rare, the majority of it actually commissioned by WotC itself or other professional outlets. The past five years, though, have seen an absolute EXPLOSION of individual fans getting dragonborn art, and I couldn't be happier; we're seeing so much more variety and character as a result. Fat ones, skinny ones, really really dragony ones, nearly humanoid ones, women, men, wizards, thieves, nobles, necromancers, all sorts. As a dragonborn fan, this is lovely, as it means I have far more art to steal employ for helping demonstrate what my characters may look like.

D&D having elves standing next to dragon-men and devil-people, because players genuinely think those things are just fun to do. Perhaps some will call that "anime" (though anime that feature humanoid dragons, even lizardfolk, are relatively rare; usually you have catgirls or fox-/wolf-people or the like). Perhaps some will call it "supers." Personally, I think that's putting the cart before the horse, thinking D&D is chasing after these trends, when in actuality it's being driven by the same forces that caused those trends to come about.

 

[Krachek]

DnD media wise, for graphics I would go for Raid shadow legends, for mean, charismatic and some realistic graphics.
To summarize :
Look like Raid shadow legends, plots and characters relation base on a mix from The guardians of galaxy and La case de papel.
indeed far away from LoTR!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You have Dave A to thank for the sci-fi additions, I believe.

While he may have been responsible for the first such things, he certainly wasn't the only one adding them. Gygax did it too, and perhaps more memorably.

Also if people want video game aesthetics to consider, you could do a lot worse than Final Fantasy XIV. Big people, little people, scaly people, pointy-eared people, bunny people, buff lion-men (to be joined by their hopefully-buff lion-ladies Soon™), all alongside ordinary humans. It's less cartoonishly over-the-top than Warcraft, but nowhere near as grim-and-gritty as something like The Witcher or The Elder Scrolls. And it has a very serious commitment to actually telling a story--and telling it well--that isn't always so evident in video gaming generally, nor MMOs specifically. A world of both light and shadow, grounded yet fantastical, which seems to be very much in keeping with what a lot of D&D fans today seek out.

I've noticed, for example, that many D&D players today look for a touch of...not mundanity, nor the "zero" side of zero-to-hero, but more..."domesticity," I guess, in their games. Showing aspects of both the PCs and NPCs that are more down-to-earth, even if those characters also do crazy, awesome, or crazy-awesome things too. So, for them, the whole "zero-to-hero" or "hero-to-superhero" thing may miss the point? They don't want their characters to be zeros, heroes, or superheroes all the time, they want a spread of experiences from the small and mundane to the vast and fantastical and everything in-between. Many thus embrace things that more traditionalist players would decry as "supers stuff," but which they just see as one aspect of a much more complex, multiple-part character.