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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7773524" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, they just don't.  And they won't without significant adaptation.There are tons of problems.  Take for example the relationship between the protagonist and the viewer, and the player and the player character.   When you start play in D&D, you know who you are and what you want to do.  There is no need to establish this character to you, and its for most player's not a major priority of play.  But when you are making a movie, when you introduce a character the first thing you need to do is in some way establish who this character is and how their mind works to the audience.Consider also the dynamics of play between an RPG and the dynamics of character interaction in a movie.  In an RPG, you generally have 4-8 protagonists sharing equal limelight.  How many movies can you think of with 4-8 protagonists sharing equal limelight?   There aren't many that come to mind, and movies where they've been able to pull that off, such as 'Avengers: Infinity War', they did so by having over a dozen prior movies establishing a relationship between the character and the audience via conventional movie scripts and stories.   The core party dynamic that is the experience of D&D is tough to pull off well, and ensemble cast movies are pretty rare.Consider the problem of exposition.  When you play D&D, there are a ton of things you already understand about it, especially if you've been playing a while.  And, since the game is going to go for 400 hours, you don't mind sitting through over the course of that campaign 40 or 80 hours of exposition to fill you in on what is going on.   But in a two-hour movie, even 20 or 30 minutes spent on exposition is going to seem really clunky and it takes a genius for script writing to not make all that exposition boring.  In reality, you're probably going to want to spend at most 2-3 minutes on exposition per act in a two hour movie, so 6-15 minutes depending on how things are working.  And that's on top of 3-5 minutes introducing each protagonist in the party.  Managing to do this in a way that is satisfying and doesn't feel rushed and doesn't feel contrived is going to take a work of genius because an adventure module isn't going to tell you how to go about doing this, and mostly won't have it as a concern.   Remember, an adventure path is meant to be played over the course of hundreds of hours.  That's a totally different experience than a movie or even a book.  But to the extent that you can adapt that, a movie is going to absolutely be the hardest to accomplish.   The easiest format to adapt a D&D adventure to is the long episodic format of TV, and the definitive example for fantasy in my opinion is 'Avatar: The Last Airbender'.  (And consider the disaster that was trying to adapt that story line to a movie.)   If you have 20 or more hours to tell your story in, then you might be able to build to a party dynamic with 4 or more protagonists on screen at the same time to which the audience can relate, and have enough exposition to build understanding of the setting without feeling like everything is an info dump.What I am not saying is that you can't have a story in D&D.  What I am saying is that the format is so radically different from linear, non-interactive, scripted, short duration mediums that it would take a work of genius to adapt those stories to another medium.   And what I mean by that is that works of genius aren't something that you can just commission because you want one.  You can't just decide, "We have this IP we want to cash in on.  So we'll commission a work of genius that will fully do justice to our IP."   You instead have to wait until that spark of genius comes along, and a script exists that demands to be made.  So, my proposal in this is if you want to make a D&D mass media product:a) Use a long episodic format.b) Since D&D has special effect and set requirements that are vastly more expensive than most episodes of (the very low magic, highly human centric, quasi-medieval) 'Game of Thrones' make it animated to reduce the production costs.There are additional problems.  D&D adventures have a lot of combat that if translated to the screen would be mostly repetitive.  Consider even the adaptation between Chronicles of the Dragonlance the novels, and Chronicles of the Dragonlance the adventure modules.  The vast majority of what you experience as players playing those modules is not faithfully translated to the novels or represented in them.  While some of the fights that appear in the adventure modules do appear in the novels, the longer the story goes the less overlap there actually is and the more the action tends to occur 'off stage'.   This is what I mean about how what D&D is doesn't translate to other mediums because a tactical skirmish game doesn't translate to non-interactive medium.   I don't mean that there isn't a story at all in D&D, but I do mean that there doesn't have to be a story in D&D and even when there is a story it's a smallish part of the experience.I'm not even convinced 'Princes of the Apocalypes' or 'Waterdeep: Dragon Heist' make for a great D&D story, much less that the story is such a major part of the attraction of them that they'd easily translate to another medium.   This isn't to say that they are bad adventures or devoid of story, but just that story is only a small part of the aesthetic appeal of a good adventure.  Consider an adventure like I6: Ravenloft, widely considered one of the best if not the best ever written.  While in the hands of a good and highly imaginative DM, you'll get a few good story scenes out of that adventure, the story framework is really pretty thin.  It would take a work of genius to pull that story out of the adventure and make it the central focus and not feel clichéd to an audience jaded by many vampire stories.   But to a player of the adventure, even the thin story is suitable because they are in it, making choices, immersed in the experience.  The story of picking your way through the maze that is Castle Ravenloft is a fun one, it's just not a story that readily translates to say a movie.   I mean how many movies do you know where the map of the building is a major character, if not the major character, of the story?</blockquote>

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