How badly has D&D been mismanaged?

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rumble said:
I really like The Gamers also, but there's no mass market appeal.

Maybe if you went full isekai with a bounce back to reality in cutscenes, it would work.

Could also go full immersive real world, like the movie, "OMG... We're in a Horror Movie!!!" Again, great flick, but no mass appeal.
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Low budget, how much mass market appeal do you need to make a few bucks?
 
Toadmaster said:
An RPG film could be as simple as having "the players / GM" provide the intro before fading into the "game world".
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I don’t believe that such a frame would improve a movie. It would tend to distance and undermine the story by making it doubly fictional and the stakes less important, while adding nothing. There are movies with frame stories that work — Titanic and Band of Brothers, for instance — and you could do it successfully for A Princess of Mars, but frame stories have to add something that completes the inner narrative or tweaks its impact, otherwise they are a distancing trope that invites disbelief, to no good end.

In other games that have succeeded in mass media (such as football), it is because people come to the stands or tune in on the tube to watch good players play. Or buy a newspaper every day to follow the moves in a top-flight game of Go. Just clamping a shell of dullish players doing dull stuff around a mid-budget fantasy movie neither makes it better nor makes it a D&D movie.
 
Agemegos said:
I don’t believe that such a frame would improve a movie. It would tend to distance and undermine the story by making it doubly fictional and the stakes less important, while adding nothing. There are movies with frame stories that work — Titanic and Band of Brothers, for instance — and you could do it successfully for A Princess of Mars, but frame stories have to add something that completes the inner narrative or tweaks its impact, otherwise they are a distancing trope that invites disbelief, to no good end.

In other games that have succeeded in mass media (such as football), it is because people come to the stands or tune in on the tube to watch good players play. Or buy a newspaper every day to follow the moves in a top-flight game of Go. Just clamping a shell of dullish players doing dull stuff around a mid-budget fantasy movie neither makes it better nor makes it a D&D movie.
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That is just where I draw the line between RPG movie and fantasy movie. Without any concession to the RPG element then what do you have to distinguish a film from Conan, Beastmaster, Excalibur etc.

The Princess Bride did just fine jumping back and forth between story book and "in character". Princess Bride is not an RPG movie but utilizes a similar technique to good effect.
 
I've always thought Age of Ultron dropped the ball on Ultron because it's his daddy issues with Hank Pym that make him interesting. I think the movie's Hank Pym would have made a much more interesting creator for Ultron than Tony Stark.

I'm afraid I'd rather not see the players and DM. Just me maybe but I don't care for it. I did enjoy Guardians of the Flame but that's really an extended rant about why it would suck to like in a fantasy world so the transitional element makes sense thematically.
 
Agemegos said:
Good question. And here's another: is there really a good reason to so distinguish?
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I don’t believe there is. Conan & Beastmaster are ‘very’ loosely based on books, Excalibur is based on legend, and an RPG movie can be based on a game.
 
sharps54 said:
I don’t believe there is. Conan & Beastmaster are ‘very’ loosely based on books, Excalibur is based on legend, and an RPG movie can be based on a game.
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Yeah. And when the film-makers translated those works from books and oral storytelling to movies they left the old media out. A book about Conan was adapted into a movie about Conan, not into a movie about a book about Conan. So the analogy is that a D&D game about my character Otanes should get adapted into a movie about Otanes, not into a movie about a game about Otanes.

Toadmaster Toadmaster brought up an illuminating example with The Princess Bride. That's a book about loving a book (and one's father) that got adapted into a movie about loving a book (and one's grandfather). It did not get adapted into a movie about a book about loving a book (etc.) Goldman switched media, he did not add a layer of framing.
 
I don't think there's like a "one path to success" in how a good D&D film would be handled - a good film is a good film, doesn't matter to me if it has a "people playing a game" premise, Isekei-ish, or just straight fantasy. Any of those could work with the right script, director, and actors. Ultimately quality will win through. Dredd failed at the box office but was a best-selling DVD. Labyrinth was a complete bomb in theatres but over time became one of the most profitable films of all time. I just want something good....which, well, kinda requires Hollywood not being Hollywood, in other words finding talented artists and letting them be talented artists. The Hobbit films are a good example of one issue - the executive interference is what ruined those films, explicitly. Whereas Rings of Power is an example of another issue - people with no talent contemptuous of the source material and with some blatant animosity towards the fans. And it seems like, nowadays, you get one or the other and only occasionally is a decent film squeezed out in spite of that. Which is why I'd much rather a low budget indy production. I want an A23 D&D film. My favourite film of the last 15 years was made for under a million bucks.

But you can't do that with a "Brand" because that's how Hasbro views D&D. They want a blockbuster with 100 million in cgi and a bunch of boxes checked to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
 
It also helps that the Princess Bride is a comedy and the whole joke of the original book is the fictional framing of it is a abridged version that is skipping the boring shit, based on the idea that his father used to read him the book, and that then when he tried to read the book he loved as an adult, he found that it was incredibly dense and meandering book that focused on inane minutiae and that his father had just been reading the good parts, so now he is making the version his father used to tell him.

So the movie being based on a grandfather reading the book to his grandson works into the original trappings of the existing fiction.
 
xanther said:
Now I do agree with you on computer games. Why not monetize the crap out of it. I suspect though it is more a business decision given the barrier to entry these days and existing competition.

A good game requires investment, serious investment, and you have to compete with Call of Duty, Skyrim, etc. etc. A D&D computer game can be great, Baldur's Gate, and Icewind Dale are great examples, but unlike the table top market where the first mover advantage is massive for D&D, it doesn't have that in computer games.

Computer gamers don't assign D&D sacred status as the ur progenitor and standard by which all that follows is to be judged. So D&D computer games have to fully compete against more established titles. Sure you will certainly sale D&D computer games to those who hold D&D as the ur progenitor and agree with the edition you are using :smile:, but will it cannibalize your TTRPG sales or drive them? Lots of investment, with risk, and an uncertain net revenue gain.

I suspect the owners of D&D don't want to invest and build, they want to milk.
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Except we have a direct counter example to this theory: Games Workshop. It isn't hard to get a license to use Warhammer IP. It's hard to get Games Workshop to foot the bill. GW is taking a shotgun approach with their IP and it seems to be working well for them. They've got a couple of AAA franchises out of it (*tide series, Total War) and it is an easy onboarding point to get money from fans of the IP who may or may not be buying the minis.
 
TristramEvans said:
I hate The Princess Bride. Just thought I'd put that out there.
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A big part of the joke of the novel is that S. Morgenstern's classic really isn't much good. Even after "Goldman" hacks out the boring parts what's left is a hackneyed adventure with characters that are pure cliché, and a preposterous, rambling plot. "Goldman" loved it because he shared it with his father, not because it was really good. And that's the point.
 
As a movie, Princess Bride might be close to perfection, disliking it is heretical or a best a sign of witchcraft.

And we know there is only one thing to do in that case:
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The Mad Hatter said:
I like Kindred: The Embraced. It was good enough for what it was; a drama show with vampires. It had pretty women and hot men. Damm Mark Frankel (Julian Luna) was hot.

latest
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I remember being so disappointed by this show. I was probably being too uptight. Especially considering I LOVED Forever Knight. Which was goofy as hell. Oh, but the third and final season of Forever Knight was a better Vampire: the Masquerade show than Kindred: the Embraced. Damn, that shit was good.

Fun fact: the Canadian episodes of Forever Knight had material not shown in the US, and the European release had nudity.
 
Willmark said:
cut of around 40% to the theaters?
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You are way overestimating the cut theaters get. There's a reason popcorn and a coke are $20.
Toadmaster said:
Low budget, how much mass market appeal do you need to make a few bucks?
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The problem is that the point of a D&D movie for Hasbro is to earn money and to drive people to the brand. Going Low Budget only get's you certain crowds, the low budget nerds and the D&D players. There's really no point in trying to do Clerks: The RPG Movie because The Gamers, The Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising, and The Gamers 3 already exists. You really need to already be involved in RPG culture to understand them (add CCG and convention cultures for the 3rd movie). The Princess Bride can pull off this kind of referential humor because having a family member read you a story is a universal experience for the American movie-going public. Deadpool got to pull off referential humor because it was the ascendancy of the Superhero movie so the moviegoing public was familiar with a lot of what it was going for. If you try to add an RPG tutorial into your movie, it's going to be as bad or even worse than when they explain video games in movies.

Horror movies are also a really tough bet. Yes you can get away with lower budgets and there's a built in crowd of viewers who may not already be fans of D&D, but you run the risk of preventing little timmy from ever being able to get a copy because that D&D movie had so much gore.

I do think that a D&D movie would be fascinating if they tried for a similar setup to Dread or The Seige, but with the dungeon. Here's our protagonists, they are now trapped in a structure and have to fight, sneak, magic, and think their way through it. They could go mid budget if they are willing to chase critical success and focus on having the right, tight story to tell.
 
Gringnr said:
I remember being so disappointed by this show. I was probably being too uptight. Especially considering I LOVED Forever Knight. Which was goofy as hell. Oh, but the third and final season of Forever Knight was a better Vampire: the Masquerade show than Kindred: the Embraced. Damn, that shit was good.

Fun fact: the Canadian episodes of Forever Knight had material not shown in the US, and the European release had nudity.
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Same with Highlander, which used to be shown back to back with Forever Night where I was,

It was a big selling point for the VHS subscriptions.
 
sharps54 said:
I mean if you want to make a lot of money look at the successful franchises like Fast and Furious and Transformers. Maybe you just need more racist robots and juvenile humor in your film…
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Crazy enough Bumblebee was quite good! Not sure how it did at the box office though.
 
David Johansen said:
The funny thing about Battleship is that there's a lot of good stuff in there but it doesn't quite hold together. It's also quite clearly intended as the start of a series. The alien ship that hits the satellite and explodes at the start of the movie is the one carrying the communications equipment, diplomats and leaders. What follows is a military operation to capture vital assets like a communications array. The US Navy is reacting, we get to see a modern navy focused on frigates and aircraft carriers. We get to see that the aliens are operating under rules of engagement. Yes they bring the Battleship (Missouri?) out of retirement and those big 16 inch guns are serious brute force. The old guys just popping up to crew it and everything being in place to fight it is a bit off but hey! It's a board game movie and still does a better job of showing logistics than any Star Wars or Star Trek I've ever seen.

It's not the movie I would have made. I'd have made a gritty WWII navy movie in the Pacific. On the other hand Battleship would be a terrible D&D movie.
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What the hell do aliens have to do with Battleship?
 
BedrockBrendan said:
lol. I think the only more provocative statement you could have made on a nerd forum is "Artax deserved to die"
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Speaking of which, I really like The Neverending Story but the ending is terrible and nothing like the book.

The book's ending is quite dark and meta.

In fact I think that the book is truly unadaptable, which is a claim that I think is too freely thrown around about many novels, because the very meaning of the novel is derived from the fact that it is a novel and you're reading it. Like certain stories by Calvino, it is about the very act of reading.
 
sharps54 said:
I think my issue is the breaking of the earlier continuity and the fact I hate the idea and implementation of the TVA. But things like
Thanos being a robot
and the way the gods have been treated just to deliver a few jokes in the last couple Thor movies rub me wrong.
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Given the poor performance of the movie this is probably completely irrelevant, but according to the director of The Eternals...

...MCU Thanos was not an Eternal, and the "brother" relationship referenced by Eros in that mid-credits sting was intended as metaphorical, not literal.

Which makes sense - the blood relationship between the two characters in the comics just doesn't work given the nature of the Eternals and Deviants in the MCU.
 
Parkaboy said:
I agree D&D can get there with a gaming platform. My guess is that is their focus again. The demos of their VTT could change everything if they pan out. I wondered for some while why they didn't have a 3D VTT already.
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It's tricky. It's not just a matter of giving DM's nice looking tools, but giving them tools they can use to create an entire tactical combat on the fly. I don't think that Wizard's understands this. Their VTT is pretty as hell, but as a GM who has played with most of the VTTs on the market, I'm wondering how much work it takes to set everything up. And nothing about their marketing answers this question! To me, that suggests a deep fundamental misunderstanding of their market.
Sharrow said:
It helps a heck of a lot to get a monopoly, or near to one. Amazon does, Drivethru nearly does, and so on.
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Yes, that's what I was referring to as a "network effect." And D&D already has that. When you say "role-playing game," you get a lot of confused looks. But when you say "D&D," you get instant comprehension. When you throw in the fact that they're making a plurality of profits in the RPG space with the fact that they're backed by freaking HASBRO, you've got a company that is positioned to dominate this space if only they had a vision.
lategamer said:
I think a meta TV show might work.
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A good and successful TV show only starts with an elevator pitch. As a vehicle to somehow capture and expand the RPG market, you're talking about a lot more uncertainty than what I'm proposing. Granted, I'm not well-familiar with the entertainment industry as a creator, although I'm familiar with it as a consumer, and I'm familiar with software engineering from both sides of the table. Creating a fantastic TV series that broadens the market for D&D is catching lightning in a bottle IMO. Creating a great digital platform for hosting games is shocking virgin ground. If the best that the industry can do is Roll20 and Foundry, I perceive vast untapped potential. IMHO it doesn't require a software engineer to appreciate this.
 
Edgewise said:
It's tricky. It's not just a matter of giving DM's nice looking tools, but giving them tools they can use to create an entire tactical combat on the fly. I don't think that Wizard's understands this. Their VTT is pretty as hell, but as a GM who has played with most of the VTTs on the market, I'm wondering how much work it takes to set everything up. And nothing about their marketing answers this question! To me, that suggests a deep fundamental misunderstanding of their market.
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I think the issue is the incentives are all wrong.

What VTTs should be able to do is take something like a map of an entire dungeon based on scale and zoom in quickly to generate a battlemap out any part of that map with an appropriate change of scale (say from 10ft squares and a party token to 5ft squares individual and individual player tokens).

I think the issue is that if setting up stuff in VTTs is hard to do, then GMs are more likely to spend the money on the pre-written adventures where that is done for them. You don't really sell more products by making it easier for GMs to do their own thing.

This also incentivises them to spend ever more money on the immersive wow factor (dynamic lighting! 3d!) than basic tools, which is, I think why they all seem to do the same things, and none of those things are what I would really want them to do.
 
David Johansen said:
I'm afraid I'd rather not see the players and DM. Just me maybe but I don't care for it. I did enjoy Guardians of the Flame but that's really an extended rant about why it would suck to like in a fantasy world so the transitional element makes sense thematically.
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I disliked them pretty intensely, but that was not the reason for my dislike.
 
TristramEvans said:
Same with Highlander, which used to be shown back to back with Forever Night where I was,

It was a big selling point for the VHS subscriptions.
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It was shown shortly before or after that War of the Worlds show here, I think. Very late at night in slots that probably have infomercials in them now (assuming those still exist - I haven't watched free-to-air TV for probably decades).
 
Edgewise said:
Creating a fantastic TV series that broadens the market for D&D is catching lightning in a bottle IMO.
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We might be able to agree that the lightning has not yet been captured for this, though it has for other genres several times.

Edgewise said:
Creating a great digital platform for hosting games is shocking virgin ground. If the best that the industry can do is Roll20 and Foundry, I perceive vast untapped potential. IMHO it doesn't require a software engineer to appreciate this.
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That's a fair assessment. That said, I don't actually want to play a TTRPG video game. Many VTTs seem to be edging towards it being more like a video game. Certainly the new one from WotC seemed to be that.
 
Sharrow said:
It was shown shortly before or after that War of the Worlds show here, I think. Very late at night in slots that probably have infomercials in them now (assuming those still exist - I haven't watched free-to-air TV for probably decades).
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Depends where you live but in many places there is no free-to-air tv anymore.
 
Doctor Wombat said:
Given the poor performance of the movie this is probably completely irrelevant, but according to the director of The Eternals...

...MCU Thanos was not an Eternal, and the "brother" relationship referenced by Eros in that mid-credits sting was intended as metaphorical, not literal.

Which makes sense - the blood relationship between the two characters in the comics just doesn't work given the nature of the Eternals and Deviants in the MCU.
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I hadn’t seen that but that is definitely a better way to go.
 
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