Many things have been said to justify the more than foreseeable drop at the box office of ‘Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves’. Despite being one of the most genuinely fun movies of recent times, it has been justified not to go to the cinema because it seems like an imitation of ‘The Lord of the Rings’, does not know how to adapt the cartoon series of our childhood well or is not a known IP. Fallacies and more fallacies. ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ is at the gates of its 50th anniversary and there are still those who don’t know what it is or believe that entering its world is too complicated. Today we are going to break myths and forge legends by telling the most heretics what D&D is. Grab the swords, the magic axes and the twenty-sided dice: we enter the unknown.
role before role
The animated series that devastated the homes of half the world between 1983 and 1986 (that of “You the barbarian, you the archer, acrobat, magician and I the gentleman”) it is not the source material on which this new film is based. Go ahead. In fact, both drink the same thing: the role-playing game that Gary Gygax created based on the wargames that were so fashionable in the 60s and 70s and in which entire troops were controlled with miniatures representing entire wars (especially the Napoleonic one).
I can’t sell Gary Gygax as an outsider, at least first of all: he really was more of a fan of this type of game than, looking for his place in them, he created a realistic wargame called ‘Chainmail’… in which he was allowed the audacity to introduce wizards, elves and -yes- hobbits. It was the beginning of what would later become ‘Fantastic medieval wargame campaigns playable with paper, pencil and miniatures’. He may have had to do some marketing work, but ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ was born.
You may be wondering by now what the hell is an rpg game. Roughly and with many nuances, it is a collectively told story in which each player plays a character who reacts to the narrative of a master. Each character has different points divided by abilities (his strength, his attack, his charisma or his intelligence, among others) and his actions are decided with a dice roll. As I told you, with many nuances: over the years, games of all kinds have been created, from those that do not need statistics or a master’s degree to those that go beyond dice. So, You may be thinking, it’s a bore only suitable for geeks, right? Summarized in one word: no.
a hellish world
In the 80’s, ‘Advanced Dungeons & Dragons’ became an American phenomenon such that it dethroned the classic board games. Even in ‘ET the alien’ they played a game! In fact, it’s rare to show the decade on a screen without, ‘Freaks and geeks’ style, allowing the characters to role-play. If you’ve never played the game, it might be weird to watch (especially since different outlets have gone out of their way to portray gamers as obsessed), but if you give it a chance, it’s loads of fun. If even Homer Simpson ended up playing for three hours until a goblin killed him, are you going to be any less?
Like everything that is successful among a generation, it ended up scaring the older ones: ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ was part of the Satanic Panic (as the last season of ‘Stranger things’ showed), with the parents insisting that the roleros were a public danger and committed the same violent acts with some dice than in real life. And little by little, it was falling into oblivion as movies like ‘Monsters and Labyrinths’, in which Tom Hanks ended up with his soul corrupted by Satan after playing, made their way into the collective imagination.
It didn’t help that the disastrous third edition of ‘Dungeons & Dragons’, from 2000, coincided with the gruesome film with Jeremy Irons as a crazed villain and absurd. The role of the table was gradually lost in favor of video games, some of them clearly inspired by the creation of Gary Gygax, and it remained in a redoubt from which it seemed that it was never going to leave. Phrases like “I have a level 10 wizard elf who throws fireballs at his enemies thanks to the staff of power” they stopped sounding like fantasy… and started sounding like a misfit. And then came Twitch.
twitch craft
March 12, 2015. Nothing seemed to presage it, but ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ was about to leave behind years and years of marginalization and prejudice and it was going to become the number one entertainment on the Internet. It is on that date that ‘Critical role’ premieres on Twitch. Soon, the more general public began to want to imitate Matthew Mercer and his and his the network was filled with games of the most famous role-playing game of all time.
From there, the boom has been undeniable: whoever doesn’t know the role-playing game or knows where it comes from is because they don’t want to. Wizards of the Coast has made gold selling fifth edition manualsDan Harmon made his own series for three seasons (‘Harmonquest’), was honored by ‘Community’, ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘Adventure Time’, celebrities such as Stephen Colbert, Vin Diesel or Joseph Gordon-Levitt came out of the closet as fans and each entertainment portal wanted its ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ campaign. Drawing your sword and fighting orcs was cool again thirty years later.
‘Dungeons & Dragons’ is not just a role-playing game: it is a form of expression. An always fun way of narrating, capable of bringing out the best (and worst) in people, of getting out of everyday life for a moment, of imagining only with some dice and a sheet of paper. Yes, it is a well-known IP, perhaps one of the best known outside of audiovisuals. No, it is not “a series of drawings”. Yes, definitely, and even if you’ve never rolled a 20-sided die, you should watch the movie. And yes, you should talk to that friend of yours who bought the manual a couple of years ago and always tells you to create a character to get into his party. You may find that your prejudices were always absurd. Cast charisma!
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