How does Dungeons & Dragons hold up from a long-time player’s perspective?
Let's look at all the ways Honor Among Thieves captures the real D&D experience—annoying DM quirks and all
Film Features Dungeons & Dragons
This week, Dungeons And Dragons: Honor Among Thieves hits theaters, with stars Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez leading a party of adventurers on an epic and glorious quest to … well, steal crap. (They are thieves, after all.) You can read our full review of the film right here, but suffice it to say that it’s one of the more bracingly fun action-adventure movies we’ve seen in some time: Fast-moving, inventive, and with a surprising amount of feeling behind it.
But feelings, schmeelings. What we really wanted to know, as long-time players of the tabletop game on which the movie was based, was this: Is it recognizably Dungeons & Dragons? And we don’t just mean tossing a displacer beast into a battle, or giving each character a distinct character class. (Although that stuff does count for something, especially when compared to some of those other Dungeons & Dragons movies.) No, what we wanted to know was whether the film replicates the real D&D, the mixture of annoyances and joys that can only come from collaborative storytelling between a bunch of people who all agree, in the interest of fun, that they care what happens to a bunch of pretend dwarves or elves or bird-people, etc.
To that effect, we’ve catalogued five different ways Honor Among Thieves nails the D&D experience, from emulating common foibles of DMs and players alike, to the ways it lifts some of the best parts of the tabletop experience. So pull up a chair, grab some dice, and let’s dive into the adventure.
Actually, this is covered in my backstory…
Look: You took the time to write an elaborate backstory for your player character down, and now everybody else at the table is damn well going to hear it. That’s the abiding vibe of the opening minutes of Honor Among Thieves, as Edgin the bard (Pine) attempts to browbeat some judgmental officials into submission with an in-depth accounting of how he ended up as a dashing adventurer/scoundrel/criminal.
To be fair, Ed’s backstory is pretty compelling, full of moral compromises, sudden tragedy, and cute kids. (One of the strengths of the film is that it sells its “found family” conceit with quite a bit more sincerity than any other Michelle Rodriguez-starring action movie franchises you might care to name.) But even so: If you’ve ever had to sit through a 10-minute monologue on why your party’s drow rogue turned against his people and became a noble (but tormented) anti-hero with two swords and a magic bow, etc., etc., etc., the moments where Pine demands the floor for some all-important “context” are going to ring familiar.
The ever-dreaded DM’s “Pet NPC”
In the grand book of Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master clichés, few are as infamous (or as eye-roll-inducing) as the “pet NPC.” Which, to be clear, isn’t a character with an animal companion—although that can introduce its own complications, ones Honor Among Thieves smartly avoids. Rather, it’s a character created by the DM, inserted into the party to keep them on the proper rails, and introduced basically so that all the player characters can stand around, watch them do cool shit, and then tell them how awesome they are.
We can’t say with 100 percent certainty that Regé-Jean Page’s Honor character Xenk—a high-powered paladin who wanders into the movie, delivers a bunch of exposition, and then has some cool solo fight scenes while the rest of the party watches in admiration and awe—is an explicit reference to this trope. But we’d be kind of shocked if he wasn’t: He’s so perfect, powerful, and morally good that he feels like he was plucked straight out of the DM’s fan-fiction and plopped down into the movie to remind everyone involved what a real hero is supposed to look like. That doesn’t make him a bad character—Page gives a great, weird, high-Charisma performance. But it definitely feels like someone somewhere was winking at this particular bad Dungeon Master habit with his inclusion.
Why would I cast spells when I can just turn into a horse instead?
It’s like the old saying goes: When all you have is [the ability to Wild Shape into basically any animal with a sufficiently low number of hit dice], everything looks like [an opportunity to turn into an owlbear and mess a bunch of evil Red Wizards up]. You don’t roll a druid in D&D if you don’t want to solve almost every problem by turning into some kind of animal, real or imagined, and Doric (Sophia Lillis) is clearly no exception. Infiltration mission? Turn into an animal. Fight? Animal! Need to get out of a room? Doors are so cliché; why not turn into a fly and buzz out the window instead? Druids in Dungeons & Dragons actually have some pretty potent spells on their casting list—but nothing says real druid like ignoring all of that junk in favor of turning into a 300 lb. hybrid of the forest’s deadliest neighbors and going to town on some goons.
(Into this same category, we can toss the rest of the film’s class-based behaviors: Barbarian Holga applies the direct approach to all and any problems, sorcerer Simon causes as many problems as he solves with his bursts of wild magic, and Pine’s bard almost never fights—instead tossing pep talks and plans at his cohorts in a pretty solid simulation of the game’s Bardic Inspiration effect.)
Load your players/viewers up with treasures
While we’re on the topic of D&D clichés, here’s another: “Monty Haul,” a gamer nickname for the kind of Dungeon Master who is, if anything, too ready to load their players down with magical loot. And Honor Among Thieves certainly qualifies: It has plenty of the traditional kind of treasure, of course—this is, after all, a fantasy heist movie about a bunch of thieves executing a daring magical robbery. But it’s also willing to dish out, in abundance, the kind of shiny baubles that the nerds in the audience will crave, i.e., a whole boatload of D&D Easter eggs.
We won’t get into an exhaustive list here because it would be, well, exhausting. But rest assured that almost every one-off bit of lore or monster to appear in the movie has some kind of basis somewhere in the Monster Manual or Player’s Handbook, from the appearance of fan-favorites like the displacer beast and the gelatinous cube, to being able to tell which spells the magic users are throwing around in combat without them even yelling out the names. (As any good wizard knows: When the beefy types close in, it’s time to Misty Step the hell out of the line of fire and resume combat from a handy roof.) Amazingly, none of it feels pandering, or ironic: These characters just happen to live in a world where you might conceivably be walking around with a token that lets you cast “Speak With Dead” in your pocket, or where you have to be careful opening treasure chests because you never know when they’re going to be filled to the brim with some very angry tongues and teeth.
Good DMs steal
It’s not easy being a DM: You have to keep a whole world in your head, and play every character in it, and control every monster, and, sometimes, you’re also expected to bring the Doritos. So no one could, or should, blame you for, let’s say, homage-ing moments from your favorite movies or games in order to keep your players entertained.
Honor Among Thieves gets that—whether it’s lifting a certain iconic teleportation-based video game weapon basically wholesale for some of its heisting fun, or lifting one of the most crowd-pleasing moments from The Avengers for a story beat near its climax. The joy of the movie isn’t in it being some boundless well of creativity: It’s in seeing everybody involved push forward relentlessly in search of fun, using whatever parts they can get their hands on for the smoothest joyride possible. And that’s a huge part of the core of great Dungeons & Dragons, too: The acknowledgment that we’re all around this table to have a good time, not to throw nit-picky-y roadblocks in the way of the fun. Honor Among Thieves genuinely gets that; it’s probably the highest compliment we can lay at the movie’s feet.
69 Comments
Ideally it doesn’t in any way capture the real DnD experience.Not to be a snarky internet denizen, but I know DnD people and have played DnD and that stuff is not good storytelling. It’s super fun if you’re involved with the group or if it’s very comedic, but no one should expect or even want a movie based on an RPG to mirror the experience of an RPG.
I’m just being grumpy on a Monday, but seeing the reaction of a game player to the work based off said game just feels exhausting.
Reading your comment is exhausting grumpy pants. There’s nothing wrong with trying to find a connection between two versions of something you like. For a game like DnD, it’s inevitable that those comparisons will happen.
You sound like either a shitty player or a shitty DM lol
Counterpoint: real play podcasts are quite popular and some have great storytelling. The shows on The Glass Cannon Network are fantastic. The Adventure Zone has been adapted into graphic novels. Critical Role has a multi-season TV adaptation (The Legend of Vox Machina)
Countercounterpoint: The vast majority of real play podcasts are terrible, awkward affairs that only work when they do because the talent involved are good in other fields, like voiceover work.D&D is like golf: Way more fun to play than watch/listen to.
“Not to be a snarky internet denizen, but I know DnD people and have played DnD and that stuff is not good storytelling.”
AKA “My DM wasn’t a great writer, therefore no D&D can be well-written.”
Thanks for contributing?
Sorry you and or people you know had bad experiences!
If watching D&D weren’t fun, there wouldn’t be a dozen popular shows that are just people playing D&D.
Admittedly watching talented actors/improvisers playing is great. Watching my crew is a WHOLE different matter!
A dozen? Popular?Okay. Name them. I’ll give you Critical Role. Now 11 more.
The movie itself is not designed to play out specifically like a DnD session. Most sessions are more drawn out and tedious. What the article is alluding to are the nods to the DM/player experience. For the casual person who has played DnD a couple times, they won’t notice without it being pointed out to them.
Ed wasn’t trying to win the panel over with his backstory, it was an attempt to kill time until the bird dude showed up.Like, I apologize for having to explain the joke to you…but the whole time you think he’s going to charm his way out of prison with the help of a sympathetic ear but in reality the plan was to grab him and bust out the window.The bard happened to pass his charisma roll but the party didn’t bother waiting for the DM to talk through the scenario. So when the bird guy walks in the door the party immediately acts on their plan and the stunned DM has no choice but to go along with it.Way back when, a vlogger named Spoony did a video about a very similar scenario where the party he was DMing took action before he could finish the flavor. So he went “okay” and let them take the action which resulted in them attacking and critically wounding a key ally NPC and completely derailing his game.
When am I getting the Gauntlet movie I’ve been waiting literally years for!? There’s 4 damn characters. How hard can it be? I think Ernie Fosselius is still around…yeah, he is, I just checked.
Same!, I mean theres even a maze in this one!I mean Dwayne Johnson was in a movie based on an Atari/Midway arcade game , and somehow he’s not playing Thor the Warrior ( he was in the so , so Rampage)?? What kind of universe do we live in !!
Thrill as DwayneTheRockJohnson is out-acted by a CGI primate!
Elf shot the food!
I thought there was a good Meta of Kirk Playing the Bard, Spock playing Rege-Jean Page, and Uhurua playing the warrior or the druid, haven’t nailed the last one down, but I think it fits well and would be funny.
Justice Smith’s young-faced sorcerer has Chekov all over it. I think you have to give Sulu the barbarian just because of that one episode where he went shirtless sword fighting, and that leaves Uhura as the druid.
I loved the fact that they threw around “Neverwinter” and “Baldur’s Gate” and other bits and bobs of lore without explanation. It made this filthy casual happy to get the references while making the world feel like people lived in it.
“Oh, that city / magic relic / legendary Paladin? I’ve heard of him. Now we can move on to stabbing fat dragons in their fat heads and being insulted by walking brains.”
As a D&D fan I was like, “Sure.” As a Baldur’s Gate fan I was like, “YES!!!!!”
The movie fails to capture those times when our party dice rolling goes so ice cold that a basic encounter becomes a situation where the party is genuinely on the brink of losing their lives, as always seems to happen with my folks
The first time I ever played, one of the other group members spent the first 80% of the session rolling a D12 instead of a D20.
Based on the walking brains they apparently all failed their intelligence roles when writing up their character sheets.
I kind of figured that was what was happening when the magical distraction went south.
Yeah, that was a failed roll and the DM coming up with an in-universe reason for what should be a simple spell futzing up. (“Uh, your … foot gets stuck in a loose flagstone. Yeah.”)
My brother has a real gift for making what he thinks should be the easy encounter the one that nearly kills us, and then we breeze through the hard one.
The best gaming subtext is in the scene at the bridge in the Underdark: The DM has set up an elaborate environmental puzzle, but one of the players immediately ruins it up by fucking around and rolling a critical fail, so the DM has to decree that the party has been carrying around another way to cross the whole time.
And then of course the party continues to use the DM’s ass-pull artifact for the rest of the adventure, using elaborate rule-gaming to get around the DM’s attempts to set limits on its power.
My favorite bit of working around the DM in the movie was using the Gelatinous Cube to “solve” the maze. DM sets up with complex series of encounters with a puzzle on top of it. Party: “everything is coming from a sub-basement, I bet it’s open, or at least more open than this maze. Since we can survive a cube for a minute without issue; let’s just do that instead.”
Oh my God, I had that in my damn notes (which I was scribbling in the dark of the theater while sitting next to a guy in literal chainmail), “DM sets up elaborate puzzle trap that PCs immediately break” And forgot to include it here. Yes, exactly, very well-observed.
Ed and Holga’s break out felt like another one of those.I can picture the bard player using his charisma to stall by telling his elaborate sympathetic backstory only to interrupt the DM as soon as he mentions “Bird guy enters the room…” and completely miss that the DM had just rolled to see if his backstory had successfully won their pardon.So here’s the DM, about to have the council announce their decision, but the players have already declared their actions to grab bird guy and head for the window.
Even then it required using their party’s talents to even get to the point where they could use the item to enter the vault. And the DM threw a curve their way by revealing the portal was laying face down on the floor.And the DM rewarded the Druid for her idea to get by that by revealing the secondary hiding spot for the treasure which lead to them finding the boat.
You can almost see the DM look sadly down at his intricately sketched graph-paper diagram of the trap bridge before screwing it up into a ball and chucking it across the room.
The only thing that bugged me about the movie is that we see two dragons, and they both seem to be in the “dangerous animal” category of dragon, with no particular intelligence. Which is wrong, for D&D! Dragons are smart. Smarter than humans, even, and we never even get a hint of that.
True, but it was probably more fun to have a dragon that was fat and stupid. I assume they didn’t want to make it too Smaug-y. Also you can probably find a handwavey reason why the draconic statue that came to life had low intelligence (as well as the fact that it was a bronze or maybe gold dragon, which are normally lawful)
The other dragon I’m counting is the black dragon that shows up for like two seconds in the battle flashback, where all it does is an acid-breath flyby.
Oops, I forgot about that one!
It’s a dragon cult, though. The entire army is just his henchmen.
Seems like an interesting direction; I’ll definitely watch it. I played D&D a little bit growing up, and I was obsessed with the 80s cartoon when I was a kid. In fact, based on images like what’s in the header, I had originally thought that it was going to be a live-action adaptation of the cartoon. Sophia Lillis, for example, would be spot-on casting for Sheila.
No spoilers here , but , you will like this movie.
The “wildshape to spy on your enemies” mission was a classic staple of campaigns I’ve played. The only issue was that she used wildshape, by my count, seven times during the mission. Druids are normally limited to 2 per day, unless they reach level 20, at which point they have unlimited uses.Doric does not seem like she’s supposed to be a level 20 druid, though. Given that she likes to transform into an Owlbear [a CR 3 monster], we can conclude that she must be a Circle of the Moon druid of at least level 9.
Is this a stupid, punctilious, pointless quibble? Absolutely! It was the best one I could think of while watching. Fun movie.
I admit that I thought the same thing during that sequence. But much like how a druid can’t turn into an owlbear (it’s a monstrosity, not a beast), I can accept that a DM would allow it for a more fun sequence.
oh damn, I forgot about the beast requirement. I may have been letting my druid players get away with some shit….. lol
Yeah, I believe the filmmakers admitted the big asspull they did was not requiring rests.
And you know what? If we’d had rest requirements we wouldn’t have gotten that amazing Wildshape sequence.
I absolutely think movie fun should and did trump everything. I just had fun trying to think of the most egregious rule violation they pulled, because dumb shit amuses me.
dndbeyond has NPC statblocks for everyone available to ‘claim’, which I assume means you need an account. As NPCs, they all have weird quirks that don’t fit PC character traits – Doric’s has text saying she can shape change 5/day, into a CR 3 creature OR an owlbear.
lol so it’s homebrew BSAlso, she definitely did it seven times. I’m sure there’s a short rest tucked in there somewhere though.
Does the board game also take the first hour to just sit around and talk before anything happens? Asking for a friend. Well, more like an acquaintance :/
Nah. It should be the first three hours.
One bit I loved too was how there’s parts where the players are very clearly NOT trusting the DM.Namely, the opening where the DM is very clearly ready to pardon the players/let them out of jail to kick the campaign off, but the players don’t trust him to do that and instead come up with a simple/clever oddball escape plan that then gives them the “being wanted” obstacle.
Oh, and there’s also how Holga’s backstory was incredibly simple BUT she kept trying to come up with reasons to forward her pre-established plot points.
That felt very true to real campaigns. The party never trusts the easy way through a storyline, and it’s usually more fun when they fuck everything up.
The attempts to get five questions from dead people felt very much like the DM had suddenly decided to be a huge “rule lawyer” dick where even the players’ discussions out of character were added to the limit.
We DMs have those moments where we just get tired of fuckery.
Bradley Cooper as the halfling flame of Holga’s felt like when one of the PC’s spouses wants to sit in on a session and play a minor character but gets bored by all the fighting parts.
During that scene, I recalled how that actor looks remarkably like Bradley Cooper.
Bradwee Cooper
Why was there no halfling sized furniture?!
It was his new wife’s house?
I don’t think so—I think Holga comments “oh, he painted the shutters.”
One of the funniest scenes in the movie, and showing the Paladin as the DM’s NPC, is the scene where he says goodbye and the group’s watching him walk away.
Oh god, Pet NPCs are the bane of my existence. We played a campaign of Star Wars Saga Edition where my character was sort of a slow-burn Jinx from Arcade. I wasn’t blatantly trying to collect Dark Side points but he knew it was coming so he assign us a Jedi babysitter who was sitting around every corner who pretty much told us what to do and would “intervene” when it turned out I knew more about Force Powers than he did and pulled some serious whack out of nowhere. To be fair, in the Shadowrun campaign I ran my players probably thought the same thing of me when I had one of my fave bad guy NPCs show up at annoying times to ruin their plans (of which she couldn’t possibly have foreseen) because, well, I’m the GM and you’re not going to foil my intricate plan because you all chipped in to buy the Rigger a fully armed helicopter.
https://mattthecatania.wordpress.com/2023/04/02/dungeons-dragons-honor-among-thieves-lets-the-good-times-roll/
Even without being a gamer, I enjoyed this a lot. I’m still not inspired to play the TTRPG, but I wouldn’t mind more movies of this caliber.
I wondered if Xenk was meant to stand in for a player who can’t commit to the whole campaign so he’s only in for a few sessions, but a pet NPC makes a lot more sense.I’m most disappointed that there wasn’t a section where the heroes went into a basement and killed rats for 5GP per tail. That’s the essence of D&D!
I don’t suppose there are any examples in the movie of the dreaded “murderhobo”?
…Hugh Grant’s character, actually.
Based on what I’ve read you may have a point!
I mean, the only aspect of the “murder hobo” archetype he doesn’t satisfy is doing his own murdering. But if he can get someone else to do it… #profit
Is there a scene where one of the characters just starts rolling dice out of boredom, and a different character yells at him and takes his dice away?
or have one of the other players (or DM) scream “Roll like you MEAN IT “ when youre on a particularly bad streak of luck rolling dice and aren’t casting them across the room on your turns