- There wasn’t anyone in costume at the movie, which I found mildly disappointing.
- They didn’t do much to dispel the pervading idea that D&D kids are just a bunch of unpopular dorks rolling twelve-sided dice in their parents’ basements. I wouldn’t say the film stayed rooted in these kinds of stereotypes per se, but it also didn’t really go out of its way to show a different side to these people. As their stories unfolded, a lot of them turned out to have exactly the kinds of childhoods you would have thought they did.
- There was a lot, lot, lot of LARPing in this. I mention this only because we run a D&D camp at work and in March I was talking about LARPing with one of the counsellors for that camp and he was like “There is no LARPing in D&D! D&D is a character driven board game, but there is no LARPing!” On and on about how while some D&Ders may choose to LARP, LARPing is not a requirement of playing D&D. This kid has a hate on for LARPing. There was a rather amusing part where one of the LARPers was like “You know when you played Cops and Robbers as a kid? That was LARPing” as if to diffuse some of the perceived weirdness about it. You did it too, you just didn’t know it at the time!
- It’s unfortunate that the two grown men in their forties in this movie come off as pretty childish and it’s not even because of their gaming. One guy is the part-time manager of an apartment complex and he spends all his time playing D&D and writing the first draft of his epic fantasy novel. This would be fine but you can tell that his wife is long suffering and that after working all day at an office, she still comes home and does all the domestic stuff while also doing a lot of the apartment complex stuff that is supposed to be his job. Oh, and they’re carrying his $50,000 student debt on top of all this and they’ve got a very young son. I’m not sure how his wife puts up with it, but he should consider himself to be a very lucky man. This guy at least ends up with a really humours TV show on the local cable channel but, again, that don’t bring home the bacon.
The second guys is exponentially worse. He tells us about this D&D circle he set up when he was younger and as the Game Master, he was very upset about how greedy his players were being about something or other so he killed off all their characters in one fell swoop. All of them. Then he was surprised that they didn’t want to play with him anymore. So, twenty years later, he gets the group back together to finish off this particular game that he had crafted oh so many years ago and then when things start getting tense in the game, he ends up firing off an email telling them all that he is ending the game because they all suck and he’s taking his dice and going home. Then he later laments that he can’t figure out why no one has ever finished one of the game scenarios he has finely crafted. Is it because the game is too hard? That his players aren’t up to it? He hasn’t seemed to have considered that he’s a tantrum-throwing whiny baby and maybe that’s why his games never finish. He all but tips the board over in anger, it’s ridiculous. This is a GROWN MAN.
- I’m not terribly theatrical so, truthfully, I don’t really get most of this RPG stuff. This movie didn’t do much in the way of shedding a huge amount of light on it beyond what I already know (although I wasn’t really expecting it to).
- The one girl dresses up as a dark elf all the time and I’m really wondering how much money she spends on body paint. And soap.
The Dungeon Masters
The weird things about the people in this movie don’t have anything to do with D&D.
IMDB Plot Synopsis No synopsis at this time, so I'll take the one from the TIFF website instead. "Making a documentary on pop culture has many dangers, from nostalgia to smugness and condescension. The Dungeon Masters is a rare example of a film that avoids all of these pitfalls and portrays characters rich in complexity. It follows three Dungeons and Dragons gamers living in unglamorous corners of lower-middle-class America. Over the course of one year, we see how their real-life aspirations are fuelled by the worlds of their imaginations. "