How to play the D&D movie as a D&D game, according to the directors

Since Dungeons & Dragons: honor among thieves in theaters, gamers have taken to Reddit threads and RPG forums to discuss ways they can draw from the movie to enrich their home D&D games. Wizards of the Coast has released official stat blocks for the main characters of the movie, for anyone who wants to use them as NPCs or even try their hand at playing them. But DMs and players will want to go further, hoping to recreate some of the film’s specific action sequences, central heist focus, or the third-act gladiatorial combat. Honor among thieves writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein have D&D experience themselves, so Polygon asked them for their best advice on how to take their movie to the gaming table.

Goldstein says an important part of playing fun D&D games is not to make the characters too idealized or rely too much on wish fulfillment. “Our characters are made to be very imperfect,” he says. “We have always embraced the idea that they are all flawed – with the possible exception of Xenk [Regé-Jean Page’s paladin character], except that he is imperfect because he has no sense of humor. So any good D&D campaign is about finding out the strengths of your team as a whole. Where can your cohorts fill in the weaknesses in your own character?

“I’d say, if you’re creating a character, don’t be swayed by a low roll count,” says Daley. “I think in many ways you discover through your characters’ weaknesses where their true strengths lie. Just from a storytelling perspective, it’s always more fun to create constraints for your characters than for them to be good at everything – that doesn’t make for a good game nor does it make for a good story to tell.

In terms of what DMs should focus on when planning a campaign story, the directors suggested one idea most DMs are probably familiar with: using favorite media to give a story some flavor and pace.

“We watched some of our favorite movies for story beats,” says Goldstein. “That’s always ingrained in our brains after a lifetime of watching movies. We wanted to tell a heist story, so we looked at some of our favorites in that genre and found out: What are the conventions? What are the tropics? How do we do it differently? And how do we make it specific to D&D, where instead of technology, the characters have access to magic?”

“And don’t be afraid to explain in great detail how you approach a particular problem,” says Daley. “One of the most satisfying scenes we could envision and end up creating was the portal heist sequence, where the characters try to sneak a portal into a picture and sneak the picture onto a carriage. On paper, it’s so implacably specific that it can almost seem boring. But for us, those details, those obstacles that the characters have to overcome, are where you can really create a moment that you’ve never seen before in the movie world.

However, Daley adds that DMs should be willing to experiment and accept that not every beat of the story will land as they expected. “In any good campaign, a DM can create something and really know if it’s going to work until they’ve tested it,” he says. “That’s the fun of making a game, or playing it – and the fun of making a movie.”

Goldstein, for his part, has another specific tip for DMs: “The last thing I’d add to the aspiring narrator here is, give one of your characters a sack of contents, because you can get everything you could need out of it. It’s very convenient!”