<
https://www.tor.com/2023/10/18/how-baldurs-gate-3-and-honor-among-thieves-finally-captured-the-soul-of-dd/>
"It’s an amazing time to be a
Dungeons & Dragons fan. Already reinvigorated
by the success of
Stranger Things, which featured the tabletop role-playing
game heavily in its first couple seasons, and (perhaps) finding new fans over
the course of a pandemic that gave some people a lot of free time alongside
access to Zoom, the hobby has gone from relatively niche, nerdy fun to
something approaching mainstream.
This year saw two huge milestones in the
D&D world—the release of the utterly
delightful movie
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves to enthusiastic
praise from critics and audiences alike, succeeding on a level that was both
well-deserved and, frankly, pleasantly surprising, and the release of Larian
Studios’ long awaited computer roleplaying game,
Baldur’s Gate 3, to a
similarly wide-ranging rave reviews.
I’ve been a lifelong player of
D&D (and other tabletop role-playing
games—TTRPGs) and, while the writing has been on the wall for a while about
D&D’s cultural ascendency, part of what shocks and delights me about both
Honor Among Thieves and
Baldur’s Gate 3 is the degree to which both manage
to succeed while leaning into the original game’s decidedly awkward
worldbuilding, janky lore, and arcane rules that haven’t gotten any less weird
over its nearly fifty-year existence.
D&D, after all, is a game whose most
iconic original monsters are a big, angry eyeball covered in smaller eyeballs
and a creature masquerading as a treasure chest that eats acquisitive
adventurers to punish them for their hubris. It’s fun, and thrilling, and often
goofy, but not necessarily the height of poetic and thoughtful tale-spinning.
But, most importantly, both of these recent works have the dexterity and wisdom
to translate the experience of
D&D for an audience who might be largely
unfamiliar with TTRPGs without leaning into the sorts of cruelty and mockery
that was the standard approach for decades. So let’s look at how both of these
surprise hits manage to honor
D&D, leaning into what makes it quirky and
unique while still subverting its worst inclinations, all played out with the
sort of empathy that would have been unthinkable a decade ago."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
