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.
Note: Spoilers abound below for both Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and Baldur’s Gate 3.
Staying True to Your (Arguably Dumb) Roots
The Forgotten Realms (or “Toril,” if you are using the in-world name), the base setting for D&D, is a somewhat chaotic project insofar as it needs to be both a locale with a semblance of history, geopolitics, and halfway believable ecology, while also serving as a tabula rasa and jumping-off point for individual Dungeon Masters to tell their own tales. That has resulted in a world that’s mostly a series of somewhat generic fantasy tropes, a setting whose most unique elements are often its absolute weirdest, wildest, and maybe dumbest…
Take, for example, the presence and variety of D&D playable species (formerly called “races”—see the note in the section below) that are just anthropomorphic animals. From the avian Aarakocra, to the feline Tabaxi, to the draconic Dragonborn, there’s a whole host of creatures clearly invented to satisfy people’s desire to play out their fantasies of being animal people. In the fourth edition Players’ Handbook that introduced Dragonborn, there was even a dubiously helpful sidebar encouraging players to pick the species “if you want to look like a dragon.” The choice to include some of these beings in the world of Honor Among Thieves but also to represent them with somewhat goofy practical effects feels like the perfect approach. Any attempt to present those species as intrinsically cool would have risked some big-screen, uncanny valley weirdness, nigh impossible to identify with. Leaning into that decision, the movie gives us the bulging, terrified eyes of Jarnathan, the aarakocra councilman. It’s the sort of visual gag that appeals to a layperson unfamiliar with the game while at the same time subtly poking fun at D&D’s slightly lazy racial design. It’s an in-joke that doesn’t alienate newcomers.
By contrast, Baldur’s Gate 3 pulls off the rare trick of leaning into D&D’s weirder lore, not by gently poking at it, but by taking it seriously. Consider its take on the Githyanki. Introduced by author Charles Stross, who borrowed their name from an unrelated creature in George R.R. Martin’s 1977 Dying of the Light, the Githyanki are, essentially, militaristic, pointy-eared aliens who ride red dragons through space and fight with silver swords. They’re another iconic D&D monster defined by being deeply weird. And while they have been a part of the game for forty years, they rarely take center stage. But Baldur’s Gate 3 chooses to showcase the Githyanki, making them a playable species and centering a lot of their lore on the acerbic, bellicose, beloved companion, Lae’zel. There’s a natural story hook insofar as some of BG3’s main antagonists are the Mind Flayers, former enslavers and natural enemies of the Githyanki, but for a game set in Toril’s somewhat generically high-fantasy Sword Coast, the introduction of spacefaring, fascistic, extraterrestrials is quite the tonal leap.
But it works, in part, because of its refusal to stand outside of the material and comment on it. The Githyanki and Lae’zel’s presence in BG3 doesn’t feel too (pardon the pun) alien, because the game is committed to creating something detailed and believable. A mid-game questline involves dozens of hours spent playing through an encounter with a Githyanki colonial outpost, coming to understand the ins and outs of their society while deciding for yourself if their violent incursion is a threat or a blessing. The depth of the experience—the sheer volume of hours one can put into the game and still find new material—works to justify its weirdness. It doesn’t demand that you stop and learn about its wild lore, it just continues to unfurl it all around you, until the extent of the immersion lets you see it as coherent, thoughtful, and intriguing.
Curbing D&D’s Worst Instincts
While they have gotten better in recent years, D&D has long suffered from the problem of essentialized fantasy races—though as of late 2022, the game has officially begun using the term “species” rather than “race” in an effort to address this issue, so I’ll be doing the same in this essay. Up until late 2020, the game sported an alignment system (now firmly ensconced in the zeitgeist through the power of memes) where different species were saddled with codified moral outlooks. Inspired by Tolkien, they are more or less what you’d expect: Elves, dwarves, and halflings tended to be good where orcs, goblins, and ogres were intrinsically (or at least culturally) evil. Add in some uncomfortable colorism in the form of Drow, cruel, dark-skinned elves, and you have all the makings of a world with justifiable racism and an essentialist view of culture.
Where Baldur’s Gate 3 really shines, however, is in its ability to take some of D&D’s most outdated worldbuilding seriously in order to thoughtfully subvert some of its basic tenets. There is no alignment system in BG3, but it’s a world that takes the cultural essentialism of Toril seriously. Goblins tend to be cruel and stupid. Gnolls (demonic, anthropomorphic hyenas) are bloodthirsty and animalistic. The Drow are merciless and lack empathy. And the first act of the game indulges in the sort morally black-and-white heroism that one might have expected from a D&D campaign in the ’80s or ’90s: a group of refugees is sheltering at a druid’s grove is under threat from a warband led by goblins and a drow and the player (provided they don’t make morally grotesque decisions) must save them from the onslaught.
Towards the end of Act II, however, BG3 begins to make the simplistic morality of Act I feel increasingly untenable. The goblins, and drow, and gnolls, and ogres, and other monstrous species who threatened your refugee friends are not misunderstood—BG3 does stick with the idea that many of these species live for cruelty and violence—but they are being manipulated. The Cult of the Absolute, which serves as the game’s primary antagonists, has been strategically luring these peoples into conflict with refugees, rural villagers, and druids in order to rile up the anger of the citizenry of Baldur’s Gate 3’s titular city. By the time you reach the third and final act, you learn that the cult has similarly goaded the city watch and nobility into fighting the invaders and elevating a cult-operative to the head of the city’s government. The game purposefully plays up the legacy of D&D’s uncomfortable politics in order to make its gut punch of a betrayal land harder. It is, in every way, a good thing that the TTRPG has all but abandoned the uncomfortable concept of alignment, but the system gets a gloriously complicated and unnerving sendoff in D&D’s best video game adaptation to date.
Translating the Tabletop Experience
One of the most successful parts of both Honor Among Thieves and Baldur’s Gate 3 is their shared approach to translating the feel of a TTRPG without actually existing in the same space. BG3 has the advantage of being a game (albeit a largely single-player one) with rules similar to D&D’s 5th edition, but even then, the specific experience of being around a table (or in a Zoom chat) with one’s friends, telling a story communally, would be easy to lose. Past adaptations of D&D have used a literalization of the format to tell its story. The 1980s’ Dungeons & Dragons cartoon saw a group of real-world kids transformed into fantasy heroes, somewhat mimicking the idea of a TTRPG player inventing a character (though why they had them ride a magic rollercoaster that took them to a fantasy world rather than just have them playing the game remains a mystery). Even the Tom Hanks-starring, Satanic panic-era, anti-D&D propaganda film, Mazes and Monsters (1982) slips between the real-world players and their imagined epic adventures, if only to warn parents that the power of imagination is a dangerous thing to let one’s kids tap into.
Honor Among Thieves and BG3 both take on a version of this meta-structure—without the associated cheese (and attempted cheap laughs at the expense of stereotypical D&D-playing nerds) that might come with switching between players and player characters—by having their main parties playfully assembled from the general archetypes, well-known in the D&D community, that represent the familiar sort of character a certain type of player creates. Regé-Jean Page, as Honor Among Thieves’ hilariously humorless Paladin, Xenk, certainly has the mien of a rules-mongering player eager to treat the game with deadly seriousness and insistent that their fellow players adhere just as closely to the rules-as-written. By contrast, BG3’s Astarion, the arch, high-camp vampire that serves as the internet’s current collective boyfriend, feels very much like the player we all know and love who comes to the gaming table prepared to flirt shamelessly and lust after as many monstrous creatures as possible. Of course, given the somewhat infamous reputation of BG3’s propensity for indulging the players’ lechery (so much so that players hadn’t realized that some of that lothario energy was actually a bug), the sheer volume of Astarion thirst-tweets maybe says more about the TTRPG community than it does about any individual character.
Honor Among Thieves, being a movie that isn’t set at a literal D&D table, doesn’t have any semblance of a DM, but BG3 finds a myriad number of ways to make the video game feel like it’s being run by a person across the table from you. Between a fairly masterful and wry performance by Amelia Tyler as the game’s narrator, and so many thousands of choices that both subtly and dramatically shift the game’s narrative, Larian Studios makes their game feel both like a well-curated story and one with an almost unthinkable amount of player agency. But more than that, BG3 layers in a subtle level of meta-commentary without breaking the fourth wall in a way that would be alienating.
Buy the Book
City of Bones
The central conceit of the game is that your character and most of their close companions are infected by a brain-dwelling parasite that threatens to turn them into a Mind Flayer. But your character clocks, early on, that the fact that it hasn’t yet happened might imply that something even more sinister is going on. From that point forward, the game plays up the psychological horror that the parasite might be influencing your character’s behavior in ways they don’t understand. Beyond being a chilling plot point, it subtly teases the basic power imbalance of being at a D&D table. To be a player in a campaign is to put yourself at the whim of a storyteller. Many of the more recent TTRPGs have thoughtful and welcome game mechanics that help address and even out the power imbalance between dungeon master and player, but so much of the literal rules of D&D are about codifying ways to imperil one’s players’ characters.
BG3, without obvious malice, uses all the tropes of mind-control to make its players question how much free will their character is afforded. And that lack of free will, which might even serve as a subtle nod to the fact that the protagonist is, obviously, at the whims of the person playing them, is framed as a seduction. The game’s main theme, “Down By the River,” crops up as a constant leitmotif that takes on a variety of tonal shifts and moods, but in its basic form, it is figured as a seductive ballad. To play D&D is to be seduced by a story, immersed in a world not your own and full of danger and trickery. An ethical (read: good) DM does this in service of entertaining their players, but the immersiveness of the experience means that some of the best D&D experiences are ones that provoke genuine emotional responses. BG3 understands that the player experience is a long seduction, alluring as a Bard’s song, unpredictable and dangerous as the magic it carries.
***
Dungeons & Dragons at its best is an addictive, compelling experience of communal storytelling. It’s current place near the summit of our pop culture landscape is overdue and well-earned, but the game itself—with its rocky fifty-year history, math-heavy rules, and player experience that is only as good as the participants’ imagination and comfort level—is one that can be a bit alienating for newcomers.
Past attempts at adapting D&D have come across as lackluster, generic, or subpar fantasy fare that failed to realize that the game didn’t draw in generations of player because of its lore…it did so because it gave its players a deep sense of belonging. Honor Among Thieves, if you strip away its (admittedly very funny) one-liners and affable silliness, is a heartfelt story about the power of found family. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a video game that encourages its players to question whether or not they are being led into a gilded cage, unable to trust their own desires, and either struggling, heroically, to resist temptation, or else giving into it with relish and a touch of morbid curiosity.
With these two different but clever and perceptive approaches, both the video game and the movie manage to express exactly why Dungeons & Dragons is so beloved in a way that anyone can understand—and the results are better than I ever could have imagined.
Tyler Dean is a professor of Victorian Gothic Literature. He holds a doctorate from the University of California Irvine and teaches at a handful of Southern California colleges. He is the author of “Distended Youth: Arrested Development in the Victorian Novel” and his article “Exhuming M. Paul: Carmen Maria Machado and Creating Space for Pedagogical Discomfort” appears in the Winter 2022 issue of Victorian Studies. He is one half of the Lincoln & Welles podcast available on iTunes or through your favorite podcatcher. His fantastical bestiary can be found on Facebook at @presumptivebestiary.
