Video Games have been adapted to film since the Super Mario Bros movie came out in 1993. They have also been consistently mired by problems, from lousy fan reception to difficulties adapting the source material correctly. Tabletop role-play games (TTRPG) also have an older presence in movies and TV, beginning with, ironically, movies warning of the dangers of role-playing games like Mazes and Monsters. When adaptations were actually made, starting with the 2000 Dungeons and Dragons movie with Jeremy Irons, they did even worse than video game movies historically have.

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Role-Playing Game Scare of the 80s

     Warner Bros.

Ironically, the first adaptations of role-playing games to cinema or books often worked to dissuade people from playing RPGs. These weren’t adaptations of the world or experience of TTRPGs, but instead were adaptations of stories and urban legends of the dangers of Dungeons and Dragons and other similar games. These movies and books depicted role-playing games as dangerous and edgy, often showing teens and young adults who would lose the distinction between reality and fantasy after playing D&D. The 1982 movie, Mazes and Monsters, was one such movie, depicting a group of RPG players who were slowly becoming more and more detached from real life. In the movie, Tom Hanks plays Robbie Wheeling, who eventually fully believes himself to be in a fantasy world. Mazes and Monsters was based on a book from 1981, which itself was based on sensationalized stories of teens losing touch with reality after playing D&D.

Mazes and Monsters wasn’t the only movie or book made that cited D&D as a dangerous force. The novel Hobgoblin and the movie Skullduggery both deal with players going mad by playing D&D, and often try to pathologize those who play it. These movies occurred just before the Satanic Panic of the 80s that targeted Rock and Roll, RPGs, and other elements of youth culture, during which the possibilities of a straightforward adaptation of D&D were looking dicey. Stranger Things captures Satantic Panic very well in its fourth Season.

The relevance of all this panic to modern-day adaptations is that D&D and RPGs in general have a stigma. Though there isn’t widespread concern about D&D corrupting children, there is still an association between RPGs and outsiders. Even as nerd culture is becoming mainstream, RPGs are still seen as too nerdy by the general public to an extent. This has only recently begun to change, as this article will discuss later, and any D&D movie will have to overcome that stigma in order to work.

Adaptations of RPG Worlds

     New Line Cinema

In the year 2000, the world of D&D finally got an adaptation. Though 2000’s Dungeons and Dragons was an adaptation of the game, it didn’t draw from any setting of the game in particular. Though many of the recognizable monsters were from D&D books like the Monster Manual, there wasn’t anything specifically tying it to D&D in the plot or characters of the movie, or even the world itself. Rather, the movie is, functionally, a fairly generic fantasy film. It was critically panned, financially a failure, and generally forgotten about nowadays. Similar to the Mario movie, the D&D movie seemed to have scared studios off from big-budget role-playing game projects.

Other movies based on TTRPGs were released, but they were fairly minor. 2008’s Mutant Chronicles was a movie based on a TTRPG of the same name, published in 1993, that was a post apocalyptic, cyberpunk style game. Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight, was also a 2008 movie, based on the novels set within the Dragonlance universe. Dragonlance was more of a sword and sorcery-style fantasy universe. Until The Legend of Vox Machina, there wouldn’t be any adaptations of RPGs or their worlds. Despite the success of fantasy on the screen, with Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings being major standouts, there was no real attempt at a big-budget adaptation to try and make a D&D movie of TV show. Other TTRPGs would have even less luck.

Difficulty in Adapting RPGs for Movies and TV

     Netflix

One of the critical issues that faces adaptations of RPG worlds is that, often, these worlds don’t have singular stories attached to them that would make them easy to adapt. Though there are premade adventure modules, there are problems with adapting these too. Adapting something like Tomb of Horrors would be challenging as it doesn’t have much of a built-in storyline, as it’s designed to be a run-through of a dungeon. On the other hand, adapting something like Curse of Strahd, based on the original Ravenloft module, could also be challenging as that module represents a more flexible and open adventure that’s often defined as much by the characters you play as the story itself.

The issue RPG adaptations always face is that they need to make up their own material, whether that be characters to stand in for playable characters or routes the PCs would take through a dungeon, which often takes some appeal away from adapting a franchise in the first place, as that franchise is itself a blueprint for success in its own medium. There are exceptions, like the Dragonlance setting which has its own books, and the Drizzit books in the Forgotten Realms setting for example. In general, however, anyone adapting D&D or any RPG would have to start making up characters.

Currently, there are two projects in the works that intend to adapt the worlds in TTRPGs to the screen. Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves and Cyberpunk Edgerunners, a TV adaptation of the Cyberpunk 2077 RPG. Edgerunners would be especially unique as it would be the first time a TV show based on a TTRPG would have been made since 1996, when Kindred: The Embraced ran, which was loosely based on Vampire: The Masquerade. If these two properties do poorly, however, the future of TTRPG adaptations may not be in adaptations of the worlds themselves, but in adaptations of actual play shows.

Adaptations of Actual Play Podcasts

The Legend of Vox Machina represents the first real success, financially or critically, for any sort of TTRPG on-screen adaptation. Based on the first campaign of the show Critical Role, Vox Machina follows the adventure of misfit heroes as they battle the evils plaguing the setting of Exandria. Vox Machina is an inheritor of the Game of Thrones-style of gritty fantasy, as it has a lot of bloodshed, cursing, and mature jokes. Like Game of Thrones, this rowdy and adult tone helps break the stigma that RPGs are just for nerds. It also is an effective adaptation of the general tone and feeling of playing in a D&D campaign with your friends.

Adapting an actual play show has several notable advantages. Firstly, you can draw upon the fanbase of that work in particular, who may not be interested in a more general adaptation of an RPG system but might want to tune in to see their favorite characters on the screen. Secondly, the show comes with built-in characters who, if the podcast or show is good, have built-in storylines and arcs that help to define a clear direction for a possible adaptation. Most of the work a studio would have to do to adapt something as broad as a TTRPG setting into a movie or TV show is already done for them.

There are several other similar shows based on other actual play series coming out. The Legend of Vox Machina is getting a second season and there is a possibility of an Adventure Zone TV show according to Adventure Zone Twitter. Whether the future of TTRPG adaptation rests in actual play podcasts or in adaptations of settings and adventure modules remains to be seen. However, the former has seen some success thus far, and so it’s safe to say that they may go in that direction in the future.