The news arrived late yesterday afternoon, like a bolt from the blue, that Paramount Plus has ordered the production of a Dungeons and Dragons TV series. At the moment there are no details on this. In fact, we only know that the first season will consist of 8 episodes and that the pilot was written and will be directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber (Red Notice for Netflix). News that certainly confirms the enormous popularity of the most famous role-playing game franchise in the world and born almost half a century but which arrives just a few weeks after the arrival of the new film in theaters Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. A simple synergistic effort or an attempt to capitalize on the success mentioned earlier? One thing is certain the Dungeons and Dragons TV series has all it takes to be better than the movie.
The 3 reasons why the Dungeons and Dragons TV series will be better than the movie
The TV series will have no problems with duration
A 8-episode Dungeons and Dragons TV series, therefore theoretically about 8 hours of duration, it will certainly allow you to make the most of one of the RPG features or its narrative component. Not being “forced” into the cinematic duration, which for action blockbusters is now around 120/140 minutes, the TV series will certainly have at its disposal a narrative that is not only less compressed but perhaps also less linear. If that’s true Dungeons and Dragons has seen its gaming system progressively simplified for greater and easier usability, this has not affected its richness in narrative terms.
Not only one of the factors that has sanctioned the success of the role-playing game in recent years d&d, it’s just hers ability to go off the rails that instead other forms of entertainment have imposed on users at multiple levels, just take the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the infinite concatenation of films, TV series and so on as an example. In this sense the Dungeons and Dragons TV series could surpass the movie leaving room for many side quest thus also developing the characters beyond the need to have a “well-matched” party like the one seen in the film’s trailer.
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The Dungeons and Dragons TV series will be able to make better use of the lore
There is no doubt that much of the renewed popularity of Dungeons and Dragons is dictated by the media exposure generated by Stranger Things. However, it is not an exhibition for its own sake or a side element dictated by the setting of the Duffer Brothers series but on the contrary of an element that is folded and reworked for narrative purposes: the various creatures of the series are renamed taking inspiration from the monster manual by D&D. At least judging by the trailer, instead in the movie the lore it only seems to be used only as a mere accessory or even worse as a “catalogue” from which to draw in search of something cool. Not surprisingly, in this sense, the controversy surrounding the party druid who uses Wild Shape to transform herself into a owlbear. Wild Shape, by regulation, allows the druid to transform into an animal-type creature, such as a wolf or a bear, while the owlbear is a monstrous-type creature and therefore not allowed by a literal interpretation of the rules.
It might seem like a trivial matter but in reality it reveals all the lightness of the approach to lore of the film. This it will not be possible for the TV series which instead will have to deal with products that have made the world building, of the settings and of the lore itself the essential flywheel of the serial narration just think about Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon or The Rings of Power. From this point of view, then there would be an embarrassment of choice because each D&D setting has a very rich lore, see the most famous Forgotten Realms (where the film should also be set) or the historical one Dragonlance.
Retrieve our article: The guide to the Dragonlance novels
The Dungeons and Dragons TV series will be better than the movie because it will have a different tone
There Dungeons and Dragons TV series Sara better than the movie because it will have a different tone. The action-comedy trend has frankly bored: it’s not enough to insert a couple of well-known rock songs and some shrewd jokes, combined with an important budget and spectacular special effects, to make a film a success but above all not everything can lend itself to this type of adaptation. The wrong equation is perhaps that of wanting adapt certain dynamics in live action of theactual play of groups like Critical Role which have been transposed, with some success, into animated form with the Vox Machina series. But the more knowledgeable will also remember that this is not new either: one of the first transmedia interactions of D&D was in animated form in the 80s with a series that today we would define campy in the premises.
The TV series, on the other hand, having to compete with those series mentioned above, will necessarily have to have a more self-referential tone, more epic, more grounded in some ways. We will have to work in this direction hand in hand between less character development and a long-term storyline that truly embraces the lore. The initial feeling, in light of the announcement of the TV series, is that what we will see on the big screen will be a one-shot adventure while what will arrive on the small screen will be a structured campaign. In short, two different types of public and this is absolutely not a bad thing.
