The stats for all the PCs are available online, as well as the maps to what passed for dungeons. Chequez vous.
But wait, something is screwy. Ridley has a 15 DEX, which gives him a +4 bonus? Uh uh. That’s either an 18 DEX or a +2 bonus.
Norda is not a ranger, as I had assumed, but a 7th level fighter. Even Elwood is a third level fighter. But Ridley is a 2nd level rogue, 1st level fighter. How come he did most of the fighting? And how did he manage to last as long as he did against Damodar, who is also a 7th level fighter?
According to her character sheet, Marina can’t cast Dimension Door at all, or any other gate or teleport spell. She has a magical device that allows her to cast Magic Lasso, though. With her current spell selection, she’s incapable of casting Feeblemind on herself, so I guess she won’t want to go out with Ridley.
Snails is a 3rd level thief, and actually looks fairly competent, if skill ranks are anything to go by. Obviously, though, he’s too cowardly to actually use any of these skills.
We’ve gone through the Jurassic Park movies. We know that CG designers can A: make big, realistic lizard-like things (i.e. dragons) and B: make them interact with the environment realistically.
The CG in this movie were cheap, shoddy, and cartoony, the kind of thing you’d find in the earliest days of computer games with CG movies, or even in some of the “graphics-intensive” movies that followed immediately after Terminator 2.
So you can’t even say that the special effects in this movie were good. Especially when compared to other movies.
BAH! HUMBUG!
At least we have The Lord of the Rings coming out soon to help us forget this travesty. ::crosses fingers::
The sad part is, this movie was greenlit now so that it could cash in on the Fantasy mania that Lord of the Rings is establishing. After it comes out, there’ll be an onslaught of cheapo stuff ruining potential franchises.
There’s an Elfquest movie coming out. There’s a Dinotopia movie (and TV series) shooting now. There’s hope for a Dragonlance movie, and also a Dragonriders of Pern film. (I think the Pern movie has been cancelled, though)
Most of those will be rushed, cheap, and made by first-timers who haven’t learned the lesson that Fantasy is so hard to translate well.
Johnny Angel summarized the official character sheets for the D&D movie charactes thusly:
What?! That’s just plain nuts. If she’s a plain fighter, how could she find Damodar’s tracks in the woods?!
He lasted as long as he did because melee rounds last a full minute in AD&D. (Seriously, I think Damodar was supposed to be toying with him.)
I can’t believe Damodar is only 7th level, though.
“Magic Lasso”? What the heck spell is that? I don’t remember seeing it in the PHB or the Tome of Magic. It sounds less like a magic-user spell than a piece of Wonder Woman’s crimefighting gear.
<rimshot> He’ll be here all week! Tip your waitresses!
That is just disturbing. Are these films going to make it out before LOTR? I’m just seeing 2001 filled with lousy fantasy, and the burnt out public refusing to see LOTR.
Now hold on just a cotton-pickin’ melee round here!
The character sheets on that page are writted for 3rd Edition D&D rules! I thought they were using 2nd Edition AD&D as the basis for the movie!
I think I see why they did this. The character sheets and adventures on that webpage were written for use with the “D&D Adventure Game”, which is a simplified version of D&D designed for first-time players. I believe the “D&D Adventure Game” only has fighter, rogue, wizard, and priest character classes. The more “advanced” character classes – paladins, rangers, monks, sorcerers, druids, golf pros, etc. – only appear in the real D&D 3rd Edition PHB.
WHOOSH!!! (sound of sarcasm going over Danimal’s head).
OK, I admit it, I’m really confused here. Obviously Solomon’s aware of the 3rd edition that just came out, because in the interview he talks about the “latest edition” that only now has arrived. So what is the “3rd edition” from 1993 that he’s talking about? I don’t remember anything like that. Does he mean the Player’s Option type stuff (I never did buy those)?
I’d say you should be at least a 10th level fighter before you can start leveling as a Blue-Lipped Badass. Armor restrictions: black, spikey. Alignments allowed – any evil. Makes you eligible for the feat Lavender Liptwitch (prereq. Great Cleave) – you can get a whole party of adventureres to surrender to your 1 hit die foot soldiers just by showing up, as long as they don’t have dashing rogue around to actually fight back.
Just got done looking through the game adaptation of the movie. Those beholder stats were messed up, way too weak - but since the highest level PC is 3rd level, I guess that makes sense (how did that girl cast Dimension Door at 3rd level?).
Remember how, when she first cast it in the mage school, Marina pulled herself and BOTH of her lassoed thieves through the portal? Well, feast your eyes on the following sentence from the description of “dimension door” in the 2nd Edition PHB:
You canNOT tell me that Ridley and Snails had a combined weight less than 250 pounds!
And on a related note, what spell did Damodar use to return to the evil mage’s fortress after he got the Rod of Savrille? That was clearly not a dimension door. Not only was the distance between the Cave of Savrille and the Mage Fortress FAR greater than the maximum range of a dimension door spell, but Ridley followed Damodar through the portal! No teleportation spell I know of allows a straggler to follow you and hitch a free ride.
He might have been referring to the “Revised 2nd Edition” that came out at about that time. The Revised 2nd Edition consisted of bright, shiny new cover art for the PHB & DMG, a few little minor changes throughout the rules hither and thither (the only change I’ve noticed so far is a comma has been removed from after the word “holy avenger” in the description of intelligent weapon alignment restrictions), and the binding of the Monstrous Compendium into a non-loose-leaf hardcover volume called the Monstrous Manual.
However, a caveat near the beginning of the Revised 2nd Edition Player’s Handbook clearly stated, in big bold colored type, “This is not AD&D 3rd Edition!”. So either this wasn’t what Solomon was talking about, or he was blind as a bat with a power word: blind spell cast on it.
Or, another possibility I’ve considered is that he just misspoke. He was nervous, knowing that he had just laid a steaming stinker on the D&D community, and was about to start watching the gate figures rolling in, and some guy is asking him a bunch of questions.
It’s the most powerful spell known to the Kingdom of Wooded Holly. There are no level restraints, and the only reagents you need for its casting is lucre. This spell, fellow 'Dopers, is called “Cheap Gimmicky Plot Device.”