Yup. The writers/producers felt that having that many casters would effectively magic-away all the problems and wanted to keep it to simple archetypes for audiences unfamiliar with D&D. So they made one guy the “magic guy” for the most part and the druid was just “animal shapeshifter”.
To be fair, a common criticism of 5th edition D&D is that the average group can magic away just about any mundane problem. One of the pillars of D&D adventuring is exploration, and the availability of spells makes wilderness exploration trivially easy.
Yeah, that was gone back in OD&D days- unless you were a low level party (e used to use the Outdoor Survival board for it).
That is why D&D focused on dungeon exploration.
However, if you checked some of the random monster charts back then for the outdoors, you might find that “trivially easy” part a wee bit harder than you think.
That’s fair. No chance of the DM rolling on the random harlot table for a wilderness encounter.
I see room for improvement there:
00 – 10 Slovenly trunk
11 – 25 Brazen stump-et
26 – 35 Cheap troll
36 – 50 Typical treewalker
…
Well played, nerd.
So, I just saw it, and enjoyed it. But did anyone notice that the plot wasn’t the plot from the first trailer (right there in the OP if you want to scroll up)? There, it was “Some time ago, we helped a group of wizards steal something, and now they’re doing something really bad with it, so we need to steal it back”. That was completely absent from the movie-- The wizards had the thing and they were doing something really bad with it, but the protagonists had nothing to do with her getting it, and they didn’t even know they had to get it back until the very end of the movie. Did they re-write the script, or was the trailer intentionally misleading?
Didn’t that Thayan lich steal the horn in the same heist that got them thrown into jail?
…Ah, right. I was misremembering it as being part of Forge’s ill-gotten Neverwinter stash. Still, getting it back wasn’t their motivation.
It was in the end, or at least preventing its use. That’s why they went back after they had technically done what they came up do (get the girl out of there). They decided to be heroes.
My biggest issue was with Chris Pine. Not his acting; he was his typical charming, funny self. It was his character.
I get that he was a Bard, and he did inspire and distract people, which are totally Charisma-based things. And I get not making him a spell-caster. But he was completely useless in combat. A Bard has some fighting skills, and the only thing he did was comically smack someone with a lute. Even the Druid with Ezra Bridger’s wrist slingshot had a weapon of some kind. He didn’t even have a knife. He was very unbelievable as any kind of adventurer, to me at least. He felt more like a classless NPC there for plot purposes.
The movie as a whole was fun. Not a great film but a good way to spend a couple of hours. I enjoyed it as someone who has played every version of D&D over nearly 4 decades, but they did a really good job of not needing you to be familiar with the material to understand what was happening.
…Y’know, you’re right. They could have at least given him a rapier. And the biggest scene of him distracting people wasn’t even him; it was an illusion cast by the sorcerer.
He was really good at coming up with Plans That Fail, though.
Apparently the lute is supposed to be reinforced, otherwise it would just smash apart when he used it to bash people. So technically that was his weapon.
Nowadays, movie trailers have moved away from voice-over and text narration, and instead it’s entirely done with clips from the movie. There’s definitely lines that they record (and may get cut from the release) just to have the main character give a quick synopsis of the movie.
“In a world where I’m out of a job and Chris Pine stole my gig…”
But it’s not actually designed as a weapon; it could have been a reinforced rolling pin, or a belt studded with spikes, or some other mundane object not designed for combat, but just strong enough to survive being misused for violence. Either way it’s an “improvised weapon”, not something an adventurer would count on in a fight as anything but a backup or surprise weapon. And he had no arcane skills to fall back on either. He was basically useless in a fight.
As a gamer it broke my immersion far more than any fantasy elements could have, that’s all.
Before you announce your decision, I implore you to please wait for Jarnathan.
They stated it out as a magic item for 5th ed.
Another weird weapon thing was Holga’s axe. There’s two separate scenes where they go out of their way to mention how cool this axe is: once when she gets it from the guard at the beginning of the movie, and again when it gets dunked in molten iron in the fight in the smithy. And she never actually uses it. Chris Pine ends up feeding it to the animated dragon statue, but at no point in the film is anyone actually hit with the axe.
I wonder if there was an active decision to not have the heroes stab or cut anyone? Holga and the druid mostly body slam people. Pine has the lute. The sorcerer has a sling shot. The paladin has a sword, and uses it on the assassins, but those guys were undead, so don’t count.
Maybe that was required to keep it PG-13?
That was the only thing I could think of, but you can still stab a lot of people in a PG-13 movie, especially if you don’t show a lot of blood. The Lord of the Rings movies were PG-13, and they were hacking off limbs in those.
Maybe Hasbro was worried about a visual hack and slash fest being attached to their brand.