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Fighting the good fight
Picture of RogueJSK
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quote:
Originally posted by dsiets:
When he came back he told me they didn't believe in that stuff and I should return it to whence it came (The evil Toys-R-us).

Weeks later they took me to their church that was having a movie on the occult. D&D was featured.

Now, I consider myself a Christian. I just couldn't understand why D&D was considered satanic.

I think this was my earliest taste of the influence MSM could have.


Yeah, the 1980s were the heyday of the "Satanic Panic", when hysterical parents were convinced that everything - from novels to tabletop games to rock music - were nefarious plots by demons to corrupt their children's souls, and every unsolved murder was bound to have been caused by secret cultists practicing human sacrifice.

It finally started to peter out in the 1990s. but never truly went away in certain circles.


My parents briefly jumped on that Satan Everywhere! bandwagon, circa the mid/late 1980s. All of a sudden, saturday morning cartoons were The Devil. Breakfast cereal was The Devil. Ninja Turtles were The Devil. All non-Christian music was The Devil. Muppets were The Devil.

Luckily, that only lasted a year or so.

But shortly afterwards they fixated on banning me from wearing certain colors of clothing for the next couple years, mainly red or blue, which they were certain were going to get me shot in a gang-related drive-by on my suburban elementary school playground. I shit you not, my Mom had a sheet of paper on which she had noted which colors were "gang-related" (probably based on some news blurb), and when we went clothes shopping she would have to consult her notes to determine whether I could get that color of shirt or not.

No matter that I was a chubby little white kid and we lived leagues away from the nearest urban nest of bloodthirsty gangbangers. No, they were convinced that if little RogueJSK dared to be seen wearing red or blue in public, the Bloods and/or Crips were going to appear and execute me on sight.


I blame partly Dr. Dobson/Focus On The Family, and partly the evening news, for all their elementary school parenting overreaction foolishness. Thankfully they unclenched around the time I moved up to middle school.
 
Posts: 33210 | Location: Northwest Arkansas | Registered: January 06, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Picture of Pyker
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I have a (female) friend who has banned any mention of KFC in her house or to her kids because they are promoting the video game 'Diablo IV' and she thinks they are encouraging Satan worship.

I just shake my head. Of all the shit going on in this country, not to mention the craphole that Minnesota is becoming with the current DFL majority, and this is the stuff she gets spun up about?
 
Posts: 2763 | Location: Lake Country, Minnesota | Registered: September 06, 2019Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Experienced Slacker
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Never have been able to figure out why faith in a deity so often makes people have even more faith that evil is everywhere.

What do you gotta protect me from so badly Mom? Isn't God good for it? Roll Eyes

Yup, I didn't get to play until I left home either. Only thing we ever sacrificed for it was our ability to attract females.
 
Posts: 7516 | Registered: May 12, 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Picture of Blume9mm
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Never seen a D&D movie but I'll bet they can't beat the original ... Wizards.... greatest movie ever to watch in a theater late at night stoned....

And the ending is even perfect for a gun forum like this.... "I wanna show you a trick Mother showed me when you weren't around....."

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Blume9mm,


My Native American Name:
"Runs with Scissors"
 
Posts: 4441 | Location: Greenville, SC | Registered: January 30, 2017Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Each post crafted from
rich Corinthian leather
Picture of TheFrontRange
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I was a little skeptical of the movie, and I appreciate the heads-up here.

Re: D&D Nerdiness: as an RPG nerd in my early teens in the ‘80s, I spent an inordinate amount of time at the local B. Dalton Booksellers establishment, particularly around their selection of D&D-related literature and paraphernalia.

So frequent a loiterer was I that one time, a customer called-in to ask a store associate a number of questions about the game, questions the associate was quickly flummoxed by. Said associate put the call on-hold and asked 13- or 14-year-old me if I could assist the caller, which I promptly did, walking them through the subtle nuances that existed between D&D, Advanced D&D, D&D Basic vs. D&D Expert, etc., etc.

Somewhere along the way in all my loitering, I did otherwise buy books from that B. Dalton (not only D&D stuff but the fabled “Mack Bolan” works, etc.), but I think that customer-assist phone call earned me some brownie points with the staff LOL.



"The sea was angry that day, my friends - like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli." - George Costanza
 
Posts: 6736 | Registered: September 04, 2003Reply With QuoteReport This Post
I'd rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I am not
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First of all. Pace that is a very nice collection of AD&D books. IF you look them up some of them are actually worth a good amount of money depending on condition and what printing they are..I played Basic and AD&D when they came out before moving on to Hero games and Star frontiers.

So I definitely was excited to watch Honor among thieves. Pedrocola...... I agree that it sucked but not for the same reasons.

Pros--
1. The actors were good. I thought they did a decent job with the poorly written story.
2. I liked the special effects.
3. They used groups, magic and monsters from the actual game. wich is cool for a fan of D&D.
4. There was some funny moments.

Cons---
1. Poor writing. Whomever wrote the script should have been floggged. I wanted something with more substance and edge that appealed to adult viewwers. Like something closer to GOT.
2. Wokeness-- Wizards of the Coast is now run by a bunch of liberals who want inclusion and everybody to be whatever they want to be. wich takes away from the game play
 
Posts: 7890 | Location: Bismarck ND | Registered: February 19, 2003Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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My high point (low point) was Michelle Rodriguez fighting basically a platoon of fully armored soldiers. Literally full up armor including full helmets with face shields. She is punching them in the face (metal face shield on a metal helmet) and they go down like bricks. She is punching armor and knocking guys out. It’s like the age old argument of what exactly does Storm Trooper armor stop exactly? Comically silly.

Ronin might be right. Maybe the actors didn’t phone it in, the script was so retarded that I might have blamed it on them.

I never played DD so none of the game references meant anything to me. If you make a DD movie though you probably should plan on a bunch of people not being dungeon masters and write your script accordingly. Lol

Spoiler ahead. When I said bad CGI I specifically meant that scene with the cats and the fish that swallowed the kitten. It was such a stupid scene I may be getting the facts wrong. My sister (60) and I looked at each other and both were like, did they really just put an actor in a cat fuzzy costume? It was horrendous.
 
Posts: 7540 | Location: Florida | Registered: June 18, 2005Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Fighting the good fight
Picture of RogueJSK
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quote:
Originally posted by pedropcola:
Spoiler ahead. When I said bad CGI I specifically meant that scene with the cats and the fish that swallowed the kitten. It was such a stupid scene I may be getting the facts wrong. My sister (60) and I looked at each other and both were like, did they really just put an actor in a cat fuzzy costume? It was horrendous.


That scene with the Tabaxi child that's rescued from the fish and handed to their parent wasn't CGI (computer generated imagery). The fish, kitten, and cat parent were physically created animatronics.

So yes, it was a person in a cat suit, with a puppeteer off-screen robotically controlling the facial features in the head. Just like in the days before CGI.

Whereas CGI would have involved filming either an actor in a motion capture suit or just a placeholder item (like a tennis ball), and then digitally inserting a computer-generated character over top of that. Like Gollum in Lord of the Rings, for example. Or the big blue aliens in the Avatar films.

The creators of this film made a deliberate choice to render many of the individual characters in this film via practical effects, not CGI. Like the Dragonborn (dragon guy) and Aarakocra (eagle guy) parole board members, which were also animatronics.

From https://www.polygon.com/237243...vie-creatures-tabaxi

quote:
Over the past couple of months, fans of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves have had a lot of chances to peek behind the scenes, particularly at the practical technology that went into the movie’s characters.

For better or worse, it was often obvious in the movie that writer-director team John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein prefered physical, on-set solutions for their non-human creatures. Some of them are more convincing than others — in particular, viewers have had a lot to say about a Tabaxi parent and child seen at a village, who look more like animatronic stuffed animals than real creatures. But Daley says even their jankiness is part of the movie’s charm.

“Some of these creatures are sillier-looking than others,” he tells Polygon in an interview shortly after the movie’s PVOD release. “That Tabaxi in particular — one person online described the Tabaxi baby as ‘cursed.’ But I think even when you have something that is so clearly animatronic, so clearly fake, it is still in many ways more real than it would be if [the actors] were holding a tennis ball embellished with CG.”

Goldstein says that they tried to use physical puppets rather than CG effects whenever possible. “Basically, if we could build it, we would,” he says. “Anything that was humanoid-size and scale, we would try to build and then burnish with visual effects.”

One example was an Aarakocra character seen in the opening scenes, a humanoid bird-man named Jarnathan, who’s become a fan favorite from the film. “Jarnathan’s wings were real, but not in every sequence,” Goldstein says. “When he’s falling from the tower, the wings were added digitally, for the most part. But we always wanted, where we could, to have them be real.”

“I think there is a fondness that people hold in their heart for the practical approach to these creatures,” Daley says, “even if there is something also fundamentally absurd about them on an aesthetic level.”

Another example Goldstein gives is the Dragonborn member of the Absolution Council at the Icewind Dale prison in that opening sequence. “That was a motion-capture headset thing that the operator was wearing off-camera, and making the face movements for the character,” he says.

“Things like a dragon, we obviously couldn’t build, because it’s enormous. So we would just have a proxy for the actors to interact with, whether it’s hitting it or jumping on it, that kind of thing.”

The attempt to focus on practical effects extended to the sets. That became obvious in a startling, short 360-degree video clip Daley posted on Twitter, showing the main square of the city of Neverwinter. It was part of an elaborate physical build intended for a number of sequences, including the final faceoff with the movie’s villain.

“I’ve just seen it so often, where you can definitely tell that whatever terrain your characters are navigating is entirely fabricated, or done-up in post,” Daley says. “And I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily lazy — obviously, there’s a lot of thought put into designing that world they’re creating after the fact. But there’s something always more tactile and satisfying about being able to understand that this environment that our characters are going through is there.”

Goldstein says the Neverwinter set was built in Belfast, over the top of the King’s Landing sets used in HBO’s series Game of Thrones. “We took over the Game of Thrones backlot,” he says. “Though it had been largely destroyed in the finale of that series, we were able to refurbish enough of it so that we had streets and alleys and buildings, which we could then extend with CG. But the main plaza was almost entirely our build. And we knew our final battle would take place in that plaza, with the stone dragon coming out of the fountain and all of that. So that dictated the requirements of that space. And we just didn’t want to do that on a blue-screen stage.”

Daley says the city of Neverwinter needed to look familiar to fantasy audiences, but not so familiar that it felt derivative. “We wanted it to be reminiscent of the quasi-medieval cities you’ve seen in this type of genre, but we also knew it had to transcend and differentiate from those things, so it felt fresh and unique,” he says. “And we drew upon the influence of our incredible production designer, Ray Chan, in giving people something that felt familiar and also exotic.

“He drew influences from all over the globe. There are Eastern influences there, certainly Mediterranean, and not your obvious generic, European depiction of what a medieval city could be. It was great just getting into the nitty-gritty details, where you pause on any one tableau and see new details that you didn’t see the last time. That to me is what’s so fun about world-creating, and making a movie like this.”

Building a physical Neverwinter was important to Daley and Goldstein, but they also felt it would be important for their cast. “It helps our actors as well,” Daley says. “There is this lack of disconnect, because they get to see and touch and explore this incredible set. It hearkens back to the films we grew up loving and watching, where you couldn’t rely on fully CG environments. So as much as we possibly could, we went practical with sets. When you get into places like the Underdark, it was wholly impossible to do that — obviously we’re then relying more on CG set extension. But even there, there’s a good half a city block of real Underdark that we built.”
 
Posts: 33210 | Location: Northwest Arkansas | Registered: January 06, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Hmmm. Saying that shitty fuzzy costumes that look fucking retarded "is part of the movie's charm" is another way of saying the director is a moron.

I have zero issue with choosing costumes over CGI. I have issues with making the costume look like walking through Disney's Hall of the Presidents in 1975. Bad is bad. It isn't charming.

That entire article where the makers of the film defended their choices would be entirely plausible had their movie not sucked ass. Yet it sucked ass so their choices were poor choices. You can't make a shitty movie better by explaining why it was better, you make it better by making a good movie in the first place. This ain't that.

I called it CGI, it was not CGI. My bad. (I knew it wasn't CGI but if the filmmaker didn't feel the need to give a shit about the viewers I didn't give a shit about accurately describing their shit product either. lol) If they had spent as much time worrying about the script as they apparently did about how Neverwinter looked this thread might be going a different direction. They should have made a diorama instead of a movie.
 
Posts: 7540 | Location: Florida | Registered: June 18, 2005Reply With QuoteReport This Post
bigger government
= smaller citizen
Picture of Veeper
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quote:
LMAO, are you calling me old?

You touched a nerve. Better hope you roll a save.




“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.”—H.L. Mencken
 
Posts: 9184 | Location: West Michigan | Registered: April 20, 2006Reply With QuoteReport This Post
A man's got to know
his limitations
Picture of hberttmank
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I saw this tonight on Prime, I never played the game or knew anything about it. I liked it, had some really good fantasy action scenes in it, the people that quit half way missed out on some good action and humor. I was entertained, but I don't looks for things wrong.



"But, as luck would have it, he stood up. He caught that chunk of lead." Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock
 
Posts: 9436 | Registered: March 23, 2003Reply With QuoteReport This Post
bigger government
= smaller citizen
Picture of Veeper
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Honestly, WotC and D&D are dying IPs now that Hasbro’s plans for OGL and e-D&D are out in the open.

“D&D is huge and unstoppable!” (Yeah so was Star Wars…) Pathfinder is pretty sweet though, if you haven’t tried it yet.




“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.”—H.L. Mencken
 
Posts: 9184 | Location: West Michigan | Registered: April 20, 2006Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Donate Blood,
Save a Life!
Picture of StarTraveler
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I played AD&D in the early 80s and ran my own campaign for several years through college and grad school, plus I’ve played a number of D&D video game adaptations and even written quite a few Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories (fan fictions of Fritz Lieber’s duo on which parts of D&D were based).

This movie took a lot of good elements of Dungeons & Dragons and combined them together with varying success. The writing, particularly in the first half, left something to be desired, but I chalked at least part of this up as the need to establish the setting and tell the backstory of the characters. Some of the characters weren’t very believable (but that’s entirely in the nature of the game to make it fun for those of both sexes). The creatures were very well done (owl bear, anyone? Displacer beast and gelatinous cube) in both CGI and animatronics, and the action and the story improved in the second half when it was straight action plot rather than convoluted backstory. It’s not going to win any awards for best picture or screenplay but it was a fun popcorn movie that can be worth a viewing if you enjoy fantasy-type settings and if it’s playing on your streaming service at no additional cost. My wife and I both enjoyed it, 3.5 of 5*.


***

"Aut viam inveniam aut faciam (I will either find a way or make one)." -- Hannibal Barca
 
Posts: 2179 | Location: Georgia | Registered: July 19, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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I'm going to be weird. I liked it. It reminded me of some of the ways our games would go on tabletop. I can look past some stuff in a fantasy movie.
 
Posts: 3119 | Location: Pnw | Registered: March 21, 2009Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Fighting the good fight
Picture of RogueJSK
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quote:
Originally posted by Veeper:
Pathfinder is pretty sweet though, if you haven’t tried it yet.


As a big fan of D&D 3E/3.5E (despite its quirks), I gladly switched over to Pathfinder 1E when the D&D 4E abomination came out. Pathfinder was basically D&D 3.75E, so it was an easy transition, and was a much better option than going with 4E, plus they fixed a number of the remaining issues with 3E/3.5E, though not all.

However, with a few exceptions, I mostly prefer D&D 5E to Pathfinder, though I haven't tried Pathfinder 2E yet. And 5E is certainly way more accessible to a new player or the average casual tabletop gamer than Pathfinder or earlier D&D editions, and the simpler 5E system is one of the primary reasons why D&D has exploded in popularity lately.
 
Posts: 33210 | Location: Northwest Arkansas | Registered: January 06, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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