Judging__Eagle wrote:What, how, who, where, why and when would be covered in the study of D&D?
Chronologically?
It's inspirations? Attempting to uncover all of them?
What is important that should be covered?
Here's my rough quasi-chronological outline for how I'd do such a film ( with zero research done, I'm sure some of my info is questionable and the rest needs citations ):
Maybe a five minute overview the history of games which led to wargames. Start at the root, going all the way back to, Go, Mancala and the Royal Game of Ur, but you probably want a nod to the differentiation of the three major branches of Chess in the renaissance (and how that reflected the difference between the cultures that played them - because that lets you play up the theme that games reflect their societies later in the film ) Then on to the development of Kreigspeil as an actual military training tool. From their, the spread of such things to a broader hobby market, with a minute or so devoted to HG Wells enthusiasm and publication of
Little Wars..
Then about five minutes on the history of myth, fantasy and improvisational theater.
Then for the next twenty minutes you get people talking in glowing terms about the genius of Gygax and Arenson in combining these elements into one game and talk about GenCon and the early days. A bit about Blackmoor, Greyhawk and the crazy idea of marketing different sets of Basic and Advanced lines at the same time, but mainly people being crazy at Cons and showing the spread of D&D. Covers of Dragon Magazine showing increased production values, the growth of dedicated hobby shoppes ( although this was also due to changes in comic book distribution in the 70s ), the saturday morning cartoon, the game being featured in
E.T. etc, etc
Then at about 30 minutes in, you get to the "tragedy struck" part. You have no shortage of personality conflicts and legal actions to tell tales about here. The Tolkien estate lawsuit, the 700 club condemnation ( Be sure to show "Dark Dungeons" ), Gygax squeezing people out, only to be later squeezed out himself,
Mazes and Monsters. You break from this to talk about how D&D spawned a bunch of imitators, copycats and spinoffs: Tunnels and Trolls, Villains and Vigilantes, Ars Magica, GURPs, and the Wizardry line of computer games.
I'd also want to talk about the Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games here, and how the settlement still looks unfair in hindsight. But more importantly how it led to the foundation of the EFF and has influenced legal rights online ever since.
Then you come back to D&D with the launch of 2nd ed, and various heads talking about how that revived sales and/or fractured the fanbase. Be sure to include a bit of edition war, you can mention how hate for Mrs. Williams is still strong two decades later, but in general you spin this slightly positive for a bit, and be sure to bring up SSI's gold box games. (as well as possibly the term "mailer daemon and Tom Christianson's maintence of Perl as they relate to computer developments ) But then talk about how V:tM (which was based on Ars Magica) made gaming both sexy and accessible to girls. Get a succession of people saying shamelessly that while D&D was mostly nerdy boys doing math, Vampire got them laid and intercut that with comparative sales graphs for he two games in the early 1990s, until V:tM became the category leader.
And if this wasn't enough, D&D and V:tM together faced a new type of game on the market - clip of Richard Garfield set to "Magic Man". Interview a bunch of hobby store owners about how M:tG became a best seller, and RPG sales tanked during the mid-90s. Rag on Dragon Dice and Lorraine Williams and Spellfire and whatever you can dig up actual business records to mock around here - in hindsight TSR was full of poor business choices in a changing market. Explain how WotC was the winner here and not only made enough money to buy D&D out of TSR's bankruptcy, but also had enough geek-foresight to land the Pokemon US license before the big companies were even aware of it. Explain how this motivated Hasbro to buy them out. If you want, you can digress about Hasbro's track record of buying out just about every other successful game of the 20t century - dating back to at least Monopoly.
Then explain how WotC tried to release a mass market RPG, and how they brought in Jon Tweet ( who had done work on ArM that was cribbed for V;tM ) to design it, and tried to use Hasbro's mass market pipeline to sell it. Set this up as defeat-of-expectation, and intercut some of the critical praise and awards, but Everway was a commercial flop. You can also have some heads talk about Alternity here. Have some pundits speculate about what they learned from this, digress about the Baldur's Gate games and then talk about the 2000 release of 3rd edition and how the core books actually made it onto the NY: Time bestseller list. Talk about the huge revival in D&D and how the Open-Gaming License gave 3rd party publishers an in without fearing prosecution ( note that White Wolf had an open-gaming monster book out BEFORE the 3.0 M&M ). Get lines outside the LotR movies, Get a Vin Diesel clip here, and show Gygax's Futurama appearance, etc, etc
Then switch back to "history repeats itself" and get into the 3.5 vs 3.0 fanbase fragmentation, WotC pulling items from Open Game Content, and unilaterally modifying the OGL in light of the Book of Erotic Fantasy, interest dropping off and Christmas layoffs. Get a someone bitching about the move of GenCon and someone else loving it.
Then talk about further technological changes, and how common RPG-video games had become. Talk about Neverwinter Nights, sure, but also the Final Fantasy series and the rise of the MMORPG. Mention that these all use Arenson's Hit Point mechanic and note the point when the US video game industry started grossing more than than the US film industry. Imply pretty heavily that dude got shafted for being open-gaming instead of patenting the idea. While on the subject of technological changes, talk about .pdfs and piracy and find some grognards who are willing to say they photocopied manuals back in the early days. Point to the rise of Amazon and the decline of the bookstore. Point to the rise of WoW as an incredibly large MMORPG
Use that as the setup for the launch of 4e, and WotC's attempt to move to much more digital-distribution model with DDI and such. Dig up whatever 4e quotes and stats you can. I'm not making this film, nor am I gonna argue about (again) it here, just get some sources and some quotes that are filmworthy and back your own damn view about how 4e sold and what fans at cons said about it.
Then you corner Monte Cook and sign some NDAs, so that he can tell you the great stuff about the 5e launch that they'll be announcing next GenCon under the condition that the film isn't released until after that goes public. Leave 5e a bunch of hype with an open question how it will be able to adapt to an ever-changing market.
Then wrap up with a discussion of the influence D&D has had, how it's not only a cultural icon and a representation of an entire hobby, but how it pioneered an entire category of games, how just one idea from it is integral to so many video and computer games, how it indirectly shaped internet laws.
