The Dungeon Masters Movie Review

Here’s my The Dungeon Masters movie review. I’ll follow this post with interviews of the 3 dungeonmasters who were featured in the movie, so stay tuned.

I recently watched The Dungeon Masters documentary at the AFI Film Festival in Dallas, hoping to see a loving portrayal of a hobby that I enjoy. Afterwards, the director took questions from the audience. The director, Keven McAlester, previously directed another documentary, You’re Gonna Miss Me, about the rise and fall of 60’s psychedelic rocker, Roky Erickson, of the 13th Floor Elevators.

From my viewing of the movie and the questions Mr. McAlester answered later, here are three things you should know about this movie to begin with.

1. The Dungeon Masters were chosen from among around 20 game masters at the annual GenCon who interviewed with the producers of the film. The director said they chose the first three DMs they interviewed. The documentary tells the story of these three particular game masters, who otherwise had no connection to one another.
2. The documentary took place over a year’s time, from one GenCon to the next one. The director mentioned that their filming took place over two years, though, or that he spent two years with the people being filmed.
3. The director of The Dungeon Masters mentioned that he had never played roleplaying games himself, though his brother played D&D when they were growing up.

An Outsider’s View of Role Playing

The Dungeon Masters is an outsider’s view of the roleplaying hobby. That might raise red flags for some gamers, since they probably assume an outsider is going to give a leering portrayal of gamers and their “strange” hobby.

The first question that came to my mind for me was why someone would decide to spend two years of their life filming a documentary about a game they were never curious about enough to play. I wouldn’t expect someone producing a documentary about a rock star to have to give a rock concert beforehand, but role-playing doesn’t take much of a commitment.

Keven McAlester said he played Dungeons and Dragons once after production of the movie began to get a feel for the hobby, but he was awful at it. So awful that he expected his thief character to cast spells. McAlester also noted that he and his crew took great pains to include only scenes where the DMs were sharing the humor of gaming, instead of scenes which made fun of his subjects.

Elizabeth

I didn’t get that impression watching the film, though. I though the movie portrayed these three dungeon masters in a negative light, and I came away thinking these people are socially awkward and consumed by their hobby – especially in the case of the Drow Princess.

“The Drow Princess” is Elizabeth, a DM and cosplayer who dresses up for conventions, L.A.R.P. gatherings and (perhaps) her local gaming sessions as a dark elf. Elizabeth lives along the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast, and she describes herself as doing little else but playing World Of Warcraft or D&D when not working. As a DM, Elizabeth’s players praise her for multi-layered, imaginative characters. Elizabeth is portrayed by the documentary as a woman who has been victimized by men at various points of her life, from an abusive ex-husband to a boss who propositioned her for sex. Therefore, Elizabeth identifies with drow culture, because it is a female-dominated society.

You can probably see where this is headed.

Elizabeth never smiles in the movie, so one gets the impression that she’s a dour person whose only joy comes from her imaginary life gaming. Elizabeth’s story focuses less on her skills as a DM or the games than on her relationship with her boyfriends and her propensity to dress up in elaborate body paint. 1/3rd of the movie goes by before we see her out of her drow costume. Later, a scene showing her new boyfriend is clearly a punchline, because he is shown in similar garb.

Getting to know Elizabeth a little bit on Twitter (@drowgirl), or reading some of her writing on her website, Snark and Bitter, one comes away with a much different impression of her as a person. She seems happier, funnier, and smarter online than the portrayal of her in the movie would indicate. I like her a lot in spite of not knowing her well.

Richard

Richard, on the other hand, is the most evocative of the dungeon masters, if nothing else because we see more of Richard narrating his gaming sessions. This is probably because Richard has the boldest personality and isthe biggest showman as a dungeon master. Richard also is portrayed as a controlling, egomaniacal game master. One gets the idea there’s something of the Wizard of Oz in Richard, as he likes to instill a sense of dread in his players about what’s coming next. I imagine surviving one of Richard’s dungeons would result in a sense of accomplishment, but the arbitrary nature of his DM style appears to eventually antagonize most of his players.

Richard appears to live in a nicer home than the other gamers portrayed, but his personal life seems particularly dysfunctional. Richard seems unable to cope with relationships in either his gaming life or his real life, and he tends toabruptly end these relationships. Richard left one marriage of 15 years, apparently leaving his wife and step-children with hardly an explanation. In the movie, he seems happily remarried, though Richard appears to have difficulty maintaining relationships with both people and players alike.

Richard is the least sympathetically portrayed, and the director spoke of Richard as a wild card with a series of “baroque” twists the film crew didn’t see coming. While the more colorful sides of Richard’s personality aren’t explored in detail, we see Richard the nudist, Richard the Army reservist and Richard the Jewish convert at various points in the movie.

Again, having dealt with Richard via email and visiting his website, he seems like a really great guy. It’s impossible to not wonder at the portrayal of him in the movie and how it contrasts with what he seems like in real life. (Admittedly, I’ve interacted with Richard less than with Elizabeth, but he seems like a pretty cool guy in real life.)

Scott

Scott, the third DM, comes across as a good guy working through a bad stretch of life. The film makers show less of his life as a dungeon master and more of his life as a puppeteer, an assistant apartment manager, an aspiring novelist and the host of a cable access show about a failed supervillain. (By the way, I would love to see an episode of that tv show.) Scott comes across as a guy who’s “lost” a lot at life, but as a talented man who keeps trying new schemes to get ahead. Scott seems exasperated with his wife much of the time, while she seems to see most of his creative projects as frivolous.

I got the impression that Scott doesn’t DM Dungeons & Dragons a whole lot, but instead plays “supers” roleplaying. For instance, at GenCon, Scott’s villain is a brain-in-a-jar. That might explain why Scott was shown at the gaming table the least, though it might also be that the various projects in his life probably also overshadowed his gaming. On a side note, Scott never got his novel produced, though he has written his own roleplaying game, Hot Chicks.

Scott seemed like the most likable of the dungeon masters featured in the movie, and he’s equally likable in real life. His RPG looks like a lot of fun, although I haven’t had the chance to look at it closely enough to review it here yet. (It’s on my list of things to do though.)

Production Quality of The Dungeon Masters

The soundtrack of The Dungeon Masters added a lot to the drama and sometime pathos of the documentary. The film quality was adequate, if unspectacular. The movie was framed in 5 acts, which had little to do with the structure of the story. These “acts” seemed like an artificial and arbitary excuse to display cool roleplaying-related phrases.

Dungeon Crawls Are Not a Spectator Sport

I would have liked to have seen more about the hobby of role-playing itself. In The Dungeon Masters, we saw each of the DMs roleplaying a little bit either with their home group or at the convention, though the coverage was pretty limited. Mostly, you learned about the skills of the DM from the dungeon masters’ interviews, or brief cuts to interviews with one or two players. In the few roleplaying-themed movies I’ve seen, you never see a particularly good explanation of our hobby and how it works. Most of what you see is parody. It’s my contention that even RPGs fully explained would still be strange enough for the viewers, but have a little more credibility. That being said, I’ll cut The Dungeon Masters slack and admit that watching other people role-play is boring, so that’s naturally going to be cut when you have scenes of live-action role-playing, skilled puppeteering or a tense meeting between a stepfather and the boy he neglected

That being said, the L.A.R.P. scenes portray the LARPing as nothing more than a game of cops & robbers with plastic swords and elaborate costumes, instead of taking time to explain the rules of the game. The resulting scenes make those taking part in the game as childish, instead of rational adults taking part in a weekend amusement.

Rating The Dungeon Masters

I give The Dungeon Masters 2 stars out of 4. I laughed throughout the movie, but I realized by the end of The Dungeon Masters that the laughs were generally of the cruel and gawking kind. Sure, I’ll laugh for a while about how silly our hobby can look and can be, but in the end, I got the idea that the producers weren’t laughing with our three heroes, but laughing at them. This wasn’t a complete hatchet job, which is why I give this movie 2 stars. But I came away wondering if Scott’s wife really is that hostile to his creative work, if Elizabeth really never smiles and if Richard was really a jerk. The fact that I can’t trust that the documentarian at his word probably says enough.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 6:49 am and is filed under Roleplaying Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Search Games Information Depot 

Contact Us - Privacy Policy - Other Sites - Yahoo Games - BOTW Games