When Your Game Goes Hollywood: How to Adapt Jurassic Park, Jumanji, and Any Other Movie Into an RPG Adventure or Campaign

3 Wise DMs

Lots of DMs draw inspiration from their favorite movies. But adapting a movie to your game isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Can you really use D&D, where the PCs are super-powered, to create Jurassic Park, where most of the characters are lunch? How do you capture the magic of Lord of the Rings in a way your players can actually play through without following the book scene-for-scene? How do you turn linear silver screen storytelling into something that can survive an encounter with your players’ shenanigans?

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave dig into how they’d go about adopting some favorite movies into adventures or campaigns, including how it can go wrong, choosing the right system, and understanding the details your players will identify with.

1:00 Listener question: How do you adapt movies into a campaign without forcing your players to recreate the movie?

2:00 Think about why most video games based on movies suck, because your adaptation could suffer the same problems

6:00 Campaign or adventure? Does your movie have enough material to be more than a module?

9:00 Should you adapt the movie to D&D or use a system that might support it better?

13:00 Souping up dinosaurs to be Jurassic-Park-worthy threats

15:00 Does a movie-inspired game have to railroad players down the movie plot scene-by-scene? (And DM Dave’s moonshot Lord of the Rings campaign idea)

21:00 Why we don’t recommend creating your own game system to play out a movie (and how DM Tony tried)

24:00 Is Call of Cthulhu better for doing Jurassic Park than D&D 5E?

27:00 The Great Jumanji Debate: Robin Williams or The Rock version?

29:00 A campaign is more than the setting: How to build the movie idea into something bigger

35:00 Keeping Gandalf Cool: Should you limit character choices to fit the tone of the setting or pump up NPC abilities to match the power of your PCs?

38:00 NPCs, locations, and the feel of the movie you’re adapting

42:00 Session 0 or The Big Surprise? How to introduce your movie adaptation

47:00 Final thoughts