I Played Dungeons & Dragons At A Film Festival - And It Was Perfect

If you're a fan of genre cinema, you probably know about Fantastic Fest. Austin's week-long film festival is home to some of the industry's most oddball genre movies. And because it's hosted at the Alamo Drafthouse, there's always a wide range of live events and activities, too. And that is how I found myself holding a fistfull of dice in a group of strangers for a special edition of Dungeons & Drafthouse, Alamo's monthly Dungeons & Dragons series. 

If there's something better suited to my interest than tabletop games at a film festival, I don't know what it is.

If the thought of D&D on a festival program surprises you, well, it's actually more reasonable than you think. Over the past few years, many film festivals have expanded their programming to add television, podcasts, and even video games to their schedule. And while D&D might lack the overt audio-visual connection of the other media, tabletop is still a medium heavily influenced by our relationship to movies — especially when it comes to the roles we assign ourselves at the table. It's a great opportunity to step out of your passive self as an audience member and become a proactive storyteller and roleplayer.

So I made up my mind early to skip a few movies and roll some dice. While I'm a heavy consumer of D&D actual plays — shows like NADDPod accompany me on my runs or when I'm in the car — I've only participated in a handful of sessions at my own table. I tend to lean more towards rules-light games like Frontier Scum or Death in Space for my own friend groups, but a session designed to be self-contained in three hours felt like the perfect way to dabble in D&D and a welcome change of pace during a long weekend.

It also didn't hurt that Dungeons & Drafthouse leaned fully into the horror vibes for the session, introducing a collection of eldritch horrors ripped right from the pages of a John Carpenter screenplay. The story in a nutshell: we played a group of mercenaries hired to learn why a small mining town was no longer sending out supplies — or, as one player noted, the fantasy equivalent of the Pinkertons. When we got there, we learned that the miners had uncovered a cursed artifact which trapped the village in an unholy aurora and turned its residents into a fusion of flesh and appendages.

(The moon grew a face and winked at us. It sucked.)

My character was Barfur, a Dwarf cleric with a love-hate relationship to other deities. Part of the fun of a one-shot is that there is no time to overthink your character; three hours won't let you dig into a tragic background or reveal a horrible secret, so it's mostly an excuse to pick a fun voice and let your character find himself at the table. I quickly learned that Barfur was incredibly pedantic and a bit obsessed with fire, encouraging others to burn down the village's only church (which, given the third-act twist, would've gone over poorly with the town).

And all around the table were other players of varying experience levels. The person to my right had never played a single game of D&D in his life — so, naturally, he rolled extremely well and did more damage than the rest of the party combined. Across from him was a DM who turned in his screen to make sure our table had a full party. He leaned heavily into his barbarian himbo, encouraging all of us to take bigger swings with our own characters (and answering questions about our character sheets out of character to keep the action from slowing down).

Even with a group of complete strangers, there was no shortage of great moments. In one scene, our barbarian rolled a natural 20 when attempting to toss a sorcerer through a shattered window, only to discover minutes later that the front door was fully unlocked. We also agreed, loudly and often, not to think too hard about the monster we killed outside of the village, who may or may not have been just a normal villager caught in an enchantment. As I told the table, I don't have any healing spells for PTSD, so out of sight, out of mind.

We laughed. We made pop culture references. We gave Kate Siegel a silent thumbs up as she wandered through the event room ("Ooh, Dungeons & Dragons!"). For those few hours, we hit pause on the normal conversations about movies — what have you seen, what did you think — and got to engage with others in a more active way. And while it may seem overly sentimental, in a setting where so many conversations skew towards criticism, it was fun to check ego at the door and just be silly with a group of complete strangers

And while the experience may not inspire me to embrace D&D as my game of record — I'll stick with my rules-light horror systems, thanks — it certainly inspired me to go check out the next Dungeons & Drafthouse session. I'm always in search of new ways to marry my love of cinema and my love of tabletop, and it turns out getting to know fellow cinephiles over a pile of dice is a fantastic way to crack the ice. If you're lucky enough to have a film festival in your area that leans into tabletop games, be sure to give it a try.