Why Your Next D&D Campaign Should Be Stolen From a Video Game

Expected read time: about 10 minutes

The spark of imagination is a precious seed that can grow into your next epic Dungeons & Dragons campaign. This spark might come from anywhere; a book, a movie, a song, even a photo—anything that speaks to you and gets your creative juices flowing! Our topic today could cover any of those stimuli, but we’re going to focus on one in particular…

Video games!

I have a feeling there are fewer skeptics about video games within a crowd of tabletop roleplayers than most groups, but it’s probably still worth noting video games can be art, and in a variety of ways!

I first heard the above quote by Stravinsky while studying to get my degree in music. And what a marvelous quote it is! Stravinsky may have been speaking about composers, but we can apply his words to any art form. And let’s not mince words here; a video game can be as much a work of art as any literature, music, or movie. Or a roleplaying game, for that matter! One could even say that art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

With that terrible joke aside, let’s discuss why your next D&D campaign should be stolen from a video game.

Freedom to Change

As a Dungeon Master, you have the right to steal anything you want from a video game (or other source) and make it a part of your D&D campaign. The best thing about this is that you can steal just parts of it at a time; you don’t have to include anything from the source material that you don’t want to. For example, when I ran my campaign based on Black Isle Studio’s Icewind Dale, I purposefully changed the gender of some of the NPCs. Why? Because I felt there were too many men in the original game, and not enough women. The world felt richer to me with a higher number of prominent female roles.

Did you know that even in Wizards of the Coast’s published 5e adventures they tell DMs to pick and choose what they want to keep for their own game? They write the adventures, but they expect each DM who uses them to adapt them for their own purposes. We should feel free to do the same thing with the video games that inspire us!

For example, if you decided to adapt Two Worlds to a D&D campaign, you maybe wouldn’t want to keep the exact dialogue that Reality Pump wrote for the NPCs, as it’s notoriously…not great:

But the lore about the world, Antaloor? Why not?

Adapted Well to D&D

Some video games are excellent fits for a campaign of Dungeons & Dragons because their roots are already based in the pen-and-paper game. As you might have guessed from this blog, I’m a huge fan of Black Isle Studios’ old Infinity Engine games based on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition. They were actually my first introduction to D&D! I had no idea what THAC0 was or Hit Dice, or even what 1d8 meant, but I fell in love with creating characters of different races and classes to form a party and ‘venture forth’ on quests in a fantasy world.

The Baldur’s Gate saga and later Neverwinter Nights are based on tabletop D&D. If you’re familiar with the games (which take place in the Forgotten Realms setting, the same as most 5e products), you can easily find stat blocks in the Monster Manual that match up with the creatures of these video games. You can almost run your tabletop party through every battle in these video games, directly translating the types and numbers of monsters that appear on-screen into 5e encounters. (Note: There are a a few things to bear in mind if you take this approach, which are described in the “Challenges to Watch Out For” section near the end of this article.)

Not only the monsters and NPCs, but even the loot you find is easily transferable to your 5e campaign. You may need to do some small tweaks to power level and decide if any given magic item requires attunement, but beyond that everything matches up reasonably well.

A couple of years ago I ran a D&D 4e campaign based on the first Diablo game. I knew that nearly all of the campaign would revolve around combat and exploration (for reasons that are obvious if you’ve ever played a Diablo game), with fewer opportunities for roleplay, and figured I would make use of 4e’s strong tactical focus and emphasis on loot. It turned out very well! The players had fun playing it, and I had fun running it. If I were to ever run Diablo II, I think I would lean into the lush, dark lore of Sanctuary and encourage more roleplay. I might even run it in play-by-post, to really immerse us in that setting.

Evocative Atmosphere

One thing you can steal from video games is their atmosphere—their mood, the feel of the game world. Video games can bring together art, music, and cinematography to create powerful environments for the player to experience. We might not be able to port all of these things directly over to a roleplaying game, but we can call on an even greater tool that every one of our players has access to: imagination.

Think of a video game you’ve played that had a distinct air about it, one that made you feel something in a strong way. For me, a great example is Team Cherry’s Hollow Knight. Somehow it makes you feel like you live in the loneliest, saddest world, and yet for all its grimness there’s something about it that’s still beautiful, endearing, and exciting. Any DM aiming to elicit these feelings in their players would do well to immerse themselves in Hollow Knight and focus on what makes its atmosphere so compelling. You don’t even have to make all the characters bug-people if you don’t want to, though that’s another element that could make your campaign feel distinct and flavorful!

Another example is Bethesda’s Skyrim. The record-shattering title has welcomed tens of millions of players into its world of ice-rimmed mountains, forgotten dungeons, and bustling medieval towns. Stunning visuals combine with Jeremy Soule’s immersive soundtrack to make the fantasy world seem alive and real. And so vast! Imagine being able to capture that feeling in a tabletop RPG, to instill in your players a yearning for exploration—and be able to reward it in a satisfying way.

There are many tools available to enhance your D&D game and make it feel more like the video game of your choice. If it’s the art style you love from a particular game, use it! You can hang posters on your walls if you’re playing at a physical location, or incorporate the art into handouts or props. Find or make maps that evoke the same feelings. Play the video game’s music in the background of your sessions. Identify the tropes you enjoy from that game and encourage your players to lean into them. If you’re having trouble pinning down what exactly it is that you like about a game or what makes it special, look up reviews of that game. There are likely dozens of articles about your chosen game, and odds are that somebody has put into words why it’s worth loving.

Interesting Stories

Maybe it’s the story of a video game that calls to you. After all, who could resist the Grey Warden’s journey in Dragon Age: Origins, with all of the choices that affect how the main plot advances?

Another game by BioWare, Mass Effect 2, is widely regarded as the best game in the franchise with its intense suicide mission at the end. Maybe you don’t want to mix sci-fi with your fantasy (though why wouldn’t you?), but you could still unashamedly steal the concept of recruiting a team of specialists to go on an impossible mission and plug that into any fantasy setting. In fact, it sounds a little like Gary Gygax’s Tomb of Horrors tournament adventure from the first edition of D&D.

One of Wizards of the Coast’s more recent 5e adventures is based on that perilous dungeon: Tomb of Annihilation. It’s a fantastic adventure (zombie dinosaurs!) but one of the issues people have had with it is that it’s a full-length campaign that ends with a death-trap dungeon. So the player characters develop their stories and personalities as a group, and then almost certainly some of them die in the crazy dungeon at the end of the game—which feels jarring to how play has felt for the majority of the campaign. However, if you were to draw on the things that made Mass Effect 2 great, you could possibly turn the campaign into one that your players will remember and talk about forever.

A video game I’ve always wanted to run as a D&D campaign comes from the German game developer Piranha Bites. Gothic. The idea of a handful of clueless prisoners being sent into a giant magical forcefield to fend for themselves among monsters, beasts (including dinosaurs), and criminal factions just seems like an awesome premise for a unique D&D adventure. One day I’ll do it! And maybe I’ll share my process here on the blog.

Ease of Improv

The basis of improvisation as a Dungeon Master isn’t necessarily just that you think well on your feet. A large part of it is being so ‘fluent’ in your knowledge of the world and the characters in it that you can quickly decide how they react to any given circumstance. Improvisers don’t just make things up on the spot; they draw on a pre-built scaffolding of knowledge and experience, retrieving and extrapolating what they need in a quick, practiced manner. Because they’re closely in tune with the story, they’re prepared for anything.

And what better way to get in tune with a story than by spending hours experiencing it as a video game?

I chose to run Icewind Dale as a campaign because I had played it so many times that I had a lot of the dialogue for it memorized, particularly near the beginning. I knew the NPCs, I knew the monsters, I knew what to foreshadow and what to keep as a surprise. I could have run a huge swathe of the beginning material without even referencing the game—though I did, because at that point BeamDog had put out their Enhanced Edition on iOS, so I could easily open the game and boot up a save with just a few taps on my phone.

The point is, I didn’t need to spend much time prepping because I had already spent years of my childhood and adolescence immersing myself in the game. I knew it backward and forward, and that helped me to know how the game world would react to the players’ actions in a satisfying way.

Mechanical Changes

It requires getting a little more under the hood of the 5e system, but including variant rules and player options can go a long way in helping the campaign feel unique and different from ‘vanilla’ D&D. In Dragon Age’s world of Thedas, dwarves can’t use magic, but they can handle and work lyrium, a raw magical material that is dangerous to the other races. This could be a good opportunity to include some of the newer player options, such as the Rune Knight fighter subclass or the Artificer class, and possibly restrict them to dwarves only. It would help make dwarves feel different from the usual D&D settings.

One of the most popular mechanical tropes in video games that is sorely lacking in D&D 5e are robust systems for harvesting and crafting. From The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to Fallout 4, many video games use some kind of harvesting or crafting to add depth to their gameplay. Sometimes, as in Divinity: Original Sin and its dynamic sequel, harvesting and crafting are fun yet optional elements.

Many 3rd-party creators have put out their takes on these systems. The best ones I’ve found are these: 

• Hamund's Harvesting Handbook: A Complete Guide to Harvesting and Crafting in D&D 5e by Jasmine Yang

• Monster Loot - Complete Collection Bundle by Anne Gregersen

• The Armorer’s Handbook: Equipment Upgrade and Rune Magic System by heavyarms

It isn’t the purpose of this article to go into detail on what these supplements offer, but I highly encourage everyone to go check them out! And let us know in the comments or elsewhere if you’d like me to do an article dedicated to exploring these and other harvesting/crafting systems

Challenges to Watch Out For

Without going too deep, as this article is drawing to its conclusion, here are some problems that might arise when stealing from video games:

• Many video games have excellent plots that are written with a single protagonist in mind, so be careful that your adaptation shares the narrative spotlight equally amongst all the players in your campaign.

• Video games run faster than tabletop games–particularly the combats. You’ll likely want to considerably lower the number of encounters the party has, as well as how many enemies appear in those encounters, to avoid bogging the campaign down too much.

• D&D characters (particularly spellcasters) get access to abilities that let them circumvent obstacles too easily. This is part of the beauty of a roleplaying game, that your players can come up with clever solutions to problems while interacting with the game world, and both mechanical and narrative restrictions that work well in video games hold up about as well as tissue paper when brought to the tabletop. This can actually make the game more fun, but it’s something to be aware of.

• Especially in the case of popular video games, your players may be familiar with your source material. In some ways this can be a boon, since your players will have an easier time imagining the game world and knowing its lore, but it can also be a letdown if the players already know how the story beats and plot points are meant to unfold. Consider having a discussion with your players before the game starts (during a Session 0 would be ideal) about how you’d like to handle out-of-character knowledge like this.

I could (and probably will!) write an entire article on how to overcome these sorts of challenges, but that will have to be for another day.

Wrapping it Up

Video games can truly be a form of art! And as such, they’re ripe for our plundering as DMs. Immerse yourself in genres and atmospheres you love, then steal as much as you want from them.

If you’ve got any favorite video games you’d like to call out, or experiences you’ve had bringing video game elements to the table, then please sound off in the comments! I’d love to hear your thoughts.

As always, consider subscribing to the newsletter for our latest news, articles, and sales!

Happy gaming, and see you in the Archives!