Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a colorful, fun, and exciting cinematic take on the world's best tabletop RPG, drawing from the original game in many ways. Overall, Honor Among Thieves does a fine job representing the original gameplay, and dungeon masters, or DMs, might even get a few new ideas from Honor Among Thieves in return.
Still, every experienced DM knows that not every fun idea will work out in their gaming group. Certain storylines or battle strategies work better with dice or on the big screen, and sure enough, Honor Among Thieves has all kinds of material that most DMs would hesitate to or flatly refuse to include in their group's next gaming session.
10 Make The Party Use Speak With Dead On So Many Corpses
For comedy's sake, Honor Among Thieves' main characters had to use the Speak With Dead spell many times in a row as they dug up the corpses of soldiers who died in battle. The team had to use trial and error to piece together the full story, questioning one dead warrior after another all night long.
In an actual D&D game, no DM would force their players to cast this spell so many times to move the plot forward since it would disrupt the pacing and waste spell slots. At most, one or two dead bodies would prove unhelpful; the next would provide all the necessary intel.
9 Restraining The Entire Party Separately
Getting restrained is a common effect in Dungeons & Dragons, meaning a monster or player character is physically restrained and unable to freely move. This might happen when the character gets caught in a spiderweb or is gripped by a Yuan-Ti abomination's tail, requiring a STR check to break free.
In Honor Among Thieves, Edgin's entire party got restrained with magic tentacles while separated, meaning they had to make their own STR checks and couldn't help each other. That would lead to frustrating gameplay in tabletop, where low-strength characters would be rendered totally helpless.
8 Railroading The Party Toward The Final Battle
Being a DM means striking a careful balance between moving the main plot along and allowing the player characters to make their own decisions and roam freely. Ideally, the DM will passively encourage the players to wander from one major plot point to the next willingly.
By contrast, "railroading" is when the DM directly forces certain things to happen or not happen, which may annoy players. Honor Among Thieves did that when Edgin's whole party got captured and sent to the battle arena to face a deadly displacer beast, though as a movie, Honor Among Thieves had actual need for railroading.
7 Allowing Druids To Wildshape Into Owlbears
The druid class in Dungeons & Dragons is closely attuned to nature, such as their nature-based spells and most of all, their trademark Wildshape ability. With that class trait, druids can morph into animals such as snakes, birds of prey, dire wolves, and more.
Honor Among Thieves took a serious liberty with this, depicting the druid Doric morphing into an owlbear a few times for combat. In the game, druids cannot turn into owlbears, and most DMs would rather not allow the players to do so.
6 Foiling The Party's Cool Plan Instead Of Rewarding It
Dungeon masters are generally expected to reward, not punish, the players for hatching and launching creative, resourceful plans to complete a quest. There are limits to this, but overall, a DM should be pleased when the party uses ingenious and off-beat strategies for combat and stealth.
Honor Among Thieves almost did that when Edgin's party thought up a creative, cool plan to use magic portals and sneak into the city's secure treasure vault. However, the script, acting as a cruel DM, casually foiled that plan and rendered it moot, which would infuriate any real-life D&D player.
5 Treating A Dragon As A Gag
Themberchaud appeared in Honor Among Thieves during the Underdark sequence, and he was accurate to the original lore. Themberchaud spends most of his time underground and is beefier than most dragons, but Honor Among Thieves treated him more as a gag than a serious threat.
The game is Dungeons & Dragons, after all, and dragons are expected to be cool, slick supervillains rather than a goofy obstacle for the party to run screaming from. Even if a game session involved sneaking around the dragon instead of fighting it, it would feel disappointing to have a joke dragon like that.
4 Visiting The Underdark So Briefly
To maintain its sharp pacing, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves only briefly visited the terrifying Underdark region. It was a "get in, get the goods, get out" sort of sequence, and in a real D&D campaign, this sequence could be completed in a single session.
In the original game, the Underdark is much more than a side quest setting. Entire campaigns can take place down there, given the vast size of the Underdark, complete with highly diverse monsters, people, features, and traps to interact with.
3 Create A Generic Villain Like The Red Wizard
By most standards, the Red Wizard was an underwhelming villain, even if Honor Among Thieves focused more on the main characters and the humor than an epic villain. Even so, the Red Wizard felt highly generic and forgettable, being little more than an excuse for some action scenes.
The original game features more memorable and nuanced villains that all put the Red Wizard to shame, which can feel even more exciting in the hands of a skilled DM. Strahd von Zarovich, for example, is the compelling BBEG of Curse of Strahd, and Tiamat is a world-ending threat any high-level party would be thrilled to face.
2 Making A Predictable, Lawful Good Paladin Like Xenk Yendar
The paladin class has a reputation for being the class of law-abiding, honorable warriors who have pretentious speech patterns and refuse to break their oaths. The paladin class has almost become a parody of itself over time, giving the lawful good alignment a bad name.
Honor Among Thieves kept this paradigm going with its character Xenk Yendar, who functioned as an NPC who briefly joined the party. Most real-life DMs would rather use more creative and off-beat paladins who breathe new life into the class without totally abandoning the basics.
1 Making Complex, Tiresome Puzzles To Solve
Creating traps and puzzles is a tricky proposition for DMs, and it's best left to more experienced DMs, while novice DMs might avoid this entirely. The trick is to make puzzles that are intellectually challenging but still solvable without taking up too much time and effort.
Honor Among Thieves took this to an extreme with that bridge trap in the Underdark. As Xenk Yendar explained, anyone who crosses must follow a complex, delicate pattern of steps to avoid collapsing the entire bridge, only for Simon the sorcerer to accidentally set off the trap and ruin the puzzle.