You cannot replicate or recreate Barbenheimer. Barbenheimer was organic, spontaneous because people saw that these two movies–bright, colorful, comedic Barbie and dark, moody Oppenheimer–were being released on the same day and ran with it. Barbenheimer was lightning in a bottle.
Execs will try to replicate it because money. But it won’t work. Consumers will see right through the astroturfed marketing, and whatever the execs try will fail. We must let Barbenheimer be a one-and-done for the sake of the movie industry.
people are often surprised when i say that dnd 5e is not by any measure ‘rules-light’ and to illustrate what i mean, here’s the spell 'sleep’ in dnd 5th edition:
and the spell 'sleep’ in trophy gold
dnd 5th edition, across the three core sourcebooks (not including the many supplements that are hundreds of pages long!) is 960 pages long. trophy gold was originally released as 23 pagesof a 46-page zine. it recently got a full release as its own book which is still only 250 pages long, of which 200 are devoted to prebuilt incursions (trophy’s analogue to dnd campaign modules)
and trophy gold isn’t even the simplest rpg out there – i just picked it because it’s playing in a similar genre space to 5e and so the point of comparisons are very direct and obvious. single-pagerpgsare basicallytheirowngenre! there are tabletop rpgs you can learn in ten minutes or less! never let anyone tell you that dnd 5th edition is 'streamlined’ or 'simple!’ it’s not even the simplest dungeons and dragons!
Why the heck does the spell need to be so overly complicated and full of minutia? I feel like the text is trying to cast Sleep on me.
I realize that this level of complexity is not to everyone’s tastes, but there is a perfectly good reason that the sleep spell is like this in 5E.
Basically, in the context of the type of gameplay you typically have in Dungeons and Dragons, Sleep would be boring if it always worked! After all, that ends the encounter right there. But if you introduce situations in which it might not work, or will only work on some portion of the creatures you cast it on, then you have tension and excitement again. It’s cool when you pull it off instead of just being a given.
A lot of magic in D&D is like that for this reason. Magic can be very swingy mechanically. When it works, it hugely benefits you. But it doesn’t always work!
And I understand that there are games that would introduce and resolve this tension in a different way. Perhaps having the players or GM decide whether or not it works in return for some narrative benefit or penalty. There are other valid approaches. But some of us like having the Rules as Referee.
