While Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (which is set to be released in 2023), not to mention numerous shows and podcasts about the game. However, it could be argued that the best portrayal of D&D in any kind of media just so happens to be from a direct-to-video Futurama film called Bender's Game.
The story of Bender's Game has the same amount of ridiculousness as any other Futurama episode. While the central idea of the plot mainly revolves around the main cast defeating the villain Carol "Mom" Miller and her three sons due to a conflict involving dark matter, the secondary portion, the Dungeons & Dragons theme, comes to the fore in the latter half of the film. When Bender is introduced to D&D by Hermes' son Dwight, he realizes that robots do not have any function for imagination. Despite this, he rolls up a character which he dubs Titanius Anglesmith, fancy man of Cornwood. Unfortunately, Bender's fondness for make-believe causes him to lose his grip on reality, thus making him fail to separate fantasy from actuality.
After a delusional Bender comes into with a surplus of dark matter, his boosted imagination suddenly whisks the main cast (and the villains) to the fictional land of Cornwood, where they assume the roles of characters within a game of D&D, with Bender himself taking the role of his character Titanius. As an example, Professor Farnsworth becomes a wizard, Hermes and Leela become centaurs, and Fry goes by the name of "Frydo," though his character remains largely unchanged by the dimensional shift. Although the entirety of the fantasy portion of the film strongly alludes to J.R.R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, the plot revolves heavily around one major D&D feature: dice-rolling, wherein an actual die (a MacGuffin of the film called the Die of Power) is rolled in order to perform magical attacks or spells. Granted, the dice-rolling mechanics of Bender's Game is distinctly different from D&D nowadays, but the principle of the act itself is still present in the film. The combination of D&D lore, coupled with meta elements from the actual game itself inadvertently makes Bender's Game the best D&D adaptation currently committed to film.
How Honor Among Thieves Could Learn From Bender's Game
While fans are waiting for more information about Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves in of its plot (not to mention the depth of its allusions to the game), Bender's Game could actually serve as a great point of reference for the new film. Since Bender's Game fairly accurately portrays the importance of dice-rolling in D&D, Honor Among Thieves could use this ideology to their advantage. While it is most likely that no actual dice will be actively rolled in the film in regard to attacks or skill checks (with the possible exception of some kind of cameo involving a dice-rolling game), the film could have an opportunity to use role-play to emulate the successes and failures of each "roll" within its dialogue and character action.
Honor Among Thieves could take a page not just out of Bender's Game's book, but out of The Legend of Vox Machina's book as well. Given that the Amazon Prime series is an animated retelling of the first campaign from the ever-popular Dungeons & Dragons web show, direct-to-video Futurama film.
